HyperNormalisation (2016) - full transcript

HyperNormalisation tells the extraordinary story of how we got to this strange time of great uncertainty and confusion - where those who are supposed to be in power are paralysed - and have no idea what to do. And, where events keep happening that seem inexplicable and out of control - from Donald Trump to Brexit, the War in Syria, the endless migrant crisis, and random bomb attacks. It explains not only why these chaotic events are happening - but also why we, and our politicians, cannot understand them. The film shows that what has happened is that all of us in the West - not just the politicians and the journalists and the experts, but we ourselves - have retreated into a simplified, and often completely fake version of the world. But because it is all around us, we accept it as normal. From BBCiPlayer

[MUSIC: The Vanishing American Family

by Scuba Z]

[EXPLOSION]

We live in a strange time.

Extraordinary events keep happening

that undermine the

stability of our world.

Suicide bombs, waves of refugees,

Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin,

even Brexit.

[EXPLOSION]

Yet those in control

seem unable to deal with them,

and no-one has any vision

of a different

or a better kind of future.

[MUSIC: Something I Can Never Have

by Nine Inch Nails]

This film will tell the story

of how we got to this strange place.

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.

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 make-believe world,

which is why their opposition

has no effect

and nothing ever changes.

[MUSIC: The Vanishing American Family

by Scuba Z]

But this retreat into a dream world

allowed dark and destructive forces

to fester and grow outside.

Forces that are now returning

to pierce the fragile surface

of our carefully constructed

fake world.

# In dreams

# I live... #

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 the world without politics

first took 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

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 stopped.

The city held its regular meeting

to issue bonds

in return for the loans, overseen by

the city's financial controller.

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen.

Today, the city of New York is

offering for competitive bidding

the sale of 260 million

tax anticipation notes,

of which 100 million will mature

on June 3rd, 1975.

The banks were supposed

to turn up at 11am,

but it soon became clear that none

of them were going to appear.

The meeting was rescheduled for 2pm

and the banks

promised they would turn up.

The announcement on behalf of the

controller is that the offer,

which we had expected to receive

and announce at two o'clock

this afternoon,

is now expected at four o'clock.

Paul, does this mean that, so far,

nobody wants those bonds?

We will be making a further

announcement at four o'clock

and anything further that I could

say now I think would not advance

the interest of the sale,

which is now in progress.

Does this mean that you have not

been able to sell them so far today?

We will have a further announcement

at four o'clock.

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,

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, policemen

and firemen were sacked.

This was a new kind of politics.

The old politicians believed

that crises were solved

through negotiation 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 society.

Just by shifting paper around,

these slobs can make 60 million,

65 million in a single transaction.

That would take care of all

of the lay-offs in the city,

so it's reckless, it's cruel

and it's a disgrace.

There would be a fair number

of bankers, of course,

who'd say it's the unions who have

been too greedy.

What would your reaction be to that?

I guess they're right in a way.

If you can make 60 million

on a single transaction,

and a worker makes 8,000, 9,000

a year, I suppose they're correct,

and as they go back to their little

estates in Greenwich, Connecticut,

I want to wish them well, the slobs.

But the extraordinary thing was

no-one opposed the bankers.

The radicals and the left-wingers

who, ten years before,

had dreamt of changing America

through revolution did nothing.

They had retreated

and were living in the abandoned

buildings in Manhattan.

The singer Patti 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

that could not fit with the idea

of collective political action.

Instead, Patti 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 write all over the walls.

That, to me, is neater

than any 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 watch it 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 movie,

cos they don't have enough dough,

but it's some 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.

U

V

W

X

Y

Z

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 power.

Shut up.

Shut up!

One of them wrote of that time,

"It was the mood of the era

"and the revolution was

deferred indefinitely.

"And while we were dozing,

the money crept in."

[SOBBING]

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 realised that there was

now no future

in building housing

for ordinary people,

because all the government

grants had gone.

But he saw there were other ways

to get vast amounts of money

out of the state.

Trump started to buy up

derelict 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 city had to agree

because they 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 paid practically nothing.

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, Hafez 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 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 being a threat.

But Assad believed 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.

Four,

three,

two,

one.

Kissinger was also tough

and ruthless.

He had started in the 1950s

as 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 Dr Strangelove

in Stanley Kubrick's film.

Mr President, I would not rule

out the chance

to preserve a nucleus

of human specimens.

It would be quite easy.

At the bottom of some

of our deeper mineshafts.

Henry was not a warm, friendly,

modest, jovial sort of person.

He was thought of as one

of the more...

..anxious, temperamental,

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

as an interconnected system,

and his aim was to keep

that system in balance

and prevent it from falling

into chaos.

I believe that with all the

dislocations we now experience,

there also exists

an extraordinary opportunity

to form, for the first time in

history, a truly global society

carried up by the principle

of interdependence,

and if we act wisely,

and with vision,

I 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's going to be chaos.

The flight has been delayed,

we understand now.

Kissinger will be arriving here

about an hour and a half from now,

so we'll just

have the press informed

and then we'll stay

in contact with you...

And it was this idea 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.

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 stay as

a whole, as...Palestinian.

As... They call themselves,

"Those Who Go Back" -

"al-a'iduun", you say in Arabic.

Assad also believed

that such a peace

would strengthen the Arab world.

But Kissinger thought that

strengthening the Arabs

would destabilise

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 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 system.

The hallmark 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 this structural

global balance of power level.

And as he addresses questions

of human dignity,

human 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.

Kissinger described their meetings.

"Assad's controlled fury," he wrote,

"was all the more impressive

for its eerily cold,

"seemingly unemotional, demeanour."

Assad 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.

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 revenge."

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 transformed.

They would become new and better

kinds of human beings.

But by the 1980s, it was clear

that the dream had failed.

[WOMAN GASPS]

[WOMAN SPEAKS RUSSIAN]

The Soviet Union became instead

a society where no-one believed

in anything

or had any vision of the future.

[RUSSIAN SONG PLAYS]

Those who ran the Soviet Union

had 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 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

"hypernormalisation".

You were so much

a part of the system

that it was impossible

to see beyond it.

The fakeness was hypernormal.

[TANNOY ANNOUNCEMENT IN RUSSIAN]

In this stagnant world,

two brothers -

called Arkady 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 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 are hidden forces

that twist your body

and change the way

you think and feel.

