Can't Get You Out of My Head 1x6

1. In America, in the 1950s, there was a famous exhibition called

2. The Family of Man.

3. It put forward a new way of seeing the world as an alternative

4. to the horrors of Nazism and communism.

5. It showed hundreds of photographs of individuals

6. from all around the world.

7. The message was simple -

8. we are all one world...

9. .. and at the centre of that world is the individual self.

10. The man who helped design it was a refugee from Germany

11. called Herbert Bayer.

12. He saw it as a new kind of propaganda.

13. Instead of being overwhelmed by dramatic stories created

14. by those in power, the individual would make their own story

15. out of the photographs.

16. Bayer made a diagram to show his idea.

17. At the centre is the giant eye of the individual self,

18. surrounded by a mass of images.

19. It was a utopian vision of the self

20. selecting and arranging the fragments of images

21. into their own story,

22. and so becoming strong enough to withstand tyranny.

23. Confident individuals in control of their own world.

24. On the surface, Tupac Shakur was part of the age of the individual.

25. He believed deeply in the idea of self-expression.

26. But he was also one of the few in the 1980s who still believed

27. in the power of grand stories to move people,

28. and to inspire them to change the world.

29. His mother, Afeni, had been a Black Panther

30. and she still believed in the idea of revolution in America.

31. Tupac later said, "The phrase Black Power had been like a lullaby

32. "when I was a kid. My mother, she would tell me these stories

33. "of things she did or saw,

34. "and it made me feel part of something.

35. "She always raised me to think

36. "I was the black prince of the revolution."

37. What Afeni taught him was that the world most Americans lived in,

38. both white and black, was an unreal fairyland

39. that concealed the harsh reality of the power

40. that controlled their lives.

41. We're not being taught to deal with the world as it is.

42. We're being taught to deal with this fairyland,

43. which we're not even living in any more.

44. It is... It's sad because I'm telling you

45. and it should not be me telling you.

46. It should be common knowledge.

47. Aren't they wondering why death rates are going up,

48. and suicide is going up and drug abuse? Aren't they wondering?

49. Don't they understand that more people are...?

50. I mean, more kids are being handed crack

51. than are being handed diplomas.

52. I mean... I mean, it's like, you know, those little things

53. they have for the mice where they go round the circle and there's

54. little blocks for it and everything? Well, society is like that.

55. They'll let you go as far as you want.

56. But as soon as you start asking too many questions

57. and you're ready to change - boom.

58. By the 1980s, it was clear that the promises

59. of the civil rights movement had not been kept in America.

60. The idealism of black politics fell away.

61. And the communities divided into gangs,

62. that then turned on each other.

63. The shooting started about in, what, '76? Yeah.

64. 1976.

65. You know, they stopped fighting. They just started shooting.

66. You know, it was something new to me, you know.

67. We used to fight all the time.

68. The next minute, I'm running from gunshots.

69. So, I said to myself, "Say, man, we're going to start doing

70. "what they're doing."

71. You know? Same thing they do to us, we do to them.

72. Do or die, stay in the house.

73. You know, fight or stay in the house.

74. So, I weren't gon' stay in the house for nobody.

75. Then crack swept through the black communities in America

76. and Afeni Shakur finally gave up.

77. She became addicted to crack.

78. And Tupac found himself alone.

79. At the end of the 1980s, he moved to California.

80. It was supposed to be

81. one of the most integrated parts of the country,

82. but one night, Tupac went to a party

83. and he realised that white racism was re-emerging even there.

84. There was a fight at the party.

85. And I was like, "What happened?" He said, "The skinheads came

86. "and told... Called the black people 'niggers' and made them...

87. "Said they had to leave. And of course, there was a fight."

88. I was like, "Oh, my God."

89. So we were sitting there... They went home, we were sitting there,

90. talking and everything, and my friend's just like,

91. "This couldn't happen in the '60s.

92. "You know, let's figure out what to do with it."

93. He was just like, "I know, we'll start the Black Panthers again."

94. So, we started the Black Panthers,

95. but we're doing it more to fit our views, you know?

96. Less violent and more silent.

97. You know, more knowledge.

98. Tupac Shakur set out to reawaken the radicalism of the Panthers...

99. .. and to do it, he was going to use himself as the central character.

100. But there was another country that was also like a fairy-tale land...

101. .. Saudi Arabia.

102. Ever since the 1970s, billions of dollars had flooded

103. in from the West.

104. This vast wave of money had created a dream-like society,

105. run by an elite, where no-one paid any tax.

106. But there were those in Saudi Arabia

107. who saw another, much more sinister reality underneath this facade.

108. Abu Zubaydah had been born in Saudi Arabia,

109. but he was not a Saudi.

110. His family were Palestinian, and he quickly discovered

111. that if you were not a part of the Saudi elite, you were nothing.

112. He and his family were looked down on and scorned.

113. In the 1980s, Zubaydah grew more and more angry and lonely.

114. He began to write a special diary

115. into which he poured out his feelings.

116. It was special because it was written to be read

117. by just one person in the future -

118. himself in the year 2000.

119. The diary is full of a growing fury about how Saudi Arabia

120. had been taken over and corrupted

121. by the vast wealth that had come into the society.

122. He describes how everyone around him, including his friends,

123. were false and treacherous.

124. "They pretend to be pious, but really they have no values.

125. "The money has created a society where nobody believes in anything

126. "and nothing can be trusted."

127. Zubaydah tried to lose himself in music.

128. The singer he loved most was Chris de Burgh

129. and his songs like the Lady In Red.

130. But then at the end of the 1980s,

131. Zubaydah discovered the ideas of jihad.

132. At that point, modern Islamism was sweeping through the Arab world.

133. The attraction of jihad was that by losing yourself

134. in the struggle, you could free yourself from the emptiness

135. and the nihilism that the Western money was bringing into societies

136. like Saudi Arabia.

137. Lady In Red by Chris De Burgh

138. Abu Zubaydah travelled to the town of Peshawar on the Afghan border

139. to lose himself in the new revolutionary struggle

140. that was going to remake the Arab world and him.

141. Both Abu Zubaydah and Tupac Shakur, in their different ways,

142. are part of something that had begun 200 years before

143. with the French Revolution.

144. It was the idea that through revolution, you could break

145. through to a new kind of world,

146. something beyond the corrupt reality of this one.

147. But at this same moment, a completely new way

148. of seeing the world was rising up in America.

149. It said that all attempts to change the world through revolution

150. would always fail

151. because the world was too complicated for anyone

152. to be able to predict the consequences of their actions.

153. It came from engineers and scientists who were using computers

154. to model the way the world behaved.

155. If it's between the modus in relation to the advice...

156. It will not match this data in time.

157. The simulation would determine long it took the signal...

158. They saw the world as a series of complex systems.

159. Populations of animals, flocks of birds,

160. whole human societies and even global weather patterns

161. were all complex systems that you could recreate

162. as models inside the computers.

163. But when the scientists did this,

164. the computers began to reveal something they hadn't expected.

165. One tiny change in their equations

166. could have massive catastrophic consequences,

167. which they could never have predicted.

168. It was called Chaos Theory.

169. But we're beginning to learn

170. that very simple laws, very simple equations can generate astonishingly

171. complicated dynamical behaviour, apparently random behaviour,

172. which we call chaos.

173. So, the bad news is we can have nothing random in the system,

174. everything is known, and yet we cannot make long-term predictions

175. about the future because the fluttering of a butterfly's wing

176. will disturb the initial conditions.

177. Chaos Theory had a very powerful influence in the West

178. because it rose up at the very moment

179. the Soviet Union was collapsing...

180. .. and it seemed to explain why all attempts at revolution

181. had led to disaster.

182. The world was just too complex for human beings to change

183. in a predictable way.

184. But in the 1990s, as the computers became more powerful,

185. the scientists argued that even though human beings

186. would never be able to understand the complexity,

187. the computers could be used to see hidden underlying patterns

188. and make the chaos manageable.

189. This new idea was called Complexity Theory.

190. One of its main promoters was the man who had discovered

191. the elementary particles of all matter - quarks.

192. He was called Murray Gell-Mann

193. and he believed that there were underlying patterns

194. at every level of the universe,

195. not just in the particles,

196. but in the way people think,

197. in the structure of human societies,

198. and even in the languages they spoke.

199. You're always looking for patterns in nature? Yes.

200. Patterns in the way people think,

201. patterns in the elementary particles.

202. It's all part of the same way of doing things, I suppose.

203. Trying to spot the law, trying to spot the relationship...

204. The customs of primitive people,

205. languages and the relations among them.

206. And it's fascinating to try to figure out what these laws are.

207. As Complexity Theory spread,

208. it seemed to offer a new way of managing societies

209. by using computers to analyse vast amounts of data.

210. That would bypass the failed political ideas

211. that had always led to disaster in the past.

