Original subtitles

One computer scientist, at MIT,

became so disillusioned that he decided to build a computer programme

that would parody these hopeless attempts.

He was called Joseph Weizenbaum

and he built what he claimed was a computer psychotherapist.

Just like a therapist, people could come and talk to the machine

by typing in their problems.

Weizenbaum called the programme "Eliza".

He modelled it on a real psychotherapist called Carl Rogers

who was famous for simply repeating back to the patient

what they had just said.

And that is what Eliza did.

The patient sat in front of the screen and typed in

what they were feeling

and the programme repeated it back to them,

often in the form of a question.

He says I'm depressed much of the time.

Well, I need some help.

That much seems certain.

One of the first people to use Eliza was Weizenbaum's secretary

and her reaction was something that he had not predicted at all.

I asked her to my office and sat her down at the keyboard

and then she began to type and, of course,

I looked over her shoulder to make sure everything

was operating properly. After two or three interchanges

with the machine she turned to me and she said,

"Would you mind leaving the room, please?"

And yet she knew, as Weizenbaum did, that Eliza didn't understand

a single word that was being typed into it.

You're like my father in some ways.

You don't argue with me.Why do you think I don't argue with you?

You're afraid of me.Does it please you to think I'm afraid of you?

My father's afraid of everybody.

My father's afraid of everybody...

Weizenbaum was astonished.

He discovered that everyone who tried Eliza became engrossed.

They would sit for hours telling the machine

about their inner feelings

and incredibly intimate details of their lives.

They also liked it because it was free

of any kind of patronising elitism.

One person said, "After all, the computer doesn't burn out,

"look down on you, or try to have sex with you."

What Eliza showed was that, in an age of individualism,

what made people feel secure

was having themselves reflected back to them.

Just like in a mirror.

Artificial intelligence changed direction

and started to create new systems that did just that,

but on a giant scale.

They were called intelligent agents.

They worked by monitoring individuals,

gathering vast amounts of data about their past behaviour

and then looked for patterns and correlations

from which they could predict what they would want in the future.

It was a system that ordered the world in a way

that was centred around you.

And in an age of anxious individualism,

frightened of the future,

that was reassuring, just like Eliza.

A safe bubble that protected you

from the complexities of the world outside.

And the applications of this new direction

proved fruitful and profitable.

If you liked that, you'll love this.

What was rising up in different ways

was a new system that promised to keep the world stable.

Its tentacles reached into every area of our lives.

Finance promised that it could control the unpredictability

of the free market...

..while individuals were more and more monitored

to stabilise their physical and mental states.

And, increasingly, the intelligent agents online

predicted what people would want in the future

and how they would behave.

But the biggest change was to politics.

In a world where the overriding aim was now stability,

politics became just part of a wider system of managing the world.

The old idea of democratic politics,

that it gave a voice to the weak against the powerful, was eroded.

And a resentment began to quietly grow out on the edges of society.

But the new system did have a dangerous flaw.

Because in the real world, not everything can be predicted

by reading data from the past.

And someone who was about to discover that,

to his own cost, was Donald Trump.

One day a man called Jess Marcum received a phone call.

It was from Donald Trump

and Trump was desperate for help.

Marcum was a strange, mysterious figure.

He had been a nuclear scientist in the 1950s

and studied the effect of radiation from nuclear weapons

on the human body.

Then Marcum had gone to Las Vegas and become obsessed by gambling.

He had a photographic memory and he used it to instantly

process the data of the games as they were played.

From that, he could predict the outcome.

And he always won.

The Las Vegas gangsters were fascinated by him.

They called him "The Automat".

Where are we going? Let's go. Go, go, go.

Donald Trump was one of the heroes of the age.

But, in reality, much of this success was a facade.

The banks that had lent Trump millions

had discovered that he could no longer

pay the interest on the loans.

Trump's empire was facing bankruptcy.

His wife Ivana hated him because he was having an affair

with Miss Hawaiian Tropic 1985.

And then, a famous Japanese gambler called Akio Kashiwagi

came to one of Trump's casinos

and started to win millions of dollars

in an extraordinary run of luck.

Trump, who was desperate for money,

panicked as day-after-day he watched millions

being siphoned out of his casino.

So, he turned for help to Jess Marcum.

Marcum came to Trump's casino in Atlantic City.

He analysed all the data about the way the Kashiwagi had been playing.

He then told Trump to suggest a particular high-stakes game

that he knew the Japanese gambler could not resist.

His model, Marcum said, predicted that Kashiwagi had to lose.

And after five agonising days, he did.

Kashiwagi lost 10 million and he gave up.

Donald Trump was elated.

He thought he'd got his money back.

IN JAPANESE:

Before Kashiwagi could pay his debt,

he was hacked to death in his kitchen by Yakuza gangsters...

..and Donald Trump didn't get his money.

Trump's business went bankrupt

and he was forced to sell most of his buildings to the banks.

And he married Miss Hawaiian Tropic.

In the future, he would sell his name to other people

to put on their buildings

and he himself would become a celebrity tycoon.

President Assad didn't want stability.

He wanted revenge.

In December 1988,

a bomb exploded on a Pan Am plane over Lockerbie in Scotland.

Almost immediately, investigators and journalists

pointed the finger at Syria.