The picture the Strugatskys gave

was of a world

where nothing was fixed.

Where reality - both what you saw

and what you believed -

had become shifting and unstable.

And in 1979, the film director

Andrei Tarkovsky

made a film that was based

on Roadside Picnic.

He called it Stalker.

[WIND WHISTLES]

I, Ronald Reagan,

do 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 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 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.

[EXPLOSION]

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 tanks

they have outside Beirut?

Do you know how strong they are?

[HE TRANSLATES]

That means

"We are not ready to surrender".

Young, young, young!

[NEARBY EXPLOSIONS]

Keep going!

Dashed into this building here

because the PLO guys with us

expect that, sooner or later,

there will be a huge explosion.

There've been several of these

in the last few minutes.

As you can see,

there's enormous damage

in all the buildings round here.

[EXPLOSION]

Quick, quick!

[DISTANT EXPLOSIONS]

Two 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 watched

as a Christian Lebanese faction

murdered the 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 militiamen

were allowed to 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 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 Ayatollah Khomeini's Iran.

And what Khomeini

could bring to Assad

was an extraordinary new weapon

that he had just created.

It was called it

"the poor man's atomic bomb".

[CHANTING: ]

Ayatollah Khomeini had come to power

two years before

as the leader

of the Iranian revolution.

But his hold on power

was precarious,

and Khomeini had developed a new

idea of how to fight his enemies

and defend the revolution.

Khomeini 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 Koran

specifically prohibited suicide.

In the past, you became a martyr

on the battlefield

because God chose the time and place

of your death.

But Khomeini changed this.

He did it by going back to one of

the central rituals of Shia Islam.

[MUSIC PLAYS]

Every year,

Shi'ites march in a procession

mourning the sacrifice

of their founder, Husayn.

As they do, they whip themselves,

symbolically re-enacting

Husayn's suffering.

Khomeini said that

the ultimate act of penitence

was not just to whip yourself,

but to kill 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 north-western Iranian

border region of Marivan

"at 10.08 hours local time,

Saturday,"

said the Joint Staff Commands

communique numbered 1710.

Khomeini had mobilised this force

when 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.

[CHANTING]

Their job was to walk through

the enemies' minefields,

deliberately blowing themselves up

in order to open gaps

that would allow the Iranian army

to pass through unharmed.

It was organised 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.

And it was this new idea -

of an unstoppable human weapon -

that President Assad

took from Khomeini,

and brought to the West

for the first time.

But, as it travelled,

it would mutate

into something even more 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 bombing".

In October 1983, two suicide bombers

drove trucks into

the US marine barracks in Beirut.

It was seeing something move

that took me out of my trance.

And then I recognised, "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.

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,

devotees of the Ayatollah Khomeini,

or whatever -

it is Syria

who 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,

Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran, that we

must look for an explanation

of the group's activities.

Destabilisation 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.

There are no words that can express

our sorrow and grief

for the loss of those

splendid young men

and the injury to so many others.

These deeds make so evident

the bestial nature

of those who would assume power

if they could have their way

and drive us out of that area.

But despite his words,

within four months,

President Reagan withdrew all the

American troops from the Lebanon.

The Secretary of State

George Shultz explained.

"We became paralysed 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 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.

TRANSLATION: One should defend

the realm of Islam and Muslims

against heretics and invaders.

And to fulfil this duty, one 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 world.

By the middle of the 1980s,

the banks were rising up

and becoming ever more powerful

in America.

What had started ten years before

in New York,

the idea that the financial system

could run society,

was spreading.

But unlike older systems of power,

it was mostly invisible.

A writer called William Gibson

tried to dramatise 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

and to politicians.

But those networks gave

the corporations

extraordinary new powers of control.

'Good morning. South-West

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 cyberspace and as they did,

they travelled through systems

that were so powerful

that they could reach out and crush

intruders by destroying their minds.

In cyberspace, there were no laws

and no politicians to protect you.

Just raw, brutal corporate power.

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 utopia.

They were the technological utopians

who were rising up

on the West Coast of America.

They turned Gibson's idea

on its 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.

Ten years before, faced by the

complexity of real politics,

the radicals had given up on

the idea of changing the world.

But now, the computer utopians

saw, in cyberspace,

an alternative reality.

A place they could retreat to away

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.

We've got some more acid over here

if you want to go ahead.

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 that have white

in them are really great.

[SHE GIGGLES]

I feel like a rabbit.

It freed them from the narrow,

limited view of the world

that was imposed on them by

politicians and those in power.

In the United States, in the next,

five, ten, 15 years,

you're going to see more and more

people taking LSD and making it

a part of their lives, so there will

be an LSD country within 15 years.

An LSD society, there will

be less interest

in, obviously, warfare,

in power politics.

You know, politics today is

a disease, it's a real addiction.

Politics, politics, politics,

politics.

Don't politick, don't vote -

these are old men's games.

Impotent and senile old man

that want to put you

onto their old chess games

of war and power.

20 years later, the new networks

of machines seemed 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,

cyberspace could be a place where

you would be liberated from the old,

corrupt hierarchies of politics and

power and explore new ways of being.

One of the leading exponents of this

idea was called John Perry Barlow.

In the '60s, he had written songs

for the Grateful Dead

and been part of the acid

counterculture.

Now, he organised

what he called "cyberthons",

to try and bring the cyberspace

movement together.

Well, you know, the cyberthon

as it was originally conceived

was supposed to be...

..the '90s equivalent of

the acid test

and we had thought to involve

some of the same personnel.

You and I and Timmy should sit down

and talk. OK. That is good.

And it immediately acquired

a financial quality

or a commercial quality

that was initially

a little unsettling

to an old hippy like me,

but as soon as I saw it actually

working, then I thought,

"Ah, well, if you're going to have

an acid 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.

Barlow then wrote a manifesto

that he called A Declaration Of

Independence Of Cyberspace.

It was addressed to all politicians,

telling them to keep out

of this new world.

It was going to be incredibly

influential,

because what Barlow did was give

a powerful picture of the internet

not as a network controlled

by giant corporations,

but, instead, as a kind

of magical, free place.

An alternative to the

old systems of power.

It was a vision that would come

to dominate the internet

over the next 20 years.