212. But it brought with it a deeply conservative idea that was going

213. to be the foundation of today's computer-dominated world.

214. It said that what you were looking for in the data

215. are the underlying laws that govern the systems,

216. as they already exist.

217. You never ask why those systems came to exist.

218. And who benefits from them existing?

219. One of the leading complexity scientists

220. insisted that the meaning of any system was irrelevant.

221. "I don't understand what meaning is," he said.

222. "In science, there is no meaning to anything.

223. "It doesn't ask the atom why it is going left

224. "when it is subjected to a magnetic field.

225. "It just observes and describes."

226. A mad's man gun. A man that go kill with this is really mad.

227. It will kill. You betcha. You better watch out. This is an M1 Carbine.

228. 32 rounds.

229. I can go tap Lueders Park with this.

230. I can kill about 32 people if I hit them all. Guns!

231. All about shooting, taking them out. Yes.

232. And when they come shoot us, we go back and shoot them.

233. As he became more successful, Tupac Shakur dramatised in his music

234. what he called the thug life.

235. His aim, he said, was not to try and stop the violence,

236. but to make those in the gangs who were killing each other

237. realise that they could turn the violence outwards instead,

238. and fight back against those who really oppressed them.

239. But Shakur had begun to suspect

240. that maybe many people didn't really want change,

241. that they were happy living in their own fairy-tale world

242. of gangs and violence.

243. Now, if we do want to live a thug life and a gangster life

244. and all of that, OK. So, stop being cowards

245. and let's have a revolution.

246. But we don't want to do that.

247. Dudes just want to live a character.

248. They want to be cartoons. Mm-mm.

249. But if they really wanted to do something, if they was that tough -

250. all right, let's start our own country. Let's start a revolution.

251. Let's get out of here. Let's do something.

252. But they don't want to do that.

253. In response, Shakur was accused by a number of the gangs

254. of simply using them,

255. that he was sucking out details of their lives

256. and then acting it out in his music to make himself rich,

257. that he wasn't real.

258. In response, Tupac tried to become

259. more and more part of that world to prove his authenticity.

260. But then the black radicals accused him

261. of getting lost in the character he had created,

262. that really he was reinforcing and intensifying the violence,

263. not changing it.

264. One radical wrote, "Thug ambition is completely predatory...

265. ".. because it is driven by an individualism

266. "that deliberately avoids the fellow feeling and the group solidarity

267. "needed by revolutionaries."

268. In 1994, Shakur was sent to jail for five months

269. for raping a 17-year-old girl.

270. Shakur found himself in the new world of mass incarceration

271. in America.

272. DOG BARKING

273. Let's go, let's go, let's go!

274. You're fat and slow, let's go.

275. Move it!

276. Driven by fears of a wave of violent crime,

277. President Clinton had brought in tough new crime rules,

278. even though, in reality, crime was falling.

279. You shut the fuck up and move, motherfucker!

280. Hundreds of thousands of young black men were now imprisoned

281. with no hope of parole, even for minor offences.

282. It seemed to show that President Clinton cared more about the fears

283. of the white middle-class voters

284. than he did about the lives of young black men.

285. But the white radicals, who were buying Tupac Shakur's music,

286. did nothing to challenge it.

287. By moving radical politics into the world of culture,

288. Tupac Shakur had also become part of the fairy-tale world,

289. because he helped keep the anger and the dissent sealed off

290. from the real world of politics and power.

291. And now he was all alone.

292. Trust nobody. Trust nobody.

293. After dark. You know what I mean?

294. Straight up. My closest friends did me in.

295. My closest friends, my homies,

296. people who I'd have took care of their whole family,

297. I'd have took care of everything for them, looked out for them,

298. put them in a gang, everything, turned on me.

299. Fear is stronger than love.

300. Remember that. Fear is stronger than love.

301. All the love I gave did me nothing when it came to fear.

302. So, it's all good. But I'm a soldier. I always survive.

303. I constantly come back, you know what I mean?

304. Only thing that can kill me is death.

305. That's the only thing that could ever stop me - is death.

306. One night at the end of 1991, Abu Zubaydah was part of a group

307. of jihadists attacking the city of Gardez in Afghanistan.

308. GUNFIRE

309. They were trying to overthrow the communist regime

310. left behind by the Russians three years before.

311. But then suddenly a mortar exploded next to Abu Zubaydah,

312. and a piece of shrapnel pierced his skull.

313. It went into his brain,

314. and his whole way of seeing

315. and understanding the world suddenly changed.

316. The next day, he was taken back from the front line,

317. over the mountains to Peshawar.

318. For two months, he was unconscious.

319. Then his memories from the past began to come back,

320. but in a mass of fragments.

321. Nothing linked them. They made no sense.

322. So, Zubaydah began to use his diary

323. to write down all the flashes of memory,

324. to try and make sense of who he was.

325. In the end, it would run to over 1,000 pages,

326. a vast collage of memories and feelings.

327. Moments of intense loneliness as a child.

328. Of watching Pluto meet an angel in a Disney cartoon.

329. Moments of fear in combat.

330. The smell of perfume.

331. The anger he felt at friends.

332. Moments of sexual desire.

333. And the sensation of autumn coming on.

334. When he had physically recovered,

335. Abu Zubaydah went back to the jihad training camps in Afghanistan,

336. but he found that whatever he did,

337. he could not put his memories back together.

338. They remained just fragments in his brain.

339. He also had a growing sense that the whole organisation of jihad

340. was disintegrating into rival factions.

341. All ideas of solidarity and collective action had gone.

342. In the diary, he describes how you couldn't trust

343. anyone any longer.

344. Zubaydah knew Bin Laden, who was running another jihad camp.

345. Bin Laden asked him to make an alliance, but Zubaydah refused.

346. He was aware that Bin Laden was planning some kind of retaliation

347. against the Americans,

348. but he didn't trust him.

349. EXPLOSION, HORSE NEIGHS

350. Zubaydah spent his time making explosives

351. and watching American movies like Rambo III.

352. Zubaydah wrote in his diary how up in the mountains,

353. everything was falling apart.

354. The revolutionary dream of Islamism was failing...

355. .. while his sense of who he was, his identity,

356. had disintegrated into random memories.

357. They meant nothing.

358. There was no story that made sense.

359. He wrote how it was as though time had stopped.

360. He was trapped in a perpetual now,

361. haunted by fragments of memory...

362. .. with no way of moving forward into the future.

363. But in the West, scientists were beginning to ask

364. whether the very idea of an integrated self

365. was actually a fiction for everyone.

366. In the 1980s, a new group of behavioural psychologists

367. had argued that what human beings think of as their self

368. was not fully in control of their actions.

369. Now, they had been joined by neuroscientists

370. who said they had discovered something even stranger -

371. that inside their brains,

372. human beings had all kinds of different selves

373. which the conscious mind had no awareness of at all.

374. They were led by Michael Gazzaniga,

375. who would win a Nobel Prize for his work.

376. With your right hand,

377. you point to this row.

378. And with your left hand, you point to this row. OK. OK?

379. Gazzaniga studied the brains of people like Vicki.

380. She suffered from extreme epilepsy.

381. To try and stop her attacks, surgeons had cut the nerve fibres

382. that linked the two sides of her brain.

383. It worked, but it also revealed something very strange.

384. There was another force inside Vicki that emerged,

385. that kept trying to take control.

386. I knew what I wanted to wear.

387. And I would open up my closet,

388. get ready to take it out.

389. And my other hand would, like, just take control.

390. It would just reach in

391. and get something that I wouldn't want at all.

392. And a couple of times I had a pair of shorts on,

393. and then I'd find myself putting another pair of shorts on

394. on top of a pair I already had on. And which I knew...

395. I knew was wrong.

396. Gazzaniga argued that really there

397. were multiple selves inside the human brain,

398. each one taking control at different moments.

399. Normally that is hidden because the one self that is conscious

400. constantly makes up stories to explain

401. what all the other selves are doing.

402. But when the connection between the two parts of the brain is cut,

403. it can't do that...

404. .. and the other parts emerge.

405. Vicki wasn't strange, Gazzaniga said, she just showed the truth.

406. Gazzaniga argued that really all human beings live

407. in a made-up dream world of stories

408. which give them the illusion that they are in control.

409. But, really, there is something else inside them

410. that they will never contact.

411. We have to quit viewing man as a single psychological entity.

412. That, in fact, his psychological self is a multiple self,

413. that he has a variety of mental systems existing in his brain.

414. They have emotions, they have memories, they have incentives,

415. they have destinies.

416. And they're able to control the motor apparatus,

417. by which I mean they are able to make movements,

418. they're able to actually precipitate behaviours on the part of someone.

419. And once those actions are completed,

420. here comes this verbal system in to give an explanation

421. and to propose a theory

422. to itself to explain why these actions were carried out.