"The bombing had been done," they said, "in revenge for the Americans

"shooting down an Iranian airliner in the Gulf a few months before."

And for 18 months, everyone agreed that this was the truth.

But then, a strange thing happened.

The security agencies said that they had been wrong.

It hadn't been Syria at all.

It was Libya who had been behind the Lockerbie bombing.

But many journalists and politicians did not believe it.

They were convinced that the switch had happened

for the most cynical of reasons.

That America and Britain desperately needed Assad as an ally

in the coming Gulf War against Saddam Hussein.

So, once again, they blamed Colonel Gaddafi as the terrorist mastermind.

Syria, of course, was, unfortunately, accused

of many terrorist outrages and of harbouring terrorist groups.

It appears that we have now restored relations with them,

as have the Americans. They're now our friends,

although we've got no real assurances on the past whatsoever.

It strikes me as very strange indeed that many of the things

we thought were previously the responsibility of Syria

have now, dramatically, become the responsibility of Libya.

But Assad was not really in control.

Because he had released forces

that no-one would be able to control.

The force that, ten years before,

he had brought from Iran to attack the West - the human bomb -

was now about to jump, like a virus,

from Shia to Sunni Islam.

In December 1992, the militant group Hamas

kidnapped an Israeli border guard and stabbed him to death.

The Israeli response was overwhelming.

They arrested 415 members of Hamas,

put them on buses and took them to the top of a bleak mountain

in southern Lebanon.

They left them there -

and refused to allow any humanitarian aid through.

THEY CHANT AND SHOUT

But the Israelis had dumped the Hamas militants

in an area controlled by Hezbollah.

They spent six months there,

and during that time, they learnt from Hezbollah

how powerful suicide bombing could be.

Hezbollah told them how they had used it

to force the Israelis out of Beirut

and back to the border.

The first sign that the idea had spread to Hamas

was when a group of the deportees

marched in protest towards the Israeli border,

dressed as martyrs, as the Israelis shelled them.

But it soon became more than just theatre.

Hamas began a wave of suicide attacks in Israel.

REPORTER:Just before nine, at the height of Tel Aviv's rush hour,

the bomb ripped apart a commuter bus.

An amateur cameraman recorded the scene in the moments afterwards

as a dazed woman was helped out of the smouldering wreckage.

I didn't want to believe that under my house there is a bomb.

And when I realised it's a bomb, I...

I started to cry.

Because it was the first time I saw it in Tel Aviv.

Hamas sent the bombers into the heart of Israeli cities

to blow themselves up and kill as many around them as possible.

In doing this, Hamas were going much further than Hezbollah ever had.

They were targeting civilians,

something Hezbollah had never done.

The tactic shocked the Sunni world.

This was something completely alien to its history.

Not only did the Koran forbid suicide,

but Sunni Islam did not have any rituals of self-sacrifice -

unlike the Shias.

The most senior religious leader in Saudi Arabia

insisted it was wrong.

But a mainstream theologian from Egypt

called Sheikh Qaradawi seized the moment.

He issued a fatwa that justified the attacks.

"And," he added, "it was also justified to kill civilians,

"because, in Israel, everyone -

"including women - serve as reservists.

"So, really, they are all part of the enemy army."

TRANSLATION:It's not suicide. It is martyrdom in the name of God.

Islamic theologians and jurisprudence

have debated this issue.

Israeli women are not like women in our society,

because Israeli women are militarised.

Secondly, I consider this type of martyrdom operation

as an indication of justice of Allah, our Almighty.

Allah is just.

Through his infinite wisdom,

he has given the weak what the strong do not possess.

And that is their ability to turn their bodies into bombs

like the Palestinians do.

Hamas kept sending the bombers into Israel.

Sometimes day-after-day.

The horror overwhelmed Israeli society

and it completely destroyed the ability of politics

to solve the Palestinian crisis.

Instead, in the Israeli election of 1996,

Benjamin Netanyahu took power.

He turned against the peace process, which was exactly what Hamas wanted.

And from then on, the two sides became locked together

in ever more horrific cycles of violence.

# Netanyahu! #

The human bomb had destroyed the very thing

that President Assad had first wanted.

A real political solution to the Palestinian question.

REPORTER: It was just after one o'clock

and the market was full of shoppers.

SIRENS WAIL

Streams of ambulances came to carry away the dead and the injured.

It was a place of appalling suffering.

But even with the first grief

came the immediate political impact on the peace process.

Peace impossible!

This moment, it will be the end!

It must be the end of this bloody peace process.

And, in America, all optimistic visions of the future

had also disappeared.

Instead everyone in society - not just the politicians -

but the scientists, the journalists, and all kinds of experts

had begun to focus on the dangers that might be hidden in the future.

This, in turn, created a pessimistic mood

that then began to spread out from the rational technocratic world

and infect the whole of the culture.

And everyone became possessed by dark forebodings,

imagining the very worst that might happen.