Governments of the industrial world,

cyberspace 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 impose on us.

We will create a civilisation

of the mind in cyberspace.

May it be more humane and fair

than the world your governments

have made before.

It's begun.

This is the key to a new order.

This code disk means freedom.

But two young hackers in New York

thought that Barlow

was describing a fantasy world,

that his vision bore

no relationship at all

to what was really emerging online.

They were cult figures

on the early online scene

and their fans followed

and recorded them.

They called themselves Phiber Optik

and Acid Phreak

and they spent their time exploring

and breaking in

to giant computer networks

that they knew

were the hard realities

of modern digital power.

My specific instance, I was charged

with conspiracy

to commit a few dozen "overacts",

they called them.

Among a number of things having to

do with computer trespass and...

and I guess computer eavesdropping,

interception.

Unauthorised access to federal

interest computers,

which is pretty vague law.

Communications network

computers and so on.

In a notorious public debate online,

the two hackers attacked Barlow.

What infuriated them most

was Barlow'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 Phreak hacked into

the computers of

a giant corporation called TRW.

TRW had originally built the systems

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 system,

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 Barlow's credit history

and 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, used that

information to control your destiny.

But the system that was allowing

this to happen

were the new

giant networks of information

connected through computer servers.

The hackers were questioning whether

Barlow's utopian rhetoric

about cyberspace might really be

a convenient camouflage

hiding the emergence of a new and

growing power

that was way beyond politics.

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 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 paralysing complexity of

real Middle-Eastern politics.

The perfect candidate was

waiting in the wings.

Colonel Gaddafi, the ruler of Libya.

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 figure.

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.

Gentlemen, the Queen.

[GOD SAVE THE QUEEN PLAYS]

When he was a young officer,

Gaddafi had been sent

to England for training

and he had detested

the patronising racism

that he said he had found

at the heart of British society.

Yes, I attended a course.

I had been in England in 1966

from February to August.

You had the best months.

[HE CHUCKLES]

I was in Beaconsfield,

a village called Beaconsfield,

in an army school.

In fact, we were ill-treated in that

place from some British officers.

I think the officers were Jews,

maybe Jews.

Ill-treated in what sort of way?

In many ways.

They ill-treat us every time.

By being rude or by bullying or...?

In their own behaviour towards us,

they ill-treated us.

They hate us in there

because of colonisation.

It is the result of colonising.

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 had sent money and weapons

to the IRA in Ireland

to help them overthrow

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 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 talk tough,

let's see you use some

of these billions and billions

and billions of dollars' worth

of weapons

that you've asked us to approve.

Your 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's 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 services

who investigated the attacks

were convinced that Libya

was not involved at all

and that the mastermind behind

the attacks was, in fact, Syria -

that the terrorists

had been directed

by the Syrian intelligence agencies.

But the Americans say that

the attack at Rome Airport

was organised by Gaddafi,

not by Damascus. What do you say?

No, we don't have any evidence...

You have no evidence?

..supporting such an...affirmation.

The only evidence we have

shows a Syrian connection.

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 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 interrogated

the surviving terrorists.

I must just say

I don't agree with that.

But you've no evidence that Libya

was in on the planning either.

Our evidence on Libya is

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 attacks,

he made no attempt

to deny the allegations.

Instead, he went the other way

and turned the crisis

into a global drama...

It is not a time of saying.

It is a time of war,

a time of confrontation.

..threatening suicide attacks

against America.

TRANSLATION:

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 peoples around the world,

even the blacks in 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 honour and

privilege that I present to you

the leader of the

al-Fateh Revolution from Libya,

our brother Muammar al-Gaddafi.

[APPLAUSE]

Gaddafi told them that Libya

was now their ally

in their struggle against

white America.

..To express my full 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 rocket scientists

to come to Libya

to build him a rocket.

He insisted that

it had no military purpose.

Libya was now going to

explore outer space.

I think it is peaceful and civil...

Civilian?

..civilian activity

for investigation of space

and something like this

and it has nothing to do

with any military things.

But no-one believed him.

Journalists warned that Gaddafi was

really preparing to attack Europe,

vividly dramatising

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 degrees

could, of course,

become something very different -

a missile possibly

carrying a warhead.

That would put Libya

within range of an enormous area.

A chilling proposition

with its range of 2,000km.

The Americans and 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 supervillain,

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.

So, you think, in the past,

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?Maybe.

[HE CHUCKLES]

Then, there was

another terrorist attack

at a discotheque 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 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 global revolutionary

and his manic ravings

and then re-presenting

them as fact.

And, in the process, together,

the Americans and Gaddafi were

constructing a fictional world.

The analysts were certainly,

I'm convinced...

pressured into developing

a prima facie case

against the Libyan Government.

From the somewhat

incoherent ravings of a maniac,

both interceptions

of a clandestine nature

and interceptions of an open radio

broadcast or whatever,

as well as other sources,

quotations of his,

one can assemble

a neatly-put-together package

demonstrating that the man

had violent interests

against the United States

and its European allies.

The European intelligence agencies

told the Americans

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 less downsided

consequences, if you will.

There's less Arab support

for Gaddafi,

we figured there would be less

Soviet support for Gaddafi.

There's no question that Libya was

more vulnerable than Syria and Iran.

He was a soft target?And that

is certainly an element, of 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.

TRANSLATION: The family

were asleep and my wife

was, that day, tied down to the bed

because she had a slipped disc.

I tried to rescue the children

and the house started to collapse,

as you can see.

And the bombs started to land.

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.

Ever since then,

there have been rumours that his

adopted daughter actually survived.

But many other children

were killed in the raid

because the American bombing

was so inaccurate.

Gaddafi realised 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 democracy.

TRANSLATION: I feel that

I'm really responsible

for conveying the Third Way theory

and the Green Book

to the rising generations, to the

young American and British people,

so that we can rescue America

and Britain

and these generations

of young people from this theory,

this electoral party theory

which enabled an imbecile

like Reagan

to rule the mightiest power on Earth

and use it to destroy

other people's homes

and enabled a harlot like Thatcher

to rule a great nation like Britain.

MAN: Wow, look at that.

What the heck is that?

Oh, my God, look at that.

Holy crap!

It's just moving really slowly. Wow!

Look, look, look! Come here,

come here! What is it doing?

What the heck?!

