vArWcUt2

1EXPLOSION
2
3We live in a strange time.
4
5Extraordinary events keep happening that undermine the stability of our world.
6
7Suicide bombs, waves of refugees,
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9Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, even Brexit.
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11EXPLOSION
12
13Yet those in control seem unable to deal with them, and no-one has any vision of a different or a better kind of future.
14
15MUSIC: Something I Can Never Have by Nine Inch Nails
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17This film will tell the story of how we got to this strange place.
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19It is about how, over the past 40 years, politicians, financiers and technological utopians, rather than face up to the real complexities of the world, retreated.
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21Instead, they constructed a simpler version of the world in order to hang on to power.
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23And as this fake world grew, all of us went along with it, because the simplicity was reassuring.
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25Even those who thought they were attacking the system - the radicals, the artists, the musicians, and our whole counterculture - actually became part of the trickery, because they, too, had retreated into the make-believe world, which is why their opposition has no effect and nothing ever changes.
26
27MUSIC: The Vanishing American Family by Scuba Z
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29But this retreat into a dream world allowed dark and destructive forces to fester and grow outside.
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31Forces that are now returning to pierce the fragile surface of our carefully constructed fake world.
32
33# In dreams
34
35# I live... #
36
37The story begins in two cities at the same moment in 1975.
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39One is New York.
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41The other is Damascus.
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43It was a moment when two ideas about how it might be possible to run the world without politics first took hold.
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45In 1975, New York City was on the verge of collapse.
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47For 30 years, the politicians who ran the city had borrowed more and more money from the banks to pay for its growing services and welfare.
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49But in the early '70s, the middle classes fled from the city and the taxes they paid disappeared with them.
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51So, the banks lent the city even more.
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53But then, they began to get worried about the size of the growing debt and whether the city would ever be able to pay it back.
54
55And then one day in 1975, the banks just stopped.
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57The city held its regular meeting to issue bonds in return for the loans, overseen by the city's financial controller.
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59Good morning, ladies and gentlemen.
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61Today, the city of New York is offering for competitive bidding the sale of 260 million tax anticipation notes, of which 100 million will mature on June 3rd, 1975.
62
63The banks were supposed to turn up at 11am, but it soon became clear that none of them were going to appear.
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65The meeting was rescheduled for 2pm and the banks promised they would turn up.
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67The announcement on behalf of the controller is that the offer, which we had expected to receive and announce at two o'clock this afternoon, is now expected at four o'clock.
68
69Paul, does this mean that, so far, nobody wants those bonds?
70
71We will be making a further announcement at four o'clock and anything further that I could say now I think would not advance the interest of the sale, which is now in progress.
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73Does this mean that you have not been able to sell them so far today?
74
75We will have a further announcement at four o'clock.
76
77What happened that day in New York marked a radical shift in power.
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79The banks insisted that in order to protect their loans they should be allowed to take control of the city.
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81The city appealed to the President, but he refused to help, so a new committee was set up to manage the city's finances.
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83Out of nine members, eight of them were bankers.
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85It was the start of an extraordinary experiment where the financial institutions took power away from the politicians and started to run society themselves.
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87The city had no other option.
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89The bankers enforced what was called "austerity" on the city, insisting that thousands of teachers, policemen and firemen were sacked.
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91This was a new kind of politics.
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93The old politicians believed that crises were solved through negotiation and deals.
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95The bankers had a completely different view.
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97They were just the representatives of something that couldn't be negotiated with - the logic of the market.
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99To them, there was no alternative to this system.
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101It should run society.
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103Just by shifting paper around, these slobs can make 60 million, 65 million in a single transaction.
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105That would take care of all of the lay-offs in the city, so it's reckless, it's cruel and it's a disgrace.
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107There would be a fair number of bankers, of course, who'd say it's the unions who have been too greedy.
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109What would your reaction be to that? I guess they're right in a way.
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111If you can make 60 million on a single transaction, and a worker makes 8,000, 9,000 a year, I suppose they're correct, and as they go back to their little estates in Greenwich, Connecticut,
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113I want to wish them well, the slobs.
114
115But the extraordinary thing was no-one opposed the bankers.
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117The radicals and the left-wingers who, ten years before, had dreamt of changing America through revolution did nothing.
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119They had retreated and were living in the abandoned buildings in Manhattan.
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121The singer Patti Smith later described the mood of disillusion that had come over them.
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123"I could not identify
124
125"with the political movements any longer," she said.
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127"All the manic activity in the streets.
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129"In trying to join them, I felt overwhelmed
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131"by yet another form of bureaucracy."
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133What she was describing was the rise of a new, powerful individualism that could not fit with the idea of collective political action.
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135Instead, Patti Smith and many others became a new kind of individual radical, who watched the decaying city with a cool detachment.
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137They didn't try and change it.
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139They just experienced it.
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141Look at that. Isn't that cool?
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143I love that, where, like, kids write all over the walls.
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145That, to me, is neater than any art sometimes.
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147"Jose and Maria forever."
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149Oh, there's a lot of things, like, when you pass by big movie houses, maybe we'll find one, but they have little movie screens, where you can see clips of, like, Z, or something like that.
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151People watch it over and over.
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153I've seen people, I've checked them out. All day!
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155I've gone back and forth and they're still there watching the credits of a movie, cos they don't have enough dough, but it's some entertainment, you know?
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157Instead, radicals across America turned to art and music as a means of expressing their criticism of society.
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159They believed that instead of trying to change the world outside the new radicalism should try and change what was inside people's heads, and the way to do this was through self-expression, not collective action.
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161U
162
163V
164
165W
166
167X
168
169Y
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171Z
172
173But some of the Left saw that something else was really going on - that by detaching themselves and retreating into an ironic coolness, a whole generation were beginning to lose touch with the reality of power.
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175Shut up.
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177Shut up!
178
179One of them wrote of that time,
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181"It was the mood of the era
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183"and the revolution was deferred indefinitely.
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185"And while we were dozing, the money crept in."
186
187SOBBING
188
189What's your date of birth, Larry?
190
191But one of the people who did understand how to use this new power was Donald Trump.
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193Trump realised that there was now no future in building housing for ordinary people, because all the government grants had gone.
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195But he saw there were other ways to get vast amounts of money out of the state.
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197Trump started to buy up derelict buildings in New York and he announced that he was going to transform them into luxury hotels and apartments.
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199But in return, he negotiated the biggest tax break in New York's history, worth 160 million.
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201The city had to agree because they were desperate, and the banks, seeing a new opportunity, also started to lend him money.
202
203And Donald Trump began to transform New York into a city for the rich, while he paid practically nothing.
204
205At the very same time, in 1975, there was a confrontation between two powerful men in Damascus, the capital of Syria.
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207One was Henry Kissinger, the US Secretary of State.
208
209The other was the President of Syria, Hafez al-Assad.
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211The battle between the two men was going to have profound consequences for the world.
212
213And like in New York, it was going to be a struggle between the old idea of using politics to change the world and a new idea that you could run the world as a stable system.
214
215President Assad dominated Syria.
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217The country was full of giant images and statues that glorified him.
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219He was brutal and ruthless, killing or imprisoning anyone he suspected of being a threat.
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221But Assad believed that the violence was for a purpose.
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223He wanted to find a way of uniting the Arab countries and using that power to stand up to the West.
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225Four, three, two, one.
226
227Kissinger was also tough and ruthless.
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229He had started in the 1950s as an expert in the theory of nuclear strategy.
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231What was called "the delicate balance of terror."
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233It was the system that ran the Cold War.
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235Both sides believed that if they attacked, the other side would immediately launch their missiles and everyone would be annihilated.
236
237Kissinger had been one of the models for the character of Dr Strangelove in Stanley Kubrick's film.
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239Mr President, I would not rule out the chance to preserve a nucleus of human specimens.
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241It would be quite easy.
242
243At the bottom of some of our deeper mineshafts.
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245Henry was not a warm, friendly, modest, jovial sort of person.
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247He was thought of as one of the more...
248
249..anxious, temperamental, self-conscious, ambitious, inconsiderate people at Harvard.
250
251Kissinger saw himself as a hard realist.
252
253He had no time for the emotional turmoil of political ideologies.
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255He believed that history had always really been a struggle for power between groups and nations.
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257But what Kissinger took from the Cold War was a way of seeing the world as an interconnected system, and his aim was to keep that system in balance and prevent it from falling into chaos.
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259I believe that with all the dislocations we now experience, there also exists an extraordinary opportunity to form, for the first time in history, a truly global society carried up by the principle of interdependence, and if we act wisely, and with vision,
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261I think we can look back to all this turmoil as the birth pangs of a more creative and better system.
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263If we miss the opportunity, I think there's going to be chaos.
264
265The flight has been delayed, we understand now.
266
267Kissinger will be arriving here about an hour and a half from now, so we'll just have the press informed and then we'll stay in contact with you...
268
269And it was this idea that Kissinger set out to impose on the chaotic politics of the Middle East.
270
271But to manage it, he knew that he was going to have to deal with President Assad of Syria.
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273President Assad was convinced that there would only ever be a real and lasting peace between the Arabs and Israel if the Palestinian refugees were allowed to return to their homeland.
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275Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were living in exile in Syria, as well as in the Lebanon and Jordan.
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277Have you found that the Palestinians here want to integrate with the Syrians at all?
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279Oh, no. No, never.
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281They don't want...
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283Not here or neither in Lebanon or in Jordan, never.
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285No, because they want to stay as a whole, as...Palestinian.
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287As... They call themselves, "Those Who Go Back" -
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289"al-a'iduun", you say in Arabic.
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291Assad also believed that such a peace would strengthen the Arab world.
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293But Kissinger thought that strengthening the Arabs would destabilise his balance of power.
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295So, he set out to do the very opposite - to fracture the power of the Arab countries, by dividing them and breaking their alliances, so they would keep each other in check.
296
297Kissinger now played a double game.
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299Or as he termed it, "constructive ambiguity".
300
301In a series of meetings, he persuaded Egypt to sign a separate agreement with Israel.
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303But at the same time, he led Assad to believe that he was working for a wider peace agreement, one that WOULD include the Palestinians.
304
305In reality, the Palestinians were ignored.
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307They were irrelevant to the structural balance of the global system.
308
309The hallmark of Kissinger's thinking about international politics is its structural design.
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311Everything is always connected in his mind to everything else.
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313But his first thoughts are on that level, on this structural global balance of power level.
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315And as he addresses questions of human dignity, human survival, human freedom...
316
317..I think they tend to come into his mind as an adjunct of the play of nations at the power game.
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319When Assad found out the truth, it was too late.
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321In a series of confrontations with Kissinger in Damascus,
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323Assad raged about this treachery.
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325He told Kissinger that what he had done would release demons hidden under the surface of the Arab world.
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327Kissinger described their meetings.
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329"Assad's controlled fury," he wrote,
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331"was all the more impressive for its eerily cold,
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333"seemingly unemotional, demeanour."
334
335Assad now retreated.
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337He started to build a giant palace that loomed over Damascus...
338
339..and his belief that it would be possible to transform the Arab world began to fade.
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341A British journalist, who knew Assad, wrote...
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343"Assad's optimism has gone.
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345"A trust in the future has gone.
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347"What has emerged instead is a brutal, vengeful Assad,
348
349"who believes in nothing except revenge."
350
351The original dream of the Soviet Union had been to create a glorious new world.
352
353A world where not only the society, but the people themselves would be transformed.
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355They would become new and better kinds of human beings.
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357But by the 1980s, it was clear that the dream had failed.
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359WOMAN GASPS
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361WOMAN SPEAKS RUSSIAN
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363The Soviet Union became instead a society where no-one believed in anything or had any vision of the future.
364
365RUSSIAN SONG PLAYS
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367Those who ran the Soviet Union had believed that they could plan and manage a new kind of socialist society.
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369But they had discovered that it was impossible to control and predict everything and the plan had run out of control.
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371But rather than reveal this, the technocrats began to pretend that everything was still going according to plan.
372
373And what emerged instead was a fake version of the society.
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375The Soviet Union became a society where everyone knew that what their leaders said was not real because they could see with their own eyes that the economy was falling apart.
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377But everybody had to play along and pretend that it WAS real because no-one could imagine any alternative.
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379One Soviet writer called it "hypernormalisation".
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381You were so much a part of the system that it was impossible to see beyond it.
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383The fakeness was hypernormal.