# Dream, baby, dream

# Dream, baby, dream

# Dream, baby, dream

# Dream, baby, dream

# Forever

# Oh, dream, baby, dream

# Dream, baby, dream

# Dream, baby, dream

# Dream, baby, dream

# Forever... #

SHATTERING EXPLOSIONS

# ..Dream, baby, dream

# Oh, baby, we gotta keep that dream alive

# Keep that dream alive

# Forever

# Oh, dream, baby, dream

# Dream, baby, dream

# Dream, baby, dream

# Dream, baby, dream

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

# Dream, baby, dream, baby

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

PANICKED SCREAMS

RUMBLING, SHATTERING GLASS

# Oh, you keep that fire, burning, baby

# Oh, you gotta keep that flame burning brightly, baby... #

CRASHING EXPLOSIONS

SILENCE

DISTANT SIRENS

The attacks in September 2001 were suicide bombs,

but now on a huge scale.

They demonstrated the terrifying power of this new force

to penetrate all defences.

They had come to kill thousands of Americans on their own soil.

20 years before,

President Reagan had been confronted by the first suicide bombers.

They had been unleashed by President Assad of Syria

to force America out of the Middle East.

But rather than confront the complexity of Syria

and Israel and the Palestinian problem,

America had retreated and left Syria -

and suicide bombing -

to fester and mutate.

They had gone instead for Colonel Gaddafi

and turned him into an evil global terrorist.

But, in the process, this changed the way people saw

and understood terrorism.

Instead of a violence born out of political struggles for power,

it became replaced by a much simpler image of an evil tyrant

at the head of a rogue state

who became more like an archcriminal

who wanted to terrorise the world.

All the politics and power dropped away.

The problem was just them and their evil personalities.

And after 9/11, this led to a new, and equally simple, idea.

That if only you could remove these tyrannical figures,

then the grateful people of their country

would transform naturally into a democracy,

because they would be free of the evil.

We owe it to the future of civilisation

not to allow the world's worst leaders

to develop and deploy, and therefore,

blackmail freedom-loving countries

with the world's worst weapons.

We know they've already got chemical and biological weapons there.

We know that they're certainly doing their best

to acquire nuclear weapons technology.

If we allow them to do that,

and do nothing about it, then,

I think, later generations will consider us deeply irresponsible.

Both Tony Blair and George Bush became possessed by the idea

of ridding the world of Saddam Hussein.

So possessed that they believed any story

that proved his evil intentions.

And the line between reality and fiction became ever more blurred.

In September 2002, the head of MI6 rushed to Downing Street

to tell Blair excitedly that they had finally found the source

that confirmed everything.

The source, he said, had "direct access"

to Saddam Hussein's chemical weapons programme

which was making vast quantities of VX and sarin nerve agents.

The nerve agents were being loaded into "linked hollow glass spheres".

But then someone in MI6 noticed

that the detail the source was describing was identical

to scenes in the 1996 movie The Rock,

starring Sean Connery and Nicolas Cage.

Really elegant string-of-pearls configuration.

Unfortunately, incredibly unstable.

What exactly does this stuff do?

If the rocket renders it aerosol,

it could take out the entire city of people.

How?It's a cholinesterase inhibitor.

Stops the brain from sending nerve messages down the spinal cord...

A later report into the Iraq War pointed out,

"Glass containers were not typically used in chemical munitions..."

..seizes your nervous system... Do not move that!

"..and the informant had obviously seen

"a popular movie known as The Rock

"that had inaccurately depicted nerve agents being carried

"in glass beads or spheres."

..that's after your skin melts off.

My God.

That there is a threat from Saddam Hussein

and the weapons of mass destruction that he has acquired,

is not in doubt at all.

Hafez al-Assad had died in 2000.

His son, Bashar, became the new president of Syria.

But he couldn't escape the inexorable logic

of what his father had started.

20 years before, his father had sent Shi'ite suicide bombers

to attack the Americans in Lebanon.

Now, as America and Britain invaded Iraq,

Bashar decided that he would copy his father.

But what he was about to let loose would tear the Arab world apart -

and then come back to try to destroy him.

STATELY FANFARE PLAYS

Bashar Assad had was never supposed to have been president.

It was always going to have been his elder brother, Bassel.

But then, Bassel had died in a car crash.

So now, Bashar took over the giant palace

that his father had built above Damascus.

Up to this point, Bashar had not been interested in politics.

He was fascinated by computers.

He founded the Syrian Computer Society

and brought the internet to the country.

His favourite band was the Electric Light Orchestra.

But now, he was president.

And he set out to attack America.

Bashar Assad was convinced that the invasion of Iraq

was just the first step of a plot by the Western powers

to take over the whole of the Middle East.

He knew that the invasion had outraged

many of the radical Islamists in Syria

and what they most wanted to do was to go to Iraq and kill Americans.

So, Bashar instructed the Syrian Intelligence Services

to help them do this.

Syrian agents set up a pipeline

that began to feed thousands of militants across the border

and into the heart of the insurgency.

And it grew.

Within a year, almost all of the foreign fighters

from across the world were coming through Syria...

..and they brought suicide bombing with them.

The Americans estimated that 90% of the suicide bombers in Iraq

were foreign fighters.

But it began to run out of control.

Most of the jihadists had joined the group al-Qaeda in Iraq

that then turned to killing Shi'ites in an attempt to create a civil war.

And the force that had originally been invented by the Shi'ites,

suicide bombing, now returned

and started to kill them.

Then, this.

EXPLOSION

STUNNED SILENCE

A moment of silence before people realised what was happening.

SCREAMING

A few seconds ago, we just had repeated explosions

in the street below me.

People are now fleeing in terror

from the central square around the mosque.