Guys, it's...

Whoa!Oh, my gosh!

Wow!

What is happening?

Dude, what is happening?!

What is going on?

Oh, my gosh!

Oh, my God, guys!

Guys, is that a freaking UFO?

Wait, can you get a good video?

What is it?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 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 Government were 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 rumour that these

were really alien visitations.

One of those chosen

was called Paul Bennewitz

who lived outside

a giant air base 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 sanctioned counterintelligence

operation to convince him

that what he was seeing was UFOs

and that what we didn't want him

to know was

that he had tapped

into something on the base

and we didn't want him

to ever disclose that.

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.

Bennewitz and others

chosen by the agency

were, it is alleged,

given a series of forged documents.

Many of them were top-secret memos

by the military

describing sightings of

unidentified aerial 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 1990s.

What the fuck is that?That's a...

That's crazy, bro.

Is that that space, uh...?

And it also fuelled

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 programme.

The President's advisers

had given it a name -

they called it

"perception management"

and it became a central part

of the American Government

during the 1980s.

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

of the real world.

Reality became less and less

of an important factor

in American politics.

It wasn't what was real that was

driving anything

or the facts driving anything.

It was how you could turn those

facts or twist those facts

or even make up the facts to make

your opponent look bad.

So, perception management became

a device

and the facts could be twisted.

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 handle.

But something was about to happen

that would demonstrate dramatically

just how far the American Government

had detached from reality.

The Soviet Empire was about

to implode.

And no-one, none of the

politicians,

or the journalists,

or the think tank experts,

or the economists,

or the academics saw it coming.

That's it! Whoo!

Get ready to work out.

[GUNSHOTS]

The collapse of the Soviet Union

also had a powerful effect

on the West.

For many, it symbolised the final

failure of the dream

that politics could 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 world.

One of the first people to describe

this dramatic change

was a left-wing German political

thinker called Ulrich 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,

and modern technologies

so potentially dangerous

that it was impossible to predict

the outcomes of anything you did.

The catalogue 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

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 were 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?

[EXPLOSION]

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 north-west of the United

States called East Wenatchee.

It was a giant computer

whose job was to make

the future predictable.

The man building it was

a banker called Larry Fink.

Back in 1986,

Mr Fink's career had collapsed.

Shoot!

He lost 100 million in a deal

and had been sacked.

He became determined

it wouldn't happen again.

Fink started a company called

BlackRock and built

a computer he called Aladdin.

It is housed in a series

of large sheds

in the apple orchards

outside Wenatchee.

Fink'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 world

and it take 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

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 20,000 portfolios.

I am Aladdin.I am Aladdin.

And, today, I'll find the numbers

behind the 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 am 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 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 Wenatchee

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 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

near-sighted. I mean, really.

I mean, no-one had ever offered

me glasses.

And then, all of a sudden,

here comes somebody that says,

"OK, now try these on.

Try this Prozac on."

And I tried it on and for the

first time in my life I went,

"Whoa! Is this the way

reality really is?"

Your perception can be changed

and it's frightening

and it's scary to people.

It speaks of science fiction almost.

Well, the medicine just kind of lets

you listen to what needs to go on.

And then your doctor,

every time you come back, says,

"You're looking so much better."

And then every time I go in he goes,

"You're so beautiful." You know?

He isn't even sucking up.

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."

So, I go out and tell my friends,

"I feel so much better

about myself."

Mom goes out, "Oh, I feel so much

better about myself."

So, your friends start saying,

"I've seen such an improvement.

"I've seen such improvement."

And everybody improves all the way

around. They see improvement.

It's like everybody's brainwashing

each other into being happy.

But there was a more effective way

of reassuring people

that was being developed that did

not involve medication.

It, too, came from computer systems

but this time,

artificial intelligence.

But the way to do it

had been discovered by 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 programme the rules

that governed human thought...

..but they never worked.

One computer scientist, at MIT,

became so disillusioned that he

decided to build a computer

programme

that would parody

these hopeless attempts.

He was called Joseph Weizenbaum

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.

Weizenbaum called the programme

"Eliza".

He modelled it on a real

psychotherapist called Carl Rogers

who was famous for simply

repeating back to the patient

what they had just said.

And that is what Eliza did.

The patient sat in front of the

screen and typed in

what they were feeling

and the programme repeated it back

to them,

often in the form of a question.

He says I'm depressed much

of the time.

Well, I need some help.

That much seems certain.

One of the first people to use Eliza

was Weizenbaum's secretary

and her reaction was something

that he had not predicted at all.

I asked her to my office and sat her

down at the keyboard

and then she began to type and, of

course,

I looked over her shoulder to

make sure everything

was operating properly.

After two or three interchanges

with the machine she turned to

me and she said,

"Would you mind

leaving the room, please?"

And yet she knew, as Weizenbaum did,

that Eliza didn't understand

a single word that was being

typed into it.

You're like my father in some ways.

You don't argue with me.Why do you

think I don't argue 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...

Weizenbaum 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 details

of their lives.

They also liked it

because it was free

of any kind of

patronising 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 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 behaviour

and then looked for patterns

and correlations

from which they could predict

what they would want in the future.

It was a system that ordered

the world in a way

that was centred 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.

And the applications of this new

direction

proved fruitful and profitable.

If you liked that, you'll love 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 more monitored

to stabilise 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 stability,

politics became just part of a wider

system of managing the 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 society.

But the new system did have

a dangerous flaw.

Because in the real world,

not everything can be predicted

by reading data from the past.

And someone who was about to

discover that,

to his own cost, was Donald Trump.

One day a man called Jess Marcum

received a phone call.

It was from Donald Trump

and Trump was desperate for help.

Marcum was a strange,

mysterious figure.

He had been a nuclear scientist

in the 1950s

and studied the effect of radiation

from nuclear weapons

on the human body.

Then Marcum 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 going?

Let's go. Go, go, go.

Donald Trump was one

of the heroes of the age.

But, in reality, much of this

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 1985.

And then, a famous Japanese gambler

called Akio Kashiwagi

came to one of Trump's casinos

and started to win millions

of dollars

in an extraordinary run of luck.

Trump, who was desperate for money,

panicked as day-after-day

he watched millions

being siphoned out of his casino.

So, he turned for help

to Jess Marcum.

