Adam Curtis - HyperNormalisation (2016). Sottotitoli in italiano

Summary

"HyperNormalisation" is a documentary by Adam Curtis that delves into the complex web of truth and illusions in our modern world. Over the last 40 years, politicians, financial institutions, and technocrats have created a simplified version of reality to retain control. This fake world, comfortingly simple, has loopholes exploited by the likes of Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and others. These actors have used confusion, manipulated perceptions, and constructed grand narratives to shape politics and society, highlighting the blurred lines between fact and fiction.

Highlights

• Adam Curtis explores how a 'fake world' was constructed over 40 years to maintain control 🌎.
• Key players like Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin have manipulated these constructs for their rise 🤡.
• Perception management in politics blurs truth and falsehood, affecting global narratives 🌀.
• The evolution of cyberspace from a utopian escape to a tool for corporate and political control 📲.
• Social media's dual role in sparking movements and creating echo chambers 📢.

Key Takeaways

• HyperNormalisation explains a simplified world created by politicians and financiers to maintain power over the past four decades 🌐.
• Our retreat into a simpler, reassuring fake world has given rise to manipulative leaders like Trump and Putin 🎭.
• Perception management blurs lines between truth and fiction, seen in events like the demonization of Gaddafi and the murky politics of Russia 🕵️‍♂️.
• The rise of cyberspace has both offered an escape and become a tool of control, illustrating the dual nature of digital utopias and corporate power 💻.
• The internet and social media have sparked movements like Occupy but also contributed to echo chambers and divisive politics 🪐.

Overview

Embark on a journey through Adam Curtis's "HyperNormalisation," where the lines between reality and illusion blur. Over four decades, the political and financial elite have sculpted a simpler world narrative, giving us a comforting yet misleading sense of control. This artificially stable reality has bred leaders who thrive on chaos and systemic manipulation.

In this documentary, Curtis reveals how figures like Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin exploit these pervasive narratives. By manipulating truths and leveraging media, they maintain their power while the general public remains ensnared in webs of half-truths and perceptions. It's a stark look at how facts become fictions in the corridors of power.

Cyberspace and social media emerge as double-edged swords within this narrative. While they fuel grassroots movements and empowerment, they also serve as instruments of control, isolating individuals in feedback loops of familiar ideas. "HyperNormalisation" not only exposes these dichotomies but also challenges us to rethink our engagement with modern media and power dynamics.

Chapters

• 00:00 - 02:00: Introduction This chapter sets the stage by acknowledging the peculiar and unprecedented nature of the current era.
• 02:00 - 35:00: Suicide Bombings and Political Chaos The chapter discusses the recurring instability in the world, highlighted by events such as suicide bombings, waves of refugees, the influence of global leaders like Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, and significant political developments like Brexit. Despite these challenges, those in power appear incapable of addressing these issues, with no apparent vision for a different or better future. The chapter sets the stage for a story about how these circumstances have led to the current unsettling global situation.
• 35:00 - 47:00: The Birth of Cyberspace The chapter titled 'The Birth of Cyberspace' delves into the past 40 years, where politicians, financiers, and technological utopians, instead of confronting the world's real complexities, retreated to create a simplified version of reality. This construction was an effort to maintain power, and as this artificial world expanded, the general populace embraced it for its reassuring simplicity.
• 47:00 - 80:00: Perception Management and Global Politics This chapter explores how various groups, including radicals, artists, and musicians, who believed they were opposing the system, inadvertently became part of it. Their dissent was absorbed into the system, rendering their efforts ineffective and preventing meaningful change. This phenomenon is described as a retreat into a make-believe world, which allowed malicious forces to expand and thrive unnoticed.
• 80:00 - 110:00: Collapse of Soviet Union and Rise of Managed Society The Soviet Union collapsed under external pressures that challenged the deceptive stability of its society. The chapter explores how these external forces disrupted the carefully maintained facade of the Soviet Union's supposed unity and strength.
• 110:00 - 125:00: Revolutionary Movements and the Arab Spring The chapter 'Revolutionary Movements and the Arab Spring' begins with a story set in two cities, New York and Damascus, in the year 1975. It explores the emerging ideas about governance and the possible ways to lead postulated during that time.
• 125:00 - 144:00: The Illusion of a Free Cyberspace The chapter discusses the concept of a world without politics, taking New York City in 1975 as a case study. At this time, New York City was on the brink of financial collapse, largely due to the extensive borrowing by politicians in order to finance expanding services and welfare programs. However, in the early 1970s, these efforts were undermined as the middle class began to leave the city.
• 144:00 - 168:00: Rise of Uncertainty in Politics The chapter discusses the economic crisis faced by the city due to a disappearing taxpayer base, leading to growing debt concerns from banks. Eventually, in 1975, the banks stopped lending, leaving the city unable to issue bonds as usual.
• 168:00 - 175:00: Conclusion In this chapter, the city's Financial controller announces a competitive bidding sale for $260 million in tax anticipation notes, with $100 million set to mature on June 3rd, 1975. Originally scheduled for 11:00 a.m., the banks failed to show up, leading to a rescheduling of the meeting to 2:00 p.m., with the banks promising their attendance.

Adam Curtis - HyperNormalisation (2016). Sottotitoli in italiano Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 [Music] we live in a strange time extraordinary
• 00:30 - 01:00 events keep happening that undermine the stability of our world suicide bombs waves of refugees Donald Trump Vladimir Putin even brexit yet those in control seem unable to deal with and no one has any vision of a different or a better kind of future this film will tell the story of how we got to this strange place
• 01:00 - 01:30 it 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 instead they constructed a simpler version of the world in order to hang on to power and as this fake World grew all of us went along with it because the Simplicity was reassuring
• 01:30 - 02:00 even 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 makeb believe World which is why their opposition has no effect and nothing ever changes but this Retreat into a dream world allowed dark and destructive forces to fester and grow
• 02:00 - 02:30 outside forces that are now returning to pierce the fragile surface of our carefully constructed fake world [Music] I
• 02:30 - 03:00 [Music] The Story begins in Two Cities at the same moment in 1975 one is New York the other is Damascus it was a moment when two ideas about how it might be possible to run
• 03:00 - 03:30 the world without politics first took [Music] hold in 1975 New York City was on the verge of collapse for 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 but in the early' 70s the middle classes fled from the city
• 03:30 - 04:00 and the taxes they paid disappeared with them so the banks lent the city even more but 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 and then one day in 1975 the banks just [Music] stopped the city held its regular meeting to issue Bonds in return for the loans
• 04:00 - 04:30 overseen by the city's Financial controller morning ladies and gentlemen today the city of New York is offering for competitive bidding sale 260 million tax anticipation notes of which 100 million will mature on June 3rd 1975 the banks were supposed to turn up at 11:00 a.m. but it soon became clear that none of them were going to appear the meeting was rescheduled for 2: p.m. and the banks promised they
• 04:30 - 05:00 would turn [Music] up the announcement on behalf of the controller is that the offer which we had expected to receive an announce at 2:00 this afternoon is now expected at 4:00 Paul does this mean that so far nobody wants those bonds we will be making a further announcement at 4:00 and any further
• 05:00 - 05:30 that I could say now I think would not Advance the interest of the sale which is now in progress does this mean that you have not been able to sell them so far today we will have a further announcement at 4:00 what happened that day in New York marked a radical shift in power the banks insisted that in order to protect their loans they should be allowed to take control of the city the city appealed to the president
• 05:30 - 06:00 but he refused to help so a new committee was set up to manage the city's finances out of nine members eight of them were Bankers it was the start of an extraordinary experiment where the financial institutions took power away from the politicians and started to run Society themselves the city had no other option the bankers enforced what was called austerity on the city insisting that thousands of teachers Poli policemen and
• 06:00 - 06:30 firemen were sacked this was a new kind of Politics the old politicians believed that crises were solved through negotiations and Deals the bankers had a completely different view they were just the representatives of something that couldn't be negotiated with the logic of the market to them there was no alternative to this system it should run
• 06:30 - 07:00 [Music] Society just by shifting paper around these slobs can make 6065 million in a single transaction that would take care of all of the layoffs in the city so it's Reckless it's cruel and it's a disgrace there'd be a fair number of Bankers of course who'd say well it's the unions who have been too greedy now what would your reaction be to I guess they're right in a way if you can make $60 million on a single transaction and
• 07:00 - 07:30 a worker makes $89,000 a year I suppose they're correct and as they go back to their little Estates in Greenwich Connecticut I want to wish them well the slobs but the extraordinary thing was no one opposed the bankers the radicals and the left wiers who 10 years before had dreamt of changing America through Revolution did nothing they had retreated and were living in the abandoned buildings in Manhattan
• 07:30 - 08:00 [Music] the singer Patty Smith later described the mood of disillusion that had come over them I could not identify with the political movements any longer she said all the manic activity in the streets in trying to join them I felt overwhelmed by yet another form of bureaucracy what she was describing was the rise of a new powerful individualism
• 08:00 - 08:30 that could not fit with the idea of collective political action instead Patty Smith and many others became a new kind of individual radical who watched the decaying city with a cool Detachment they didn't try and change it they just experienced it look at that Isn't that cool I love that where like kids ride all over the walls that's to me is neater than any
• 08:30 - 09:00 art sometimes Jose and Maria forever oh 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 people watching over and over I've seen people I've checked them out all day I've gone back and forth and they're still there watching the credits of a of a movie cuz they don't have enough do but it's some
• 09:00 - 09:30 entertainment you know instead radicals Across America turned to Art and music as a means of expressing their criticism of society they 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
• 09:30 - 10:00 u v w x y z [Music]
• 10:00 - 10:30 but 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 [Music] power shut up shut up one of them wrote at that time it was the mood of the era and the Revolution was deferred
• 10:30 - 11:00 indefinitely and while we were dozing the money crept [Music] in what's your date of birth Larry but one of the people who did understand how to use this new power was Donald Trump trump realized that there was now no future in building housing for ordinary people because all the
• 11:00 - 11:30 government grants had gone but he saw that there were other ways to get vast amounts of money out of the state Trump started to buy up derel buildings in New York and he announced that he was going to transform them into luxury hotels and apartments but in return He negotiated the biggest tax break in New York's history worth $160 million the had to agree because they
• 11:30 - 12:00 were desperate and the banks seeing a new opportunity also started to lend him money and Donald Trump began to transform New York into a city for the rich while he pay practically [Music] nothing