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385TANNOY ANNOUNCEMENT IN RUSSIAN
386
387In this stagnant world, two brothers - called Arkady and Boris Strugatsky - became the inspiration of a growing new dissident movement.
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389They weren't politicians, they were science fiction writers, and in their stories, they expressed the strange mood that was rising up as the Soviet Empire collapsed.
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391Their most famous book was called Roadside Picnic.
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393It is set in a world that seems like the present, except there is a zone that has been created by an alien force.
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395People, known as "stalkers", go into the zone.
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397They find that nothing is what it seems, that reality changes minute by minute.
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399Shadows go the wrong way.
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401There are hidden forces that twist your body and change the way you think and feel.
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403The picture the Strugatskys gave was of a world where nothing was fixed.
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405Where reality - both what you saw and what you believed - had become shifting and unstable.
406
407And in 1979, the film director Andrei Tarkovsky made a film that was based on Roadside Picnic.
408
409He called it Stalker.
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411WIND WHISTLES
412
413I, Ronald Reagan, do solemnly swear...
414
415..That I will faithfully execute the office of president of the United States.
416
417..that I will faithfully execute the office of president of the United States.
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419The new president of America had a new vision of the world.
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421It wasn't the harsh realism of Henry Kissinger any longer, it was different - it was a simple, moral crusade, where America had a special destiny to fight evil and to make the world a better place.
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423The places and the periods in which man has known freedom are few and far between - just scattered moments on the span of time.
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425And most of those moments have been ours.
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427The American people have a genius for great and unselfish deeds.
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429Into the hands of America,
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431God has placed the destiny of an afflicted mankind.
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433God bless America.
434
435But this crusade was going to lead Reagan to come face-to-face with Henry Kissinger's legacy...
436
437..and, above all, the vengeful fury of President Assad of Syria.
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439EXPLOSION Israel was now determined to finally destroy the power of the Palestinians.
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441And, in 1982, they sent a massive army to encircle the Palestinian camps in the Lebanon.
442
443Do you know... Do you know how strong the Israelis are?
444
445Do you know how many tanks they have outside Beirut?
446
447Do you know how strong they are?
448
449HE TRANSLATES
450
451That means "We are not ready to surrender".
452
453Young, young, young!
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455NEARBY EXPLOSIONS
456
457Keep going!
458
459Dashed into this building here because the PLO guys with us expect that, sooner or later, there will be a huge explosion.
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461There've been several of these in the last few minutes.
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463As you can see, there's enormous damage in all the buildings round here.
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465EXPLOSION
466
467Quick, quick!
468
469DISTANT EXPLOSIONS
470
471Two months later, thousands of Palestinian refugees were massacred in the camps.
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473It horrified the world.
474
475But what was even more shocking was that Israel had allowed it to happen.
476
477Its troops had stood by and watched as a Christian Lebanese faction murdered the Palestinians.
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479This was the first of the massacres we discovered yesterday.
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481Now, 24 hours later, the stench here is appalling.
482
483But the effects on the Israelis of what their Christian allies did here and in dozens of other places around this camp are going to be immense.
484
485There's always been a risk of such massacres if Christian militiamen were allowed to come into Palestinian camps, and the Israelis seem to have done nothing to prevent them coming into this one.
486
487In the face of the horror and the growing chaos,
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489President Reagan was forced to act.
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491He announced that American marines would come to Beirut to lead a peacekeeping force.
492
493Reagan insisted that the troops were neutral.
494
495But President Assad was convinced that there was another reality.
496
497He saw the troops as part of the growing conspiracy between America and Israel to divide the Middle East into factions and destroy the power of the Arabs.
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499Assad decided to get the Americans out of the Middle East.
500
501And to do this, he made an alliance with the new revolutionary force of Ayatollah Khomeini's Iran.
502
503And what Khomeini could bring to Assad was an extraordinary new weapon that he had just created.
504
505It was called it "the poor man's atomic bomb".
506
507CHANTING:
508
509Ayatollah Khomeini had come to power two years before as the leader of the Iranian revolution.
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511But his hold on power was precarious, and Khomeini had developed a new idea of how to fight his enemies and defend the revolution.
512
513Khomeini told his followers that they could destroy themselves in order to save the revolution providing that, in the process, they killed as many enemies around them as possible.
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515This was completely new, because the Koran specifically prohibited suicide.
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517In the past, you became a martyr on the battlefield because God chose the time and place of your death.
518
519But Khomeini changed this.
520
521He did it by going back to one of the central rituals of Shia Islam.
522
523MUSIC PLAYS
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525Every year, Shi'ites march in a procession mourning the sacrifice of their founder, Husayn.
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527As they do, they whip themselves, symbolically re-enacting Husayn's suffering.
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529Khomeini said that the ultimate act of penitence was not just to whip yourself, but to kill yourself...
530
531..providing it was for the greater good of the revolution.
532
533In the name of God, the compassionate, the merciful, good afternoon.
534
535"An Iraqi Soviet-made MiG-23 was shot down
536
537"by the air-force jet fighters of the Islamic Republic
538
539"over the north-western Iranian border region of Marivan
540
541"at 10.08 hours local time, Saturday," said the Joint Staff Commands communique numbered 1710.
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543Khomeini had mobilised this force when the country was attacked by Iraq.
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545Iran faced almost certain defeat because Iraq had far superior weapons, many of them supplied by America.
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547So, the revolutionaries took tens of thousands of young boys out of schools, put them on buses and sent them to the front line.
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549CHANTING
550
551Their job was to walk through the enemies' minefields, deliberately blowing themselves up in order to open gaps that would allow the Iranian army to pass through unharmed.
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553It was organised suicide on a vast scale.
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555This human sacrifice was commemorated in giant cemeteries across the country.
556
557Fountains flowing with blood red-water glorified this new kind of martyrdom.
558
559And it was this new idea - of an unstoppable human weapon - that President Assad took from Khomeini, and brought to the West for the first time.
560
561But, as it travelled, it would mutate into something even more deadly.
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563Instead of just killing yourself, you would take explosives with you into the heart of the enemy and then blow yourself up, taking dozens or even hundreds along with you.
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565It would become known as "suicide bombing".
566
567In October 1983, two suicide bombers drove trucks into the US marine barracks in Beirut.
568
569It was seeing something move that took me out of my trance.
570
571And then I recognised, "Oh, yes, marines were in that building.
572
573"A lot of marines were in that building."
574
575And that's when I ran down and...
576
577And it was a black... black marine.
578
579He looked white.
580
581The dust had just covered him.
582
583The massive explosions killed 241 Americans.
584
585The bombers were members of a new militant group that no-one had heard of.
586
587They called themselves Hezbollah and, although many of them were Iranian, they were very much under the control of Syria and the Syrian intelligence agencies.
588
589President Assad was using them as his proxies to attack America.
590
591Whoever carried out yesterday's bombings - Shia Muslim fanatics, devotees of the Ayatollah Khomeini, or whatever - it is Syria who profits politically.
592
593The most significant fact is that the dissidents live and work with Syrian protection.
594
595So, it is to Syria rather than to the dissident group's guiding light,
596
597Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran, that we must look for an explanation of the group's activities. Destabilisation is Syria's
598
599Middle-Eastern way of reminding the world that Syria must not be left out of plans for the future of the area.
600
601There are no words that can express our sorrow and grief for the loss of those splendid young men and the injury to so many others.
602
603These deeds make so evident the bestial nature of those who would assume power if they could have their way and drive us out of that area.
604
605But despite his words, within four months,
606
607President Reagan withdrew all the American troops from the Lebanon.
608
609The Secretary of State George Shultz explained.
610
611"We became paralysed by the complexity that we faced," he said.
612
613So, the Americans turned and left.
614
615For President Assad, it was an extraordinary achievement.
616
617He was the only Arab leader to have defeated the Americans and forced them to leave the Middle East.
618
619He had done it by using the new force of suicide bombing.
620
621A force that, once unleashed, was going to spread with unstoppable power.
622
623But at this point, both Assad and the Iranians thought that they could control it.
624
625And what gave it this extraordinary power was that it held out the dream of transcending the corruptions of the world and entering a new and better realm.
626
627TRANSLATION:One should defend the realm of Islam and Muslims against heretics and invaders.
628
629And to fulfil this duty, one should even sacrifice one's life.
630
631We believe that martyrs can overlook our deeds from the other world.
632
633It means that, after death, the martyr lives and can still witness this world.
634
635By the middle of the 1980s, the banks were rising up and becoming ever more powerful in America.
636
637What had started ten years before in New York, the idea that the financial system could run society, was spreading.
638
639But unlike older systems of power, it was mostly invisible.
640
641A writer called William Gibson tried to dramatise what was happening in a powerful, imaginative way, in a series of novels.
642
643Gibson had noticed how the banks and the new corporations were beginning to link themselves together through computer systems.
644
645What they were creating was a series of giant networks of information that were invisible to ordinary people and to politicians.
646
647But those networks gave the corporations extraordinary new powers of control.
648
649'Good morning. South-West Development. May I help you?'
650
651Gibson gave this new world a name.
652
653He called it "cyberspace" and his novels described a future that was dangerous and frightening.
654
655Hackers could literally enter into cyberspace and as they did, they travelled through systems that were so powerful that they could reach out and crush intruders by destroying their minds.
656
657In cyberspace, there were no laws and no politicians to protect you.
658
659Just raw, brutal corporate power.
660
661But then, a strange thing happened.
662
663A new group of visionaries in America took Gibson's idea of a hidden, secret world and transformed it into something completely different.
664
665They turned it into a dream of a new utopia.
666
667They were the technological utopians who were rising up on the West Coast of America.
668
669They turned Gibson's idea on its head.
670
671Instead of cyberspace being a frightening place, dominated by powerful corporations, they reinvented it as the very opposite.
672
673A new, safe world where radical dreams could come true.
674
675Ten years before, faced by the complexity of real politics, the radicals had given up on the idea of changing the world.
676
677But now, the computer utopians saw, in cyberspace, an alternative reality.
678
679A place they could retreat to away from the harsh right-wing politics that now dominated Reagan's America.
680
681The roots of this vision lay back in the counterculture of the 1960s, and, above all, with LSD.
682
683We've got some more acid over here if you want to go ahead.
684
685Many of those who had taken LSD in the '60s were convinced that it was more than just another drug, that it opened human perception and allowed people to see new realities that were normally hidden from them.
686
687See, the ones that have white in them are really great.
688
689SHE GIGGLES
690
691I feel like a rabbit.
692
693It freed them from the narrow, limited view of the world that was imposed on them by politicians and those in power.
694
695In the United States, in the next, five, ten, 15 years, you're going to see more and more people taking LSD and making it a part of their lives, so there will be an LSD country within 15 years.
696
697An LSD society, there will be less interest in, obviously, warfare, in power politics.
698
699You know, politics today is a disease, it's a real addiction.
700
701Politics, politics, politics, politics.
702
703Don't politick, don't vote - these are old men's games.
704
705Impotent and senile old man that want to put you onto their old chess games of war and power.
706
70720 years later, the new networks of machines seemed to offer a way to construct a real alternate reality.
708
709Not just one that was chemically induced, but a space that actually existed in a parallel dimension to the real world.
710
711And like with acid, cyberspace could be a place where you would be liberated from the old, corrupt hierarchies of politics and power and explore new ways of being.
712
713One of the leading exponents of this idea was called John Perry Barlow.
714
715In the '60s, he had written songs for the Grateful Dead and been part of the acid counterculture.
716
717Now, he organised what he called "cyberthons", to try and bring the cyberspace movement together.
718
719Well, you know, the cyberthon as it was originally conceived was supposed to be...
720
721..the '90s equivalent of the acid test and we had thought to involve some of the same personnel.
722
723You and I and Timmy should sit down and talk. OK. That is good.
724
725And it immediately acquired a financial quality or a commercial quality that was initially a little unsettling to an old hippy like me, but as soon as I saw it actually working, then I thought,
726
727"Ah, well, if you're going to have an acid test for the '90s,
728
729"money better be involved."
730
731Instead of having a glass barrier that separates you - your mind - from the mind of the computer, the computer pulls us inside and creates a world for us.
732
733Incorporates everything that could be incorporated.
734
735It incorporates experience itself.
736
737Barlow then wrote a manifesto that he called A Declaration Of Independence Of Cyberspace.
738
739It was addressed to all politicians, telling them to keep out of this new world.
740
741It was going to be incredibly influential, because what Barlow did was give a powerful picture of the internet not as a network controlled by giant corporations, but, instead, as a kind of magical, free place.