Marcum came to Trump's casino

in Atlantic City.

He analysed all the data about the

way the 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, Marcum said, predicted

that Kashiwagi had to lose.

And after five agonising days,

he did.

Kashiwagi lost 10 million

and he gave up.

Donald Trump was elated.

He thought he'd got his money back.

[IN JAPANESE:]

Before Kashiwagi could pay

his debt,

he was hacked to death in

his kitchen by Yakuza gangsters...

..and Donald Trump

didn't get his money.

Trump's business went bankrupt

and he was forced to sell most of

his buildings to the banks.

And he married Miss Hawaiian 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.

President Assad

didn't want stability.

He wanted revenge.

In December 1988,

a bomb exploded on a Pan Am plane

over Lockerbie in Scotland.

Almost immediately, investigators

and journalists

pointed the finger at Syria.

"The bombing had been done," they

said, "in revenge for the Americans

"shooting down 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 Lockerbie bombing.

But many journalists and politicians

did not believe it.

They were convinced

that the switch had happened

for the most cynical of reasons.

That America and Britain desperately

needed Assad as an ally

in the coming Gulf War against

Saddam Hussein.

So, once again, they blamed Colonel

Gaddafi as the terrorist mastermind.

Syria, of course, was,

unfortunately, accused

of many terrorist outrages and

of harbouring terrorist groups.

It appears that we have now

restored relations with them,

as have the Americans.

They're now our friends,

although we've got no real

assurances on the past whatsoever.

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 control.

The force that, ten years before,

he had brought from Iran to attack

the West - the human bomb -

was now about to jump,

like a virus,

from Shia to Sunni Islam.

In December 1992,

the militant group Hamas

kidnapped an Israeli border guard

and stabbed him to death.

The Israeli response

was overwhelming.

They arrested 415 members of Hamas,

put them on buses and took them

to the top of a bleak mountain

in southern Lebanon.

They left them there -

and refused to allow any

humanitarian aid through.

[THEY CHANT AND SHOUT]

But the Israelis

had dumped the Hamas militants

in an area controlled by Hezbollah.

They spent six months there,

and during that time,

they learnt from Hezbollah

how powerful

suicide bombing could be.

Hezbollah 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 deportees

marched in protest towards the

Israeli border,

dressed as martyrs,

as the Israelis shelled them.

But it soon became more

than just theatre.

Hamas began a wave of suicide

attacks in Israel.

REPORTER: Just before nine, 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 smouldering wreckage.

I didn't want to believe that under

my house there is a bomb.

And when I realised it's a bomb,

I...

I started to cry.

Because it was the 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 Hezbollah had never done.

The tactic shocked the Sunni world.

This was something completely

alien to its history.

Not only did the

Koran forbid suicide,

but Sunni Islam did not have any

rituals of self-sacrifice -

unlike the Shias.

The most senior religious leader

in Saudi Arabia

insisted it was wrong.

But a mainstream theologian

from Egypt

called Sheikh Qaradawi

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 -

"including women -

serve as reservists.

"So, really, they are all part

of the enemy army."

TRANSLATION: It's not suicide.

It is martyrdom in the name of God.

Islamic theologians and

jurisprudence

have debated this issue.

Israeli women are not like

women in our society,

because Israeli women

are militarised.

Secondly, I consider this type

of martyrdom operation

as an indication of justice

of Allah, our Almighty.

Allah is just.

Through his infinite wisdom,

he has given the weak

what the strong do not possess.

And that is their ability to turn

their bodies into bombs

like the Palestinians do.

Hamas kept sending the bombers

into Israel.

Sometimes day-after-day.

The horror overwhelmed

Israeli society

and it completely destroyed

the ability of politics

to solve the Palestinian 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.

# Netanyahu! #

The human bomb had destroyed

the very thing

that President Assad

had first wanted.

A real political solution

to the Palestinian question.

REPORTER:

It was just after one o'clock

and the market

was full of shoppers.

[SIRENS WAIL]

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.

Peace impossible!

This moment, it will be the end!

It must be the end of

this bloody peace 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 journalists,

and all kinds of experts

had begun to focus on the dangers

that might be hidden in the 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 culture.

And everyone became possessed

by dark forebodings,

imagining the very worst

that might happen.

# Dream, baby, dream

# Dream, baby, dream

# Dream, baby, dream

# Dream, baby, dream

# Forever

# Oh, dream, baby, dream

# Dream, baby, dream

# Dream, baby, dream

# Dream, baby, dream

# Forever... #

[SHATTERING EXPLOSIONS]

# ..Dream, baby, dream

# Oh, baby, we gotta

keep that dream alive

# Keep that dream alive

# Forever

# Oh, dream, baby, dream

# Dream, baby, dream

# Dream, baby, dream

# Dream, baby, dream

# Oh, dream, baby, dream, baby,

dream, baby

# Dream, baby, dream, baby

# Oh, dream, baby, dream... #

[SCREAMING]

[PANICKED SCREAMS]

[RUMBLING, SHATTERING GLASS]

# Oh, you keep that fire,

burning, baby

# Oh, you gotta keep that flame

burning brightly, baby... #

[CRASHING EXPLOSIONS]

[SILENCE]

[DISTANT SIRENS]

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 defences.

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

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 Colonel Gaddafi

and turned him into

an evil global terrorist.

But, in the process, this 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

archcriminal

who wanted to terrorise the world.

All the politics and power

dropped away.

The problem was just them

and their evil personalities.

And after 9/11, 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

civilisation

not to allow the

world's worst leaders

to develop and deploy,

and therefore,

blackmail freedom-loving countries

with the world's worst weapons.

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 generations will

consider us deeply irresponsible.

Both Tony Blair and George Bush

became possessed by the idea

of 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 programme

which was making vast 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 Sean Connery

and Nicolas Cage.

Really elegant string-of-pearls

configuration.

Unfortunately, incredibly unstable.

What exactly does this stuff do?

If the rocket renders it aerosol,

it could take out the entire city

of people.

How?It's a

cholinesterase inhibitor.

Stops the brain from sending nerve

messages down the spinal cord...

A later report into

the Iraq War pointed out,

"Glass containers were not typically

used in chemical munitions..."

..seizes your nervous 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 carried

"in glass beads or spheres."

..that's after your skin melts off.

My God.