423. The 1990s was the high point of the idea of individualism.

424. With all the old revolutions gone, it promised the vision

425. of a new world of free, confident people.

426. But what was happening was that the sciences, that had grown up

427. with that individualism, were now turning on it and eating away at it.

428. Complexity theory said that human beings were just components

429. in vast, complex systems,

430. systems that they would never be able to understand,

431. which meant what they thought and what they felt

432. was irrelevant to the system...

433. .. while psychology, and now neuroscience, said that much

434. of what went on inside people's brains was beyond their control...

435. .. which meant that the conscious bit inside the brain,

436. the part that applies meaning to the world,

437. was actually irrelevant.

438. Bit by bit, the idea of the world as something that human beings

439. could understand and change was disappearing.

440. Human consciousness was being sidelined.

441. In 1996, Tupac Shakur was shot in Las Vegas.

442. He was taken to hospital in a critical condition.

443. Six days later, he died.

444. Still today, no-one knows who shot him.

445. The suspicion and the lack of trust that he had come to fear

446. was now spreading through the black community.

447. And in that mood, a new conspiracy theory was rising up.

448. It said that the crack epidemic in black areas had been created

449. by the CIA and the US government.

450. And the feelings of suspicion and paranoia spread even further.

451. This show is about finding some truth.

452. Was the CIA responsible for, in any way, shape or form,

453. funnelling cocaine into the United States of America

454. back in the early '80s,

455. and then helped to develop and turn it into crack,

456. which was then spread across America, and is the reason why

457. most of our inner cities are in the plight that they are in?

458. So, we're right between that house...

459. .. and this house. We're renting this half of a house.

460. Right, so this is our garage.

461. Basically, nobody's in here,

462. but we've got a ping pong table, a computer.

463. But there was still a group of idealists,

464. at the heart of Silicon Valley, who still believed

465. that individuals could remake the world,

466. and they could help them do it in a new way.

467. It wouldn't confront the old systems of power.

468. It would simply bypass them.

469. There's Larry, the CEO of Google.

470. At Google, our mission is to make the world's information accessible

471. and useful, and that means all the world's information,

472. which now in our index numbers over a billion documents.

473. And it's an incredible resource.

474. I mean, in history, you have never had access to just, you know,

475. pretty much all the world's information in seconds.

476. And we have that now.

477. My hope is to provide instant access

478. to any information anybody ever wants in future.

479. I think I want to make the world a better place.

480. The idealism behind Google was the same vision

481. that had been behind The Family of Man exhibition 40 years before.

482. It said that everyone could use the information

483. to build their own story, free of the old elites,

484. who in the past had controlled what they read and what they saw.

485. But it would also link them together.

486. One world at the centre of which would be the individual self,

487. assembling the data in any way they wanted.

488. But in Russia, that same dream was now seen to have led to disaster.

489. At the start of the 1990s, a giant experiment had begun

490. to transform the country into a free market democracy.

491. But it had gone disastrously wrong.

492. Russia had been taken over by a small group called the oligarchs

493. who had looted the country of much of its wealth.

494. THEY TALK IN RUSSIAN

495. And the idea that Russia could become a society of free individuals

496. was now seen as a joke.

497. No-one believed in communism or democracy any longer.

498. What does it mean...? What does democracy mean for most Russians,

499. not in Moscow? Unfortunately...

500. Well, the word "socialism" has lost its meaning and its value

501. in this country ten years ago.

502. After ten years, democracy is a kind of a curse.

503. You can curse,

504. you can offend someone, by naming him a democrat.

505. So this is the...

506. .. answer to your question.

507. Thank you very much indeed. Thank you.

508. In 1999, the oligarchs decided to select Russia's next president

509. to make sure it was someone who would protect them.

510. They selected Vladimir Putin.

511. He was an anonymous bureaucrat running the security service.

512. And a man who believed in nothing.

513. With their money and the media they controlled backing him,

514. Putin was duly elected.

515. The oligarchs believed that they were now safe

516. and their power would continue undisturbed.

517. But then something unexpected happened.

518. In August of 2000, the nuclear submarine Kursk

519. set out on the first Navy exercise since the fall of the Soviet Union.

520. As a torpedo was being loaded, it exploded.

521. And the submarine sank to the ocean floor.

522. To begin with, the Russian Navy didn't notice

523. that anything had happened.

524. Then they began to search for the Kursk,

525. but they couldn't find it.

526. The families of the crew came to the base at Murmansk.

527. The officials assured them that they were in contact

528. with the crew, but this was a lie.

529. They knew that all 118 sailors were already dead.

530. The families grew desperate.

531. To begin with, Putin did nothing.

532. He had no idea how to react.

533. But, finally, he was forced to come to Murmansk

534. to confront the angry families in a closed meeting.

535. What Putin then did to save himself

536. was turn that anger away from himself

537. and towards the very people who had put him in power.

538. "The people who killed your sons," he told the families,

539. "were the corrupt elites in Moscow,

540. "the oligarchs who have all the money and control all the media.

541. "They are the ones who are lying to you.

542. "They are the ones who have destroyed the Army and the Navy.

543. "They are the ones who have stolen everything

544. "and have everyone in their pocket."

545. Faced by a catastrophe,

546. what Putin had discovered was a new source of power.

547. It was the raw anger of those outside the major cities in Russia

548. who felt lonely and isolated,

549. as their jobs and lives had collapsed around them.

550. They had been promised a democracy.

551. But what they got was chaos and corruption on a vast scale.

552. And Putin had realised the power that anger could give him.

553. But he himself still believed in nothing.

554. He had been taken and placed in power, and he had no goal.

555. The Russian journalist Mikhail Zygar wrote,

556. "There is no logic in the age of Putin.

557. "There is no plan or strategy.

558. "Everything that happens, like with the Kursk,

559. "is a tactical step, a real-time response to external stimuli

560. "devoid of any ultimate objective."

561. By the start of 2000, Silicon Valley had become the focus

562. of a giant financial boom.

563. Wall Street banks were pouring millions of dollars

564. into small companies that they knew were unlikely to ever make

565. any real profit.

566. Their real aim was to create massive share price rises

567. when they took the companies public on the stock exchange.

568. But then the bubble suddenly burst.

569. FAST SPEECH

570. Companies that only weeks before had been valued

571. at billions of dollars disappeared overnight,

572. their technology auctioned off in fire sales.

573. We have $100,000 computers

574. with eight processors and ten hard drives,

575. and just decked out with gigs of RAM.

576. And that stuff's going for ten cents, 20 cents on the dollar.

577. Google managed to survive,

578. but the crash meant that they met the power of money,

579. which was going to reshape their aims completely.

580. The venture capitalists, who had invested in the company,

581. now had the upper hand.

582. They told Sergey Brin that he had to find a way to make money.

583. And quickly.

584. And a sense of emergency gripped Google.

585. But then they found the solution.

586. Every time someone searched the web, they left trails behind them,

587. traces, as they travelled through the internet.

588. Up to this point, that mass of data had simply been used to make

589. the system of giving people information more efficient.

590. But now the company's engineers realised

591. that if they gathered enough of it together,

592. they could build up a picture of how every individual behaved

593. and how they were likely to behave in the future.

594. It meant they could predict

595. what advertisement an individual would click on and respond to...

596. .. without having to ask them anything.

597. Google started to tell advertisers that they had found a way

598. of replacing the hit-and-miss of old advertising

599. with a new scientific certainty.

600. And very quickly, they began to make millions of dollars.

601. But there was a problem.

602. What Google were doing was gathering vast amounts of data on millions

603. of people without them being fully aware of it.

604. And by 2001, the Federal Trade Commission was preparing a law

605. which would stop much of what they were doing.

606. But then suddenly, many of those problems disappeared.

607. RADIO COMMUNICATIONS

608. The attacks on September the 11th shocked America because no-one

609. had seen them coming.

610. The phrase constantly used was, "We failed to join up the dots."

611. And in the state of fear, the government passed

612. the Patriot Act. It said that everyone's personal data

613. must be open to examination, to stop further attacks.

614. Privacy of the individual now became irrelevant in the face of a much

615. higher need - security.

616. It meant that the very thing that Google had invented, looking

617. for patterns in a mass of data, now became central to the security

618. of the United States.

619. And the threat of new laws to stop Google

620. collecting as much data on people as they wanted faded away.

621. The shock of the attacks of 9/11 began a shift away

622. from the individualism that had been at the centre

623. of America since the 1950s.

624. And Google was going to become central to that shift.

625. Because rather than doing what they had originally dreamed of,

626. giving people data so they could make their own stories, what Google

627. were now doing was TAKING people's data and using it to predict

628. what those individuals would do, without having to ask them anything.

629. What they thought or felt as individuals

630. and the stories they told themselves was completely irrelevant.