• 12:00 - 12:30 [Music] at the very same time in 1975 there was a confrontation between two powerful men in Damascus the capital of Syria one was Henry Kissinger the US Secretary of State the other was the president of Syria haes al-assad the battle between the two men was going to have profound consequences for the world and like in New York it was going
• 12:30 - 13:00 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 president Assad dominated Syria the country was full of giant images and statues that glorified him he was brutal and ruthless killing or imprisoning anyone he suspected of
• 13:00 - 13:30 being a threat but a sad beli that the violence was for a purpose he wanted to find a way of uniting the Arab countries and using that power to stand up to the West 4 3 2 one Kissinger was also tough and ruthless he had started in the 1950s as
• 13:30 - 14:00 an expert in the theory of nuclear strategy what was called the delicate balance of Terror it was the system that ran the Cold War both sides believed that if they attacked the other side would immediately launch their missiles and everyone would be annihilated Kissinger had been one of the models for the character of doct strange love in Stanley Kubrick's film Mr President I would not had the chance
• 14:00 - 14:30 to preserve a nucleus of human specimens it would be quite easy at the bottom of some of our deeper Minds Sir Henry was not a warm friendly modest jovial sort of person he was thought of as one of the more uh anxious temperamental
• 14:30 - 15:00 self-conscious ambitious inconsiderate people at Harvard Kissinger saw himself as a hard realist he had no time for the emotional turmoil of political ideologies he believed that history had always really been a struggle for power between groups and Nations but what Kissinger took from the cold war was a way of seeing the world
• 15:00 - 15:30 as an interconnected system and his aim was to keep that system in balance and prevent it from falling into [Music] chaos I believe that with all the dislocations we know 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 I
• 15:30 - 16:00 think we can look back to all this turmoil as the birth pangs of a more creative and better system if we miss the opportunity I think there going to be chaos the flight has been delayed we understand now the ker will be arriving here at about um an hour and a half from now so we'll just get the uh have the Press informed and then we'll stay contact with you and it was this idea
• 16:00 - 16:30 that Kissinger set out to impose on the chaotic politics of the Middle East but to manage it he knew that he was going to have to deal with President Assad of Syria president 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
• 16:30 - 17:00 land hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were living in Exile in Syria as well as in the Lebanon and Jordan have you found that the Palestinians here want to integrate with the syrians at all oh no no never they don't want not here or neither in Lebanon or in Jordan never no because they want to to stay as as a whole as a Palestinian as they call themselves those who go back in say in Arabic
• 17:00 - 17:30 Assad also believed that such a peace would strengthen the Arab world but Kissinger thought that strengthening the Arabs would destabilize his balance of power so 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 Kissinger now played a double game or as he termed it constructive
• 17:30 - 18:00 ambiguity in a series of meetings he persuaded Egypt to sign a separate agreement with Israel but at the same time he led Assad to believe that he was working for a wider peace agreement one that would include the Palestinians in reality the Palestinians were ignored they were irrelevant to the structural balance of the global
• 18:00 - 18:30 [Music] system the Hallmark of of Kissinger's thinking about International politics is its structural design everything is always connected in his mind to everything else but his first thoughts are on that level on the structural Global balance of power level and as he addresses uh questions of human dignity human
• 18:30 - 19:00 survival human freedom I think they tend to come into his mind as an adjunct of the play of Nations at the power game when Assad found out the truth it was too late in a series of confrontations with Kissinger in Damascus Assad raged about this treachery he told Kissinger that what he had done would release demons hidden under the surface of the Arab world
• 19:00 - 19:30 cassendra described their meetings Assad's controlled Fury he wrote was all the more impressive for its eerily cold seemingly unemotional demeanor Asad now retreated he started to build a giant Palace that loomed over Damascus and his belief that it would be possible to transform the Arab world began to fade
• 19:30 - 20:00 a British journalist who knew Assad wrote Assad's optimism has gone a trust in the future has gone what has emerged instead is a brutal vengeful Assad who believes in nothing except [Music] Revenge
• 20:00 - 20:30 [Music] the original Dream of the Soviet Union had been to create a glorious new world a world where not only the Society but the people themselves would be
• 20:30 - 21:00 transformed they would become new and better kinds of human [Music] beings but by the 1980s it was clear that the dream had failed the Soviet Union became instead a society where no one believed in anything or had any vision of the
• 21:00 - 21:30 future
• 21:30 - 22:00 fore
• 22:00 - 22:30 fore spee [Music] [Music] foreign
• 22:30 - 23:00 [Music] foree for Fore [Music] spee
• 23:00 - 23:30 [Music] foree who ran the Soviet Union had
• 23:30 - 24:00 believed that they could plan and manage a new kind of socialist society but they had discovered that it was impossible to control and predict everything and the plan had run out of control but rather than reveal this the technocrats began to pretend that everything was still going according to plan and what emerged instead was a fake version of the society the Soviet Union became a Society where everyone knew that what
• 24:00 - 24:30 their leaders said was not real because they could see with their own eyes that the economy was falling apart but everybody had to play along and pretend that it was real because no one could imagine any alternative one Soviet writer called it hyper normalization you were so much a part of the system that it was impossible to see beyond it the fakeness was
• 24:30 - 25:00 hypernormal in this stagnant world two brothers called arari and Boris strugatsky became the inspiration of a growing new dissident movement they weren't politicians they were science fiction writers and in their stories they expressed the strange mood that was rising up as the Soviet
• 25:00 - 25:30 Empire collapsed their most famous book was called roadside picnic it is set in a world that seems like the present except there is a zone that has been created by an alien force people known as stalkers go into the Zone they find that nothing is what it seems that reality changes minute by minute Shadows go the wrong way there hidden forces that twist your body and
• 25:30 - 26:00 change the way you think and [Music] feel the picture of the stratas gave was of a world where nothing was fixed where reality both what you saw and what you believed had become shifting and [Music] unstable and in 1979 the film director Andre tarkovski made a film that was
• 26:00 - 26:30 based on roadside picnic he called it stalker [Applause]
• 26:30 - 27:00 foreign foree speech [Music] for [Music]
• 27:00 - 27:30 I Ronald Reagan to solemnly swear that I will Faithfully execute the office of President of the United States that I will Faithfully execute the office of President of the United States the new president of America had a new vision of the world it wasn't the harsh realism of
• 27:30 - 28:00 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 the places and the periods in which man has known Freedom are few and far between just scattered moments on the span of time and most of those moments have been ours the American people have a genius for great and unselfish
• 28:00 - 28:30 deeds into the hands of America God has placed the destiny of an Afflicted mankind God Bless America but this Crusade was going to lead Reagan to come face to face with Henry Kissinger's Legacy and above all the vengeful Fury of President Assad of Syria
• 28:30 - 29:00 Israel was now determined to finally destroy the power of the Palestinians and in 1982 they sent a massive Army to encircle the Palestinian camps in the Lebanon do you know do you know how strong the Israelis are do you know how many how many tanks they have outside
• 29:00 - 29:30 sorry that means we we are not ready to surrender dasing this building here because the p guyses with us expect that
• 29:30 - 30:00 sooner or later there will be a huge explosion there been several of these in the last few minutes as you can see there's enormous damage in all the buildings around here quickly quickly
• 30:00 - 30:30 2 months later thousands of Palestinian refugees were massacred in the camps it horrified the world but what was even more shocking was that Israel had allowed it to happen its troops had stood by and
• 30:30 - 31:00 watched as a Christian Lebanese faction murdered the [Music] Palestinians this was the first of the massacres we discovered yesterday now 24 hours later the stench here is appalling but 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 there's always been a risk of such massacres if Christian militi men were allowed to
• 31:00 - 31:30 come into Palestinian camps and the Israelis seem to have done nothing to prevent them coming into this one in the face of the horror and the growing chaos President Reagan was forced to act he announced that American Marines would come to Beirut to lead a peacekeeping force Reagan insisted that the troops were neutral but president Assad was convinced that there was another reality he saw the troops as part of the growing conspiracy between America and
• 31:30 - 32:00 Israel to divide the Middle East into factions and destroy the power of the Arabs Assad decided to get the Americans out of the Middle East and to do this he made an alliance with the new revolutionary force of ayalah H's Iran and what heni could bring to Assad was an extraordinary new weapon that he had just created it was called the poor man's atomic
• 32:00 - 32:30 [Music] [Applause] [Music] bomb ayalah heni had come to power two years before as the leader of the Iranian Revolution but his hold on power was precarious and heri had developed a new idea of how to fight his enemies and
• 32:30 - 33:00 defend the revolution H 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 this was completely new because the Quran specifically prohibited suicide in the past you became a martyr on the battlefield because God chose the time and place of your death but heri changed this he did it by
• 33:00 - 33:30 going back to one of the central rituals of Shia Islam every year Shiites March in A procession mourning the sacrifice of their founder Hussein as they do they whip themselves symbolically reenacting Hussein's [Music] suffering pan said that the ultimate Act of penitence was not just to whip yourself but to kill
• 33:30 - 34:00 yourself providing it was for the greater good of the revolution in the name of God the compassionate the merciful good afternoon an Iraqi Soviet made Mig 23 was shot down by the Air Force jet fighters of the Islamic Republic over the Northwestern Iranian border region of mivon at 108 hours local time Saturday said the joint staff commands commun number 17 in hermani had mobilized this Force when
• 34:00 - 34:30 the country was attacked by Iraq Iran faced almost certain defeat because Iraq had far superior weapons many of them supplied by America so the revolutionaries took tens of thousands of young boys out of schools put them on buses and sent them to the front line their job was to walk through the enemy's minefields deliberately blowing themselves up in order to open gaps that
• 34:30 - 35:00 would allow the Iranian Army to pass through [Music] unharmed it was organized suicide on a vast scale this human sacrifice was commemorated in giant cemeteries across the country fountains flowing with blood red water glorified this new kind of martyrdom
• 35:00 - 35:30 [Music] and it was this new idea of an Unstoppable Human Weapon that President Assad took from heri and brought to the West for the first time but as it traveled it would mutate into something even more
• 35:30 - 36:00 deadly instead 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 it would become known as suicide [Music] bombing in October 1983 two suicide bombers drove trucks into the US Marine Barracks in Bay
• 36:00 - 36:30 route it was seeing something move that took me out of my trance and then I recognized oh yes Marines were in that building a lot of Marines were in that building and that's when I ran down and and it was a black black Marine he looked white the dust had just covered him the massive explosions killed 241 Americans the bombers were members of a new militant group that no one had heard of
• 36:30 - 37:00 they called themselves Hezbollah and although many of them were Iranian they were very much under the control of Syria and the Syrian intelligence agencies president Assad was using them as His proxies to attack America whoever carried out yesterday's bombings Shia Muslim Fanatics devotes of the ayat or whatever it is Syria who