This is what everybody feared... DISTANT EXPLOSION

We just heard another explosion in the distance.

..that somebody would try to target this religious festival

to try to bring about a sectarian conflict in Iraq.

SCREAMING

There was panic.

A terrified stampede.

But some of these people were running into the next bombs.

EXPLOSIONS

We counted at least six separate explosions.

MUSIC DROWNS AUDIO

Tony Blair and George Bush were faced by disaster.

Iraq was imploding.

While, at home, they were being accused of lying to their own people

to justify the invasion.

What they desperately needed was something that would show

that the invasion was having a good effect in the Arab world.

So, they made an extraordinary decision.

They turned for help to the man who they had always insisted

was one of the world's most dangerous tyrants.

Colonel Gaddafi.

And, instead, they set out to make him their new best friend.

It was going to be the highest achievement

of Perception Management.

A man who had been created by the West

as a fake global supervillain

was now going to be turned into a fake hero of democracy.

And everyone, not just politicians, would become involved.

Public relations, academics,

television presenters, spies, and even musicians

were all going to help reinvent Colonel Gaddafi.

It would show just how many people in the Western Establishment

had, by now, become the engineers of this fake world.

Ever since he had been accused of the Lockerbie bombing,

Colonel Gaddafi had been a complete outcast.

The West had imposed sanctions on Libya

and the economy was falling apart.

But then, suddenly, Tony Blair broke live into the BBC evening news.

The Prime Minister, Tony Blair, is about to make a statement,

the BBC understands, from Downing Street.

It's of international significance.

He'll be making his statement at any moment now.

We can see pictures of him in Durham...

This evening...Here he is.

..Colonel Gaddafi has confirmed that Libya has, in the past,

sought to develop weapons-of-mass-destruction

capabilities.

Libya has now declared its intention to dismantle

its weapons of mass destruction completely.

This decision by Colonel Gaddafi is a historic one,

and a courageous one, and I applaud it.

Today, in Tripoli,

the leader of Libya,

Colonel Muammar al-Gaddafi...

..publically confirmed his commitment to disclose and dismantle

all weapons-of-mass-destruction programmes in his country.

Colonel Gaddafi now became,

for Western politicians, a heroic figure.

His decision to give up his weapons of mass destruction

seemed to prove that the invasion of Iraq

could transform the Middle East.

And Tony Blair travelled to meet Gaddafi in his desert tent.

To welcome him back into what one journalist called,

"The community of civilised nations."

But, as in the past,

nothing was what it seemed with Colonel Gaddafi.

In reality, Gaddafi did not really have

the terrifying weapons of mass destruction

that he was promising to destroy.

His nuclear programme had stuttered to a halt long ago

and never produced anything dangerous.

He had managed to buy some equipment on the black market,

but his technicians had been unable to assemble it.

His biological weapons were non-existent.

All he had was some old mustard gas in leaking barrels.

But now, he had to pretend to have a terrifying arsenal of weapons.

And the West had to pretend

that they had avoided another global threat.

And then the made-up stories became even more complicated.

As part of the deal, the West said that if Gaddafi admitted

that Libya had done the Lockerbie bombing,

then they would lift the sanctions.

But many of those who had investigated Lockerbie

were still convinced that Libya hadn't done it.

That, really, it had been Syria.

But Colonel Gaddafi confessed.

His son, Saif, was interviewed about this confession.

He said that his father was simply pretending

that he had been behind the Lockerbie bombing

to get the sanctions lifted.

That new lies were being built on top of old lies

to construct a completely make-believe world.

You have to accept, or you had to accept at the time,

a responsibility, because you have to accept responsibilities,

you have to pay compensation in order to get rid of sanction.

We did that, not because we are convinced that we did it,

but because of the final exit out of this nightmare.

So, what you're saying is that you accept responsibility,

but you're not admitting that you did it. Yes.

And this is all a sham,

you're saying, just to get sanctions over with

so that you can start normal diplomatic relations with the West.

OK. OK. What's wrong with that?

It's a very cynical way to behave, as a country, isn't it?

Many people would say... First of all...

I mean, the Americans and the British,

they told us to write that letter.

They told us to pay compensation.

And then, they opened their embassies

and they restored their relation.

They came to us.

It was their game. Not our game.

Does the... Does the leader know there's a picture on the television?

Will you tell him? Oh, good. Thank you.

INDISTINCT CONVERSATION

Public relations companies then came to Libya

to do what they called "reframing the narrative".

One firm was paid 3 million to turn Gaddafi

into what they described as a modern world thinker.

CREW MURMURS

OK. We're going in ten.

They did this by bringing other famous world thinkers

and TV presenters out to Libya to meet the colonel

and discuss his theories.

Hello, and welcome to Libya In The Global Age,

A Conversation With Muammar Gaddafi.

But first, let's get the story so far of Libya.

One world thinker was called Lord Anthony Giddens.

Coincidentally, he had a theory which he called "The Third Way"

which had inspired Tony Blair.

Colonel Gaddafi's own theory was called "The Third Universal Theory."

Lord Giddens later wrote about his talks

with the Libyan leader.

"Colonel Gaddafi likes my term 'the third way'

"because his own political philosophy

"is a version of this idea.

"He makes many intelligent and perceptive points.