631. Consciousness was being sidelined even more.

632. GUNFIRE

633. When the coalition invaded Afghanistan, Abu Zubaydah had fled.

634. He had not been involved in the attacks, but he knew

635. that the Americans were arresting all the jihadists they could find.

636. He travelled back over the mountains and hid in Faisalabad in Pakistan.

637. But two months later, he was captured.

638. Within months of September the 11th, 2001, we captured a man

639. named Abu Zubaydah.

640. We believe that Zubaydah was a senior terrorist leader

641. and a trusted associate of Osama bin Laden.

642. Zubaydah was severely wounded

643. during the firefight that brought him into custody.

644. These are dangerous men with unparalleled knowledge

645. about terrorist networks and their plans of new attacks.

646. Zubaydah was taken by the CIA to a secret prison

647. they ran in Pakistan.

648. He told them that he had had nothing to do with the attacks,

649. but they didn't believe him.

650. Then they read his diary that he had written to himself.

651. And the CIA decided it meant that Zubaydah had a multiple personality

652. and that the other, hidden, self was hiding the information

653. they desperately needed.

654. So, the CIA turned to psychology to unlock the information they knew

655. was concealed inside his head.

656. Is this the new positive psychology class?

657. Yes, it is.

658. So, what is this positive psychology stuff?

659. Is the rest of the field negative?

660. Well, that's not really the case.

661. Positive psychology is the study of the psychological aspects

662. of what makes life worth living.

663. It simply focuses on building the best in people as opposed

664. to repairing the worst.

665. I see. I need to get to my next class.

666. Catch you later.

667. Thank you for helping me learn more about this fascinating field.

668. Positive psychology was part of

669. the new psychology that had risen

670. up in the 1990s. It said that millions of people

671. were really far weaker than previously thought,

672. that they were trapped in a state of what the psychologists

673. called learned helplessness.

674. And positive psychology would develop techniques

675. to rescue these people.

676. But psychologists working for the CIA decided they would turn

677. the system in reverse.

678. They would use it to reduce Abu Zubaydah back to a state

679. of learned helplessness.

680. They called it enhanced interrogation.

681. And they did it by waterboarding Zubaydah 83 times,

682. by repeatedly smashing him against the wall,

683. and locking him naked in a freezing box for weeks at a time.

684. The CIA videotaped the interrogations, but later

685. destroyed the tapes.

686. They reportedly show Abu Zubaydah screaming,

687. shaking uncontrollably and vomiting.

688. What was done to him became the model for a system of torture

689. that the Americans then used across the War on Terror,

690. including the prison at Abu Ghraib.

691. Desperate for the torture to stop, Zubaydah just spewed out

692. all the disconnected memories inside his brain,

693. memories that even he had not been able to piece together.

694. They were fragmented images of what might happen in America,

695. many of them drawn from the films he had watched, including Godzilla.

696. And that same sense of incoherent confusion was now

697. unleashed on America.

698. The CIA believed them, and the fragments inside

699. Abu Zubaydah's brain now

700. spread out across America to create yet another wave of fear.

701. But there were more and more people who were beginning to realise

702. that out in the margins of Western societies, there was a growing anger

703. and a total disillusion with the system...

704. .. because it offered hundreds of thousands of people nothing,

705. and gave their lives no purpose or meaning.

706. I was brought up in a working-class way, in a working-class background.

707. I were lucky. I were good at school.

708. I were academically minded. I were quick.

709. I could make people laugh, you know what I mean? I could do things.

710. I could chat and still get on with me work.

711. Most people couldn't do that.

712. They were people genuinely who were fantastic with working

713. with their hands, but the other five hours of the day,

714. they were just miserable.

715. It's just not set up to cater for working-class lads

716. who were that way inclined. There's just no end goal.

717. There's no end point. There's no path.

718. There's just... "Get on with it" is the main phrase that you hear

719. constantly, and that messes with your mind after a while.

720. Dominic Cummings worked as a political adviser

721. for the Conservative Party.

722. But he believed that all politicians, left and right,

723. had completely lost

724. touch with the people they were supposed to represent.

725. Cummings came from the North East and he had seen the disillusion

726. and the anger that had been growing there ever since a wave of factory

727. closures in the late 1990s.

728. The Labour Government had insisted

729. that there was nothing they could do in the face

730. of what was called globalism.

731. But Cummings wanted to find a way to remake politics,

732. so it could challenge these new forms of unaccountable power.

733. And the way to do that, he believed, was by using complexity theory.

734. Cummings was fascinated by the founder of complexity theory,

735. Murray Gell-Mann, because Cummings believed that Gell-Mann's ideas

736. explained why politicians, like Tony Blair, had failed to stand

737. up against the force of globalisation.

738. The systems of power, like international finance, were now

739. so complex that politicians could never predict

740. what effect their policies would have.

741. So, they had stopped trying to control them

742. and simply let them rip.

743. But complexity theory, he believed, would allow you to understand

744. and control these new forces...

745. .. because if you looked at the world as a series of complex systems,

746. you would find that there were underlying patterns.

747. It's a very simple point, but a very important one, I think,

748. about sheer complexity.

749. If you look around at social networks, physical networks, mental

750. networks, they consist of...

751. They consist of complicated,

752. non-linear and independent systems.

753. In these networks, properties emerge from the interaction

754. of lots of different agents.

755. You can't tell what's going to happen just by looking

756. at a single agent.

757. So, for example, if you look at ant colonies, you have lots

758. of interacting ants.

759. And from this, you have emergent behaviours like farming,

760. slavery and war, that you can never predict from a single ant.

761. The extreme complexity means that prediction is extremely

762. difficult even over tiny timescales.

763. It means... The scale of complexity means you can't have centralised

764. control. There's no master ant, there's no master neuron,

765. there's no master immune cell.

766. Cummings wanted to use data and computers to see the underlying

767. patterns in modern society, and then use that knowledge to take

768. power back from the unelected elites who had seized control.

769. But to do that, he was going to have to find a way to harness

770. the anger and the disenchantment that was growing in the country.

771. THEY ALL CHANT

772. INSTRUCTOR SPEAKS

773. But Cummings was not alone.

774. Across the world, there was a growing feeling that politics

775. had completely lost touch with the people, and was therefore

776. losing its power to hold society together.

777. In China, the children of those who had led the Cultural Revolution

778. were now in power.

779. They were called the princelings.

780. We are very happy to invite the newly elected members

781. of the standing committee of the Political Bureau of the...

782. On the surface, the China they ruled over was a powerful country.

783. It had a rich and rapidly growing middle class.

784. What the hell? What's happened?

785. And China was also pouring money into a rapidly

786. growing military force.

787. But what had been buried and forgotten

788. was any guiding ideology,

789. any confident story about what this was all for.

790. Instead, money had filled the void.

791. And that now seemed to be dissolving

792. the bonds that held society together.

793. There was an extraordinary wave of organised crime sweeping

794. through Chinese cities.

795. Vast amounts of government money was being stolen and smuggled abroad.

796. But at the centre of the corruption was land and property.

797. On the edge of the new giant cities,

798. organised gangs were forcing farmers out of their houses at gunpoint

799. and seizing their land.

800. What's happening is quite literally a massive land grab.

801. Those with political power, or money and political connections, are doing

802. everything they can to take control of land.

803. And the reason is very simple.

804. Today in China, land is extremely valuable.

805. It's in demand for all sorts of things - for housing developments

806. like this one, for factories, for shopping malls.

807. Making money was never easier.

808. What made the corruption so widespread

809. was that under communism, no-one was allowed to own land.

810. All the land was owned by the party.

811. Which meant that hundreds of thousands of party officials

812. were being bombarded by bribes and threats from organised crime,

813. wanting to get the land.

814. And corruption spread on an extraordinary scale.

815. The government's chief advisor, Wang Huning, called

816. it ultra corruption.

817. He said it was so extensive that it was hollowing out the whole

818. political system of control.

819. The country, he said, risked fragmenting into the anarchy

820. of the 1920s,

821. when hundreds of separate areas were controlled by rival warlords.

822. But one man decided he was going to make a stand against this.

823. He was called Bo Xilai.

824. He was at the heart of the Chinese elite.

825. Bo's father had been one of the leaders of the revolution

826. with Mao Zedong.

827. But in the Cultural Revolution, Mao had turned on Bo's father

828. and he was brutally beaten.

829. And Bo's mother was killed mysteriously.

830. Bo himself had been a Red Guard, but was sent to a labour camp

831. for five years.

832. But Bo now announced that he was going to bring back

833. the dreams from that time.

834. In 2007, Bo was made the head of the city of Chongqing.

835. Chongqing was one of the biggest cities in the world.

836. It had a population of 32 million people.

837. And Bo decided to use the city as a laboratory

838. for a giant experiment.

839. FANFARE

840. He started to hold mass rallies in the city, which were broadcast

841. live on television, and Red songs from the Mao era,

842. were sung by thousands.