• 37:00 - 37:30 profits politically the most significant fact is that the dissidents live and work with Syrian protection so it is to Syria rather than to the dissident group's Guiding Light ayat of Iran that we must look for an explanation of the group's activities destabilization is Syria's Middle Eastern way of reminding the world that Syria must not be left out of plans for the future of the area
• 37:30 - 38:00 there are no words that can express our sorrow and grief over the loss of those Splendid young men and the injury to so many others these Deeds make so evident the beastial nature of those who would assume power if they could have their way and drive us out of that area but despite his
• 38:00 - 38:30 words within 4 months President Reagan withdrew all the American troops from the Lebanon the Secretary of State George Schulz explained we became Paralyzed by the complexity that we faced he said so the Americans Turned and Left for president Assad it was an extraordinary achievement he was the only Arab leader to have defeated the Americans and forced them to leave the Middle East he had done it by using the new force of
• 38:30 - 39:00 suicide bombing a force that once Unleashed was going to spread with unstoppable power but at this point both Assad and the Iranians thought that they could control it and 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 one should defend the realm of Islam and Muslims against Heretics and Invaders and to fulfill this Duty one
• 39:00 - 39:30 should even sacrifice one's life we believe that Martyrs can Overlook our Deeds from the other world it means that after death the Martyr lives and can still witness this [Music] world
• 39:30 - 40:00 [Music] by the middle of the 1980s the banks were rising up and becoming ever more powerful in America what had started 10 years before in New York the idea that the financial system could run Society was
• 40:00 - 40:30 spreading but unlike older systems of power it was mostly invisible a writer called William Gibson tried to dramatize what was happening in a powerful imaginative way in a series of novels Gibson had noticed how the banks and the new corporations were beginning to link themselves together through computer systems what they were creating was a series of giant networks of information that were invisible to Ordinary People
• 40:30 - 41:00 and to politicians but those networks gave the corporations extraordinary new powers of [Music] control good morning Southwest development may I help you Gibson gave this new world a name he called it cyberspace and his novels described a future that was dangerous and frightening hackers could literally enter into
• 41:00 - 41:30 cyberspace and as they did they traveled through systems that were so powerful that they could reach out and Crush Intruders by destroying their minds in cyberspace there were no laws and no politicians to protect you just raw brutal corporate [Music] power [Music]
• 41:30 - 42:00 but then a strange thing happened a new group of Visionaries in America took Gibson's idea of a hidden secret world and transformed it into something completely different they turned it into a dream of a new [Music] Utopia they were the technological utopians who were rising up on the west west coast of America they turned Gibson's idea on its
• 42:00 - 42:30 head instead of cyberspace being a frightening Place dominated by powerful corporations they reinvented it as the very opposite a new safe world where radical dreams could come true 10 years before faced by the complexity of real Politics the radicals had given up on the idea of changing the world but now the the computer utopians saw in cyberspace an alternative reality
• 42:30 - 43:00 a place they could Retreat to a way from the harsh right-wing politics that now dominated Reagan's America the roots of this Vision lay back in the counterculture of the 1960s and above all with LSD [Music]
• 43:00 - 43:30 we got some more acid over here if you want to go ahead and Dr many 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 see the ones they have wi in them are really [Applause] great like a rabbit it freed them from the narrow limited
• 43:30 - 44:00 view of the world that was imposed on them by politicians and those in power in the United States in the next 5 10 15 years you're going to see more and more people taking LSD and making it a part of their lives so that we'll be an LSD country within 15 years an LSD Society uh there'll be less interest in obviously Warfare in power politics you know politics today is a disease that's a real addiction politics politics politics politics don't politic don't vote these are old men's games impotent
• 44:00 - 44:30 and scile old men that want to put you onto their old chess games of war and power 20 years later the new networks of machines seem to offer a way to construct a real alternate reality not just one that was chemically induced but a space that actually existed in a parallel Dimension to the real world and like with acid space could be a place where you would be liberated from the old corrupt hierarchies of
• 44:30 - 45:00 politics and power and explore new ways of being one of the leading exponents of this idea was called John Perry bow in the 60s he had written songs for the Grateful Dead and been part of the acid counterculture now he organized what he called cyberon to try and bring the cyberspace movement together well you know the Cyber Thon as it was originally conceived was uh was
• 45:00 - 45:30 supposed to be uh the '90s equivalent of the acid test uh and we had thought to involve some of the same Personnel you and I and Timmy should sit down and talk okay that's good and it immediately acquired a uh a financial quality or commercial quality that was initially a little unsettling to an Old Hippie like me but as soon as I saw it actually working then I thought ah well if you're going
• 45:30 - 46:00 to have an asset test for the '90s money better be involved instead 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 incorporates everything that could be incorporated it incorporates experience itself bow then wrote a Manifesto that he called a declaration of independence of cyberspace it was addressed to all politicians
• 46:00 - 46:30 telling them to keep out of this new world it was going to be incredibly influential because what barow 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 an alternative to the old systems of power it was a vision that would come to dominate the internet over the next 20 years
• 46:30 - 47:00 governments of the industrial World cyber space does not lie within your borders we 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 I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to
• 47:00 - 47:30 impose on us we will create a civilization of the Mind in cyberspace may it be more Humane and fair than the world your governments have made before it's [Music] begun this is the key to a New Order this code dis means
• 47:30 - 48:00 freedom but two young hackers in New York thought that barow was describing a fantasy world that his vision bore no relationship at all to what was really emerging online they were cult figures on the early online scene and their fans followed and recorded them they called themselves fiber optic and acid freak and they spent their time exploring and breaking into giant computer networks that they knew were
• 48:00 - 48:30 the hard realities of modern digital power my specific instance I was charged with conspiracy to commit a few dozen overt acts they called them among a number of things having to do with computer trespass and and I guess computer eavesdropping interception unauthorized access to Federal interest computers which which is pretty vague law Communications
• 48:30 - 49:00 Network computers and so on in a notorious public debate online the two hackers attacked barow what infuriated them most was Bow's insistence that there was no hierarchy or controlling powers in the new Cyber world the hackers set out to demonstrate that he was wrong acid freak hacked into the computers of a giant Corporation Called TRW TRW had originally built the systems
• 49:00 - 49:30 that ran the Cold War for the US military they had helped create the delicate balance of Terror now TRW had adapted their computers to run a new syst that of credit and debt their computers gathered up the Credit Data of millions of Americans and were being used by the Banks to decide individuals credit ratings the hackers broke into the TRW Network stole Bay's credit history and
• 49:30 - 50:00 published it online the hackers were demonstrating The Growing Power of Finance how the companies that ran the new systems of credit knew more and more about you and increasingly use that information to control your destiny and the system that was allowing this to happen with a new giant Network networks of information connected through computer
• 50:00 - 50:30 [Music] servers the hackers were questioning whether Bow's utopian rhetoric about cyberspace might really be a convenient camouflage hiding the emergence of a new and Growing Power that was way Beyond [Music] politics
• 50:30 - 51:00 [Music] but cyberspace was not the only imaginary story being created faced with the humiliating defeat in the Lebanon President Reagan's government was desperate to shore up the
• 51:00 - 51:30 vision of a moral world where a good America struggled against evil and to do this they were going to create a simple villain an imaginary enemy one that would free them from the paralyzing complexity of real Middle Eastern politics and the perfect candidate was waiting in the wings Colonel Gaddafi the ruler of Libya [Music]
• 51:30 - 52:00 the Americans were going to ruthlessly use Colonel Gaddafi to create a fake terrorist Mastermind and Gaddafi was going to happily play along because it would turn him into a famous Global [Music] figure [Music]
• 52:00 - 52:30 Colonel 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 he believed that he was an international revolutionary whose Destiny was to challenge the power of the West gentleman the [Music]
• 52:30 - 53:00 queen when he was a young officer Gaddafi had been sent to England for training and he had detested the patronizing racism that he said he had found at the heart of British Society yes I attended the the course I have been in England since 1966 from uh April to August you had the best
• 53:00 - 53:30 months I I was in Buckfield The Village called Buckfield [Music] in Army School in fact we ill treated in that place from uh some British uh officers I think uh those officers were Jews maybe Jews but ill
• 53:30 - 54:00 treated in what sort of way in many ways they ill treat us uh every time by being rude or by being bullying or in their own behavior towards us they ill treated us they hit us anyhow because of colonization it is a
• 54:00 - 54:30 result of colonialism once in power Gaddafi had developed his own revolutionary Theory which he called the third universal theory it was an alternative he said to Communism and capitalism he published it in a green book but practically no one read it he sent money and weapons to the IRA in Ireland to help them overthrow
• 54:30 - 55:00 the British ruling class but all the other Arab leaders rejected him and his ideas they thought that he was mad and by the mid 1980s Gaddafi was an isolated figure with no friends and no Global influence then suddenly that changed in December 1985 terrorists attacked Rome and Vienna airports
• 55:00 - 55:30 simultaneously killing 19 people including five Americans there was growing pressure on President Reagan to retaliate it's time to rename your state department the capitulation Department get off of your stick Mr President the American people are sick and tired of being kicked around you talked her let's say you use some of these bons and bons and billions dollars worth of weapons that you've asked us to approve your
• 55:30 - 56:00 words are cheap talk President Reagan immediately announced that Colonel Gaddafi was definitely behind the attacks these murderers could not carry out their crimes without the sanctuary and support provided by regimes such as Colonel Gaddafi in Libya the Rome and Vienna murders are only the latest in a series of brutal terrorist acts committed with Gaddafi's backing but the European security service who investigated the attacks were convinced that Libya was not involved at all and
• 56:00 - 56:30 that the Mastermind behind the attacks was in fact Syria that the terrorists had been directed by the Syrian intelligence agencies but the Americans say that the attack at Rome airport was organized by Gaddafi not by Damascus what do you say we we we we don't have any any evidence have no evidence supporting such a such a uh
• 56:30 - 57:00 affirmation the only evidence we have show shows a Syrian connection do you say that it was Libya and the president said the evidence of Libya's culpability was irrefutable yeah but the Italian authorities to whom I've spoken say def emphatically on the record that their investigations have shown that it was entirely masterminded by Syria I don't agree with that at all well they've in interrogated the surviving uh terrorists I must just say