"I leave enlivened and encouraged."

That for 40 years, the leader of Libya, Muammar Gaddafi...

And then, Colonel Gaddafi achieved his lifelong dream.

He was invited to address the United Nations.

He spent almost two hours explaining his Third International Theory.

And also demanding an investigation

into the shootings of President Kennedy and Martin Luther King.

When he was in New York, Gaddafi was offered a tent,

just like the one he had at home,

in the gardens of a grand mansion.

The man who made the offer was Donald Trump.

TRUMP:'I've dealt with everybody.

'And by the way, I can tell you something else!' What?

'I've dealt with Gaddafi.'

What did you do?'Excuse me. I rented him a piece of land.

'He paid me more for one night than the land was worth

'for the whole year or for two years.

'And then, I didn't let him use the land!

'That's what we should be doing.' Was that over in New Jersey?

'I don't want to use the word "screw", but I screwed him.

'That's what we should be doing!'

People in Britain and America now began to

turn away from politics.

The effect of the Iraq war had been very powerful.

Not only did millions of people feel that they had been lied to

over the weapons of mass destruction,

but there was a deeper feeling - that whatever

they did or said had no effect.

That despite the mass protests, and the fears and the warnings -

the war had happened anyway.

Liberals, radicals and a whole new generation

of young people retreated.

They turned instead to another world that was free of this hypocrisy

and the corruption of politics

They went into cyberspace.

# Once upon a time it was you by the door

# I... #

By now cyberspace had become even more

sophisticated and responsive to human interaction.

The online world was full of algorithms

that could analyse and predict human behaviour.

The man behind much of this was

a scientist called Judea Pearl.

He was the godfather of modern Artificial Intelligence.

Pearl's breakthrough had been to use what were

called Bayesian Belief Networks.

They were systems that could predict behaviour,

even when the information was incomplete.

But to make the system work, Pearl and others had imported

a model of human beings drawn from economics.

They created what were called rational agents,

software that mimicked human beings

but in a very simplified form.

The model assumed that the agent would always act rationally in

order to get what it wanted. Nothing more.

One of the early utopians of cyberspace,

Jaron Lanier, warned of the implications of this.

"The agent's model of what you are

"interested in will always be a cartoon.

"And in return you will see a cartoon

"version of the world through the agent's eyes."

And, he added, "It will never be clear

"who they are working for - you or someone else."

New technology began to allow people to upload

millions of images and videos into cyberspace.

And the web - which up to that point had seemed

like an abstract otherworld - began to

look and feel like the real world.

INDISTINCT

No, not yet.

From videos of animals, personal moments of

experience, extraordinary events,

to horrific terror videos, more and more was uploaded.

HIP-HOP MUSIC PLAYS

And in a strange, sad twist,

the first terrorist beheading video that was

posted online was that of

Judea Pearl's own son, Daniel Pearl.

He was a journalist for the

Wall Street Journal and had been kidnapped by

radical Islamists in Pakistan.

They recorded what they said was his confession...

..and then his killing.

My name is Daniel Pearl.

I'm a Jewish-American.

I come from... On my father's side of the family, are Zionists.

My father is Jewish.

My mother is Jewish. I'm Jewish.

Only now do I think about some of the people in Guantanamo Bay

must be in a similar situation.

This was a new world that the old systems of power

found it very difficult to deal with.

In the wake of the 9/11 attacks,

the security agencies secretly collected data from

millions of people online.

One programme was called Optic Nerve. It took stills from

the webcam conversations of millions of people across the world,

trying to spot terrorists planning another attack.

The programme did not discover a single terrorist.

But it did discover something else.

A top secret assessment said...

But increasingly, people were using

the internet in other ways - to present themselves as

THEY wanted to be seen.

I guess the video blog is about me.

I don't really want to tell you where I live

because you could, like, stalk me.

The web drew people in because it was mesmerising.

It was somewhere that you could explore

and get lost in in any way you wanted.

But behind the screen, like in a two-way mirror,

the simplified agents were watching and

predicting and guiding your hand on the mouse.

Stop...

I nearly... threw my phone away!

Stop! Stop!

Pose.Pose. And snap a selfie...

PHONE CAMERA WHIRS

There you go.There you go.

They play with themselves.

But what they don't know...

As the intelligent systems online gathered

ever more data, new forms of guidance began to emerge.

Social media created filters -

complex algorithms that looked at what

individuals liked - and then fed more of the same

back to them.

In the process, individuals began to

move, without noticing, into bubbles that

isolated them from enormous amounts of other information.

They only heard and saw what they liked.

And the news feeds increasingly

excluded anything that might challenge people's

pre-existing beliefs.

# And now it's all right

# I know my own lie

# Is coming to say

# You will call out

# Yourself

# I know I thought

# Makes my face and hands cold

# And I

# Ooh

# Ooh

# Ooh... #

The version of cyberspace that was

rising up seemed to be very much like

William Gibson's original vision.

That behind the superficial freedoms of the web

were a few giant corporations with opaque systems that controlled

what people saw and shaped what they thought.

And what was even more mysterious was

how they made their decisions about what you should like.

And what should be hidden from you.

But then, the other utopian vision of cyberspace re-emerged.

Taking over the roadway.

CHANTING

Take it!