843. HE SPEAKS PASSIONATELY

844. SINGING

845. Bo said that the reason for the corruption in China

846. was because there was no shared vision of the future, no aim

847. or purpose other than money,

848. and he was going to reawaken the idealism of the past.

849. And he also passed sweeping laws to try and tackle the growing

850. inequalities, subsidising housing and education.

851. And Bo brought in a new police chief, whose job was to root

852. out the gangsters

853. who had corrupted every part of the city government,

854. and were still demolishing thousands of people's houses.

855. Bo soon became famous and he was seen

856. as a future leader.

857. He and his wife, a lawyer called Gu Kailai,

858. became a glamorous couple.

859. They, like many others of the Chinese elite, had a fascination

860. for old England.

861. Many of the estates being built for the new rich

862. in China's cities were designed to look like an imaginary version

863. of England's past.

864. Bo and Gu decided to send their son to an English public school, Harrow.

865. And it led them to meet an Englishman who had come to China,

866. called Neil Heywood.

867. He had also been to Harrow and he helped their son.

868. And he soon became close to the family.

869. Heywood also lived in the old dreams of England,

870. from a time when it was powerful.

871. He dropped hints that he worked for MI6 and he drove around Beijing

872. in an Aston Martin with the numberplate 007.

873. Heywood used his friendship with the family to make a property

874. deal in Chongqing.

875. But then for some reason, the deal went wrong

876. and Heywood blamed Gu Kailai.

877. At the same time, rumours started to come from the centre, in Beijing,

878. that what Bo Xilai was doing in Chongqing might not

879. be as idealistic as it seemed.

880. And in Russia, there were those who were also trying to attack

881. and expose the emptiness and the corruption that had taken

882. over the society there.

883. In 2007, members of the small National Bolshevik Party,

884. that was led by Eduard Limonov,

885. burst into the finance ministry in Moscow.

886. They wanted to make people realise the corruption of Russia

887. hadn't gone away.

888. It was now spreading even deeper into the society.

889. And that Putin had to go.

890. They were arrested and 39 of them were put on trial together

891. in a giant cage.

892. I believe we are a most effective organisation of Russia

893. who irritate the government. But very effective, very effective.

894. The clumsy police state cannot struggle against us.

895. 39 young people behind bars, more than six months.

896. What they said, they said, "We want Putin to go out."

897. Putin's other main opponent was the journalist Anna Politkovskaya.

898. What Putin had done, she said, was simply take the vast corruption

899. that had begun with the oligarchs and shift it into the public sector.

900. So the civil servants, the managers, and the intelligence agents

901. around Putin all now benefited.

902. One of them put it simply,

903. "Why take hand-outs from billionaires

904. "if you can become a billionaire yourself?"

905. Politkovskaya said that the society Putin had created

906. was one in his own image.

907. It, too, believed in nothing.

908. He became president without any programme,

909. without any words.

910. If there was independent television,

911. they would tear Putin apart piece by piece.

912. He has nothing to debate.

913. He has no programme, he has no personality, he has no interests.

914. The bureaucrats have made literally millions,

915. together with their families.

916. I think they were very happy with Putin.

917. They knew he would create favourable conditions

918. in which corruption could flourish.

919. Three months after the interview,

920. Anna Politkovskaya was shot outside her apartment in Moscow.

921. But despite the shock and outrage, nothing changed.

922. Since Putin had come to power, the global price of oil

923. had increased massively.

924. And money had poured into Russia.

925. One journalist described what happened.

926. "The country", he said, "rode through the first decade

927. "of the 21st century in a state of semi-oblivion.

928. "In a dream world of consumption."

929. Like Bo Xilai in China,

930. Eduard Limonov believed that the only way to escape

931. from this empty world was to bring back the old dreams from the past.

932. But in his case,

933. the communism was mixed with a fascist nationalism.

934. The End Of The World by Skeeter Davis

935. Google was now making billions,

936. and at the heart of it was data.

937. It had become a new gold rush.

938. Products of more and more companies around the world

939. were set up to mine all the traces of human behaviour everywhere.

940. And nothing was quite what it seemed.

941. The makers of Roomba revealed that new models would also be able

942. to gather and transmit information about the inside of people's homes.

943. People, though, they added, could always turn this off if they wanted.

944. Hi, I'm Tristan - Global Passion Ambassador

945. for We-Vibe couples' vibrator.

946. Even the vibrator We-Vibe was discovered transmitting data

947. about people's private behaviour back to the servers.

948. Good morning, Cayla.

949. Good morning. I love the morning. Don't you?

950. While the German government instructed parents to destroy

951. any models of Cayla the doll,

952. because it contained what they called a concealed espionage device

953. that could also transmit personal data

954. about the behaviour of the whole family.

955. And Pokemon GO, which was created by a subsidiary of Google,

956. was more than just a game.

957. As well as extracting even more data from the players' phones,

958. it was also what one researcher described as persuasive gaming.

959. An experiment to see if you could move mass groups of people around

960. to where you wanted them.

961. As well as having fun, the players could also be guided

962. to what was called sponsored locations.

963. Cafes and bars that would pay to be a part of the system.

964. One journalist described the aim.

965. "Pokemon", she said, "is about herding people

966. "to monetised checkpoints without them being fully aware of it."

967. All this was not only creating a world where human behaviour

968. could be predicted, it was going to do something else.

969. Something that scientists and engineers

970. had been struggling with for 50 years.

971. It was finally going to solve the problem of how to create

972. real artificial intelligence.

973. But it would do it by creating machines

974. that could see a different kind of reality.

975. One that was hidden from human beings.

976. The key figure who did this was a psychologist

977. called Geoffrey Hinton.

978. He was the great-great-grandson of George Boole,

979. who had invented Boolean logic -

980. that is behind all the algorithms in modern computers.

981. In the 1990s, Hinton realised that the idea that you can create AI

982. by feeding rules of human logic into the machines had completely failed.

983. What Hinton said was that you do the opposite -

984. you get rid of all the rules of logic

985. and instead feed a mass of data into the computer

986. and let it look for its own connections and patterns.

987. He used what were called neural networks, where the connections

988. inside the computer mimicked the human brain.

989. Back in the '90s, there was a completely different paradigm

990. that wasn't called artificial intelligence,

991. it was called neural networks,

992. that said, we know about an intelligence system,

993. it's the brain, and the way that works is you have lots

994. of little processors with lots of connections between them,

995. and you change the strengths of the connections

996. and that's how you learn things.

997. And those connection strength changes have to somehow be driven by data.

998. You're not programmed, you somehow absorb information from data.

999. And you can't do it with rules. There's too many rules to write.

1000. You just have to learn it from data.

1001. Now, that data was available online,

1002. and Hinton began to feed millions of words and images into the machines

1003. and instructed them to look for patterns.

1004. To learn a language, the neural network

1005. would look for which particular words appeared next to each other

1006. in the billions of sentences they were scanning

1007. and which were far apart.

1008. The machine is not interested in the meaning of the sentence,

1009. only the patterns.

1010. It was a completely different way of making sense of reality.

1011. Human beings told themselves stories about what was happening around them

1012. minute by minute.

1013. Hinton's neural networks were a kind of intelligence

1014. that completely ignored all stories.

1015. Instead, they crossed back and forth across time and space

1016. as they searched through data on the internet

1017. looking for links and patterns that human beings

1018. would never be able to see or understand.

1019. Hinton began to work on artificial intelligence at Google,

1020. and he gave what he had created a name.

1021. He called it Vector-World.

1022. It expressed what was becoming

1023. one of the most powerful mythologies of our age.

1024. The idea that had begun with complexity theory

1025. in the early 1990s.

1026. It said that the world is too complicated

1027. for us as human beings to understand.

1028. But nothing is too complicated for the machines and the data,

1029. for they can see the hidden reality under the surface.

1030. And this new fragmented way of ordering reality into patterns

1031. was going to spread.

1032. And as it did, it would detach human beings even further

1033. from understanding what was happening in the real world.

1034. In the banks, computers were being used to package the vast amounts

1035. of mortgages that were being lent in the property boom

1036. to everyone and anyone.

1037. The computers cut up the dangerous high-risk loans

1038. and recombined them with other safer loans.

1039. The bankers believed that this neutralised the risk

1040. and stabilised the system.

1041. But as they did this, the connection of the debts

1042. to human reality was broken.

1043. Instead, they simply became patterns of millions of fragments

1044. of meaningless data moving harmlessly around the system

1045. in the server farms.

1046. What had happened was that the bankers, the risk analysts,

1047. the rating agencies, the accountants, and the politicians,

1048. had all given themselves up to this new way of thinking.

1049. A way of thinking that said that the data and the algorithms

1050. understood the complexity of the world better than you did...

1051. .. which meant that none of them saw the absurdity

1052. of what was really happening.