• 57:00 - 57:30 I don't agree with that but you have no evidence that Libya was in on the planning either our evidence on Libya is uh circumstantial but very strong but why does the president then say it's irrefutable if you call it circumstantial well people can be convicted and sentenced in our courts on circumstantial evidence but what made it even more confusing was that although there seemed to be no evidence that Gaddafi had been behind the attack he made no attempt to deny the allegations instead he went the other
• 57:30 - 58:00 way and turned the crisis into a Global Drama it is not a time of saying it is a time of work time of Confrontation threatening suicide attacks against America this hostile position cannot be explained in a in racist and Crusade terms suicidal attacks will have to be an answer to a military uh attack but Libya is not affected by
• 58:00 - 58:30 such measures that Reagan has declared stinking rotten pedo Gaddafi now started to play a role that was going to become very familiar he grabbed the publicity that had been given to him by the Americans and used it dramatically he promoted himself as an international revolutionary who would help to liberate oppressed people around the world even the blacks in [Music]
• 58:30 - 59:00 America Gaddafi arranged for a live satellite link to a mass meeting of the Nation of Islam in Chicago brothers and sisters it is with great honor and privilege that I present to you the leader of the alata revolution from Libya our brother muar El Gaddafi Gaddafi told them that Libya was now their Ally in their struggle against White America and to express my full
• 59:00 - 59:30 support and support of my country to your struggle for freedom for emancipation Gaddafi promised that he would Supply weapons to create a black Army in America of 400,000 men if White America refuses to accept blacks as US citizens he told them it must therefore be destroyed Gaddafi also invited a group of German
• 59:30 - 60:00 rocket scientists to come to Libya to build him a rocket he insisted it had no military purpose Libya was now going to explore outer space I think it is peaceful and uh civili civilian civilian civilian activity uh for investigation of space and something like this and uh it has nothing to do with any
• 60:00 - 60:30 uh military things but no one believed him journalists warned that Gaddafi was really preparing to attack Europe vividly dramatizing the new danger that is something like this which goes that way to put something into space but the same device tilted say to an angle of 45° could of course become something very different a missile possibly carrying a warhead that would put Libya within range of an enor area chilling proposition with its range of 2,000
• 60:30 - 61:00 km the Americans in Gaddafi now became locked together in a cycle of mutual reinforcement in the process a powerful New Image was created that was going to capture the imagination of the West Gaddafi became a global super villain at the head of what was called a rogue State a Madman who threatened the stability of the world and Gaddafi was loving every minute of it does he think in the past
• 61:00 - 61:30 his decisions sometimes have been taken too quickly maybe maybe on world affairs maybe I think sometimes that is what has made people in the world nervous of you perhaps
• 61:30 - 62:00 then there was another terrorist attack at a discotek in West Berlin a bomb killed an American Soldier and injured hundreds the 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
• 62:00 - 62:30 proved that he was also The Mastermind behind a whole range of other attacks President Reagan ordered the Pentagon to prepare to bomb Libya but again there were doubts this time within the American government itself there were concerns that analysts were being pressured to make a case that didn't really exist and to do it they were taking Gaddafi's rhetoric about himself as a
• 62:30 - 63:00 global Revolution and His Manic ravings and then representing them as fact and in the process together the Americans and Gaddafi were constructing a fictional world the analyst was certainly I'm convinced uh pressured into developing a primacia case against uh the Libyan government from the the um somewhat incoherent ravings of a Maniac um
• 63:00 - 63:30 both interceptions of a clandestine nature interceptions of a uh open radio broadcast or whatever as well as other sources quotations of of his that one can assemble a neatly put together package demonstrating that the man had violent interests against the United States and uh it's European allies the European intelligence agencies told the Americans
• 63:30 - 64:00 that they were wrong that it was Syria that was behind the bombing not Libya but the Americans had decided to attack Libya because they couldn't face the dangerous consequences of attacking Syria instead they went for Gaddafi a man without friends or Allies Libya had were less uh downside consequences if you will there's less Arab support for Gaddafi we figured there would be less Soviet support for
• 64:00 - 64:30 Gaddafi there's no question but what Libya was more vulnerable than Syria and Iran a self that is certainly an element uh of [Applause] course in April 1986 the Americans attacked Libya their targets included Colonel Gaddafi's own house immediately after the attack Gaddafi appeared in the ruins to describe what had happened the family
• 64:30 - 65:00 were asleep and my wife was that day tied down to the bed because she had a slep disc I tried to rescue the children and the house started to collapse as you can see and the books started to burn they concentrated on the children's room so that they would kill all the children our small adopted daughter was killed and two of our children were injured but yet again Gaddafi might have been lying
• 65:00 - 65:30 ever since then there have been rumors that his adopted daughter actually survived but many other children were killed in the raid because the American bombing was so inaccurate Gaddafi realized that the attention of the whole world was now focused on him and he grabbed the moment to promote his own revolutionary Theory the third way as a global alternative to [Music] democracy I feel that I'm really
• 65:30 - 66:00 responsible for conveying the third world theory and the green book to the rising generation to the young American and British people so that we can rescue America and Britain and these generations of young people from this Theory which this electoral party Theory which enabled an embassy like rean to rule the mightiest power on Earth and use it to destroy other people's homes and enabled a harlot like thater to rule a great nation like
• 66:00 - 66:30 [Music] Britain wow look at that what the heck is that oh my God look at that holy
• 66:30 - 67:00 crap it's just moving really slowly wow go go come here come here come here what is it doing what the heck guys fre oh my gosh what the what is happening is happening what is going on oh my gosh p happy [ __ ] oh my God guys guys is that a freaking
• 67:00 - 67:30 UFO wait can you get a good video what the hell in the 1980s more and more people in the United States reported seeing unexplained objects and lights in the sky at 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 the documents had been hidden for
• 67:30 - 68:00 20 years and they seemed to prove that there had been a giant cover up but actually the reality was even stranger the American government might have been making it all up that they had created a fake conspiracy to deliberately mislead the population the lights that people imagined were UFOs May in reality have been new high technology weapons that the US
• 68:00 - 68:30 government were [Music] testing the 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 the 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 rumor that
• 68:30 - 69:00 these were really alien visitations one of those chosen was called Paul benovitz who lived outside a giant Airbase in New Mexico and had noticed strange things going on years later I sat down with Paul at dinner and told Paul exactly that everything we did was a sanction Counter Intelligence operation to convince him that what he was seeing was UFOs and that what what
• 69:00 - 69:30 we didn't want him to know was that he tapped into something on the base and we we didn't want him to ever disclose that we 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 benovitz and others chosen by the agency were it is alleged given a series of forged documents many of them were top secret memo by the military describing sightings of unidentified aerial
• 69:30 - 70:00 Vehicles the documents spread like wildfire and they formed the basis for the wave of belief in UFOs that would spread through America in the [Music] 1990s what the [ __ ] is that that's a that's a that's crazy bro is that that space
• 70:00 - 70:30 uh and it also fueled The Wider growing belief that governments lied to you that conspiracies were real what 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 program the President's advisers had given it a name they called it perception
• 70:30 - 71:00 management and it became a central part of the American government during the [Music] 1980s the 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
• 71:00 - 71:30 of the real [Music] world reality became less and less of an important factor in American politics it wasn't what was real uh that was driving anything or the facts driving anything it was how you could turn those facts or twist the facts or even make up the facts to make your opponent looked bad so perception management became a a device and the facts could be twisted
• 71:30 - 72:00 anything could be anything it becomes how can you manipulate the American people and in the process reality becomes what reality becomes simply something to play with to achieve that end reality is not important in this context reality is simply something that you [Music] handle but something was about to happen that would demonstrate dramatic L just how far the American government had detached from reality the Soviet Empire was about to
• 72:00 - 72:30 implode and no one none of the politicians or the journalists or the think tank experts or the economists or the academics saw it [Music] coming [Music]
• 72:30 - 73:00 get ready to work out [Music]
• 73:00 - 73:30 let
• 73:30 - 74:00 [Music] h [Music]
• 74:00 - 74:30 [Applause] [Music] a
• 74:30 - 75:00 [Music] the collapse of the Soviet Union also had a powerful effect on the west for many it symbolized the final failure of the dream that politics could
• 75:00 - 75:30 be used to build a new kind of world what was going to emerge instead was a new system that had nothing to do with politics a system whose aim was not to try and change things but rather to manage a post-political [Music] world one of the first people to describe this dramatic change was a left-wing German political thinker
• 75:30 - 76:00 called uck Beck Beck 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 in the past politicians might have been able to do this but now they were faced with what he called a runaway world where things were so complex and interconnected Ed and modern Technologies so potentially dangerous that it was impossible to predict the
• 76:00 - 76:30 outcomes of anything you did the catalog of environmental disasters proved this politicians would have to give up any idea of trying to change the world instead their new aim would be to try and predict the dangers in the future and then find ways to avoid those risks although Beck came from the political left the world he saw coming was deeply
• 76:30 - 77:00 conservative the picture he gave was of a political class reduced to trying to steer Society into a dark and frightening future constantly peering forward and trying to see the risks coming towards them their only aim to avoid those risks and keep Society stable it only lasted for a few seconds so you're basically shocked you really didn't know what was going on at the time where were you in the building and where was the explosion
• 77:00 - 77:30 oh my God but 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 all of them outside politics one part of it was taking shape in a Tiny Town in the far Northwest of the United States called East wachi it was a giant computer whose job
• 77:30 - 78:00 was to make the future [Music] predictable the man building it was a banker called Larry thinkink back in 1986 Mr Fink's career had collapsed [ __ ] haven't done any he lost $100 million in a deal and had been sacked he became determined it wouldn't
• 78:00 - 78:30 happen again Thinkin started a company called Black Rock and built a computer he called Aladdin it is housed in a series of large sheds in the apple orchards outside wachi think's aim was to use the computer to predict with certainty what the risk of any deal or investment was going to be the computer constantly monitors the
• 78:30 - 79:00 world and it takes things that it sees happening and then Compares them to events in the past it 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 out 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
• 79:00 - 79:30 and keep the system stable today I'm going to deliver 1.8 million reports execute 25,000 trades and avert 3,000 disasters I'm going to monitor interest rates in Europe silver prices in Asia droughts in the midwest I'm going to witness 4 billion shares change hands on the New York Stock Exchange and record the effects on 14 trillion in assets across 20, th000 portfolios I am Aladdin I am Aladdin and today I'll find the numbers behind the