CHEERING AND WHOOPING

CHANTING

After the financial crash of 2008

the politicians saved the banks.

But they did practically nothing about the massive corruption

that was revealed in its wake.

And the reason they gave was that it might

destabilise the system.

Public anger burst out. The Occupy movement took over Wall Street

and then the Senate in Washington.

The issue is that certain individuals

that are very wealthy, have pretty much corrupted our political system

and this is the heart of it.

This is the Senate building.

These people have been cut off and they've corrupted our democracy

and it's literally killing people.

I'm an Iraqi war vet. I went to Iraq in 2009.

I've seen what happens first hand when we let corruption

rule our elected government and democracy. We're coming here today

just to raise awareness.

What drove the Occupy movement was the

original dream of the internet that people

like John Perry Barlow had outlined in the early 1990s.

In his Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,

Barlow had described a new world free of politics and the

old hierarchies of power.

A space where people connected together as equals in a network

and built a new society without leaders.

Now, the Occupy movement set out to

build that kind of society in the real world.

The camps were to be the models.

All the meetings used the idea of the human microphone.

People throughout the crowd repeated a

speaker's words so everyone could hear them.

ALL:We are now going to vote...

SPEAKER:..on whether to stay here for the next two hours...

ALL:..on whether to stay here for the next two hours...

SPEAKER:..or leave now.

ALL:..or leave now.

But if someone wanted to challenge the speaker,

the human amplifiers also had to repeat THEIR words

so their voice had equal power.

SPEAKER:..what she said...

ALL:..what she said...

SPEAKER: ..was that...ALL: ..was that...SPEAKER: ..the proposal...

Each person was an autonomous individual who expressed

what they believed.

But together they became components in a network that organised itself

through the feedback of information around the system.

You could organise people without the exercise of power.

CHANTING

CAR HORNS BLARE

The crisis in Egypt.

CHANTING AND SHOUTING

A march through our main streets.

Looks like chaos. Looks like

police is running around

and a few hundred people walking down the street.

Then, almost immediately, the Arab Spring began.

The first revolution started in Tunisia,

but it quickly spread to Egypt.

On January 25th 2011, thousands of Egyptians

came out in groups across Cairo and then

started moving towards Tahrir Square.

It seemed like a spontaneous uprising but the internet

had played a key role in organising the groups.

One of the main activists was

an Egyptian computer engineer called Wael Ghonim.

He worked for Google in Egypt

but he had also set up the Facebook site that

played the key role in organising the first protests.

As hundreds of thousands took over Tahrir Square,

Ghonim gave an interview on Egyptian TV.

But Ghonim was also overwhelmed by the power

this new technology had,

that a computer engineer with a keyboard could call out

thousands of people...

some of whom then died in the midst of the protests.

Many liberals in the West saw this as proof

of the revolutionary power of the internet.

Again it seemed to be able to organise

a revolution without leaders.

A revolution powerful enough to topple a brutal dictator

who had been backed by America and the West for 30 years.

But the internet radicals were not the

only ones who saw their dreams being fulfilled

in the Arab Spring.

Many of the political leaders of the West also

enthusiastically supported the revolutions

because it seemed to fit with their simple idea of regime change.

It might have failed in Iraq

but now the people, everywhere, were rising up to rid

themselves of the evil tyrants.

And democracy would flourish.

So when an uprising began in Libya,

Britain, France and America supported it.

And suddenly, Colonel Gaddafi stopped being

a hero of the West.

All the politicians, and the public relations people, and the academics

who had all promoted him as a global thinker

suddenly disappeared.

And Gaddafi became yet again an evil dictator who had to be overthrown.

His son Saif said, "The way these people are

"disowning me and my father is disgusting.

"Just a few months ago, we were being treated as

"honoured friends.

"Now that rebels are threatening our country, these cowards

"are turning on us."

Colonel Gaddafi retreated to the ruins of the house that

the Americans had bombed 30 years before and addressed the world.

TRANSLATION: Muammar Gaddafi is the glory.

If I had a position, if I were a president,

I would have resigned.

I would have thrown my resignation in your face.

But I have no position, no post.

I have nowhere to resign from.

I have my gun, I have my rifle to fight for Libya.

Withdraw your children from the streets.

Take your children back.

They are drugging your children.

They are making your children drunk

and they are sending them to hell.

Your children will die. What for?

In November 2011 a large convoy was spotted driving at high speed

away from Colonel Gaddafi's home town of Sirte.

An American drone,

controlled from a shed outside Las Vegas,

was sent to follow it.

CAR HORN BEEPS

CAR HORNS BEEP

The operator fired a missile at the lead car of the convoy.

Gaddafi then fled - looking for shelter from

the oncoming rebel forces.

He hid under the road in a drainage pipe.

But instead of becoming a democracy,

Libya began to descend into chaos.

And the other revolutions were also failing.

The Occupy camps had become trapped in endless meetings.

And it became clear that there

was a terrible confusion at the heart of the movement.

The radicals had believed that if

they could create a new way of organising people

then a new society would emerge.

But what they did not have was a picture of what that

society would be like, a vision of the future.

The truth was that their revolution was not about an idea.

It was about how you manage things.

And those who had started the revolution

in Egypt came face-to-face with the same terrible fact.

Social media had helped

to bring people together in Tahrir square.