742
743An alternative to the old systems of power.
744
745It was a vision that would come to dominate the internet over the next 20 years.
746
747Governments of the industrial world, cyberspace does not lie within your borders.
748
749We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere, may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.
750
751I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us.
752
753We will create a civilisation of the mind in cyberspace.
754
755May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before.
756
757It's begun.
758
759This is the key to a new order.
760
761This code disk means freedom.
762
763But two young hackers in New York thought that Barlow was describing a fantasy world, that his vision bore no relationship at all to what was really emerging online.
764
765They were cult figures on the early online scene and their fans followed and recorded them.
766
767They called themselves Phiber Optik and Acid Phreak and they spent their time exploring and breaking in to giant computer networks that they knew were the hard realities of modern digital power.
768
769My specific instance, I was charged with conspiracy to commit a few dozen "overacts", they called them.
770
771Among a number of things having to do with computer trespass and... and I guess computer eavesdropping, interception.
772
773Unauthorised access to federal interest computers, which is pretty vague law.
774
775Communications network computers and so on.
776
777In a notorious public debate online, the two hackers attacked Barlow.
778
779What infuriated them most was Barlow's insistence that there was no hierarchy or controlling powers in the new cyber world.
780
781The hackers set out to demonstrate that he was wrong.
782
783Acid Phreak hacked into the computers of a giant corporation called TRW.
784
785TRW had originally built the systems that ran the Cold War for the US military.
786
787They had helped create the delicate balance of terror.
788
789Now, TRW had adapted their computers to run a new system, that of credit and debt.
790
791Their computers gathered up the credit data of millions of Americans and were being used by the banks to decide individuals' credit ratings.
792
793The hackers broke into the TRW network, stole Barlow's credit history and published it online.
794
795The hackers were demonstrating the growing power of finance.
796
797How the companies that ran the new systems of credit knew more and more about you, and, increasingly, used that information to control your destiny.
798
799But the system that was allowing this to happen were the new giant networks of information connected through computer servers.
800
801The hackers were questioning whether Barlow's utopian rhetoric about cyberspace might really be a convenient camouflage hiding the emergence of a new and growing power that was way beyond politics.
802
803But cyberspace was not the only imaginary story being created.
804
805Faced with the humiliating defeat in the Lebanon,
806
807President Reagan's government was desperate to shore up the vision of a moral world where a good America struggled against evil.
808
809And to do this they were going to create a simple villain.
810
811An imaginary enemy, one that would free them from the paralysing complexity of real Middle-Eastern politics.
812
813The perfect candidate was waiting in the wings.
814
815Colonel Gaddafi, the ruler of Libya.
816
817The Americans were going to ruthlessly use Colonel Gaddafi to create a fake terrorist mastermind.
818
819And Gaddafi was going to happily play along, because it would turn him into a famous global figure.
820
821Colonel Gaddafi had taken power in a coup in the 1970s but from the very start, he was convinced that he was more than just the leader of one country.
822
823He believed that he was an international revolutionary whose destiny was to challenge the power of the West.
824
825Gentlemen, the Queen.
826
827GOD SAVE THE QUEEN PLAYS
828
829When he was a young officer,
830
831Gaddafi had been sent to England for training and he had detested the patronising racism that he said he had found at the heart of British society.
832
833Yes, I attended a course.
834
835I had been in England in 1966 from February to August.
836
837You had the best months.
838
839HE CHUCKLES
840
841I was in Beaconsfield, a village called Beaconsfield, in an army school.
842
843In fact, we were ill-treated in that place from some British officers.
844
845I think the officers were Jews, maybe Jews.
846
847Ill-treated in what sort of way?
848
849In many ways.
850
851They ill-treat us every time.
852
853By being rude or by bullying or...?
854
855In their own behaviour towards us, they ill-treated us.
856
857They hate us in there because of colonisation.
858
859It is the result of colonising.
860
861Once in power, Gaddafi had developed his own revolutionary theory, which he called the Third Universal Theory.
862
863It was an alternative, he said, to communism and capitalism.
864
865He published it in a green book, but practically no-one read it.
866
867He had sent money and weapons to the IRA in Ireland to help them overthrow the British ruling class.
868
869But all the other Arab leaders rejected him and his ideas.
870
871They thought that he was mad.
872
873And by the mid-1980s, Gaddafi was an isolated figure with no friends and no global influence.
874
875Then, suddenly, that changed.
876
877In December 1985, terrorists attacked Rome and Vienna airports simultaneously, killing 19 people, including five Americans.
878
879There was growing pressure on President Reagan to retaliate.
880
881It's time to rename your State Department the Capitulation Department.
882
883Get off of your stick, Mr President.
884
885The American people are sick and tired of being kicked around.
886
887You talk tough, let's see you use some of these billions and billions and billions of dollars' worth of weapons that you've asked us to approve.
888
889Your words are cheap talk.
890
891President Reagan immediately announced that Colonel Gaddafi was definitely behind the attacks.
892
893These murderers could not carry out their crimes without the sanctuary and support provided by regimes such as Colonel Gaddafi's in Libya.
894
895The Rome and Vienna murders are only the latest in a series of brutal terrorist acts committed with Gaddafi's backing.
896
897But the European security services who investigated the attacks were convinced that Libya was not involved at all and that the mastermind behind the attacks was, in fact, Syria - that the terrorists had been directed by the Syrian intelligence agencies.
898
899But the Americans say that the attack at Rome Airport was organised by Gaddafi, not by Damascus. What do you say?
900
901No, we don't have any evidence... You have no evidence?
902
903..supporting such an...affirmation.
904
905The only evidence we have shows a Syrian connection.
906
907You say that it was Libya and the President said the evidence of Libya's culpability was irrefutable.Yeah.
908
909But the Italian authorities to whom I've spoken say emphatically on the record that their investigations have shown that it was entirely masterminded by Syria.
910
911I don't agree with that at all.
912
913Well, they interrogated the surviving terrorists.
914
915I must just say I don't agree with that.
916
917But you've no evidence that Libya was in on the planning either.
918
919Our evidence on Libya is circumstantial, but very strong.
920
921But why does the President then say it's "irrefutable", if you call it "circumstantial"?
922
923Well, people can be convicted and sentenced in our courts on circumstantial evidence.
924
925But what made it even more confusing was that although there seemed to be no evidence that Gaddafi had been behind the attacks, he made no attempt to deny the allegations.
926
927Instead, he went the other way and turned the crisis into a global drama...
928
929It is not a time of saying.
930
931It is a time of war, a time of confrontation.
932
933..threatening suicide attacks against America.
934
935TRANSLATION:
936
937Gaddafi now started to play a role that was going to become very familiar.
938
939He grabbed the publicity that had been given to him by the Americans and used it dramatically.
940
941He promoted himself as an international revolutionary who would help to liberate oppressed peoples around the world, even the blacks in America.
942
943Gaddafi arranged for a live satellite link to a mass meeting of the Nation Of Islam in Chicago.
944
945Brothers and sisters, it is with great honour and privilege that I present to you the leader of the al-Fateh Revolution from Libya, our brother Muammar al-Gaddafi.
946
947APPLAUSE
948
949Gaddafi told them that Libya was now their ally in their struggle against white America.
950
951..To express my full support and support of my country to your struggle for freedom, for emancipation.
952
953Gaddafi promised that he would supply weapons to create a black army in America of 400,000 men.
954
955"If white America refuses to accept blacks as US citizens," he told them, "it must therefore be destroyed."
956
957Gaddafi also invited a group of German rocket scientists to come to Libya to build him a rocket.
958
959He insisted that it had no military purpose.
960
961Libya was now going to explore outer space.
962
963I think it is peaceful and civil...
964
965Civilian?
966
967..civilian activity for investigation of space and something like this and it has nothing to do with any military things.
968
969But no-one believed him.
970
971Journalists warned that Gaddafi was really preparing to attack Europe, vividly dramatising the new danger.
972
973That is something like this which goes that way to put something into space.
974
975But the same device tilted, say, to an angle of 45 degrees could, of course, become something very different - a missile possibly carrying a warhead.
976
977That would put Libya within range of an enormous area.
978
979A chilling proposition with its range of 2,000km.
980
981The Americans and Gaddafi now became locked together in a cycle of mutual reinforcement.
982
983In the process, a powerful new image was created that was going to capture the imagination of the West.
984
985Gaddafi became a global supervillain, at the head of what was called a "rogue state" - a madman who threatened the stability of the world.
986
987And Gaddafi was loving every minute of it.
988
989So, you think, in the past, his decisions sometimes have been taken too quickly...
990
991Maybe, maybe. ..on world affairs?Maybe.
992
993I think, sometimes, that is what has made people in the world nervous of you, perhaps?Maybe.
994
995HE CHUCKLES
996
997Then, there was another terrorist attack at a discotheque in West Berlin.
998
999A bomb killed an American soldier and injured hundreds.
1000
1001The Americans released what they said were intercepts by the National Security Agency that proved that Colonel Gaddafi was behind the bombing and a dossier that they said proved that he was also the mastermind behind a whole range of other attacks.
1002
1003President Reagan ordered the Pentagon to prepare to bomb Libya.
1004
1005But again, there were doubts - this time, within the American Government itself.
1006
1007There were concerns that analysts were being pressured to make a case that didn't really exist...
1008
1009..and to do it, they were taking Gaddafi's rhetoric about himself as a global revolutionary and his manic ravings and then re-presenting them as fact.
1010
1011And, in the process, together, the Americans and Gaddafi were constructing a fictional world.
1012
1013The analysts were certainly, I'm convinced... pressured into developing a prima facie case against the Libyan Government.
1014
1015From the somewhat incoherent ravings of a maniac, both interceptions of a clandestine nature and interceptions of an open radio broadcast or whatever, as well as other sources, quotations of his, one can assemble a neatly-put-together package demonstrating that the man had violent interests against the United States and its European allies.
1016
1017The European intelligence agencies told the Americans that they were wrong, that it was Syria that was behind the bombing, not Libya.
1018
1019But the Americans had decided to attack Libya because they couldn't face the dangerous consequences of attacking Syria.
1020
1021Instead, they went for Gaddafi, a man without friends or allies.
1022
1023Libya had less downsided consequences, if you will.
1024
1025There's less Arab support for Gaddafi, we figured there would be less Soviet support for Gaddafi.
1026
1027There's no question that Libya was more vulnerable than Syria and Iran.
1028
1029He was a soft target?And that is certainly an element, of course.
1030
1031In April 1986, the Americans attacked Libya.
1032
1033Their targets included Colonel Gaddafi's own house.
1034
1035Immediately after the attack,
1036
1037Gaddafi appeared in the ruins to describe what had happened.
1038
1039TRANSLATION:The family were asleep and my wife was, that day, tied down to the bed because she had a slipped disc.
1040
1041I tried to rescue the children and the house started to collapse, as you can see.
1042
1043And the bombs started to land.
1044
1045They concentrated on the children's room so that they would kill all the children.
1046
1047Our small adopted daughter was killed and two of our children were injured.
1048
1049But, yet again, Gaddafi might have been lying.
1050
1051Ever since then, there have been rumours that his adopted daughter actually survived.
1052
1053But many other children were killed in the raid because the American bombing was so inaccurate.
1054
1055Gaddafi realised that the attention of the whole world was now focused on him and he grabbed the moment to promote his own revolutionary theory,
1056
1057The Third Way, as a global alternative to democracy.
1058
1059TRANSLATION:I feel that I'm really responsible for conveying the Third Way theory and the Green Book to the rising generations, to the young American and British people, so that we can rescue America and Britain and these generations of young people from this theory, this electoral party theory which enabled an imbecile like Reagan to rule the mightiest power on Earth and use it to destroy other people's homes and enabled a harlot like Thatcher to rule a great nation like Britain.
1060
1061MAN:Wow, look at that. What the heck is that?
1062
1063Oh, my God, look at that.
1064
1065Holy crap!
1066
1067It's just moving really slowly. Wow!
1068
1069Look, look, look! Come here, come here! What is it doing?
1070
1071What the heck?!
1072
1073Guys, it's...
1074
1075Whoa!Oh, my gosh!
1076
1077Wow!
1078
1079What is happening? Dude, what is happening?!
1080
1081What is going on? Oh, my gosh!
1082
1083Oh, my God, guys! Guys, is that a freaking UFO?
1084
1085Wait, can you get a good video? What is it?What the hell?
1086
1087In the 1980s, more and more people in the United States reported seeing unexplained objects and lights in the sky.