That there is a threat from

Saddam Hussein

and the weapons of mass destruction

that he has acquired,

is not in doubt at all.

Hafez al-Assad had died in 2000.

His son, Bashar, 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 Shi'ite suicide bombers

to attack the Americans in Lebanon.

Now, as America and Britain

invaded Iraq,

Bashar decided that

he would copy his father.

But what he was about to let loose

would tear the Arab world apart -

and then come back to try

to destroy him.

[STATELY FANFARE PLAYS]

Bashar Assad had was never

supposed to have been president.

It was always going to have

been his elder brother, Bassel.

But then, Bassel had died

in a car crash.

So now, Bashar took

over the giant palace

that his father had built

above Damascus.

Up to this point, Bashar 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 favourite band was the

Electric Light Orchestra.

But now, he was president.

And he set out to attack 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, Bashar instructed

the 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 of 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 fighters.

But it began to run out of control.

Most of the jihadists had joined

the group al-Qaeda in Iraq

that then turned to killing Shi'ites

in an attempt to create a civil war.

And the force that had originally

been invented by the Shi'ites,

suicide bombing, now returned

and started to kill them.

Then, this.

[EXPLOSION]

[STUNNED SILENCE]

A moment of silence before people

realised what was happening.

[SCREAMING]

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...

[DISTANT EXPLOSION]

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 Iraq.

[SCREAMING]

There was panic.

A terrified stampede.

But some of these people

were running into the next bombs.

[EXPLOSIONS]

We counted at least six

separate explosions.

[MUSIC DROWNS AUDIO]

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 turned for help to the man

who they had always insisted

was one of the world's most

dangerous tyrants.

Colonel 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 supervillain

was now going to be turned

into a fake hero of 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 engineers

of this fake world.

Ever since he had been accused

of the Lockerbie 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,

the BBC 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 Durham...

This evening...Here he is.

..Colonel 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 a historic one,

and a courageous one,

and I applaud it.

Today, in Tripoli,

the leader of Libya,

Colonel Muammar al-Gaddafi...

..publically confirmed his

commitment to disclose and dismantle

all weapons-of-mass-destruction

programmes 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 travelled to meet

Gaddafi in his desert tent.

To welcome him back into

what one journalist called,

"The community

of civilised 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 programme

had stuttered to a halt long ago

and never 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 terrifying arsenal of weapons.

And the West had to pretend

that they had avoided

another global threat.

And then the made-up stories

became even more complicated.

As part of the deal, the West said

that if Gaddafi admitted

that Libya had done

the Lockerbie bombing,

then they would lift

the sanctions.

But many of those who

had investigated Lockerbie

were still convinced

that Libya hadn't done it.

That, really, it had been Syria.

But Colonel Gaddafi confessed.

His son, Saif, was interviewed

about this confession.

He said that his father

was simply pretending

that he had been behind

the Lockerbie 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 the time,

a responsibility, because you have

to accept responsibilities,

you have to pay compensation in

order to get rid of sanction.

We did that, not because we are

convinced that we did it,

but because of the final 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 get sanctions over with

so that you can start normal

diplomatic relations with the West.

OK. OK. What's wrong with that?

It's a very cynical way to behave,

as a country, isn't it?

Many people would say...

First of all...

I mean,

the Americans and the British,

they told us to write that letter.

They told us to pay compensation.

And then, they opened their

embassies

and they restored their relation.

They came to us.

It was their game. Not our game.

Does the... Does the leader know

there's a picture on the television?

Will you tell him?

Oh, good. Thank you.

[INDISTINCT CONVERSATION]

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.

[CREW MURMURS]

OK. We're going in ten.

They did this by bringing

other famous world thinkers

and TV presenters out to Libya

to meet the colonel

and discuss his theories.

Hello, and welcome to

Libya In The Global Age,

A Conversation With Muammar 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 inspired Tony Blair.

Colonel Gaddafi's own theory was

called "The Third Universal Theory."

Lord Giddens 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 encouraged."

That for 40 years, the leader of

Libya, Muammar Gaddafi...

And then, Colonel Gaddafi

achieved his lifelong dream.

He was invited to address

the United Nations.

He spent almost two hours explaining

his Third International Theory.

And also demanding 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

Donald Trump.

TRUMP: 'I've dealt with everybody.

'And by the way, I can tell you

something else!' What?

'I've dealt with Gaddafi.'

What did you do?'Excuse me.

I rented him a piece of land.

'He paid me more for one night

than 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 doing!'

People in Britain and

America now began to

turn away from politics.

The effect of the Iraq war had been

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 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

that was free of this hypocrisy

and the corruption of politics

They went into cyberspace.

# Once upon a time it was you by the

door

# I... #

By now cyberspace had

become even more

sophisticated and

responsive to human interaction.

The online

world was full of algorithms

that could

analyse and predict human behaviour.

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 Bayesian Belief Networks.

They were systems that could

predict behaviour,

even when the information was

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 more.

One of the early

utopians of cyberspace,

Jaron Lanier, warned of

the implications of this.

"The agent's model of

what you are

"interested in will

always be a cartoon.

"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 - you or someone 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

otherworld - began to

look and feel like the

real world.

[INDISTINCT]

No, not yet.

From videos of animals,

personal moments of

experience,

extraordinary events,

to horrific terror videos,

more and more was uploaded.

[HIP-HOP MUSIC PLAYS]

And in a

strange, sad twist,

the first terrorist

beheading video that was

posted online was that of

Judea Pearl's own son, Daniel Pearl.

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... On my father's side

of the family, are Zionists.

My father is Jewish.

My mother is Jewish.

I'm Jewish.

Only now do I think about some of

the people in Guantanamo 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 online.

One programme was called

Optic Nerve. It took stills from

the webcam conversations of

millions of people across the world,

trying to spot terrorists planning

another attack.

The programme did not

discover a single terrorist.

But it did

discover something else.

A top secret assessment said...

But increasingly, people

were using

the internet in other ways - to

present themselves as

THEY wanted to be seen.

I guess the 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 mesmerising.

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 hand on the mouse.

Stop...

I nearly...

threw my phone away!

Stop! Stop!

Pose.Pose. And snap a selfie...

[PHONE CAMERA WHIRS]

There you go.There you go.

They play with themselves.

But what they don't know...