But once there, the internet gave no clue as

to what kind of new society they could create in Egypt.

The movement stalled.

And a group that DID have a powerful idea - the

Muslim Brotherhood - rushed in to fill the vacuum.

The Brotherhood took power in an election

and one of them, Mohamed Morsi, became President.

The liberals and the Left were shocked.

And, bit by bit, they turned back to

the military, protesting, asking them to save

the revolution from being captured by Islamists.

In the spring of 2013, the military took action.

They arrested the President and

killed hundreds of his supporters who protested.

And an extraordinary spectacle unfolded in Tahrir Square.

Thousands of the liberal activists who

had begun the revolution two years before,

summoned by social media, now welcomed the

military back by waving their laser pens at the

helicopters flying overhead.

The crowd had been summoned there once again by Facebook.

After the failure of the revolutions, it was not

just the radicals - no-one in the West had

any idea of how to change the world.

At home, the politicians had given so much of their

power away, to finance and the ever-growing

managerial bureaucracies, that they in effect

had become managers themselves.

While abroad, all their adventures had failed.

And their simplistic vision of the world had been exposed

as dangerous and destructive.

But in Russia, there was a group of men who

had seen how this very lack of belief in

politics, and dark uncertainty about the

future could work to their advantage.

What they had done was turn politics into a strange

theatre where nobody knew what was true or

what was fake any longer.

They were called political technologists and they were

the key figures behind President Putin.

They had kept him in power, unchallenged, for 15 years.

Some of them had been dissidents back in the 1970s

and had been powerfully influenced by the

science fiction writings of the Strugatsky brothers.

20 years later, when Russia fell

apart after the end of communism, they rose up

and took control of the media.

And they used it to manipulate the electorate on a vast scale.

For them, reality was just something that

could be manipulated and shaped into anything

you wanted it to be.

GLASS THUDS

But then a technologist emerged who went much further.

And his ideas would become central to

Putin's grip on power.

He was called Vladislav Surkov.

Surkov came originally from the theatre world and those who have

studied his career say that what he did was take

avant-garde ideas from the theatre and bring

them into the heart of politics.

Surkov's aim was not just to manipulate people

but to go deeper and play with, and undermine

their very perception of the world so they are

never sure what is really happening.

Surkov turned Russian politics into

a bewildering, constantly changing piece of theatre.

He used Kremlin money to sponsor

all kinds of groups - from mass anti-fascist youth organisations,

to the very opposite - neo-Nazi skinheads.

And liberal human rights groups who

then attacked the government.

Surkov even backed whole political parties that were

opposed to President Putin.

But the key thing was that Surkov then let it be known that this

was what he was doing.

Which meant that no-one was sure what was real or what was fake

in modern Russia.

As one journalist put it,

"It's a strategy of power that keeps any opposition

"constantly confused -

"a ceaseless shape-shifting that is unstoppable

"because it is indefinable."

Meanwhile, real power was elsewhere -

hidden away behind the stage,

exercised without anyone seeing it.

And then the same thing seemed to start happening in the West.

By now it was becoming ever more clear

that the system had deep flaws.

Every month there were new revelations,

of most of the banks' involvement in global corruption,

of massive tax avoidance by all the major corporations,

of the secret surveillance of everyone's e-mails

by the National Security Agency.

Yet no-one was prosecuted,

except for a few people at the lowest levels.

And behind it all,

the massive inequality kept on growing.

Yet the structure of power remained the same.

Nothing ever changed -

because nothing could be allowed to destabilise the system.

But then the shape-shifting began.

CHEERING

Thank you very much. So nice.

So amazing. So amazing.

WOMAN: We love you. What? That's OK.

I love you more, OK?

CHEERING

The campaign that Donald Trump ran

was unlike anything before in politics.

Nothing was fixed.

What he said, who he attacked

and how he attacked them was constantly changing and shifting.

Trump attacked his Republican rivals

as all being part of a broken and corrupt system -

a politics where everyone could be bought,

using words that could have come from the Occupy movement.

You've also donated to several Democratic candidates,

Hillary Clinton included, Nancy Pelosi.

You explained away those donations saying you did that

to get business-related favours.

And you said recently, "When you give,

"they do whatever the hell you want them to do."

You'd better believe it. So what specifically did they do?

If I ask them, if I need them...

You know, most of the people on this stage,

I've given to, just so you understand, a lot of money.

I will tell you that our system is broken.

I give to many people.

Before this, before two months ago, I was a businessman.

I give to everybody. When they call, I give.

And you know what, when I need something from them,

two years later, three years later, I call them.

They are there for me. So what did you get?And that's a broken system.

But at the same time, Trump used the language

of the extreme racist right in America,

connecting with people's darkest fears -

pushing them and bringing those fears out into the open.

Get the fuck out of here!

Our country, motherfucker!

Our country!

Proud fucking American!

Made in the USA, bitch!

Made in the fucking USA!

Don't fucking come back, burrito bitch!

Go fucking right back to jail, motherfucker!

Build that fucking wall for me!

Trump! Donald Trump!

Fuck you! I love my country!

Yeah! I'll fuck like at least ten of you up in one session,

you fucking pussy!

Many of the facts that Trump asserted

were also completely untrue.

But Trump didn't care.

He and his audience knew that much of what he said

bore little relationship to reality.