1053. A vast wave of money was being lent to millions of poor people

1054. who could never afford to pay it back.

1055. But then it got more complicated because human beings were also

1056. exposed to the avalanche of data online...

1057. .. and they started to behave in very much the same way

1058. as Geoffrey Hinton's artificial intelligence machines.

1059. They, too, spent vast amounts of time searching through all the data,

1060. looking for patterns, links and coincidences

1061. that had no obvious meaning.

1062. But, being human beings,

1063. they then turned them into fantastic elaborate stories.

1064. They were called conspiracy theories.

1065. 40 years before, Kerry Thornley and his friend Greg Hill

1066. had started what they called Operation Mindfuck.

1067. They had spread the conspiracy theory that the Illuminati

1068. were really the secret rulers of the world.

1069. They had done it to parody and ridicule all conspiracy theories

1070. because they thought that they undermined the confidence

1071. of individuals and made them easier to control.

1072. But now, in the mass of data online,

1073. those stories about the Illuminati got mixed up

1074. with other conspiracies, both true and false,

1075. and out of it came extraordinary dreamlike stories

1076. built out of fragments of truth and fiction.

1077. Millions of people became convinced that all the major stars,

1078. from Britney Spears to Beyonce,

1079. were being manipulated and controlled by the Illuminati.

1080. The theory said that the Illuminati had worked with the CIA

1081. and their MK-Ultra project

1082. and with Walt Disney to create a new system of mind control.

1083. The stars' videos contained hidden messages.

1084. Above all, images of triangles, put there by the Illuminati.

1085. Telltale clues to what is really happening.

1086. But one star had anticipated this.

1087. In 2012, the Coachella festival and Dr Dre

1088. used computers and fragments of data from the past

1089. to reconstruct Tupac Shakur on stage.

1090. You know what the fuck this is!

1091. What up, Dre? I'm chillin'. What's up, Pac?

1092. What up, Snoop? What's up, my nigga?

1093. What the fuck is up, Coachella?

1094. And an album Tupac had recorded just before his death

1095. was also released.

1096. He had called it Killuminati...

1097. .. and in it, Shakur had attacked the way the black community

1098. was already, in the 1990s,

1099. retreating into conspiracy theories about the Illuminati.

1100. They were doing it, he said, to avoid confronting

1101. the very real powers that did control their lives.

1102. His message was simple.

1103. That suspicion was just another form of control.

1104. Tonight, turmoil on the American housing market gets even worse

1105. and the aftershocks wipe tens of billions off world stock markets.

1106. The organisations which underpin mortgage lending in America

1107. need a multibillion dollar bailout.

1108. Are you ask... Are you checking me? Are you asking me if I'm trading?

1109. In 2008, the systems in the banks

1110. that had structured the mortgage loans failed completely.

1111. It led to a global economic crash.

1112. The governments in Britain and America rescued the banks...

1113. .. but they then decided to transfer the debt that incurred

1114. away from the private sector to the public sector.

1115. And what was called austerity began.

1116. That decision was going to have powerful consequences

1117. because it created anger among millions of people

1118. outside the system.

1119. Then, in the wake of the crash,

1120. evidence of widespread corruption came out.

1121. That all the major banks had been rigging interest rates

1122. and many of them had been laundering money for organised crime,

1123. including the drug cartels in Mexico.

1124. But, again, nothing seemed to change.

1125. A few lowly people were prosecuted

1126. and experts talked of reforms and stress tests,

1127. and the shock among those outside the system grew further.

1128. And from that came the reaction.

1129. It was the elites.

1130. And people like you and me.

1131. People that bought into the system.

1132. And who's been held accountable?

1133. Name me one banker, one CEO,

1134. one law firm, one accounting firm.

1135. We basically just flooded the zone with liquidity,

1136. we bailed out the party of Davos.

1137. And let me say it differently, the party of Davos,

1138. the scientific, engineering, managerial,

1139. financial, cultural elite, bail themselves out.

1140. Remember, this populist movement and Donald Trump...

1141. ..is not the cause of this, they're the product of this.

1142. And it worked on different levels.

1143. It wasn't... The most obvious level was, we've got to take back control

1144. from Brussels, but it was also, and I think David Cameron

1145. and George Osborne didn't quite appreciate this,

1146. it was also about taking back control from...

1147. .. of the system itself.

1148. It was, for a lot of people, "Take back control",

1149. made them think, yeah, these are the guys who screwed up the economy,

1150. who drove it off a cliff in 2008, whose mates are all

1151. the Goldman Sachs bankers and hedge funders on massive bonuses,

1152. us mugs on PAYE are the ones paying the bills for this,

1153. we'll show those guys, we'll take back control from you lot in London.

1154. For Dominic Cummings, Brexit was not an end in itself.

1155. For him, it was a way of getting rid of the failed elites

1156. and the old political systems that ran Britain.

1157. In their place, he was going to use modern network technologies and data

1158. to transform an old, decaying society.

1159. But what Cummings hadn't reckoned with was how the campaign

1160. that he had begun would awaken ghosts from Britain's past...

1161. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome to the stage

1162. the leader of the Brexit Party, Nigel Farage.

1163. .. and how they would reach out to possess Brexit and modern Britain.

1164. At the end of 2011,

1165. the body of a British man was discovered

1166. in the Lucky Holiday Hotel in Chongqing.

1167. It was Neil Heywood, who had been friends with Bo Xilai and his wife.

1168. There were rumours that he had been murdered.

1169. Did a British man die here?

1170. You don't know? You don't take interviews?

1171. Do you know if it's factually true that that happened?

1172. Did that actually happened?

1173. OK.

1174. After the body was found, Bo's police chief came to him

1175. and he told him that Bo's wife had arranged the murder

1176. because Heywood was threatening to reveal

1177. that she had been illegally moving large amounts of money abroad.

1178. The police chief then fled to the American consulate

1179. in nearby Chengdu because he feared that Bo was going to kill him.

1180. And he told the press that Bo and his wife

1181. were really ruthless gangsters who had brought corruption

1182. to the very top of the Communist Party.

1183. What then came out shocked China.

1184. It was alleged that while Bo had portrayed himself

1185. as an idealistic hero and paraded gangsters and corrupt officials

1186. in front of the cameras,

1187. he and his police chief had really been using extreme violence

1188. and torture, taking millions from organised criminals

1189. and bribes from property developers

1190. and then keeping the money for themselves.

1191. SINGING

1192. While Bo sang songs praising Mao Zedong,

1193. he had really just been using those revolutionary ideas

1194. as a smokescreen to hide corruption that went to the very heart

1195. of the city government.

1196. But Bo Xilai denied all the allegations.

1197. He came to the party conference in Beijing and insisted

1198. that what was happening was an attempt to smear him

1199. by the corrupt networks that he was rooting out in Chongqing.

1200. No-one knew who to believe.

1201. There were rumours that really it was an even more complex plot

1202. by his rivals in Beijing to stop Bo from getting power.

1203. And in the middle of the conference,

1204. he and his wife were arrested and thrown into jail.

1205. Suddenly, at the end of 2011,

1206. a wave of protests burst out in Russia.

1207. As well as Pussy Riot, one night, a young internet blogger

1208. called Alexei Navalny got up on a platform

1209. and he chanted the phrase that redefined Russia

1210. for what up to then had been an apolitical generation.

1211. Putin was furious. It was complete hypocrisy.

1212. He had given the new Russian middle classes prosperity,

1213. now they were stabbing him in the back.

1214. He grew increasingly paranoid, fearful that those groups

1215. who had benefited from the corruption would turn against him.

1216. And to protect himself, he shapeshifted again.

1217. Putin did the very thing that Eduard Limonov had called for.

1218. He created a new organisation called the Popular Front,

1219. to promote Russian nationalism.

1220. But Putin went much further than Limonov

1221. because he summoned up a dark, frightening vision

1222. from Russia's past.

1223. It's said that Russia as a whole, what was called Eurasia,

1224. was the last defence against a corrupt West

1225. that was trying to take over the whole world.

1226. It was a great power nationalism

1227. that challenged America's idea of its exceptionalism.

1228. What Putin was promoting was Russian exceptionalism.

1229. It was epitomised by the Night Wolves -

1230. an extreme nationalist motorcycle club,

1231. who announced that they were now Putin's bodyguards.

1232. We Won't Leave Our Cities by DEKABR

1233. The Night Wolves put on mass shows

1234. that dramatised the paranoid conspiracy theory

1235. that America, led by Barack Obama and the bankers, and the Illuminati,

1236. were planning to undermine Vladimir Putin and destroy Russia.

1237. In the West, after the crash,

1238. the bankers had also now become the villains.

1239. They were at the centre of conspiracy theories

1240. that said that they were running a global system of corruption.