1088
1089At the same time, investigators who believed in UFOs revealed that they had discovered top-secret government documents that stated that alien craft had visited Earth.
1090
1091The documents had been hidden for 20 years and they seemed to prove that there had been a giant cover-up.
1092
1093But, actually, the reality was even stranger.
1094
1095The American Government might have been making it all up, that they had created a fake conspiracy to deliberately mislead the population.
1096
1097The lights that people imagined were UFOs may, in reality, have been new high-technology weapons that the US Government were testing.
1098
1099The government had developed the weapons because they, in turn, imagined that the Soviet Union was far stronger than it was and still wanted to conquer the world.
1100
1101The government wanted to keep the weapons secret, but they couldn't always hide their appearance in the skies so it is alleged that they chose a number of people to use to spread the rumour that these were really alien visitations.
1102
1103One of those chosen was called Paul Bennewitz who lived outside a giant air base in New Mexico and had noticed strange things going on.
1104
1105Years later,
1106
1107I sat down with Paul at dinner and told Paul exactly that everything we did was a sanctioned counterintelligence operation to convince him that what he was seeing was UFOs and that what we didn't want him to know was that he had tapped into something on the base and we didn't want him to ever disclose that.
1108
1109We kind of planted the seed in Paul that what he was seeing and what he was hearing and what he was collecting was, in fact, probably, maybe, UFOs.
1110
1111Bennewitz and others chosen by the agency were, it is alleged, given a series of forged documents.
1112
1113Many of them were top-secret memos by the military describing sightings of unidentified aerial vehicles.
1114
1115The documents spread like wildfire and they formed the basis for the wave of belief in UFOs that would spread through America in the 1990s.
1116
1117What the fuck is that?That's a...
1118
1119That's crazy, bro.
1120
1121Is that that space, uh...?
1122
1123And it also fuelled the wider growing belief that governments lied to you - that conspiracies were real.
1124
1125What the Reagan administration were doing, both with Colonel Gaddafi and with the UFOs, was a blurring of fact and fiction but it was part of an even broader programme.
1126
1127The President's advisers had given it a name - they called it "perception management" and it became a central part of the American Government during the 1980s.
1128
1129The aim was to tell dramatic stories that grabbed the public imagination, not just about the Middle East, but about Central America and the Soviet Union and it didn't matter if the stories were true or not, providing they distracted people and you, the politician, from having to deal with the intractable complexities of the real world.
1130
1131Reality became less and less of an important factor in American politics.
1132
1133It wasn't what was real that was driving anything or the facts driving anything.
1134
1135It was how you could turn those facts or twist those facts or even make up the facts to make your opponent look bad.
1136
1137So, perception management became a device and the facts could be twisted. Anything could be anything.
1138
1139It becomes how can you manipulate the American people?
1140
1141And, in the process, reality becomes what?
1142
1143Reality becomes simply something to play with to achieve that end.
1144
1145Reality is not important in this context.
1146
1147Reality is simply something that you handle.
1148
1149But something was about to happen that would demonstrate dramatically just how far the American Government had detached from reality.
1150
1151The Soviet Empire was about to implode.
1152
1153And no-one, none of the politicians, or the journalists, or the think tank experts, or the economists, or the academics saw it coming.
1154
1155That's it! Whoo!
1156
1157Get ready to work out.
1158
1159GUNSHOTS
1160
1161The collapse of the Soviet Union also had a powerful effect on the West.
1162
1163For many, it symbolised the final failure of the dream that politics could be used to build a new kind of world.
1164
1165What was going to emerge instead was a new system that had nothing to do with politics.
1166
1167A system whose aim was not to try and change things, but rather, to manage a post-political world.
1168
1169One of the first people to describe this dramatic change was a left-wing German political thinker called Ulrich Beck.
1170
1171Beck said that any politician who believed that they could take control of society, and drive it forward to build a better future, was now seen as dangerous.
1172
1173In the past, politicians might have been able to do this.
1174
1175But now they were faced with what he called "a runaway world."
1176
1177Where things were so complex and interconnected, and modern technologies so potentially dangerous that it was impossible to predict the outcomes of anything you did.
1178
1179The catalogue of environmental disasters proved this.
1180
1181Politicians would have to give up any idea of trying to change the world.
1182
1183Instead, their new aim would be to try and predict the dangers in the future, and then, find ways to avoid those risks.
1184
1185Although Beck came from the political left, the world he saw coming was deeply conservative.
1186
1187The picture he gave was of a political class reduced to trying to steer society into a dark and frightening future.
1188
1189Constantly peering forward and trying to see the risks coming towards them.
1190
1191Their only aim, to avoid those risks and keep society stable.
1192
1193It only lasted for a few seconds so you were basically shocked, you really didn't know what was going on at the time.
1194
1195Where were you in the building and where was the explosion?
1196
1197EXPLOSION Oh, my God!
1198
1199But a system that could anticipate the future and keep society stable was already being built, pieced together from all kinds of different, and sometimes surprising, sources.
1200
1201All of them outside politics.
1202
1203One part of it was taking shape in a tiny town in the far north-west of the United States called East Wenatchee.
1204
1205It was a giant computer whose job was to make the future predictable.
1206
1207The man building it was a banker called Larry Fink.
1208
1209Back in 1986,
1210
1211Mr Fink's career had collapsed.
1212
1213Shoot!
1214
1215He lost 100 million in a deal and had been sacked.
1216
1217He became determined it wouldn't happen again.
1218
1219Fink started a company called BlackRock and built a computer he called Aladdin.
1220
1221It is housed in a series of large sheds in the apple orchards outside Wenatchee.
1222
1223Fink's aim was to use the computer to predict, with certainty, what the risk of any deal or investment was going to be.
1224
1225The computer constantly monitors the world and it take things that it sees happening, and then, compares them to events in the past.
1226
1227It can do this because it has, in its memory, a vast history of the past 50 years. Not just financial, but all kinds of events.
1228
1229Out of the millions and millions of correlations, the computer then spots possible disasters, possible dangers lying in the future and moves the investments to avoid any radical change and keep the system stable.
1230
1231Today, I'm going to deliver 1.8 million reports.
1232
1233Execute 25,000 trades.
1234
1235And avert 3,000 disasters.
1236
1237I'm going to monitor interest rates in Europe.
1238
1239Silver prices in Asia. Droughts in the Midwest.
1240
1241I'm going to witness 4 billion shares change hands on the
1242
1243New York Stock Exchange.
1244
1245And record the effects on 14 trillion in assets across 20,000 portfolios.
1246
1247I am Aladdin.I am Aladdin.
1248
1249And, today, I'll find the numbers behind the numbers.
1250
1251I will see the trends the models don't.
1252
1253The connections.The risks.
1254
1255I am Aladdin.I am Aladdin, and I will get the data right.
1256
1257I am 25 million lines of code.
1258
1259Written by hundreds of people.
1260
1261Across two decades.
1262
1263I'm smarter than any algorithm.
1264
1265More powerful than any processor.
1266
1267Because I am Aladdin.
1268
1269Because I am Aladdin.
1270
1271I am Aladdin.
1272
1273I am Aladdin...
1274
1275Aladdin has proved to be incredibly successful.
1276
1277The assets it guides and controls now amount to 15 trillion, which is 7% of the world's total wealth.
1278
1279But Wenatchee was also a dramatic example of another kind of craving for stability and reassurance.
1280
1281More of its citizens took Prozac than practically any other town in America.
1282
1283When a person's central nervous system is changed by an SSRI, with that medicine they will view things differently and they will be strangers.
1284
1285They look at things differently.
1286
1287I have a chemical up here that changes me.
1288
1289I think differently.
1290
1291For me it was like walking around like this for my whole life and really not knowing that I was near-sighted. I mean, really.
1292
1293I mean, no-one had ever offered me glasses.
1294
1295And then, all of a sudden, here comes somebody that says,
1296
1297"OK, now try these on. Try this Prozac on."
1298
1299And I tried it on and for the first time in my life I went,
1300
1301"Whoa! Is this the way reality really is?"
1302
1303Your perception can be changed and it's frightening and it's scary to people.
1304
1305It speaks of science fiction almost.
1306
1307Well, the medicine just kind of lets you listen to what needs to go on.
1308
1309And then your doctor, every time you come back, says,
1310
1311"You're looking so much better."
1312
1313And then every time I go in he goes,
1314
1315"You're so beautiful." You know?
1316
1317He isn't even sucking up. He's being nice, you know?
1318
1319"You're beautiful, you're nice, you're friendly.
1320
1321"You've got so much going for you." I think, "Yeah, I do."
1322
1323So, I go out and tell my friends,
1324
1325"I feel so much better about myself."
1326
1327Mom goes out, "Oh, I feel so much better about myself."
1328
1329So, your friends start saying, "I've seen such an improvement.
1330
1331"I've seen such improvement."
1332
1333And everybody improves all the way around. They see improvement.
1334
1335It's like everybody's brainwashing each other into being happy.
1336
1337But there was a more effective way of reassuring people that was being developed that did not involve medication.
1338
1339It, too, came from computer systems but this time, artificial intelligence.
1340
1341But the way to do it had been discovered by accident.
1342
1343Back in the 1960s, there had been optimistic dreams that it would be possible to develop computers that could think like human beings.
1344
1345Scientists then spent years trying to programme the rules that governed human thought...
1346
1347..but they never worked.
1348
1349One computer scientist, at MIT, became so disillusioned that he decided to build a computer programme that would parody these hopeless attempts.
1350
1351He was called Joseph Weizenbaum and he built what he claimed was a computer psychotherapist.
1352
1353Just like a therapist, people could come and talk to the machine by typing in their problems.
1354
1355Weizenbaum called the programme "Eliza".
1356
1357He modelled it on a real psychotherapist called Carl Rogers who was famous for simply repeating back to the patient what they had just said.
1358
1359And that is what Eliza did.
1360
1361The patient sat in front of the screen and typed in what they were feeling and the programme repeated it back to them, often in the form of a question.
1362
1363He says I'm depressed much of the time.
1364
1365Well, I need some help.
1366
1367That much seems certain.
1368
1369One of the first people to use Eliza was Weizenbaum's secretary and her reaction was something that he had not predicted at all.
1370
1371I asked her to my office and sat her down at the keyboard and then she began to type and, of course,
1372
1373I looked over her shoulder to make sure everything was operating properly. After two or three interchanges with the machine she turned to me and she said,
1374
1375"Would you mind leaving the room, please?"
1376
1377And yet she knew, as Weizenbaum did, that Eliza didn't understand a single word that was being typed into it.
1378
1379You're like my father in some ways.
1380
1381You don't argue with me.Why do you think I don't argue with you?
1382
1383You're afraid of me.Does it please you to think I'm afraid of you?
1384
1385My father's afraid of everybody.
1386
1387My father's afraid of everybody...
1388
1389Weizenbaum was astonished.
1390
1391He discovered that everyone who tried Eliza became engrossed.
1392
1393They would sit for hours telling the machine about their inner feelings and incredibly intimate details of their lives.
1394
1395They also liked it because it was free of any kind of patronising elitism.
1396
1397One person said, "After all, the computer doesn't burn out,
1398
1399"look down on you, or try to have sex with you."
1400
1401What Eliza showed was that, in an age of individualism, what made people feel secure was having themselves reflected back to them.
1402
1403Just like in a mirror.
1404
1405Artificial intelligence changed direction and started to create new systems that did just that, but on a giant scale.
1406
1407They were called intelligent agents.
1408
1409They worked by monitoring individuals, gathering vast amounts of data about their past behaviour and then looked for patterns and correlations from which they could predict what they would want in the future.
1410
1411It was a system that ordered the world in a way that was centred around you.
1412
1413And in an age of anxious individualism, frightened of the future, that was reassuring, just like Eliza.
1414
1415A safe bubble that protected you from the complexities of the world outside.
1416
1417And the applications of this new direction proved fruitful and profitable.
1418
1419If you liked that, you'll love this.
1420
1421What was rising up in different ways was a new system that promised to keep the world stable.
1422
1423Its tentacles reached into every area of our lives.
1424
1425Finance promised that it could control the unpredictability of the free market...
1426
1427..while individuals were more and more monitored to stabilise their physical and mental states.
1428
1429And, increasingly, the intelligent agents online predicted what people would want in the future and how they would behave.
1430
1431But the biggest change was to politics.
1432
1433In a world where the overriding aim was now stability, politics became just part of a wider system of managing the world.