As the intelligent

systems online gathered

ever more data, new

forms of guidance began to 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 people's

pre-existing beliefs.

# And now it's all right

# I know my own lie

# Is coming to say

# You will call out

# Yourself

# I know I thought

# Makes my face and hands cold

# And I

# Ooh

# Ooh

# Ooh... #

The version of

cyberspace that was

rising up seemed to be

very much like

William Gibson's original 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 re-emerged.

Taking over the roadway.

[CHANTING]

Take it!

[CHEERING AND WHOOPING]

[CHANTING]

After the financial

crash of 2008

the politicians saved the banks.

But they did practically nothing

about the massive corruption

that was

revealed in its wake.

And the reason they gave

was that it might

destabilise 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 the heart of it.

This is the Senate building.

These people have been cut off and

they've corrupted our democracy

and it's literally killing people.

I'm an Iraqi war vet.

I went to Iraq in 2009.

I've seen what happens first hand

when we let corruption

rule our elected government and

democracy. We're coming here today

just to raise awareness.

What drove the Occupy

movement was the

original dream of the

internet that people

like John Perry Barlow

had outlined in the early 1990s.

In his Declaration of the

Independence of Cyberspace,

Barlow 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 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.

ALL: We are now going to vote...

SPEAKER: ..on whether to stay here

for the next two hours...

ALL: ..on whether to stay here for

the next two hours...

SPEAKER: ..or leave now.

ALL: ..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.

SPEAKER: ..what she said...

ALL: ..what she said...

SPEAKER: ..was that...ALL: ..was

that...SPEAKER: ..the proposal...

Each person was an autonomous

individual who expressed

what they believed.

But together they became components

in a network that organised itself

through the feedback of information

around the system.

You could organise people without

the exercise of power.

[CHANTING]

[CAR HORNS BLARE]

The crisis in Egypt.

[CHANTING AND SHOUTING]

A march through our main streets.

Looks like chaos. Looks like

police is running around

and a few hundred people walking

down the street.

Then, almost immediately,

the Arab Spring began.

The first

revolution started in Tunisia,

but it

quickly spread to Egypt.

On January 25th 2011,

thousands of Egyptians

came out in groups

across Cairo and then

started moving towards

Tahrir Square.

It seemed like a spontaneous

uprising but the internet

had played a

key role in organising the groups.

One of the main activists was

an Egyptian computer

engineer called Wael Ghonim.

He worked for Google in Egypt

but he had also set up the

Facebook site that

played the key role in

organising the first protests.

As hundreds of

thousands took over Tahrir Square,

Ghonim

gave an interview on Egyptian TV.

But Ghonim was also

overwhelmed by the power

this new technology had,

that a computer engineer with a

keyboard could call out

thousands of people...

some of whom then died in the

midst of the protests.

Many liberals in the

West saw this as proof

of the revolutionary

power of the internet.

Again it seemed to be

able to organise

a revolution without leaders.

A revolution powerful enough to

topple a brutal dictator

who had been backed by

America and the West for 30 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 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 flourish.

So when an uprising

began in Libya,

Britain, France and

America supported it.

And suddenly, Colonel

Gaddafi stopped being

a hero of the 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 evil

dictator who had to be overthrown.

His son Saif said, "The

way these people are

"disowning me and my

father is disgusting.

"Just a few months ago, we

were being treated as

"honoured 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.

TRANSLATION:

Muammar Gaddafi 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 position, no post.

I 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 are making your children drunk

and they are sending them to hell.

Your children will die. What for?

In November 2011 a large convoy was

spotted driving at high speed

away from Colonel Gaddafi's home

town of Sirte.

An American drone,

controlled from a shed

outside Las Vegas,

was sent to follow it.

[CAR HORN BEEPS]

[CAR HORNS BEEP]

The operator fired a missile at the

lead car of the convoy.

Gaddafi then fled -

looking for shelter from

the oncoming rebel forces.

He hid under the road in a drainage

pipe.

But instead of becoming

a democracy,

Libya began to descend into 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 organising people

then a new society

would emerge.

But what they did not have 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 terrible fact.

Social media had helped

to bring people together

in Tahrir square.

But once there, the

internet gave no clue as

to what kind of new

society 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, Mohamed Morsi,

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 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 Tahrir Square.

Thousands of the

liberal activists who

had begun the revolution

two years before,

summoned by social

media, now welcomed the

military back by waving

their laser pens at the

helicopters flying overhead.

The crowd had been summoned there

once again by Facebook.

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 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

theatre where 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 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

apart after the end of

communism, they rose up

and took control of the media.

And they used it to manipulate the

electorate on a vast scale.

For them, reality

was just something that

could be manipulated

and shaped into anything

you wanted it to be.

[GLASS THUDS]

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 Surkov.

Surkov came originally from the

theatre world and those who have

studied his career say that what

he did was take

avant-garde ideas from

the theatre and bring

them into the heart of

politics.

Surkov's aim was not just to

manipulate people

but to go deeper and play

with, and undermine

their very perception of

the world so they are

never sure what is

really happening.

Surkov turned Russian

politics into

a bewildering, constantly

changing piece of theatre.

He used Kremlin

money to sponsor

all kinds of groups - from mass

anti-fascist youth organisations,

to the

very opposite - neo-Nazi skinheads.

And liberal

human rights groups who

then attacked the government.

Surkov even backed whole political

parties that were

opposed to President Putin.

But the key thing was that Surkov

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 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."

Meanwhile, real power

was elsewhere -

hidden away behind the stage,

exercised without

anyone seeing 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 banks' involvement

in global corruption,

of massive tax avoidance by

all the major corporations,

of the secret surveillance

of everyone's e-mails

by the National Security Agency.

Yet no-one was prosecuted,

except 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 destabilise the system.

But then the shape-shifting began.

[CHEERING]

Thank you very much. So nice.

So amazing. So amazing.

WOMAN: We love you.

What? That's OK.

I love you more, OK?

[CHEERING]

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 all being part of

a broken and corrupt system -

a politics where everyone

could be bought,

using words that could have come

from the Occupy movement.

You've also donated to several

Democratic candidates,

Hillary Clinton included,

Nancy Pelosi.

You explained away those donations

saying you did that

to get business-related favours.

And you said recently,

"When you give,

"they do whatever the hell

you want them to do."

