Original subtitles

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.