1434
1435The old idea of democratic politics, that it gave a voice to the weak against the powerful, was eroded.
1436
1437And a resentment began to quietly grow out on the edges of society.
1438
1439But the new system did have a dangerous flaw.
1440
1441Because in the real world, not everything can be predicted by reading data from the past.
1442
1443And someone who was about to discover that, to his own cost, was Donald Trump.
1444
1445One day a man called Jess Marcum received a phone call.
1446
1447It was from Donald Trump and Trump was desperate for help.
1448
1449Marcum was a strange, mysterious figure.
1450
1451He had been a nuclear scientist in the 1950s and studied the effect of radiation from nuclear weapons on the human body.
1452
1453Then Marcum had gone to Las Vegas and become obsessed by gambling.
1454
1455He had a photographic memory and he used it to instantly process the data of the games as they were played.
1456
1457From that, he could predict the outcome.
1458
1459And he always won.
1460
1461The Las Vegas gangsters were fascinated by him.
1462
1463They called him "The Automat".
1464
1465Where are we going? Let's go. Go, go, go.
1466
1467Donald Trump was one of the heroes of the age.
1468
1469But, in reality, much of this success was a facade.
1470
1471The banks that had lent Trump millions had discovered that he could no longer pay the interest on the loans.
1472
1473Trump's empire was facing bankruptcy.
1474
1475His wife Ivana hated him because he was having an affair with Miss Hawaiian Tropic 1985.
1476
1477And then, a famous Japanese gambler called Akio Kashiwagi came to one of Trump's casinos and started to win millions of dollars in an extraordinary run of luck.
1478
1479Trump, who was desperate for money, panicked as day-after-day he watched millions being siphoned out of his casino.
1480
1481So, he turned for help to Jess Marcum.
1482
1483Marcum came to Trump's casino in Atlantic City.
1484
1485He analysed all the data about the way the Kashiwagi had been playing.
1486
1487He then told Trump to suggest a particular high-stakes game that he knew the Japanese gambler could not resist.
1488
1489His model, Marcum said, predicted that Kashiwagi had to lose.
1490
1491And after five agonising days, he did.
1492
1493Kashiwagi lost 10 million and he gave up.
1494
1495Donald Trump was elated.
1496
1497He thought he'd got his money back.
1498
1499IN JAPANESE:
1500
1501Before Kashiwagi could pay his debt, he was hacked to death in his kitchen by Yakuza gangsters...
1502
1503..and Donald Trump didn't get his money.
1504
1505Trump's business went bankrupt and he was forced to sell most of his buildings to the banks.
1506
1507And he married Miss Hawaiian Tropic.
1508
1509In the future, he would sell his name to other people to put on their buildings and he himself would become a celebrity tycoon.
1510
1511President Assad didn't want stability.
1512
1513He wanted revenge.
1514
1515In December 1988, a bomb exploded on a Pan Am plane over Lockerbie in Scotland.
1516
1517Almost immediately, investigators and journalists pointed the finger at Syria.
1518
1519"The bombing had been done," they said, "in revenge for the Americans
1520
1521"shooting down an Iranian airliner in the Gulf a few months before."
1522
1523And for 18 months, everyone agreed that this was the truth.
1524
1525But then, a strange thing happened.
1526
1527The security agencies said that they had been wrong.
1528
1529It hadn't been Syria at all.
1530
1531It was Libya who had been behind the Lockerbie bombing.
1532
1533But many journalists and politicians did not believe it.
1534
1535They were convinced that the switch had happened for the most cynical of reasons.
1536
1537That America and Britain desperately needed Assad as an ally in the coming Gulf War against Saddam Hussein.
1538
1539So, once again, they blamed Colonel Gaddafi as the terrorist mastermind.
1540
1541Syria, of course, was, unfortunately, accused of many terrorist outrages and of harbouring terrorist groups.
1542
1543It appears that we have now restored relations with them, as have the Americans. They're now our friends, although we've got no real assurances on the past whatsoever.
1544
1545It strikes me as very strange indeed that many of the things we thought were previously the responsibility of Syria have now, dramatically, become the responsibility of Libya.
1546
1547But Assad was not really in control.
1548
1549Because he had released forces that no-one would be able to control.
1550
1551The force that, ten years before, he had brought from Iran to attack the West - the human bomb - was now about to jump, like a virus, from Shia to Sunni Islam.
1552
1553In December 1992, the militant group Hamas kidnapped an Israeli border guard and stabbed him to death.
1554
1555The Israeli response was overwhelming.
1556
1557They arrested 415 members of Hamas, put them on buses and took them to the top of a bleak mountain in southern Lebanon.
1558
1559They left them there - and refused to allow any humanitarian aid through.
1560
1561THEY CHANT AND SHOUT
1562
1563But the Israelis had dumped the Hamas militants in an area controlled by Hezbollah.
1564
1565They spent six months there, and during that time, they learnt from Hezbollah how powerful suicide bombing could be.
1566
1567Hezbollah told them how they had used it to force the Israelis out of Beirut and back to the border.
1568
1569The first sign that the idea had spread to Hamas was when a group of the deportees marched in protest towards the Israeli border, dressed as martyrs, as the Israelis shelled them.
1570
1571But it soon became more than just theatre.
1572
1573Hamas began a wave of suicide attacks in Israel.
1574
1575REPORTER:Just before nine, at the height of Tel Aviv's rush hour, the bomb ripped apart a commuter bus.
1576
1577An amateur cameraman recorded the scene in the moments afterwards as a dazed woman was helped out of the smouldering wreckage.
1578
1579I didn't want to believe that under my house there is a bomb.
1580
1581And when I realised it's a bomb, I...
1582
1583I started to cry.
1584
1585Because it was the first time I saw it in Tel Aviv.
1586
1587Hamas sent the bombers into the heart of Israeli cities to blow themselves up and kill as many around them as possible.
1588
1589In doing this, Hamas were going much further than Hezbollah ever had.
1590
1591They were targeting civilians, something Hezbollah had never done.
1592
1593The tactic shocked the Sunni world.
1594
1595This was something completely alien to its history.
1596
1597Not only did the Koran forbid suicide, but Sunni Islam did not have any rituals of self-sacrifice - unlike the Shias.
1598
1599The most senior religious leader in Saudi Arabia insisted it was wrong.
1600
1601But a mainstream theologian from Egypt called Sheikh Qaradawi seized the moment.
1602
1603He issued a fatwa that justified the attacks.
1604
1605"And," he added, "it was also justified to kill civilians,
1606
1607"because, in Israel, everyone -
1608
1609"including women - serve as reservists.
1610
1611"So, really, they are all part of the enemy army."
1612
1613TRANSLATION:It's not suicide. It is martyrdom in the name of God.
1614
1615Islamic theologians and jurisprudence have debated this issue.
1616
1617Israeli women are not like women in our society, because Israeli women are militarised.
1618
1619Secondly, I consider this type of martyrdom operation as an indication of justice of Allah, our Almighty.
1620
1621Allah is just.
1622
1623Through his infinite wisdom, he has given the weak what the strong do not possess.
1624
1625And that is their ability to turn their bodies into bombs like the Palestinians do.
1626
1627Hamas kept sending the bombers into Israel.
1628
1629Sometimes day-after-day.
1630
1631The horror overwhelmed Israeli society and it completely destroyed the ability of politics to solve the Palestinian crisis.
1632
1633Instead, in the Israeli election of 1996,
1634
1635Benjamin Netanyahu took power.
1636
1637He turned against the peace process, which was exactly what Hamas wanted.
1638
1639And from then on, the two sides became locked together in ever more horrific cycles of violence.
1640
1641# Netanyahu! #
1642
1643The human bomb had destroyed the very thing that President Assad had first wanted.
1644
1645A real political solution to the Palestinian question.
1646
1647REPORTER: It was just after one o'clock and the market was full of shoppers.
1648
1649SIRENS WAIL
1650
1651Streams of ambulances came to carry away the dead and the injured.
1652
1653It was a place of appalling suffering.
1654
1655But even with the first grief came the immediate political impact on the peace process.
1656
1657Peace impossible!
1658
1659This moment, it will be the end!
1660
1661It must be the end of this bloody peace process.
1662
1663And, in America, all optimistic visions of the future had also disappeared.
1664
1665Instead everyone in society - not just the politicians - but the scientists, the journalists, and all kinds of experts had begun to focus on the dangers that might be hidden in the future.
1666
1667This, in turn, created a pessimistic mood that then began to spread out from the rational technocratic world and infect the whole of the culture.
1668
1669And everyone became possessed by dark forebodings, imagining the very worst that might happen.
1670
1671# Dream, baby, dream
1672
1673# Dream, baby, dream
1674
1675# Dream, baby, dream
1676
1677# Dream, baby, dream
1678
1679# Forever
1680
1681# Oh, dream, baby, dream
1682
1683# Dream, baby, dream
1684
1685# Dream, baby, dream
1686
1687# Dream, baby, dream
1688
1689# Forever... #
1690
1691SHATTERING EXPLOSIONS
1692
1693# ..Dream, baby, dream
1694
1695# Oh, baby, we gotta keep that dream alive
1696
1697# Keep that dream alive
1698
1699# Forever
1700
1701# Oh, dream, baby, dream
1702
1703# Dream, baby, dream
1704
1705# Dream, baby, dream
1706
1707# Dream, baby, dream
1708
1709# Oh, dream, baby, dream, baby, dream, baby
1710
1711# Dream, baby, dream, baby
1712
1713# Oh, dream, baby, dream... # SCREAMING
1714
1715PANICKED SCREAMS
1716
1717RUMBLING, SHATTERING GLASS
1718
1719# Oh, you keep that fire, burning, baby
1720
1721# Oh, you gotta keep that flame burning brightly, baby... #
1722
1723CRASHING EXPLOSIONS
1724
1725SILENCE
1726
1727DISTANT SIRENS
1728
1729The attacks in September 2001 were suicide bombs, but now on a huge scale.
1730
1731They demonstrated the terrifying power of this new force to penetrate all defences.
1732
1733They had come to kill thousands of Americans on their own soil.
1734
173520 years before,
1736
1737President Reagan had been confronted by the first suicide bombers.
1738
1739They had been unleashed by President Assad of Syria to force America out of the Middle East.
1740
1741But rather than confront the complexity of Syria and Israel and the Palestinian problem,
1742
1743America had retreated and left Syria - and suicide bombing - to fester and mutate.
1744
1745They had gone instead for Colonel Gaddafi and turned him into an evil global terrorist.
1746
1747But, in the process, this changed the way people saw and understood terrorism.
1748
1749Instead of a violence born out of political struggles for power, it became replaced by a much simpler image of an evil tyrant at the head of a rogue state who became more like an archcriminal who wanted to terrorise the world.
1750
1751All the politics and power dropped away.
1752
1753The problem was just them and their evil personalities.
1754
1755And after 9/11, this led to a new, and equally simple, idea.
1756
1757That if only you could remove these tyrannical figures, then the grateful people of their country would transform naturally into a democracy, because they would be free of the evil.
1758
1759We owe it to the future of civilisation not to allow the world's worst leaders to develop and deploy, and therefore, blackmail freedom-loving countries with the world's worst weapons.
1760
1761We know they've already got chemical and biological weapons there.
1762
1763We know that they're certainly doing their best to acquire nuclear weapons technology.
1764
1765If we allow them to do that, and do nothing about it, then,
1766
1767I think, later generations will consider us deeply irresponsible.
1768
1769Both Tony Blair and George Bush became possessed by the idea of ridding the world of Saddam Hussein.
1770
1771So possessed that they believed any story that proved his evil intentions.
1772
1773And the line between reality and fiction became ever more blurred.
1774
1775In September 2002, the head of MI6 rushed to Downing Street to tell Blair excitedly that they had finally found the source that confirmed everything.
1776
1777The source, he said, had "direct access" to Saddam Hussein's chemical weapons programme which was making vast quantities of VX and sarin nerve agents.
1778
1779The nerve agents were being loaded into "linked hollow glass spheres".
1780
1781But then someone in MI6 noticed that the detail the source was describing was identical to scenes in the 1996 movie The Rock, starring Sean Connery and Nicolas Cage.
1782
1783Really elegant string-of-pearls configuration.
1784
1785Unfortunately, incredibly unstable.
1786
1787What exactly does this stuff do?
1788
1789If the rocket renders it aerosol, it could take out the entire city of people.
1790
1791How?It's a cholinesterase inhibitor.