• 79:30 - 80:00 numbers I will see the trends the models don't the connections the risks I am Aladdin I am Aladdin and I will get the data right I ear 25 million lines of code written by hundreds of people across two decades I'm smarter than any algorithm more powerful than any processor because I am Aladdin because I am Aladdin I am Aladdin I am
• 80:00 - 80:30 Aladdin Aladdin has proved to be incredibly successful the assets it guides and controls now amount to $15 trillion which is 7% of the world's total wealth but wachi was also a dramatic example of another kind of craving for stability and reassurance more of its citizens took Prozac than practically any other town in
• 80:30 - 81:00 America when a person's central nervous system is changed by an SSRI with that medicine they will view things differently and they will be strangers they look at things differently I have a chemical up here that changes me I think differently for me it was like walking around like this for my whole life and really not knowing that I was nearsighted I mean really I mean no one had ever offered me glasses and then all of a sudden here comes uh somebody that says okay now try these on try this Prozac on and I tried it on and
• 81:00 - 81:30 for the first time in my life I went whoa is this the way reality really is your perception can be changed and and it's frightening and it's scary to people it's it's it's speaks of Science Fiction almost well the medicine just kind of lets you be you listen to what needs to go on and then your doctor you know every time you come back he says you're looking so much better and then he just
• 81:30 - 82:00 like jam he every time I come in he goes you are so beautiful you know and he isn't even sucking up I mean he's being nice you know you're beautiful you're nice you're friendly you've got so much going for you I think yeah I do yeah so I go I tell my friends I feel so much better about myself you know Mom goes out oh I feel so much better about myself so your friend starts saying you know I've seen such Improvement SE such Improvement and everybody improves all the way around they see Improvement you know it's like everybody's kind of
• 82:00 - 82:30 brainwashing each other into being happy but there was a more effective way of reassuring people that was being developed that did not involve [Music] medication it too came from computer systems but this time artificial intelligence but the way to do it had been discovered by [Music]
• 82:30 - 83:00 accident back in the 1960s there had been optimistic dreams that it would be possible to develop computers that could think like human beings scientists then spent years trying to program the rules that governed human thought but they never worked [Music] one computer scientist at MIT became so
• 83:00 - 83:30 disillusioned that he decided to build a computer program that would parody these hopeless attempts he was called Joseph wisen bow and he built what he claimed was a computer psychotherapist just like a therapist people could come and talk to the Machine by typing in their problems why B called the program Eliza he modeled it on a real psychotherapist called Carl Rogers who
• 83:30 - 84:00 was famous for simply repeating back to the patient what they had just said that is what Eliza did the patient sat in front of the screen and typed in what they were feeling and the program repeated it back to them often in the form of a question men are all alike in what way they're always bugging us about something or other can you think of a specific
• 84:00 - 84:30 example well my boyfriend made me come here your boyfriend made you come here he says um I'm depressed much of the time I'm sorry to hear that you're depressed it's true I am unhappy do you think coming here will help you not to be unhappy well I need some help that much seems certain one of the first people to use Eliza was wise and bound secretary and her reaction was something that he had not predicted at all and I asked her to my office and sat
• 84:30 - 85:00 her down at the keyboard and then she began to type and of course I looked over her shoulder to make sure that everything was operating properly after two or three interchanges with with the machine she turned to me and she said would you mind leaving the wom please and yet she knew as weisen bound did that Eliza didn't understand a single word that was being typed into it you're my father in some ways you don't argue with me why do you think I don't argue
• 85:00 - 85:30 with you you're afraid of me does it please you to think I'm afraid of you my father's afraid of everybody my father's afraid of everybody weisen bound was astonished he discovered that everyone who tried Eliza became engrossed they would sit for hours telling the machine about their inner feelings and Incredibly intimate detail details of their lives they also liked it because it was free of any kind of patronizing
• 85:30 - 86:00 elitism one person said after all the computer doesn't burn out look down on you or try to have sex with you what Eliza showed was that in an age of individualism what made people feel secure was having themselves reflected back to them just like in a [Music]
• 86:00 - 86:30 mirror artificial intelligence changed Direction and started to create new systems that did just that but on a giant scale they were called intelligent agents they worked by monitoring individuals Gathering vast amounts of data about their past behavior and then looked for patterns and correlations from which they could predict what they
• 86:30 - 87:00 would want in the future it was a system that ordered the world in a way that was centered around you and in an age of anxious individualism frightened of the future that was reassuring just like Eliza a safe bubble that protected you from the complexities of the world outside [Music] and the applications of this new
• 87:00 - 87:30 Direction prove fruitful and profitable if you liked that you'll love [Music] this what was rising up in different ways was a new system that promised to keep the world stable its tentacles reached into every area of Our Lives Finance promised that it could control the unpredictability of the free market while individuals were more and
• 87:30 - 88:00 more monitored to stabilize their physical and mental States and increasingly the intelligent agents Online predicted what people would want in the future and how they would behave but the biggest change was to politics in a world where the overriding aim was now stabiliz politics became just part of a wider system of managing the
• 88:00 - 88:30 world the old idea of democratic politics that it gave a voice to the weak against the powerful was eroded and a resentment began to quietly grow out on the edges of [Music] society [Music]
• 88:30 - 89:00 but the new system did have a dangerous flaw because in the real world not everything can be predicted by reading data from the [Music]
• 89:00 - 89:30 past and someone who was about to discover that to his own cost was Donald [Music] Trump one day a man called Jess Markham received a phone call it was from Donald Trump and Trump was desperate for help marcol was a strange mistake my serious figure he had been a nuclear scientist in the 1950s and studied the effect of radiation from nuclear weapons
• 89:30 - 90:00 on the human body then Markham had gone to Las Vegas and become obsessed by gambling he had a photographic memory and he used it to instantly process the data of the games as they were played from that he could predict the outcome and he always won the Las Vegas gangsters were fascinated by him they called him the automat where are we
• 90:00 - 90:30 going Donald Trump was one of the heroes of the age but in reality much of his success was a facade the banks that had lent Trump Millions had discovered that he could no longer pay the interest on the loans Trump's Empire was facing bankruptcy his wife Ivana hated him because he was having an affair with Miss Hawaiian Tropic [Music] 1985 and then a famous Japanese Gambler
• 90:30 - 91:00 called AKO kashiwagi came to one of Trump's casinos and started to win millions of dollars in an extraordinary run of Lu Trump who was desperate for money panicked as day after day he watched Millions being siphoned out of his Cino so he turned for help to Jess Markham Markham came to Trump's Casino in Atlantic City he analyzed all the
• 91:00 - 91:30 data about the way that kashiwagi had been playing he then told Trump to suggest a particular high stakes game that he knew the Japanese Gambler could not resist his model Markham said predicted that kashiwagi had to lose and after five agonizing days he did kashiwagi lost $10 million and he gave up Donald Trump was elated he thought he'd got his money
• 91:30 - 92:00 [Music] [Music] back before kashiwagi could pay his debt he was hacked to death in his kitchen by Yakuza gangsters and Donald Trump didn't get
• 92:00 - 92:30 his money Trump's business went bankrupt and he was forced to sell most of his buildings to the banks and he married Miss hawan Tropic in the future he would sell his name to other people to put on their buildings and he himself would become a celebrity Tycoon [Music]
• 92:30 - 93:00 president Assad didn't want stability he wanted revenge in December 1988 a bomb exploded on a PanAm plane over lockerby in Scotland almost immediately investigators and journalists pointed the finger at Syria the bombing had been done they
• 93:00 - 93:30 said in Revenge for the Americans shooting down of an Iranian airliner in the Gulf a few months before and for 18 months everyone agreed that this was the truth but then a strange thing happened the security agencies said that they had been wrong it hadn't been Syria at all it was Libya who had been behind the lockaby bombing but many journalists and politicians did not believe it they were
• 93:30 - 94:00 convinced that the switch had happened for the most cynical of reasons that America and Britain desperately needed a sad as an ally in the coming Gulf War against Saddam Hussein so once again they blamed Colonel Gaddafi as the terrorist Mastermind well city of course was unfortunately accused of many terrorist outrage and of harboring terrorist groups it appears that we have now
• 94:00 - 94:30 restored relations with them as have the Americans they're now our friends although we get no real assurances on the past whatsoever it 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 but Assad was not really in control because he had released forces that no one would be able to to control the force that 10 years before he had brought from Iran to attack the West the human bomb was now about to
• 94:30 - 95:00 jump like a virus from Shia to Sunni Islam in December 1992 the militant group Hamas kidnapped an Israeli Border guard and stabbed him to death the Israeli response was overwhelming they arrested Ed 415 members of hammmer put them on buses and took them to the top of a bleak mountain
• 95:00 - 95:30 in southern [Music] Lebanon they left them and refused to allow any humanitarian Aid through but the Israelis had dumped the Hamas militants in area controlled by Hezbollah they spent 6 months there and during that time they learned from
• 95:30 - 96:00 Hezbollah how powerful suicide bombing could be hisbah told them how they had used it to force the Israelis out of Beirut and back to the border the first sign that the idea had spread to Hamas was when a group of the Deportes marched in protest towards the Israeli border dressed as martyrs as the Israelis shelled them but it soon became more than just
• 96:00 - 96:30 theater Hamas began a wave of suicide attacks in Israel just before 9: at the height of Tel aviv's Rush Hour the bomb ripped apart a commuter bus an amateur cameraman recorded the scene in the moments afterwards as a dazed woman was helped out of the smoldering wreckage I didn't want to believe that under my house there is a bomb and when I realized it's a bomb I I started to cry because it was the
• 96:30 - 97:00 first time I saw it in Tel Aviv Hamas sent the bombers Into the Heart of Israeli cities to blow themselves up and kill as many around them as possible in doing this Hamas were going much further than Hezbollah ever had they were targeting civilians something hisbah had never done the tactic shock the Sunni world this was something completely alien to its history not only did the
• 97:00 - 97:30 Quran forbid suicide but Sunni Islam did not have any rituals of self-sacrifice unlike the Shia the most senior religious leader in Saudi Arabia insisted it was wrong but a mainstream Theologian from Egypt called shik kwi seized the moment he issued a fatwa that justified the attacks and he added it was also Justified to kill civilians because in Israel everyone
• 97:30 - 98:00 including women serve as reservice so really they are all part of the enemy Army well it's not suicide it is martydom in the name of God Islamic theologians and Juris Prudence have debated this issue Israeli women are not like women in our society because Israeli women are militarized secondly I consider this type of martydom operation as indication
• 98:00 - 98:30 of justice of Allah Almighty Allah is just through his infinite wisdom he has given the weak what the strong do not possess and that is the ability to turn their bodies into bombs like the Palestinians do Hamas kept sending the bombers into Israel sometimes day after day the horror over WellMed Israeli society and it completely destroyed the ability of politics to solve the Palestinian
