Space monkey robot thought control!

Having written a brief summary of contemporary developments in monkey robot thought control for Futurismic, I was amused & intrigued by Geoff Manaugh’s attempt to link the monkey cyborgs with the Phoenix Mars Lander;

[W]hile I know that these stories are not connected, putting them together is like something from a Thomas Pynchon novel: monkeys locked in a room somewhere, controlling the arms of machines on other planets.

As if we might discover, at the end of the day, that NASA wasn’t a human organization at all – it was a bunch of rhesus monkeys locked in a lab somewhere, enthroned amidst wires and brain-caps, like some new sign of the Tarot, lost in private visions of machines on alien worlds. An experiment gone awry.

Their “dreams” at night are actually video feeds from probes moving through outer darkness.

Now, why does this make me think of typewriters?