1792
1793Stops the brain from sending nerve messages down the spinal cord...
1794
1795A later report into the Iraq War pointed out,
1796
1797"Glass containers were not typically used in chemical munitions..."
1798
1799..seizes your nervous system... Do not move that!
1800
1801"..and the informant had obviously seen
1802
1803"a popular movie known as The Rock
1804
1805"that had inaccurately depicted nerve agents being carried
1806
1807"in glass beads or spheres."
1808
1809..that's after your skin melts off.
1810
1811My God.
1812
1813That there is a threat from Saddam Hussein and the weapons of mass destruction that he has acquired, is not in doubt at all.
1814
1815Hafez al-Assad had died in 2000.
1816
1817His son, Bashar, became the new president of Syria.
1818
1819But he couldn't escape the inexorable logic of what his father had started.
1820
182120 years before, his father had sent Shi'ite suicide bombers to attack the Americans in Lebanon.
1822
1823Now, as America and Britain invaded Iraq,
1824
1825Bashar decided that he would copy his father.
1826
1827But what he was about to let loose would tear the Arab world apart - and then come back to try to destroy him.
1828
1829STATELY FANFARE PLAYS
1830
1831Bashar Assad had was never supposed to have been president.
1832
1833It was always going to have been his elder brother, Bassel.
1834
1835But then, Bassel had died in a car crash.
1836
1837So now, Bashar took over the giant palace that his father had built above Damascus.
1838
1839Up to this point, Bashar had not been interested in politics.
1840
1841He was fascinated by computers.
1842
1843He founded the Syrian Computer Society and brought the internet to the country.
1844
1845His favourite band was the Electric Light Orchestra.
1846
1847But now, he was president.
1848
1849And he set out to attack America.
1850
1851Bashar Assad was convinced that the invasion of Iraq was just the first step of a plot by the Western powers to take over the whole of the Middle East.
1852
1853He knew that the invasion had outraged many of the radical Islamists in Syria and what they most wanted to do was to go to Iraq and kill Americans.
1854
1855So, Bashar instructed the Syrian Intelligence Services to help them do this.
1856
1857Syrian agents set up a pipeline that began to feed thousands of militants across the border and into the heart of the insurgency.
1858
1859And it grew.
1860
1861Within a year, almost all of the foreign fighters from across the world were coming through Syria...
1862
1863..and they brought suicide bombing with them.
1864
1865The Americans estimated that 90% of the suicide bombers in Iraq were foreign fighters.
1866
1867But it began to run out of control.
1868
1869Most of the jihadists had joined the group al-Qaeda in Iraq that then turned to killing Shi'ites in an attempt to create a civil war.
1870
1871And the force that had originally been invented by the Shi'ites, suicide bombing, now returned and started to kill them.
1872
1873Then, this.
1874
1875EXPLOSION
1876
1877STUNNED SILENCE
1878
1879A moment of silence before people realised what was happening.
1880
1881SCREAMING
1882
1883A few seconds ago, we just had repeated explosions in the street below me.
1884
1885People are now fleeing in terror from the central square around the mosque.
1886
1887This is what everybody feared... DISTANT EXPLOSION
1888
1889We just heard another explosion in the distance.
1890
1891..that somebody would try to target this religious festival to try to bring about a sectarian conflict in Iraq.
1892
1893SCREAMING
1894
1895There was panic.
1896
1897A terrified stampede.
1898
1899But some of these people were running into the next bombs.
1900
1901EXPLOSIONS
1902
1903We counted at least six separate explosions.
1904
1905MUSIC DROWNS AUDIO
1906
1907Tony Blair and George Bush were faced by disaster.
1908
1909Iraq was imploding.
1910
1911While, at home, they were being accused of lying to their own people to justify the invasion.
1912
1913What they desperately needed was something that would show that the invasion was having a good effect in the Arab world.
1914
1915So, they made an extraordinary decision.
1916
1917They turned for help to the man who they had always insisted was one of the world's most dangerous tyrants.
1918
1919Colonel Gaddafi.
1920
1921And, instead, they set out to make him their new best friend.
1922
1923It was going to be the highest achievement of Perception Management.
1924
1925A man who had been created by the West as a fake global supervillain was now going to be turned into a fake hero of democracy.
1926
1927And everyone, not just politicians, would become involved.
1928
1929Public relations, academics, television presenters, spies, and even musicians were all going to help reinvent Colonel Gaddafi.
1930
1931It would show just how many people in the Western Establishment had, by now, become the engineers of this fake world.
1932
1933Ever since he had been accused of the Lockerbie bombing,
1934
1935Colonel Gaddafi had been a complete outcast.
1936
1937The West had imposed sanctions on Libya and the economy was falling apart.
1938
1939But then, suddenly, Tony Blair broke live into the BBC evening news.
1940
1941The Prime Minister, Tony Blair, is about to make a statement, the BBC understands, from Downing Street.
1942
1943It's of international significance.
1944
1945He'll be making his statement at any moment now.
1946
1947We can see pictures of him in Durham...
1948
1949This evening...Here he is.
1950
1951..Colonel Gaddafi has confirmed that Libya has, in the past, sought to develop weapons-of-mass-destruction capabilities.
1952
1953Libya has now declared its intention to dismantle its weapons of mass destruction completely.
1954
1955This decision by Colonel Gaddafi is a historic one, and a courageous one, and I applaud it.
1956
1957Today, in Tripoli, the leader of Libya,
1958
1959Colonel Muammar al-Gaddafi...
1960
1961..publically confirmed his commitment to disclose and dismantle all weapons-of-mass-destruction programmes in his country.
1962
1963Colonel Gaddafi now became, for Western politicians, a heroic figure.
1964
1965His decision to give up his weapons of mass destruction seemed to prove that the invasion of Iraq could transform the Middle East.
1966
1967And Tony Blair travelled to meet Gaddafi in his desert tent.
1968
1969To welcome him back into what one journalist called,
1970
1971"The community of civilised nations."
1972
1973But, as in the past, nothing was what it seemed with Colonel Gaddafi.
1974
1975In reality, Gaddafi did not really have the terrifying weapons of mass destruction that he was promising to destroy.
1976
1977His nuclear programme had stuttered to a halt long ago and never produced anything dangerous.
1978
1979He had managed to buy some equipment on the black market, but his technicians had been unable to assemble it.
1980
1981His biological weapons were non-existent.
1982
1983All he had was some old mustard gas in leaking barrels.
1984
1985But now, he had to pretend to have a terrifying arsenal of weapons.
1986
1987And the West had to pretend that they had avoided another global threat.
1988
1989And then the made-up stories became even more complicated.
1990
1991As part of the deal, the West said that if Gaddafi admitted that Libya had done the Lockerbie bombing, then they would lift the sanctions.
1992
1993But many of those who had investigated Lockerbie were still convinced that Libya hadn't done it.
1994
1995That, really, it had been Syria.
1996
1997But Colonel Gaddafi confessed.
1998
1999His son, Saif, was interviewed about this confession.
2000
2001He said that his father was simply pretending that he had been behind the Lockerbie bombing to get the sanctions lifted.
2002
2003That new lies were being built on top of old lies to construct a completely make-believe world.
2004
2005You have to accept, or you had to accept at the time, a responsibility, because you have to accept responsibilities, you have to pay compensation in order to get rid of sanction.
2006
2007We did that, not because we are convinced that we did it, but because of the final exit out of this nightmare.
2008
2009So, what you're saying is that you accept responsibility, but you're not admitting that you did it. Yes.
2010
2011And this is all a sham, you're saying, just to get sanctions over with so that you can start normal diplomatic relations with the West.
2012
2013OK. OK. What's wrong with that?
2014
2015It's a very cynical way to behave, as a country, isn't it?
2016
2017Many people would say... First of all...
2018
2019I mean, the Americans and the British, they told us to write that letter.
2020
2021They told us to pay compensation.
2022
2023And then, they opened their embassies and they restored their relation.
2024
2025They came to us.
2026
2027It was their game. Not our game.
2028
2029Does the... Does the leader know there's a picture on the television?
2030
2031Will you tell him? Oh, good. Thank you.
2032
2033INDISTINCT CONVERSATION
2034
2035Public relations companies then came to Libya to do what they called "reframing the narrative".
2036
2037One firm was paid 3 million to turn Gaddafi into what they described as a modern world thinker.
2038
2039CREW MURMURS
2040
2041OK. We're going in ten.
2042
2043They did this by bringing other famous world thinkers and TV presenters out to Libya to meet the colonel and discuss his theories.
2044
2045Hello, and welcome to Libya In The Global Age,
2046
2047A Conversation With Muammar Gaddafi.
2048
2049But first, let's get the story so far of Libya.
2050
2051One world thinker was called Lord Anthony Giddens.
2052
2053Coincidentally, he had a theory which he called "The Third Way" which had inspired Tony Blair.
2054
2055Colonel Gaddafi's own theory was called "The Third Universal Theory."
2056
2057Lord Giddens later wrote about his talks with the Libyan leader.
2058
2059"Colonel Gaddafi likes my term 'the third way'
2060
2061"because his own political philosophy
2062
2063"is a version of this idea.
2064
2065"He makes many intelligent and perceptive points.
2066
2067"I leave enlivened and encouraged."
2068
2069That for 40 years, the leader of Libya, Muammar Gaddafi...
2070
2071And then, Colonel Gaddafi achieved his lifelong dream.
2072
2073He was invited to address the United Nations.
2074
2075He spent almost two hours explaining his Third International Theory.
2076
2077And also demanding an investigation into the shootings of President Kennedy and Martin Luther King.
2078
2079When he was in New York, Gaddafi was offered a tent, just like the one he had at home, in the gardens of a grand mansion.
2080
2081The man who made the offer was Donald Trump.
2082
2083TRUMP:'I've dealt with everybody.
2084
2085'And by the way, I can tell you something else!' What?
2086
2087'I've dealt with Gaddafi.'
2088
2089What did you do?'Excuse me. I rented him a piece of land.
2090
2091'He paid me more for one night than the land was worth
2092
2093'for the whole year or for two years.
2094
2095'And then, I didn't let him use the land!
2096
2097'That's what we should be doing.' Was that over in New Jersey?
2098
2099'I don't want to use the word "screw", but I screwed him.
2100
2101'That's what we should be doing!'
2102
2103People in Britain and America now began to turn away from politics.
2104
2105The effect of the Iraq war had been very powerful.
2106
2107Not only did millions of people feel that they had been lied to over the weapons of mass destruction, but there was a deeper feeling - that whatever they did or said had no effect.
2108
2109That despite the mass protests, and the fears and the warnings - the war had happened anyway.
2110
2111Liberals, radicals and a whole new generation of young people retreated.
2112
2113They turned instead to another world that was free of this hypocrisy and the corruption of politics
2114
2115They went into cyberspace.
2116
2117# Once upon a time it was you by the door
2118
2119# I... #
2120
2121By now cyberspace had become even more sophisticated and responsive to human interaction.
2122
2123The online world was full of algorithms that could analyse and predict human behaviour.
2124
2125The man behind much of this was a scientist called Judea Pearl.
2126
2127He was the godfather of modern Artificial Intelligence.
2128
2129Pearl's breakthrough had been to use what were called Bayesian Belief Networks.
2130
2131They were systems that could predict behaviour, even when the information was incomplete.
2132
2133But to make the system work, Pearl and others had imported a model of human beings drawn from economics.
2134
2135They created what were called rational agents, software that mimicked human beings but in a very simplified form.
2136
2137The model assumed that the agent would always act rationally in order to get what it wanted. Nothing more.
2138
2139One of the early utopians of cyberspace,
2140
2141Jaron Lanier, warned of the implications of this.
2142
2143"The agent's model of what you are
2144
2145"interested in will always be a cartoon.
2146
2147"And in return you will see a cartoon
2148
2149"version of the world through the agent's eyes."
2150
2151And, he added, "It will never be clear
2152
2153"who they are working for - you or someone else."
2154
2155New technology began to allow people to upload millions of images and videos into cyberspace.
2156
2157And the web - which up to that point had seemed like an abstract otherworld - began to look and feel like the real world.
2158
2159INDISTINCT
2160
2161No, not yet.
2162
2163From videos of animals, personal moments of experience, extraordinary events, to horrific terror videos, more and more was uploaded.
2164
2165HIP-HOP MUSIC PLAYS
2166
2167And in a strange, sad twist, the first terrorist beheading video that was posted online was that of
2168
2169Judea Pearl's own son, Daniel Pearl.