1241. A wave of leaked documents seemed to show that the City of London

1242. had become the centre of an international network

1243. that was being used to hide the illegal fortunes

1244. of kleptocrats from all around the world.

1245. Hundreds of billions, it was alleged,

1246. was being taken through London and then hidden in a network

1247. of secretive offshore territories

1248. that anti-corruption investigators called the Second Empire.

1249. But the problem was, no-one could actually find out

1250. how much of this was really true...

1251. .. because of something else the City of London

1252. had always prided itself on from the time of the Empire.

1253. Its discretion.

1254. Hello, Jim. How's the markets?

1255. Firm.

1256. There's not much doing.

1257. Nothing else? As it's you, I'll give you seven pence ha'penny.

1258. Sorry, old man, wrong way, I'm afraid.

1259. Is that all? Has he done it?

1260. No, he's evidently not satisfied.

1261. He'll try somewhere else.

1262. Now, the discretion that the City was still so proud of

1263. had in reality turned into a force shield that stopped

1264. any proper investigation of what was really going on.

1265. Eminent law firms immediately issued libel writs

1266. to anyone trying to find out what was happening.

1267. But by suppressing any real information, the suspicions grew

1268. that there was a dark, frightening world of dictators, drug lords,

1269. Russian gangsters, arms dealers, and international bankers

1270. all thriving together in the shadows of the City of London...

1271. .. which reinforced the idea that the world

1272. was bewilderingly complicated...

1273. .. and way beyond our control.

1274. In China, Gu Kailai was put on trial for poisoning Neil Heywood.

1275. She had confessed, the court said,

1276. and she was given a suspended death sentence.

1277. Then her husband, Bo Xilai, was put on trial in the city of Jinan.

1278. He denied all the charges of corruption.

1279. But outside the court, something unexpected began to happen.

1280. And as you can see, Jinan has never seen anything like it.

1281. There are huge crowds here, watching the media, watching the trial,

1282. and everybody who has any sort of grievance,

1283. any sort of complaint against the local government

1284. or the national government, is here to try and get it aired.

1285. To make their case, they've been thrusting pieces of paper

1286. into my hand.

1287. What happened outside the court in Jinan gave a glimpse

1288. of the widespread anger and frustration in China

1289. with the ruling system and its corruption.

1290. Forces simmering under the surface of the society.

1291. The party leaders were split on how to deal

1292. both with what Bo Xilai had done

1293. and the forces of anger that had now unleashed.

1294. Wen Jiabao, who was the Premier, said that the problem

1295. was that the party had never confronted

1296. what had happened during Mao's time.

1297. "Unless you have political reform and open up the society

1298. "for democratic debate", Wen said, those ghosts will always threaten."

1299. But others disagreed.

1300. Above all, the man who had just been appointed

1301. the next party secretary, Xi Jinping.

1302. His family, like Bo's, had been at the very centre

1303. of the frightening forces that Mao Zedong had unleashed.

1304. One journalist wrote,

1305. "They want to keep that great black box

1306. "that conceals the struggles and the brutality

1307. "upon which China has built its staggering economic transformation,

1308. "firmly closed."

1309. And to keep it closed, Xi Jinping decided to turn China

1310. into a giant system in which everyone's behaviour

1311. could be predicted, managed and controlled.

1312. The aim was to learn from the data

1313. how all the individuals linked together in the society

1314. so their behaviour could be predicted,

1315. like components in a system.

1316. But there was a further aim - to adjust the behaviour of people

1317. so they would fit better into the system.

1318. It was called Algorithmic Governance.

1319. If the data from all the different sources

1320. showed a person behaving well,

1321. buying the right food for their children,

1322. not cheating at computer games, and not jaywalking,

1323. then they would be given what were called social credits.

1324. This would then give them rewards,

1325. from discounts on bills, to getting better visibility on dating sites,

1326. even avoiding the queue to pay to see a doctor.

1327. 50 years before, an American psychologist called BF Skinner

1328. had become notorious when he had outlined just such a society.

1329. Skinner had shown how he could easily alter the behaviour

1330. of animals like pigeons by using a simple system of rewards.

1331. He called it Operant Conditioning.

1332. In this experiment, he must peck at the cross ten times

1333. before the food is forthcoming. After four or five sessions,

1334. the pigeon learns the routine perfectly

1335. and pecks at the cross wherever he sees it, without being in the least

1336. upset at being made to work for his living.

1337. Now, that produces in a rat or a pigeon or a monkey,

1338. and in a man, a very high rate of activity,

1339. and if you build up, you can get enormous amounts of behaviour

1340. out of these organisms for very little pay.

1341. You don't need to give them very much to induce a lot of that.

1342. A world in which a great many productive things occur

1343. on this schedule, will be a wonderful world.

1344. Skinner wrote a novel called Walden Two

1345. that described a future utopia where all human behaviour

1346. would be controlled through this kind of operant conditioning.

1347. "It was a utopia", he said, "because it would free society

1348. "from all the dangerous and irrational impulses

1349. "inside individuals' minds."

1350. All of that could be sealed off

1351. by managing people's behaviour with rewards and treats.

1352. Now China had found a way of creating just such a system

1353. of managing people through the mass of data it was gathering.

1354. It was being used to create a whole society

1355. where what went on inside people's heads was completely irrelevant.

1356. Their rational thought and their feelings were all bypassed.

1357. It was only their observed behaviour that counted.

1358. And this allowed those in charge to bury and hide

1359. the anger and frustration that had been created in a society

1360. that was riddled with corruption and growing inequalities.

1361. And if people didn't respond to the treats,

1362. they could be forcibly reprogrammed,

1363. as it is alleged is happening in large re-education facilities

1364. in Xinjiang to hundreds of thousands of the Muslim Uighur population.

1365. In the West, the corruption and the inequalities

1366. also continued to grow.

1367. And the politicians seemed unable to do anything about it.

1368. But the technology systems were mutating,

1369. morphing into ever more extreme forms...

1370. .. and out of that was going to come a completely new kind

1371. of management and control in the modern world.

1372. Unlike in China, it wouldn't try and bury people's emotions

1373. and feelings.

1374. It would work by doing the very opposite -

1375. pushing and exaggerating those emotions

1376. to a pitch of continual hysteria and suspicion

1377. that would create a frozen world, paralysed by the distrust

1378. of everyone and everything.

1379. By now, the social media corporations had realised

1380. that intense emotions were the key to increased profits...

1381. .. and what were called viral content factories

1382. were growing rapidly online.

1383. Their aim was to spread memes and other material

1384. that would create what they called high-arousal emotions,

1385. or activating emotions,

1386. such as lust and nostalgia and envy,

1387. or, best of all, outrage...

1388. .. because these were feelings that got people to pay attention longer

1389. and react more intensely,

1390. which then translated into many more clicks and shares.

1391. Then in 2014, a group of psychologists working with Facebook

1392. announced that they had found a way to put hidden messages

1393. into people's newsfeeds

1394. that would then create specific moods and feelings

1395. without the individuals being aware of it.

1396. It was the moment when the psychologists' theories of priming,

1397. or nudging, fused with the power of the new technology,

1398. and it seemed to show that manipulation could work

1399. on an industrial scale.

1400. But when it was revealed, it also had another unintended effect.

1401. It began to sew a dark suspicion into people's minds...

1402. .. because they no longer knew whether what they were feeling

1403. or thinking was their own

1404. or really coming from outside sources.

1405. But for the machines, that was no problem,

1406. because suspicion was also another perfect high-arousal emotion

1407. that they could feed off.

1408. And suspicion was about to spread uncontrollably across the internet,

1409. because into this mix came two terrible shocks.

1410. The first was Brexit,

1411. the other was the election of Donald Trump.

1412. The shock of both of these was enormous.

1413. Especially for the liberal classes,

1414. who'd always seen themselves as protecting the working class.

1415. They protested, but the shock was so intense

1416. that many people found it difficult to process what had happened.

1417. They couldn't imagine why the people had not only turned against them

1418. and their benign care,

1419. but also seemed to have voted against their own best interests,

1420. and to explain it, they latched on to the idea

1421. of hidden manipulation.

1422. That thousands of voters in America and in Britain

1423. had been manipulated online without them realising it.

1424. But then things became more complicated...

1425. .. because evidence had started to come out from the world of science

1426. that questioned the whole idea that people could be manipulated

1427. in such a way.

1428. Psychology researchers had tried to repeat a number

1429. of the most important experiments

1430. that were the foundations of modern behavioural psychology.

1431. They were astonished to find that again and again,

1432. when they repeated the experiments,

1433. they failed to get the original results.

1434. It seemed that much of the evidence for priming just wasn't there.

1435. It got so bad that one of the most famous psychologists in the world,

1436. who had promoted the idea of priming, Daniel Kahneman,

1437. wrote an open email to the science of psychology.

1438. "I see a train wreck looming", he said.