You'd 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 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. So what did

you get?And that's a broken system.

But at the same time,

Trump used the language

of the extreme racist right

in America,

connecting with

people's darkest fears -

pushing them and bringing

those fears out into the open.

Get the fuck out of here!

Our country, motherfucker!

Our country!

Proud fucking American!

Made in the USA, bitch!

Made in the fucking USA!

Don't fucking come back,

burrito bitch!

Go fucking right back to jail,

motherfucker!

Build that fucking wall for me!

Trump! Donald Trump!

Fuck you! I love my country!

Yeah! I'll fuck like at least

ten of you up in one session,

you fucking pussy!

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.

This meant that

Trump defeated journalism -

because the journalists'

central belief was that

their job was to expose

lies and assert the truth.

With Trump, this became irrelevant.

Not surprisingly,

Vladimir Putin admired this.

[MAN SPEAKS RUSSIAN]

The liberals were outraged by Trump.

But they expressed their

anger in cyberspace,

so it had no effect -

because the algorithms made sure

that they only spoke to people

who already agreed with them.

Instead, ironically, their waves

of angry messages and tweets

benefitted 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 world.

Instead, it was becoming a fuel

that was feeding the new systems

of power

and making them ever more powerful.

But none of the liberals

could possibly imagine

that Donald Trump

could ever win the nomination.

It was just a giant pantomime.

Then of course

there's Donald Trump.

Donald Trump has been saying that

he will run for president

as a Republican,

which is surprising,

since I just assumed he was

running as a joke.

[LAUGHTER]

Donald Trump often appears on

Fox, which is ironic,

because a fox often appears on

Donald Trump's head.

[LAUGHTER]

Donald Trump owns

the Miss USA Pageant,

which is great for Republicans

because it will streamline their

search for a vice president.

[LAUGHTER]

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.

[LAUGHTER]

But underneath the liberal disdain,

both Donald Trump in America,

and Vladislav Surkov in Russia

had realised the same thing -

that the version of reality that

politics presented

was no longer believable,

that the stories politicians told

their people about the world

had stopped making sense.

And in the face of that,

you could play with reality,

constantly shifting and changing,

and in the process,

further undermine and weaken

the old forms of power.

[CHILDREN SING]

And there was another force that was

about to dramatically reveal

just how weak politics had

become in the West -

Syria.

[CHILDREN SING]

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 pockmarked walls

where the ball bearings hit.

Blood splattered on the walls.

And the force of the blast

caused walls to collapse.

And everything is topsy-turvy,

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 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 bombing.

[THEY SPEAK IN OWN LANGUAGE]

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 mutated

into something that had now ended up

doing the very opposite -

tearing the Arab world apart.

Hafez al-Assad's dream of a

powerful 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 Assad's son

but his fellow Shi'ites.

And like his father,

Bashar Assad retaliated

with a vengeful fury.

And the country fell apart.

MAN: Allahu Akbar.

[WHOOSHING]

Allahu Akbar. Allahu Akbar.

[ROARING]

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 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 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.

But the effect of that

was to help keep Assad in power.

[WHOOSHING]

[CLATTERING]

Then it became more confusing.

Suddenly, the Russians 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 Surkov had developed

in the Ukraine.

He called it non-linear warfare.

It was a new kind of war -

where you never know

what the enemy are really up to.

MAN: Allahu Akbar.

The underlying aim, Surkov said,

was not to win the war,

but to use the conflict

to create a constant state

of destabilised perception -

in order to manage and control.

[MAN BREATHES HEAVILY]

Allahu Akbar.

[ORCHESTRA PLAYS]

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 Palmyra

to celebrate the withdrawal.

But in reality,

the Russians never left.

They are still there,

and still

no-one knows what they want.

[HE SPEAKS IN OWN LANGUAGE]

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 al-Suri -

the Syrian.

[HE SPEAKS IN OWN LANGUAGE]

Al-Suri had originally worked with

Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan,

but he had turned against him.

Al-Suri gave lectures that

had a powerful effect

on the Islamist movement.

He argued that

bin Laden had been wrong

to attack the West head on,

because it created a massive

military response

that had almost destroyed Islamism.

Instead, al-Suri 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 undermine the already failing

authority of western politicians.

The effect of the attacks shocked

Europe and America

and gave powerful force to the new

politics of uncertainty and anxiety.

I'm sure that you, with me,

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 guts.

[APPLAUSE]

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

al-Suri had predicted.

They used the fear to dramatise

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 could never win

became frighteningly real.

I am genuinely freaked out right

now about this whole Brexit thing.

Because we'd all been told that

it wasn't going to happen,

like it was going away, it was going

away from Brexiting

and on to the staying.

And because I had this,

like bedrock belief...

I have friends who, like,

live and work in London,

and they said, "Don't worry,

we're a very sensible people."

[LAUGHTER]

"This isn't going to happen.

It's a lot of talk,

"but we don't do that

sort of stuff here."

Um...they were wrong.

[LAUGHTER]

And that 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.

[CROWD GASPS]

[CLANKING]

[DRIPPING]

[CLANKING]

I fear that we are watching

the stirrings of fascism

in Europe again.

And I genuinely never thought

it would be my country

that did that.

I thought this would be America.

I thought America was the people

who were so filled with hate.

Not us.

And I'm so disappointed.

I'm so hurt.

Zee.

[MUSIC: Standing Room Only

by Barbara Mandrell.]

# You must think my bed's a bus stop

# The way you come and go

[HE COUGHS]

# I ain't seen you

with the lights on

# Two nights in a row

# So pack your rusty razor

# Don't bother with goodbye

# Your cup runneth open

# But mine is always dry

# Standing room only

# I can't stand no more

# Standing room only

# Outside my door

# Don't help me set the table

# Cos now there's one less place

# I won't lay Mama's silver

# For a man who won't say grace

# If home is where the heart is... #

This is my right to free speech

going on here, OK?

# Then your home's on the streets

# Me, I'll read a good book

# Turn out the lights

and go to sleep

# Standing room only

# I can't stand no more, no more

# Standing room only

# Outside my door... #

[TINNY MUSIC PLAYS]

[INDISTINCT SPEECH]

Oh.

You're on video.Oh.

Say bye, Heather.

[VIDEO OFF]