2170
2171He was a journalist for the
2172
2173Wall Street Journal and had been kidnapped by radical Islamists in Pakistan.
2174
2175They recorded what they said was his confession...
2176
2177..and then his killing.
2178
2179My name is Daniel Pearl.
2180
2181I'm a Jewish-American.
2182
2183I come from... On my father's side of the family, are Zionists.
2184
2185My father is Jewish.
2186
2187My mother is Jewish. I'm Jewish.
2188
2189Only now do I think about some of the people in Guantanamo Bay must be in a similar situation.
2190
2191This was a new world that the old systems of power found it very difficult to deal with.
2192
2193In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, the security agencies secretly collected data from millions of people online.
2194
2195One programme was called Optic Nerve. It took stills from the webcam conversations of millions of people across the world, trying to spot terrorists planning another attack.
2196
2197The programme did not discover a single terrorist.
2198
2199But it did discover something else.
2200
2201A top secret assessment said...
2202
2203But increasingly, people were using the internet in other ways - to present themselves as
2204
2205THEY wanted to be seen.
2206
2207I guess the video blog is about me.
2208
2209I don't really want to tell you where I live because you could, like, stalk me.
2210
2211The web drew people in because it was mesmerising.
2212
2213It was somewhere that you could explore and get lost in in any way you wanted.
2214
2215But behind the screen, like in a two-way mirror, the simplified agents were watching and predicting and guiding your hand on the mouse.
2216
2217Stop...
2218
2219I nearly... threw my phone away!
2220
2221Stop! Stop!
2222
2223Pose.Pose. And snap a selfie...
2224
2225PHONE CAMERA WHIRS
2226
2227There you go.There you go.
2228
2229They play with themselves.
2230
2231But what they don't know...
2232
2233As the intelligent systems online gathered ever more data, new forms of guidance began to emerge.
2234
2235Social media created filters - complex algorithms that looked at what individuals liked - and then fed more of the same back to them.
2236
2237In the process, individuals began to move, without noticing, into bubbles that isolated them from enormous amounts of other information.
2238
2239They only heard and saw what they liked.
2240
2241And the news feeds increasingly excluded anything that might challenge people's pre-existing beliefs.
2242
2243# And now it's all right
2244
2245# I know my own lie
2246
2247# Is coming to say
2248
2249# You will call out
2250
2251# Yourself
2252
2253# I know I thought
2254
2255# Makes my face and hands cold
2256
2257# And I
2258
2259# Ooh
2260
2261# Ooh
2262
2263# Ooh... #
2264
2265The version of cyberspace that was rising up seemed to be very much like
2266
2267William Gibson's original vision.
2268
2269That behind the superficial freedoms of the web were a few giant corporations with opaque systems that controlled what people saw and shaped what they thought.
2270
2271And what was even more mysterious was how they made their decisions about what you should like.
2272
2273And what should be hidden from you.
2274
2275But then, the other utopian vision of cyberspace re-emerged.
2276
2277Taking over the roadway.
2278
2279CHANTING
2280
2281Take it!
2282
2283CHEERING AND WHOOPING
2284
2285CHANTING
2286
2287After the financial crash of 2008 the politicians saved the banks.
2288
2289But they did practically nothing about the massive corruption that was revealed in its wake.
2290
2291And the reason they gave was that it might destabilise the system.
2292
2293Public anger burst out. The Occupy movement took over Wall Street and then the Senate in Washington.
2294
2295The issue is that certain individuals that are very wealthy, have pretty much corrupted our political system and this is the heart of it.
2296
2297This is the Senate building.
2298
2299These people have been cut off and they've corrupted our democracy and it's literally killing people.
2300
2301I'm an Iraqi war vet. I went to Iraq in 2009.
2302
2303I've seen what happens first hand when we let corruption rule our elected government and democracy. We're coming here today just to raise awareness.
2304
2305What drove the Occupy movement was the original dream of the internet that people like John Perry Barlow had outlined in the early 1990s.
2306
2307In his Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,
2308
2309Barlow had described a new world free of politics and the old hierarchies of power.
2310
2311A space where people connected together as equals in a network and built a new society without leaders.
2312
2313Now, the Occupy movement set out to build that kind of society in the real world.
2314
2315The camps were to be the models.
2316
2317All the meetings used the idea of the human microphone.
2318
2319People throughout the crowd repeated a speaker's words so everyone could hear them.
2320
2321ALL:We are now going to vote...
2322
2323SPEAKER:..on whether to stay here for the next two hours...
2324
2325ALL:..on whether to stay here for the next two hours...
2326
2327SPEAKER:..or leave now.
2328
2329ALL:..or leave now.
2330
2331But if someone wanted to challenge the speaker, the human amplifiers also had to repeat THEIR words so their voice had equal power.
2332
2333SPEAKER:..what she said...
2334
2335ALL:..what she said...
2336
2337SPEAKER: ..was that...ALL: ..was that...SPEAKER: ..the proposal...
2338
2339Each person was an autonomous individual who expressed what they believed.
2340
2341But together they became components in a network that organised itself through the feedback of information around the system.
2342
2343You could organise people without the exercise of power.
2344
2345CHANTING
2346
2347CAR HORNS BLARE
2348
2349The crisis in Egypt.
2350
2351CHANTING AND SHOUTING
2352
2353A march through our main streets.
2354
2355Looks like chaos. Looks like police is running around and a few hundred people walking down the street.
2356
2357Then, almost immediately, the Arab Spring began.
2358
2359The first revolution started in Tunisia, but it quickly spread to Egypt.
2360
2361On January 25th 2011, thousands of Egyptians came out in groups across Cairo and then started moving towards Tahrir Square.
2362
2363It seemed like a spontaneous uprising but the internet had played a key role in organising the groups.
2364
2365One of the main activists was an Egyptian computer engineer called Wael Ghonim.
2366
2367He worked for Google in Egypt but he had also set up the Facebook site that played the key role in organising the first protests.
2368
2369As hundreds of thousands took over Tahrir Square,
2370
2371Ghonim gave an interview on Egyptian TV.
2372
2373But Ghonim was also overwhelmed by the power this new technology had, that a computer engineer with a keyboard could call out thousands of people... some of whom then died in the midst of the protests.
2374
2375Many liberals in the West saw this as proof of the revolutionary power of the internet.
2376
2377Again it seemed to be able to organise a revolution without leaders.
2378
2379A revolution powerful enough to topple a brutal dictator who had been backed by America and the West for 30 years.
2380
2381But the internet radicals were not the only ones who saw their dreams being fulfilled in the Arab Spring.
2382
2383Many of the political leaders of the West also enthusiastically supported the revolutions because it seemed to fit with their simple idea of regime change.
2384
2385It might have failed in Iraq but now the people, everywhere, were rising up to rid themselves of the evil tyrants.
2386
2387And democracy would flourish.
2388
2389So when an uprising began in Libya,
2390
2391Britain, France and America supported it.
2392
2393And suddenly, Colonel Gaddafi stopped being a hero of the West.
2394
2395All the politicians, and the public relations people, and the academics who had all promoted him as a global thinker suddenly disappeared.
2396
2397And Gaddafi became yet again an evil dictator who had to be overthrown.
2398
2399His son Saif said, "The way these people are
2400
2401"disowning me and my father is disgusting.
2402
2403"Just a few months ago, we were being treated as
2404
2405"honoured friends.
2406
2407"Now that rebels are threatening our country, these cowards
2408
2409"are turning on us."
2410
2411Colonel Gaddafi retreated to the ruins of the house that the Americans had bombed 30 years before and addressed the world.
2412
2413TRANSLATION: Muammar Gaddafi is the glory.
2414
2415If I had a position, if I were a president,
2416
2417I would have resigned.
2418
2419I would have thrown my resignation in your face.
2420
2421But I have no position, no post.
2422
2423I have nowhere to resign from.
2424
2425I have my gun, I have my rifle to fight for Libya.
2426
2427Withdraw your children from the streets.
2428
2429Take your children back.
2430
2431They are drugging your children.
2432
2433They are making your children drunk and they are sending them to hell.
2434
2435Your children will die. What for?
2436
2437In November 2011 a large convoy was spotted driving at high speed away from Colonel Gaddafi's home town of Sirte.
2438
2439An American drone, controlled from a shed outside Las Vegas, was sent to follow it.
2440
2441CAR HORN BEEPS
2442
2443CAR HORNS BEEP
2444
2445The operator fired a missile at the lead car of the convoy.
2446
2447Gaddafi then fled - looking for shelter from the oncoming rebel forces.
2448
2449He hid under the road in a drainage pipe.
2450
2451But instead of becoming a democracy,
2452
2453Libya began to descend into chaos.
2454
2455And the other revolutions were also failing.
2456
2457The Occupy camps had become trapped in endless meetings.
2458
2459And it became clear that there was a terrible confusion at the heart of the movement.
2460
2461The radicals had believed that if they could create a new way of organising people then a new society would emerge.
2462
2463But what they did not have was a picture of what that society would be like, a vision of the future.
2464
2465The truth was that their revolution was not about an idea.
2466
2467It was about how you manage things.
2468
2469And those who had started the revolution in Egypt came face-to-face with the same terrible fact.
2470
2471Social media had helped to bring people together in Tahrir square.
2472
2473But once there, the internet gave no clue as to what kind of new society they could create in Egypt.
2474
2475The movement stalled.
2476
2477And a group that DID have a powerful idea - the
2478
2479Muslim Brotherhood - rushed in to fill the vacuum.
2480
2481The Brotherhood took power in an election and one of them, Mohamed Morsi, became President.
2482
2483The liberals and the Left were shocked.
2484
2485And, bit by bit, they turned back to the military, protesting, asking them to save the revolution from being captured by Islamists.
2486
2487In the spring of 2013, the military took action.
2488
2489They arrested the President and killed hundreds of his supporters who protested.
2490
2491And an extraordinary spectacle unfolded in Tahrir Square.
2492
2493Thousands of the liberal activists who had begun the revolution two years before, summoned by social media, now welcomed the military back by waving their laser pens at the helicopters flying overhead.
2494
2495The crowd had been summoned there once again by Facebook.
2496
2497After the failure of the revolutions, it was not just the radicals - no-one in the West had any idea of how to change the world.
2498
2499At home, the politicians had given so much of their power away, to finance and the ever-growing managerial bureaucracies, that they in effect had become managers themselves.
2500
2501While abroad, all their adventures had failed.
2502
2503And their simplistic vision of the world had been exposed as dangerous and destructive.
2504
2505But in Russia, there was a group of men who had seen how this very lack of belief in politics, and dark uncertainty about the future could work to their advantage.
2506
2507What they had done was turn politics into a strange theatre where nobody knew what was true or what was fake any longer.
2508
2509They were called political technologists and they were the key figures behind President Putin.
2510
2511They had kept him in power, unchallenged, for 15 years.
2512
2513Some of them had been dissidents back in the 1970s and had been powerfully influenced by the science fiction writings of the Strugatsky brothers.
2514
251520 years later, when Russia fell apart after the end of communism, they rose up and took control of the media.
2516
2517And they used it to manipulate the electorate on a vast scale.
2518
2519For them, reality was just something that could be manipulated and shaped into anything you wanted it to be.
2520
2521GLASS THUDS
2522
2523But then a technologist emerged who went much further.
2524
2525And his ideas would become central to
2526
2527Putin's grip on power.
2528
2529He was called Vladislav Surkov.
2530
2531Surkov came originally from the theatre world and those who have studied his career say that what he did was take avant-garde ideas from the theatre and bring them into the heart of politics.
2532
2533Surkov's aim was not just to manipulate people but to go deeper and play with, and undermine their very perception of the world so they are never sure what is really happening.
2534
2535Surkov turned Russian politics into a bewildering, constantly changing piece of theatre.
2536
2537He used Kremlin money to sponsor all kinds of groups - from mass anti-fascist youth organisations, to the very opposite - neo-Nazi skinheads.
2538
2539And liberal human rights groups who then attacked the government.
2540
2541Surkov even backed whole political parties that were opposed to President Putin.
2542
2543But the key thing was that Surkov then let it be known that this was what he was doing.
2544
2545Which meant that no-one was sure what was real or what was fake in modern Russia.
2546
2547As one journalist put it,
2548
2549"It's a strategy of power that keeps any opposition
2550
2551"constantly confused -
2552
2553"a ceaseless shape-shifting that is unstoppable
2554
2555"because it is indefinable."