• 98:30 - 99:00 crisis instead in the Israeli election of 1996 Benjamin Netanyahu took power he turned against the peace process which was exactly what Hamas wanted and from then on the two sides became locked together in ever more horrific cycles of violence the human Bond had destroyed the very thing that President Assad had first wanted a real political solution
• 99:00 - 99:30 to the Palestinian question it was just after 1:00 and the market was full of Shoppers streams of ambulances came to carry away the dead and the injured it was a place of appalling suffering but even with the first grief came the immediate political impact on the peace process here's impossible this moment it will be the end must be the end of this bloody peace
• 99:30 - 100:00 process and in America all optimistic visions of the future had also disappeared instead everyone in society not just the politicians but the scientists the journal and all kinds of experts had begun to focus on the dangers that might be hidden in the
• 100:00 - 100:30 future this in turn created a pessimistic mood that then began to spread out from the rational technocratic world and infect the whole of the [Music] culture and everyone became possessed by dark for boings Imagining the very worst that might happen [Music]
• 100:30 - 101:00 Dream Baby Dream Dream Baby [Music] Dream Dream Baby Dream Dream Dream [Music] forever
• 101:00 - 101:30 oh Dream Baby Dream Dream Baby Dream Dream Dream Dream Dream forever
• 101:30 - 102:00 [Music] baby got to keep those dream Dre Dream Baby Dream dream Dre Dre Dre Dre
• 102:00 - 102:30 [Music] [Music] Dre you
• 102:30 - 103:00 keep you got to keep that blade [Music] forever
• 103:00 - 103:30 the attacks in September 2001 were suicide bombs but now on a huge scale they demonstrated the terrifying power of this new Force to penetrate all defenses they had come to kill thousands of Americans on their own soil 20 years before President Reagan had been confronted by the first suicide bombers they had been Unleashed by
• 103:30 - 104:00 President Assad of Syria to force America out of the Middle East but rather than confront the complexity of Syria and Israel and the Palestinian problem America had retreated and left Syria and suicide bombing to fester and mutate they had gone instead for for Colonel Gaddafi and turned him into an evil Global terrorist but in the process this
• 104:00 - 104:30 changed the way people saw and understood terrorism instead 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 arch criminal who wanted to terrorize the world all the politics and power dropped away the problem was just them and their evil
• 104:30 - 105:00 [Music] personalities and after 91 this led to a new and equally simple idea that 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 we owe it to the future of civilization not to allow the world's
• 105:00 - 105:30 worst leaders to develop and deploy and therefore blackmail freed loving countries with the world's worst weapons we know they've already got chemical and biological weapons there we know that they're certainly doing their best to acquire nuclear weapons technology if we allow them to do that and do nothing about it then I think later generation will consider as deeply irresponsible both Tony Blair and George Bush became possessed by the idea of
• 105:30 - 106:00 ridding the world of Saddam Hussein so possessed that they believed any story that proved his evil intentions and the line between reality and fiction became ever more blurred in September 2002 the head of MI6 rushed to Downing Street to tell Blair excitedly that they had finally found the source that confirmed everything the source he said had Direct access to Saddam Hussein's chemical weapons program which was making vast
• 106:00 - 106:30 quantities of VX and sarin nerve agents the nerve agents were being loaded into linked Hollow glass spheres but then someone in MI6 noticed that the detail The Source was describing was identical to scenes in the 1996 movie The Rock starring sha connory and Nicholas Cage [Applause] really elegant String of Pearls
• 106:30 - 107:00 configuration unfortunately incredibly unstable what exactly does this stuff do if the rocket renders at aerosol it can take out the entire city of people oh it's a colonas inhibitor stops the brain from sending nerve messages down the spinal C A later report into the Iraq War pointed out glass containers were not typically used in chemical Munitions sees your n system do not move that and the informant had obviously seen a popular movie known as The Rock that had inaccurately depicted nerve agents being
• 107:00 - 107:30 carried in glass beads or spheres after your skin melts off my God that there is a threat from Sadam HSE and the weapons of mass destruction that he has acquired is not in doubt at all Haas alassad had died in
• 107:30 - 108:00 2000 his son Basher became the new president of Syria but he couldn't escape the inexorable logic of what his father had started 20 years before his father had sent Shiite suicide bombers to attack the Americans in Lebanon now as America and Britain invaded Iraq Basha decided decided that he would copy his father but what he was about to let loose would tear the Arab world apart
• 108:00 - 108:30 and then come back to try to destroy [Music] him Bashar Assad was never supposed to have been president it was always going to have been his elder brother basil but then basil had died in a car crash so now baser took over the giant Palace that his father had built above
• 108:30 - 109:00 Damascus after this point baser had not been interested in politics he was fascinated by computers he founded the Syrian computer society and brought the internet to the country his favorite band was the electric light or [Music] but now he was president and he set out to attack
• 109:00 - 109:30 [Music] America Bashar 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 he 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 so Basher instructed the
• 109:30 - 110:00 Syrian intelligence services to help them do this Syrian Agents set up a pipeline that began to feed thousands of militants across the border and Into the Heart of the Insurgency and it grew within a year almost all the foreign fighters from across the world were coming through Syria and they brought suicide bombing with them the Americans estimated that 90% of the suicide bombers in Iraq were foreign
• 110:00 - 110:30 Fighters but it began to run out of control most of the jihadists had joined the group al-Qaeda in Iraq that then turned killing Shiites in an attempt to create a Civil War and the force that had originally been invented by the Shiites suicide bombing now returned and started to kill
• 110:30 - 111:00 them then [Music] this a moment of silence before people realized what was happening a few seconds ago we just had repeated explosions in the street below me people are now fleeing in Terror from the Central Square around the mosque this is what everybody feared we just heard another explosion in the distance that somebody would try to Target this religious Festival to try to bring about a sectarian conflict in
• 111:00 - 111:30 [Applause] Iraq there was Panic a terrified Stampede but some of these people were running into the next bombs we counted at least six separate explosions
• 111:30 - 112:00 Tony Blair and George Bush were faced by disaster Iraq was imploding while at home they were being accused of lying to their own people to justify The Invasion what they desperately needed was something that would show that the invasion was having a good effect in the Arab world so they made an extraordinary decision they turn for help to the man
• 112:00 - 112:30 who they had always insisted was one of the world's most dangerous tyrants Colonel [Music] Gaddafi and instead they set out to make him their new best friend it was going to be the highest achievement of perception management a man who had been created by the West as a fake Global super villain was now going to be turned into a fake hero of
• 112:30 - 113:00 democracy and everyone not just politicians would become involved public relations academics television presenters spies and even musicians were all going to help reinvent Colonel Gaddafi it would show just how many people in the western establishment had by now become the engine of this fake world ever since he had been accused of
• 113:00 - 113:30 the lockerby bombing Colonel Gaddafi had been a complete Outcast the West had imposed sanctions on Libya and the economy was falling apart but then suddenly Tony Blair broke live into the BBC Evening News the Prime Minister Tony Blair is about to make a statement that understands from Downing Street it's of international significance he'll be making his statement at any moment now we can see pictures of him in D Durham
• 113:30 - 114:00 city here he is colon Gaddafi has confirmed that Libya has in the past sought to develop weapons of mass destruction capabilities Libya has now declared its intention to dismantle its weapons of mass destruction completely this decision by Colonel Gaddafi is an historic one and a Courageous one and I applaud it today Tripoli the leader of Libya Colonel muore Al Gaddafi publicly confirmed his
• 114:00 - 114:30 commitment to disclose and dismantle all weapons of mass destruction programs in his country Colonel Gaddafi now became for Western politicians a heroic figure his decision to give up his weapons of mass destruction seemed to prove that the invasion of Iraq could transform the Middle East and Tony Blair traveled to meet Gaddafi in his desert
• 114:30 - 115:00 tent to welcome him back into what one journalist called the community of civilized [Music] Nations but as in the past nothing was what it seemed with Colonel Gaddafi in reality Gaddafi did not really have the terrifying weapons of mass destruction that he was promising to destroy his nuclear program had stuttered to a halt long ago and never
• 115:00 - 115:30 produced anything dangerous he had managed to buy some equipment on the black market but his technicians had been unable to assemble it his biological weapons were non-existent all he had was some old mustard gas in leaking barrels but now he had to pretend to have a a terrifying arsenal of weapons and the West had to pretend that they had avoided another Global [Music]
• 115:30 - 116:00 threat and then the madeup stories became even more complicated as part of the deal the West said that if Gaddafi admitted that Libya had done the lockaby bombing then they would lift the sanctions but many of those who had investigated lockaby were still convinced that Libya hadn't done it but really it had been Syria but Colonel Gaddafi confessed his son Saif was interviewed about this
• 116:00 - 116:30 confession he said that his father was simply pretending that he had been behind the lockerby bombing to get the sanctions lifted that new lies were being built on top of old lies to construct a completely make believe world you have to accept or you had to accept at that time the responsibility because you have to accept responsibilities you have to pay compensation in order to get rid of sanction it means we did that not because we are convinced that we did it
• 116:30 - 117:00 but because to find an exit out of this nightmare so what you're saying is that you accept responsibility but you're not admitting that you did it yes and this is all a sham you're saying just to just to get sanctions over with so that you can start normal diplomatic relations the West okay what's wrong with that it's a very cynical way to to behave as as a country isn't it many
• 117:00 - 117:30 people would say first of all I mean the Americans in the they told us to write that letter they told us to pay compensation and then they opened their embassies and they restor the relation and they came to us it was their game not our game that's great thank you does the uh does the leader know there's a picture on the television are you going to tell them oh good thank
• 117:30 - 118:00 [Music] you public relations companies then came to Libya to do what they called reframing The Narrative one firm was paid 3 million to turn Gaddafi into what they described as a modern world thinker is that going to be there at okay we're going in 10 they did this by bringing other famous World thinkers and TV presenters out to Libya
• 118:00 - 118:30 to meet the colonel and discuss his theories hello and welcome to Libya in the global age a conversation with M Gaddafi but first let's get the story so far of Libya One World thinker was called lord Anthony giddens coincidentally he had a theory which he called the Third Way which had
• 118:30 - 119:00 inspired Tony Blair Colonel Gaddafi's own theory was called the third universal theory Lord gens later wrote about his talks with the Libyan leader Colonel Gaddafi likes my term the third way because his own political philosophy is a version of this idea he makes many intelligent and perceptive points I leave enlivened and [Music] encouraged after 40 years the leader of
• 119:00 - 119:30 Libya momar Gaddafi and then Colonel Gaddafi achieved his lifelong dream he was invited to address the United Nations he spent almost 2 hours explaining his third universal theory and also demanded an investigation into the shootings of President Kennedy and Martin Luther King when 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 the man who made the offer was