1439. "We have become the poster child for doubts

1440. "about the integrity of psychological research."

1441. Kahneman was frightened because it was undermining the idea

1442. that he had helped create -

1443. that in the human brain were systems

1444. that the conscious self was unaware of

1445. but which you, the psychologist, could trigger unconsciously.

1446. But it also had wider implications

1447. because it meant that companies like Cambridge Analytica,

1448. who claimed that they could alter the way people behaved by priming,

1449. might just be exploiting the hysteria and the suspicion.

1450. The truth was that you might be able to keep millions of people

1451. in a state of constant anxiety online

1452. by bombarding them with memes...

1453. .. but you couldn't alter underneath -

1454. what they thought and what they believed.

1455. People might be far stronger than the scientists believed.

1456. But it was too late,

1457. because once you believe you are being manipulated,

1458. there is no way back.

1459. Even being told you are not being manipulated

1460. might be manipulation.

1461. The liberal opposition became lost in an endless conspiracy theory,

1462. constantly searching for hidden clues,

1463. links and fragments of evidence to prove that, really,

1464. Vladimir Putin and firms like Cambridge Analytica

1465. had orchestrated Brexit and the election of Donald Trump.

1466. It was a mood of hysteria that ran out of control.

1467. .. whether the president of the United States was a Russian agent.

1468. Let me say that again - whether the US president

1469. might have been working for the Russians.

1470. The wall's closing in.

1471. As it appears the walls are closing in

1472. in terms of the Mueller investigation.

1473. The walls are closing in.

1474. The walls are closing in.

1475. I do feel that he feels the walls closing in on him.

1476. Legal walls are closing in on Donald Trump tonight.

1477. From a Democratic perspective,

1478. this is the president feels like the walls are closing in.

1479. As he feels the walls are closing in...

1480. I think he's feeling the Russia investigation.

1481. I think he's feeling the walls closing in on him.

1482. But what had really been manufactured

1483. by the hysteria and the suspicion

1484. was a constant source of those high-arousal emotions

1485. that the machines needed.

1486. They didn't care about the meaning

1487. of what people thought or felt about Donald Trump.

1488. They just fed off the waves of paranoia,

1489. making the technology companies ever more profitable and powerful.

1490. But many of those old institutions, who had been sidelined,

1491. also found that by promoting the suspicions,

1492. they could regain their power.

1493. Trump is about to call me.

1494. You can't trust what they tell us.

1495. Major newspapers in America and in Britain

1496. that might have gone bankrupt without Donald Trump

1497. were rescued by the continual waves

1498. of conspiracy theories they revealed...

1499. .. while the intelligence agencies,

1500. who only a few years before had been hated

1501. because they had invented the weapons of mass destruction,

1502. now became heroic truth tellers,

1503. revealing ever more hidden conspiracies.

1504. And Vladimir Putin, whose power, in reality,

1505. was becoming increasingly fragile at home in Russia,

1506. became, in the eyes of the West, a dark, malevolent force,

1507. which made him seem far stronger than he really was.

1508. HE BLOWS RASPBERRY

1509. But for Donald Trump,

1510. the paranoia allowed him to hide the fact

1511. that he was doing nothing to get rid of the corruption in America,

1512. as he had promised.

1513. His supporters, though, had their own conspiracy theory -

1514. QAnon - that explained why nothing was happening.

1515. Trump was being stopped by a secret cabal of paedophiles in Washington.

1516. And for the liberal opposition, it was a way of avoiding facing up

1517. to the genuine grievances and the very real anger in America

1518. that Trump's election had revealed,

1519. that he might be the product of a country where large areas

1520. had fallen into both desolation and despair -

1521. towns where all the factories had closed,

1522. millions had become addicted to opioids,

1523. and yet no-one in power had come to rescue them.

1524. But the liberals couldn't face this because they, too, had no idea

1525. of how to solve those problems.

1526. And outside, in the real world, nothing actually changed.

1527. The structure of power, the inequalities and the decay

1528. all carried on unchecked...

1529. .. while all kinds of groups who wanted to cling on to power

1530. protected themselves behind this brittle shell

1531. of conspiracy theories built out of disconnected fragments.

1532. But it was a very fragile structure.

1533. And at this point, Google's engineers demonstrated

1534. how easily reality in this fragmented world

1535. could become strange and frightening.

1536. They created an AI programme to learn how to see dogs.

1537. They then showed how, if they ran the algorithm backwards,

1538. the machines would alter the images of reality they were being fed,

1539. so they would see dogs everywhere.

1540. It was a world where anything could be anything

1541. because there was no real meaning any longer.

1542. Song For Zula by Phosphorescent

1543. And then into this fragile structure came a catastrophe - Covid.

1544. Unlike the other catastrophes of the past 20 years,

1545. like 9/11 and the economic crash of 2008,

1546. the virus was a force that came from completely outside

1547. the systems of power.

1548. But it has come at a moment when many of the old certainties

1549. of this age are already cracking.

1550. LOUD BANGS

1551. But the virus did more than just accelerate the chaos.

1552. It has dramatically brought into focus just how deep

1553. the inequalities in modern Western societies have gone.

1554. The millions of low-paid workers who have to keep working

1555. to prevent the societies from collapsing are at much higher risk,

1556. and those living in deprived areas

1557. are suffering much higher rates of illness and of death.

1558. Those who benefit from the system of power, it seems,

1559. are much safer than those who do not,

1560. and are also getting much richer

1561. as the markets keep rising in the pandemic.

1562. In the past, the shock of catastrophes has often led

1563. to a radical reorganisation of societies.

1564. And it may be that, even in the grim uncertainty of these days,

1565. that that same impulse to imagine other kinds of future will emerge.

1566. One possible future is that individualism will disappear,

1567. and with it the very idea of individual freedom.

1568. As has already begun in China,

1569. data will be gathered and used on a massive scale

1570. to predict and manage all human behaviour,

1571. in the way that the psychologist BF Skinner predicted.

1572. He said that individualism would be just a brief moment in history

1573. before science would find a way to manage and control everyone.

1574. "You would," said Skinner, "create a world

1575. "that is beyond freedom and dignity."

1576. Skinner believes that the experimental analysis

1577. of behaviour suggests that man's environment performs

1578. many of the functions once attributed to his inner feelings.

1579. A man feels free if he believes he is free,

1580. and he will believe he is free if he is conditioned

1581. by positive reinforcement to think so.

1582. His only hope is that he will come under the control

1583. of a natural and social environment which will enable him

1584. to pursue happiness successfully.

1585. Another possibility is that the future will be like the past.

1586. Many people are hoping that with the election of Joe Biden in America,

1587. it will be possible to return to an old stability...

1588. .. where individualism can continue to be managed by a benign elite.

1589. But although Donald Trump is gone and the Brexit deal done,

1590. what they both revealed was that underneath Western societies,

1591. there are enormous pressures building up that will not go away...

1592. .. while protests have broken out again in Russia.

1593. After the arrest of Alexei Navalny,

1594. tens of thousands came out onto the streets,

1595. demanding an end to the corrupt regime led by Vladimir Putin.

1596. The reality is that all these societies -

1597. not just America and Britain, but China and Russia, too -

1598. are exhausted, empty of any new ideas.

1599. All of them have corruption

1600. that has burrowed deep into their institutions,

1601. corruption that the politicians seem powerless to stop...

1602. .. while China, which many believe is a model for the future,

1603. is underneath a society not only riddled with corruption,

1604. but its growth is declining far more than the official figures reveal,

1605. while its population is rapidly ageing.

1606. Far from being an alternative future,

1607. China may well be yet another old, decaying society

1608. that relies on a powerful surveillance system

1609. to maintain its power,

1610. because it too has no other vision of the future.

1611. The third possibility is to try to imagine genuinely new kinds

1612. of futures, ones that have never existed before.

1613. But to do that, we as individuals will have to regain the confidence

1614. that we have lost in this frightened and uncertain time.

1615. But already, the psychological theories that tell us

1616. we are weak and manipulable are cracking...

1617. .. and more and more people are beginning to realise

1618. that the fragmented emotions of anxiety and suspicion

1619. that they feel inside them may really be just the raw material

1620. for the technology corporations to feed off.

1621. It may be that we are really far stronger than we think.

1622. The one thing that is certain is that the world of the future

1623. will be different, and that the people in that future

1624. will feel and think differently too.

1625. If we can regain our confidence, we will find that we have the power

1626. to influence how that future turns out.

1627. And as a first step,

1628. we have to start imagining what kind of future it is we want to build.

1629. The anthropologist and activist David Graeber, who died last year,

1630. described the forgotten idea that is waiting to be rediscovered

1631. and how thrilling it could be.

1632. "The ultimate hidden truth of the world," he wrote...

1633. 'Til I Gain Control Again by This Mortal Coil

1634. Natural's Not In It by Gang of Four