2556
2557Meanwhile, real power was elsewhere - hidden away behind the stage, exercised without anyone seeing it.
2558
2559And then the same thing seemed to start happening in the West.
2560
2561By now it was becoming ever more clear that the system had deep flaws.
2562
2563Every month there were new revelations, of most of the banks' involvement in global corruption, of massive tax avoidance by all the major corporations, of the secret surveillance of everyone's e-mails by the National Security Agency.
2564
2565Yet no-one was prosecuted, except for a few people at the lowest levels.
2566
2567And behind it all, the massive inequality kept on growing.
2568
2569Yet the structure of power remained the same.
2570
2571Nothing ever changed - because nothing could be allowed to destabilise the system.
2572
2573But then the shape-shifting began.
2574
2575CHEERING
2576
2577Thank you very much. So nice.
2578
2579So amazing. So amazing.
2580
2581WOMAN: We love you. What? That's OK.
2582
2583I love you more, OK?
2584
2585CHEERING
2586
2587The campaign that Donald Trump ran was unlike anything before in politics.
2588
2589Nothing was fixed.
2590
2591What he said, who he attacked and how he attacked them was constantly changing and shifting.
2592
2593Trump attacked his Republican rivals as all being part of a broken and corrupt system - a politics where everyone could be bought, using words that could have come from the Occupy movement.
2594
2595You've also donated to several Democratic candidates,
2596
2597Hillary Clinton included, Nancy Pelosi.
2598
2599You explained away those donations saying you did that to get business-related favours.
2600
2601And you said recently, "When you give,
2602
2603"they do whatever the hell you want them to do."
2604
2605You'd better believe it. So what specifically did they do?
2606
2607If I ask them, if I need them...
2608
2609You know, most of the people on this stage,
2610
2611I've given to, just so you understand, a lot of money.
2612
2613I will tell you that our system is broken.
2614
2615I give to many people.
2616
2617Before this, before two months ago, I was a businessman.
2618
2619I give to everybody. When they call, I give.
2620
2621And you know what, when I need something from them, two years later, three years later, I call them.
2622
2623They are there for me. So what did you get?And that's a broken system.
2624
2625But at the same time, Trump used the language of the extreme racist right in America, connecting with people's darkest fears - pushing them and bringing those fears out into the open.
2626
2627Get the fuck out of here!
2628
2629Our country, motherfucker!
2630
2631Our country!
2632
2633Proud fucking American!
2634
2635Made in the USA, bitch!
2636
2637Made in the fucking USA!
2638
2639Don't fucking come back, burrito bitch!
2640
2641Go fucking right back to jail, motherfucker!
2642
2643Build that fucking wall for me!
2644
2645Trump! Donald Trump!
2646
2647Fuck you! I love my country!
2648
2649Yeah! I'll fuck like at least ten of you up in one session, you fucking pussy!
2650
2651Many of the facts that Trump asserted were also completely untrue.
2652
2653But Trump didn't care.
2654
2655He and his audience knew that much of what he said bore little relationship to reality.
2656
2657This meant that Trump defeated journalism - because the journalists' central belief was that their job was to expose lies and assert the truth.
2658
2659With Trump, this became irrelevant.
2660
2661Not surprisingly, Vladimir Putin admired this.
2662
2663MAN SPEAKS RUSSIAN
2664
2665The liberals were outraged by Trump.
2666
2667But they expressed their anger in cyberspace, so it had no effect - because the algorithms made sure that they only spoke to people who already agreed with them.
2668
2669Instead, ironically, their waves of angry messages and tweets benefitted the large corporations who ran the social media platforms.
2670
2671One online analyst put it simply, "Angry people click more."
2672
2673It meant that the radical fury that came like waves across the internet no longer had the power to change the world.
2674
2675Instead, it was becoming a fuel that was feeding the new systems of power and making them ever more powerful.
2676
2677But none of the liberals could possibly imagine that Donald Trump could ever win the nomination.
2678
2679It was just a giant pantomime.
2680
2681Then of course there's Donald Trump.
2682
2683Donald Trump has been saying that he will run for president as a Republican, which is surprising, since I just assumed he was running as a joke.
2684
2685LAUGHTER
2686
2687Donald Trump often appears on Fox, which is ironic, because a fox often appears on Donald Trump's head.
2688
2689LAUGHTER
2690
2691Donald Trump owns the Miss USA Pageant, which is great for Republicans because it will streamline their search for a vice president.
2692
2693LAUGHTER
2694
2695Donald Trump said recently he has a great relationship with the blacks. though unless the Blacks are a family of white people,
2696
2697I bet he's mistaken.
2698
2699LAUGHTER
2700
2701But underneath the liberal disdain, both Donald Trump in America, and Vladislav Surkov in Russia had realised the same thing - that the version of reality that politics presented was no longer believable, that the stories politicians told their people about the world had stopped making sense.
2702
2703And in the face of that, you could play with reality, constantly shifting and changing, and in the process, further undermine and weaken the old forms of power.
2704
2705CHILDREN SING
2706
2707And there was another force that was about to dramatically reveal just how weak politics had become in the West -
2708
2709Syria.
2710
2711CHILDREN SING
2712
2713The attack happened here at a central police station in Damascus.
2714
2715Police say the bomber came up the stairs, police then opened fire, and then police say he detonated the explosives.
2716
2717And the damage is here to see.
2718
2719Behind me, the pockmarked walls where the ball bearings hit.
2720
2721Blood splattered on the walls.
2722
2723And the force of the blast caused walls to collapse.
2724
2725And everything is topsy-turvy, everything destroyed.
2726
2727By now Syria was being torn apart by a horrific civil war.
2728
2729What had started as part of the Arab Spring had turned into a vicious battle to the death between Bashar Assad and his opponents.
2730
2731And at the heart of the conflict was the force that his father had first brought to the West - suicide bombing.
2732
2733THEY SPEAK IN OWN LANGUAGE
2734
2735Back in the 1980s
2736
2737Bashar Assad's father had seen suicide bombing as a weapon he could use to force the Americans out of the Middle East.
2738
2739But over the next 30 years it had shifted and mutated into something that had now ended up doing the very opposite - tearing the Arab world apart.
2740
2741Hafez al-Assad's dream of a powerful and united Arab world was now destroyed.
2742
2743In Iraq, extremist Sunni groups had used suicide bombing as a way to start a sectarian war.
2744
2745And now groups like Isis brought the same techniques into Syria to attack not just Assad's son but his fellow Shi'ites.
2746
2747And like his father, Bashar Assad retaliated with a vengeful fury.
2748
2749And the country fell apart.
2750
2751MAN:Allahu Akbar.
2752
2753WHOOSHING
2754
2755Allahu Akbar. Allahu Akbar.
2756
2757ROARING
2758
2759My fellow Americans... tonight I want to talk to you about Syria - why it matters and where we go from here.
2760
2761Faced by the war, western politicians were bewildered.
2762
2763They insisted Bashar Assad was evil.
2764
2765But then it turned out that his enemies were more evil and more horrific than him.
2766
2767The question before the House today is how we keep the British people safe from the threat posed by Isil.
2768
2769This is not about whether we want to fight terrorism, it's about how best we do that.
2770
2771So Britain, America and France decided to bomb the terrorist threat.
2772
2773But the effect of that was to help keep Assad in power.
2774
2775WHOOSHING
2776
2777CLATTERING
2778
2779Then it became more confusing.
2780
2781Suddenly, the Russians intervened.
2782
2783President Putin sent hundreds of planes and combat troops to support Assad.
2784
2785But no-one knew what their underlying aim was.
2786
2787They seemed to be using a strategy that
2788
2789Vladislav Surkov had developed in the Ukraine.
2790
2791He called it non-linear warfare.
2792
2793It was a new kind of war - where you never know what the enemy are really up to.
2794
2795MAN:Allahu Akbar.
2796
2797The underlying aim, Surkov said, was not to win the war, but to use the conflict to create a constant state of destabilised perception - in order to manage and control.
2798
2799MAN BREATHES HEAVILY
2800
2801Allahu Akbar.
2802
2803ORCHESTRA PLAYS
2804
2805In March 2016 the Russians suddenly announced with a great fanfare that they were leaving Syria.
2806
2807And a concert was held in the ruins of Palmyra to celebrate the withdrawal.
2808
2809But in reality, the Russians never left.
2810
2811They are still there, and still no-one knows what they want.
2812
2813HE SPEAKS IN OWN LANGUAGE
2814
2815And within Syria there was a new Islamist ideologist who was determined to exploit the growing uncertainties in Europe and America.
2816
2817He was called Abu Musab al-Suri - the Syrian.
2818
2819HE SPEAKS IN OWN LANGUAGE
2820
2821Al-Suri had originally worked with Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan, but he had turned against him.
2822
2823Al-Suri gave lectures that had a powerful effect on the Islamist movement.
2824
2825He argued that bin Laden had been wrong to attack the West head on, because it created a massive military response that had almost destroyed Islamism.
2826
2827Instead, al-Suri said, independent groups or individuals should stage random, small-scale attacks on civilians in Europe and America.
2828
2829The aim was to spread fear, uncertainty and doubt - and undermine the already failing authority of western politicians.
2830
2831The effect of the attacks shocked Europe and America and gave powerful force to the new politics of uncertainty and anxiety.
2832
2833I'm sure that you, with me, share the absolute horror and total revulsion at what happened in Paris last Friday.
2834
2835And I'm afraid there is, and we have to be honest and frank about this and talk about these things without being fearful, there is a problem with some of the Muslim community in this country.
2836
2837There is a problem. And we have to be honest about it.
2838
2839Our politicians, I'm afraid, haven't had the guts.
2840
2841APPLAUSE
2842
2843This could be the great Trojan horse of all time, because you look at the migration... Study it, look at it.
2844
2845Now they'll start infiltrating with women and children.
2846
2847Both the Brexit campaign in Britain and Donald Trump in America did exactly what al-Suri had predicted.
2848
2849They used the fear to dramatise a world where everything - even going to a restaurant - had become a risky event.
2850
2851And what had been seen as doomed campaigns on the fringes of society that could never win became frighteningly real.
2852
2853I am genuinely freaked out right now about this whole Brexit thing.
2854
2855Because we'd all been told that it wasn't going to happen, like it was going away, it was going away from Brexiting and on to the staying.
2856
2857And because I had this, like bedrock belief...
2858
2859I have friends who, like, live and work in London, and they said, "Don't worry, we're a very sensible people."
2860
2861LAUGHTER
2862
2863"This isn't going to happen. It's a lot of talk,
2864
2865"but we don't do that sort of stuff here."
2866
2867Um...they were wrong.
2868
2869LAUGHTER
2870
2871And that really kind of crushes my view of, like, what can happen that is bad that we don't think is going to happen.
2872
2873Like it's just not supposed to happen.
2874
2875CROWD GASPS
2876
2877CLANKING
2878
2879DRIPPING
2880
2881CLANKING
2882
2883I fear that we are watching the stirrings of fascism in Europe again.
2884
2885And I genuinely never thought it would be my country that did that.
2886
2887I thought this would be America.
2888
2889I thought America was the people who were so filled with hate.
2890
2891Not us.
2892
2893And I'm so disappointed.
2894
2895I'm so hurt.
2896
2897Zee.
2898
2899MUSIC: Standing Room Only by Barbara Mandrell.
2900
2901# You must think my bed's a bus stop
2902
2903# The way you come and go HE COUGHS
2904
2905# I ain't seen you with the lights on
2906
2907# Two nights in a row
2908
2909# So pack your rusty razor
2910
2911# Don't bother with goodbye
2912
2913# Your cup runneth open
2914
2915# But mine is always dry
2916
2917# Standing room only
2918
2919# I can't stand no more
2920
2921# Standing room only
2922
2923# Outside my door
2924
2925# Don't help me set the table
2926
2927# Cos now there's one less place
2928
2929# I won't lay Mama's silver
2930
2931# For a man who won't say grace
2932
2933# If home is where the heart is... #
2934
2935This is my right to free speech going on here, OK?
2936
2937# Then your home's on the streets
2938
2939# Me, I'll read a good book
2940
2941# Turn out the lights and go to sleep
2942
2943# Standing room only
2944
2945# I can't stand no more, no more
2946
2947# Standing room only
2948
2949# Outside my door... #
2950
2951TINNY MUSIC PLAYS
2952
2953INDISTINCT SPEECH
2954
2955Oh.
2956
2957You're on video.Oh.
2958
2959Say bye, Heather.
2960
2961VIDEO OFF