• 119:30 - 120:00 Donald Trump I mean I dealt with everybody and by the way I could tell you something else I dealt with Gaddafi what do with gadf youed the lead what' you do excuse me I rented him a piece of land he paid me more more for one night that he's that the land was worth for the whole year or for two years and then I didn't let him use the land that's what we should be doing was that over in New Jersey I don't want to use the word screw but I screwed him that's what we should be [Music]
• 120:00 - 120:30 doing people in Britain and America now began to turn away from Politics the effect of the Iraq War had been very very powerful not 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
• 120:30 - 121:00 did or said had no effect that despite the mass protests and the fears and the warnings the war had happened anyway liberals radicals and a whole new generation of young people retreated they turned instead to another world world that was free of this hypocrisy and the corruption of politics they went into [Music]
• 121:00 - 121:30 cyberspace [Music]
• 121:30 - 122:00 by now cyberspace had become even more sophisticated and responsive to human interaction the online world was full of algorithms that could analyze and predict human behavior The Man Behind much of this was a scientist called Judea Pearl he was the Godfather of modern artificial intelligence Pearl's breakthrough had been to use what were called basian belief networks they were systems that could
• 122:00 - 122:30 predict Behavior even when the information was [Music] incomplete but to make the system work Pearl and others had imported a model of human beings drawn from economics they created what were called rational agents software that mimicked human beings but in a very simplified form the model assumed that the agent would always act rationally in order to get what it wanted nothing
• 122:30 - 123:00 more one of the early utopians of cyberspace Jon laner warned of the implications of this the agent's model of what you are interested in will always be a cartoon model and in return you will see a cartoon version of the world through the agent's eyes and he added it will never be clear who they are working for
• 123:00 - 123:30 you or someone [Music] else new technology began to allow people to upload millions of images and videos into cyberspace and the web which up to that point had seemed like an abstract other world began to look and feel like the real world your but no not like
• 123:30 - 124:00 that from videos of animals personal moments of experience extraordinary events to horrific Terror videos more and more was uploaded and in a strange sad twist the first
• 124:00 - 124:30 terrorist beheading video that was posted online was that of Judea Pearl's own son Daniel PE he was a journalist for the Wall Street Journal and had been kidnapped by radical islamists in Pakistan they recorded what they said was his confession and then his killing my name is Daniel Pearl I'm a Jewish American I come from a uh on my father's
• 124:30 - 125:00 side a family of zionists my father's Jewish my mother's Jewish I'm Jewish only now do I think about that some of the people in vantan Bay must be in a similar situation this was a new world that the old systems of power found it very difficult to deal with in the wake of the 9/11 attacks the security agencies secretly collected data from millions of people
• 125:00 - 125:30 online one program 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 the program did not discover a single terrorist but it did discover something else a top secret assessment said unfortunately there are issues with undesirable images within the data it would appear that a surprising
• 125:30 - 126:00 number of people are using webcam conversations to show intimate parts of their body to the other person also the fact that the software allows more than one person to view a webcam stream means that it appears to be being used to broadcast pornography but increasingly people were using the internet in other ways to present themselves as they wanted to be
• 126:00 - 126:30 seen I guess a video blog is about me I don't really want to tell you where I live because you could like stalk me the web Drew people in because it was mesmerizing it was somewhere that you could explore and get lost in in any way you wanted but behind the screen like in a two-way mirror the simplified agents were watching and predicting and guiding your
• 126:30 - 127:00 hand on the mouse stop threw my phone away stop stop pose pose and snap a snap a selfie there you go my name is sweetie the man asked me to take off my clothes they unest they play with themselves but what they don't know I'm
• 127:00 - 127:30 not real I'm a computer model made piece by piece to track down this man who do [Music] this as the intelligence systems online gathered ever more data new forms of guidance began to
• 127:30 - 128:00 emerge social media created filters complex algorithms that looked at what individuals liked and then fed more of the same back to them in the process individuals began to move without noticing into bubbles that isolated them from enormous amounts of other information they only heard and saw what they liked and the news feeds increasingly excluded anything that might challenge
• 128:00 - 128:30 people's pre-existing beliefs it's all right I know when my own life is come in the say you will call her your so and I I fall makes my
• 128:30 - 129:00 face come [Music] [Applause] [Music] and the version of cyberspace that was rising up seemed to be very much like William Gibson's original
• 129:00 - 129:30 Vision that 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 and what was even more mysterious was how they made their decisions about what you should like and what should be hidden from you but then the other utopian vision of cyberspace
• 129:30 - 130:00 [Music] [Applause] reemerged taking over the roadway [Applause] take after the financial crash of 2008 the politicians saved the banks but they did practically nothing about the massive corruption that was
• 130:00 - 130:30 revealed in its wake and the reason they gave was that it might destabilize the system public anger burst out the Occupy Movement took over Wall Street and then the senate in Washington the issue is that certain individuals that are very wealthy have pretty much corrupted our political system and this is like the heart of it I mean this is a senate building these people have been bought off and they basically corrupted our democracy and it's literally killing people I'm an iraqy warfet I went Iraq went in 2009 to see what happens firsthand when we let
• 130:30 - 131:00 corruption rule our government and our democracy and we're coming here today basically just aways of RAR what drove the Occupy Movement was the original Dream of the internet that people like John Perry barow had outlined in the early 199s in his Declaration of the independence of cyberspace Mar had described a new world free of politics and the old hierarchies of power a space where people connected together as equals in a network and built a new
• 131:00 - 131:30 Society without leaders now the Occupy Movement set out to build that kind of society in the real world the camps were to be the models all the meetings used the idea of the human microphone people throughout the crowd repeated a speaker's words so everyone could hear them we are now going to V whe to stay here for the next 2 hours
• 131:30 - 132:00 or now or leave now but if someone wanted to challenge the speaker the human amplifiers also had to repeat their words so their voice had equal power what she said what she said was that was that the proposal each person was an autonomous individual who expressed what they believed but together they became components in a network that organized
• 132:00 - 132:30 itself through the feedback of information around the system you could organize people without the exercise of [Music] power in Egypt Main Street looks like chaos looks like all is running around and few hundred people walking down the
• 132:30 - 133:00 street then almost immediately the Arab Spring began the first Revolution started in Tunisia but it quickly spread to Egypt on January the 25th 2011 thousands of Egyptians came out in groups across Kyra and then started moving towards Taha Square it seemed like a spontaneous Uprising but the internet had played a key role in organizing the
• 133:00 - 133:30 groups one of the main activists was an Egyptian computer engineer called wah gon he worked for Google in Egypt but he had also set up the Facebook site that played the key role in organizing the first protest as hundreds of thousands took over Taha Square gim gave an interview on Egyptian TV
• 133:30 - 134:00 Facebook
• 134:00 - 134:30 but goam 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 [Music] protest [Music] for
• 134:30 - 135:00 foreign [Music] foreign many liberals in the west saw this as proof of the Revolutionary power of the internet again it seemed to be able to organize a revolution without
• 135:00 - 135:30 leaders a revolution powerful enough to topple a brutal dictator who had been backed by America and the West for 30 [Music] years but the internet radicals were not the only ones who saw their dreams being fulfilled in the Arab Spring many of the political leaders of the West also enthusiastically supported the revolutions because it seemed to fit with their simple idea of regime
• 135:30 - 136:00 change it might have failed in Iraq but now the people everywhere were rising up to rid themselves of the evil tyrants and democracy would [Music] flourish [Music] so when an uprising began in Libya Britain France and America supported it
• 136:00 - 136:30 and suddenly Colonel Gaddafi stopped being a hero of the [Music] West all the politicians and the public relations people and the academics who had all promoted him as a global thinker suddenly disappeared and Gaddafi became yet again an even evil dictator who had to be overthrown his son Saif said the way these people are disowning me and my father is
• 136:30 - 137:00 disgusting just a few months ago we were being treated as honored friends now that Rebels are threatening our country these cowards are turning on us Colonel Gaddafi retreated to the ruins of the house that the Americans had bombed 30 years before and addressed the world those who love m is the glory if I had a position if I were a president I would have resigned I would have thrown my resignation in your face but I have no no position no post I
• 137:00 - 137:30 have nowhere to resign from I have my gun I have my rifle to fight for Libya withdraw your children from the streets take your children back they are drugging your children they making your children drunk and they they sending to Hell your children will die what [Music]
• 137:30 - 138:00 for in November 2011 a large Convoy was spotted driving at high speed away from Colonel Gaddafi's hometown of C an American drone controlled from a shed outside Las Vegas was sent to follow it [Applause] the operator fired a missile at the lead
• 138:00 - 138:30 car of the [Music] Convoy Gaddafi then fled looking for shelter from the oncoming Rebel forces he hid under the road in a drainage
• 138:30 - 139:00 f [Music] but instead of becoming a democracy Libya began to descend into
• 139:00 - 139:30 [Music] chaos and the other revolutions were also failing the Occupy camps had become trapped in Endless meetings and it became clear that there was a terrible confusion at the heart of the movement the radicals had believed that if they could create a new way of organizing people then a new society would emerge but what they did not have
• 139:30 - 140:00 was a picture of what that Society would be like a vision of the future the truth was that their Revolution was not about an idea it was about how you manage things and those who had started the revolution in Egypt came face to face with the same same terrible fact social media had helped to bring people together in taher square but once there the internet gave no clue as to what kind of new Society
• 140:00 - 140:30 they could create in Egypt the movement stalled and a group that did have a powerful idea the Muslim Brotherhood rushed in to fill the vacuum the Brotherhood took power in an election and one of them Muhammad morsy became president the Liberals and the left were shocked and bit by bit they turned back to the military protesting asking them to save the revolution from being captured by
• 140:30 - 141:00 islamists in the spring of 2013 the military took action they arrested the president and killed hundreds of his supporters who protested and an extraordinary spectacle unfolded in Taha Square thousands of the liberal activists who had begun the revolution 2 years before summoned by social media now welcomed the military back by waving their laser
• 141:00 - 141:30 pens at the helicopters flying [Music] overhead the crowd had been summoned there once again by [Music] Facebook [Music]
• 141:30 - 142:00 after 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 at home the politicians had given so much of their power away to finance and the ever growing managerial bureaucracies that they in effect had
• 142:00 - 142:30 become managers themselves while abroad all their Adventures had failed and their simplistic vision of the world had been exposed as dangerous and destructive but 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 what they had done was turn politics into a strange theater where
• 142:30 - 143:00 nobody knew what was true or what was fake any longer they were called political technologists and they were the key figures behind President Putin they had kept him in power unchallenged for 15 years some some of them had been dissidents back in the 1970s and had been powerfully influenced by the science fiction writings of the strugatsky brothers 20 years later when Russia fell
• 143:00 - 143:30 apart after the end of Communism they rose up and took control of the media and they used it to manipulate the electrod on a vast scale for them reality was just something that could be manipulated and shaped into anything you wanted it to be
• 143:30 - 144:00 [Music] but then a technologist emerged who went much further and his ideas would become Central to Putin's grip on power he was called vladislav COV zarov came originally from the theater world and those who have studied his career say that what he did was take avantgard ideas from the theater and bring them into the heart of
• 144:00 - 144:30 politics zov'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 [Music] happening COV turned Russian politics into a bewildering constantly changing piece of theater he used Kremlin money to sponsor all kinds of groups from Mass
• 144:30 - 145:00 anti-fascist youth organizations to the very opposite Neo-Nazi skinheads and liberal human rights groups who then attacked the government sov even backed whole political parties that were opposed to President Putin but the key thing was that COV then let it be known that this was what he was doing which meant that no one was sure what was real or what was fake in modern
• 145:00 - 145:30 Russia as one journalist put it it's a strategy of power that keeps any opposition constantly confused a ceaseless shape-shifting that is Unstoppable because it is indefinable mean meanwhile real power was elsewhere hidden away behind the stage exercised without anyone seeing
• 145:30 - 146:00 it and then the same thing seemed to start happening in the west by now it was becoming ever more clear that the system had deep flaws every month there were New Revelations of most of the bank's involvement in global Corruption of massive taxes avoidance by all the major corporations of the secret surveillance of everyone's emails by the National Security Agency yet no one was prosecuted except
• 146:00 - 146:30 for a few people at the lowest levels and behind it all the massive inequality kept on growing yet the structure of power remained the same nothing ever changed because nothing could be allowed to destabilize the system but then the shape shifting [Applause] began thank you very much so nice so amazing so amazing what that's okay we I
• 146:30 - 147:00 love you more okay the campaign that Donald Trump ran was unlike anything before in politics nothing was fixed what he said who he attacked and how he attacked them was constantly changing and shifting Trump attacked his Republican Rivals as being all part of a broken and corrupt system a politics where everyone could be bored using words that could have come from the Occupy
• 147:00 - 147:30 Movement you've also donated to several de Democratic candidates Hillary Clinton included Nancy Pelosi you explained away those donations saying you did that to get business related favors and you said recently quote when you give they do whatever the hell you want them to do you better believe it so what specifically did they do if I ask them if I need them you know most of the people on this stage I've given to just so you understand a lot of money I will tell you that our system is broken I
• 147:30 - 148:00 give to many people before this before two months ago I was a businessman I give to everybody when they call I give and you know what when I need something from them two years later three years later I call them they are there for me and that's a broken system but at the same time Trump used the Lang Ang of the extreme racist right in America connecting with people's darkest fears pushing them and bringing those fears out into the get the [ __ ] out of
• 148:00 - 148:30 here [ __ ] our country [ __ ] americ made in USA [ __ ] made in [ __ ] USA go [ __ ] cook my burrito [ __ ] go [ __ ] made my tortilla [ __ ] build that [ __ ] for me trp I love Trump [ __ ] you I love my country yeah I'll [ __ ] like at least 10
• 148:30 - 149:00 of you up in one [ __ ] you [ __ ] [ __ ] many of the facts that Trump asserted were also completely untrue but Trump didn't care he and his audience knew that much of what he said bore little relationship to reality thank you very much this meant that Trump defeated journalism beautiful place because the journalist Central belief was that their job was to expose lies and assert the truth with Trump this became irrelevant not surprisingly Vladimir
• 149:00 - 149:30 Putin admired thisal TR
• 149:30 - 150:00 for the Liberals were outraged by Trump but they expressed their anger in cyberspace so it had no effect because the
• 150:00 - 150:30 algorithms made sure that they only spoke to people who already agreed with them instead ironically their waves of angry messages and tweets benefited the large corporations who ran the social media platforms one online analyst put it simply angry people click more it meant that the radical Fury that came like waves across the internet no longer had the power to change the
• 150:30 - 151:00 world instead it was becoming a fuel that was feeding the new systems of power and making them ever more [Music] powerful but none of the Liberals could possibly imagine that Donald Trump could ever win the nomination it was just a giant pant and then of course there's Donald Trump Donald Trump has been saying that
• 151:00 - 151:30 he will run for president as a republican which is surprising since I just assumed he was running as a joke Donald Trump often appears on Fox which is ironic because a fox often appears on Donald Trump's head Donald Trump owns the missusa pageant
• 151:30 - 152:00 which is great for Republicans because it will streamline their search for a vice president Donald Trump said recently he has a great relationship with the blacks though unless the blacks are a family of white people I bet he's mistaken
• 152:00 - 152:30 but underneath the liberal disdain both Donald Trump in America and vladislav COV in Russia had realized 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 and in the face of that you could play with reality constantly shifting and changing and in the process further
• 152:30 - 153:00 undermine and weaken the old forms of [Music] power [Music]
• 153:00 - 153:30 and there was another force that was about to dramatically reveal just how weak politics had become in the west [Music] Syria [Music]
• 153:30 - 154:00 the attack happened here at a Central police station in Damascus police say the bomber came up the stairs police then opened fire and then police say he detonated the explosives and the damage is here to see behind me the pock marked walls were the bul bearings hit blood splattered on the walls and the force of the blast caused walls to collapse and everything is topsy turvy
• 154:00 - 154:30 everything destroyed by now Syria was being torn apart by a horrific Civil War what had started as part of the Arab Spring had turned into a vicious battle to the death between between Bashar Assad and his opponents and at the heart of the conflict was the force that his father had first brought to the West suicide
• 154:30 - 155:00 [Music] bombing back in the 1980s Bashar Assad's father had seen suicide bombing as a weapon he could use to force the Americans out of the Middle East but over the next 30 Years it had shifted and M ated into something that had now ended up doing the very opposite tearing the Arab world apart Haas al-asad's dream of a powerful
• 155:00 - 155:30 and United Arab world was now destroyed in Iraq extremist Sunni groups had used suicide bombing as a way to start a sectarian war and now groups like Isis brought the same techniques into Syria to attack not just sad son but his fellow [Music] Shields and like his father Bashar Assad
• 155:30 - 156:00 retaliated with a vengeful Fury and the country fell apart [Music] Allah allahar [Music]
• 156:00 - 156:30 my fellow Americans tonight I want to talk to you about Syria why it matters and where we go from here faced by the war Western politicians were bewildered they insisted that Bashar Assad was evil but then it turned out that his enemies were more evil and more horrific than him the question before the house today is how we keep the British people safe
• 156:30 - 157:00 from the threat posed by isil this is not about whether we want to fight terrorism it's about how best we do that so Britain America and France decided to bomb the terrorist threat the effect of that was to help keep Assad in power then it became more confusing suddenly the Russians
• 157:00 - 157:30 intervened President Putin sent hundreds of planes and combat troops to support Assad but no one knew what their underlying aim was they seemed to be using a strategy that vladislav COV had developed in the Ukraine he called it non nonlinear Warfare it was a new kind of War where you never know what the enemy are really up to the underlying aim sov said was not
• 157:30 - 158:00 to win the war but to use the conflict to create a constant state of destabilized perception in order to manage and control allahar in March 2016 the Russians suddenly announced with a great Fanfare that they were leaving Syria and a concert was held in the ruins of palara to celebrate the
• 158:00 - 158:30 withdrawal but in reality the Russians never left they are still there and still no one knows what they really [Music] want and within Syria there was a new islamist ideologist who was determined to exploit the growing uncertainties in Europe and America he was called Abu musab
• 158:30 - 159:00 aluri the Syrian aluri had originally worked with Osama Bin Laden in Afghanistan but he had turned against him aluri gave lectures that had a powerful effect on the islamist movement he argued that Bin Laden had been wrong to attack the West headon
• 159:00 - 159:30 because it created a massive military response that had almost destroyed islamism instead alui said independent groups or individuals should stage random small scale attacks on civilians in Europe and America the aim was to spread fear uncertainty and doubt and undermined the already failing authority of Western
• 159:30 - 160:00 [Music] politicians the effect of the attacks shocked Europe and America America and gave powerful force to the New Politics of uncertainty and anxiety I'm sure uh that you with me
• 160:00 - 160:30 share the absolute horror and total revulsion at what happened in Paris last Friday and 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 there is a problem and we have to be honest about it our politicians I'm afraid haven't had the
• 160:30 - 161:00 G this could be the great Trojan Horse of all time because you look at the migration study it look at it now they'll start infiltrating with women and children both the brexit campaign in Britain and Donald Trump in America did exactly what aluri had predicted they used the fear to dramatize a world where everything even going to a restaurant had become a risky event and what had been seen as doomed campaigns on the fringes of society that
• 161:00 - 161:30 could never win became frighteningly real I am genuinely freaked out right now about this whole brexit thing because we had all been told that it wasn't going to happen like it was going away it was going away from brexiting and onto the staying and because I had this like Bedrock belief I have friends who like live and work in London they said oh don't worry we're very sensible people this isn't going to happen it's a lot of talk but that we don't do that sort of stuff here um they were
• 161:30 - 162:00 wrong and I really kind of crushes my view of like what can happen that is bad that we don't think is going to happen like it's just not supposed to happen no
• 162:00 - 162:30 I feel like we're watching the stirrings of fascism in Europe again and I genuinely never thought it would be my country I thought this would be America I thought America was the people who was so filled with I'm so disappointed I'm so
• 162:30 - 163:00 hurt [Music] [Applause] Z you must think my BS a bu the way you come and
• 163:00 - 163:30 go I ain't seen you with the lights on two night in a row so pack your rusty razor don't bother with goodbye your cup run it over but
• 163:30 - 164:00 mine is always [Applause] [Music] dry I can't stand no more standing room only outside my [Music] door don't help me set the
• 164:00 - 164:30 table now there one I M silver for a man who won't say gra if home where the this is my right to free speech going on here [Music]
• 164:30 - 165:00 okay [Music] street I'll read a good book turn out the lights and go to sleep stand in room only I can't stand no more no more
• 165:00 - 165:30 stand on video say bye
• 165:30 - 166:00 [Music] Heather [Music] Dre Dre dream Dre Dre Dre Dre Dre
• 166:00 - 166:30 [Music] Dre
• 166:30 - 167:00 what