This meant that Trump defeated journalism -

because the journalists' central belief was that

their job was to expose lies and assert the truth.

With Trump, this became irrelevant.

Not surprisingly, Vladimir Putin admired this.

MAN SPEAKS RUSSIAN

The liberals were outraged by Trump.

But they expressed their anger in cyberspace,

so it had no effect -

because the algorithms made sure that they only spoke to people

who already agreed with them.

Instead, ironically, their waves of angry messages and tweets

benefitted the large corporations who ran the social media platforms.

One online analyst put it simply, "Angry people click more."

It meant that the radical fury

that came like waves across the internet

no longer had the power to change the world.

Instead, it was becoming a fuel

that was feeding the new systems of power

and making them ever more powerful.

But none of the liberals could possibly imagine

that Donald Trump could ever win the nomination.

It was just a giant pantomime.

Then of course there's Donald Trump.

Donald Trump has been saying that he will run for president

as a Republican, which is surprising,

since I just assumed he was running as a joke.

LAUGHTER

Donald Trump often appears on Fox, which is ironic,

because a fox often appears on Donald Trump's head.

LAUGHTER

Donald Trump owns the Miss USA Pageant,

which is great for Republicans

because it will streamline their search for a vice president.

LAUGHTER

Donald Trump said recently he has a great relationship with the blacks.

though unless the Blacks are a family of white people,

I bet he's mistaken.

LAUGHTER

But underneath the liberal disdain,

both Donald Trump in America, and Vladislav Surkov in Russia

had realised the same thing -

that the version of reality that politics presented

was no longer believable,

that the stories politicians told their people about the world

had stopped making sense.

And in the face of that, you could play with reality,

constantly shifting and changing,

and in the process, further undermine and weaken

the old forms of power.

CHILDREN SING

And there was another force that was about to dramatically reveal

just how weak politics had become in the West -

Syria.

CHILDREN SING

The attack happened here at a central police station

in Damascus.

Police say the bomber came up the stairs,

police then opened fire,

and then police say he detonated the explosives.

And the damage is here to see.

Behind me, the pockmarked walls where the ball bearings hit.

Blood splattered on the walls.

And the force of the blast caused walls to collapse.

And everything is topsy-turvy, everything destroyed.

By now Syria was being torn apart by a horrific civil war.

What had started as part of the Arab Spring

had turned into a vicious battle to the death

between Bashar Assad and his opponents.

And at the heart of the conflict

was the force that his father had first brought to the West -

suicide bombing.

THEY SPEAK IN OWN LANGUAGE

Back in the 1980s

Bashar Assad's father had seen suicide bombing

as a weapon he could use

to force the Americans out of the Middle East.

But over the next 30 years it had shifted and mutated

into something that had now ended up doing the very opposite -

tearing the Arab world apart.

Hafez al-Assad's dream of a powerful and united Arab world

was now destroyed.

In Iraq, extremist Sunni groups had used suicide bombing

as a way to start a sectarian war.

And now groups like Isis brought the same techniques into Syria

to attack not just Assad's son but his fellow Shi'ites.

And like his father, Bashar Assad retaliated

with a vengeful fury.

And the country fell apart.

MAN:Allahu Akbar.

WHOOSHING

Allahu Akbar. Allahu Akbar.

ROARING

My fellow Americans...

tonight I want to talk to you about Syria -

why it matters and where we go from here.

Faced by the war, western politicians were bewildered.

They insisted Bashar Assad was evil.

But then it turned out that his enemies were more evil

and more horrific than him.

The question before the House today

is how we keep the British people safe from the threat

posed by Isil.

This is not about whether we want to fight terrorism,

it's about how best we do that.

So Britain, America and France

decided to bomb the terrorist threat.

But the effect of that was to help keep Assad in power.

WHOOSHING

CLATTERING

Then it became more confusing.

Suddenly, the Russians intervened.

President Putin sent hundreds of planes and combat troops

to support Assad.

But no-one knew what their underlying aim was.

They seemed to be using a strategy that

Vladislav Surkov had developed in the Ukraine.

He called it non-linear warfare.

It was a new kind of war - where you never know

what the enemy are really up to.

MAN:Allahu Akbar.

The underlying aim, Surkov said, was not to win the war,

but to use the conflict to create a constant state

of destabilised perception -

in order to manage and control.

MAN BREATHES HEAVILY

Allahu Akbar.

ORCHESTRA PLAYS

In March 2016 the Russians suddenly announced with a great fanfare

that they were leaving Syria.

And a concert was held in the ruins of Palmyra

to celebrate the withdrawal.

But in reality, the Russians never left.

They are still there,

and still no-one knows what they want.

HE SPEAKS IN OWN LANGUAGE

And within Syria there was a new Islamist ideologist

who was determined to exploit the growing uncertainties

in Europe and America.

He was called Abu Musab al-Suri -

the Syrian.

HE SPEAKS IN OWN LANGUAGE

Al-Suri had originally worked with Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan,

but he had turned against him.

Al-Suri gave lectures that had a powerful effect

on the Islamist movement.

He argued that bin Laden had been wrong

to attack the West head on,

because it created a massive military response

that had almost destroyed Islamism.

Instead, al-Suri said,

independent groups or individuals

should stage random, small-scale attacks

on civilians in Europe and America.

The aim was to spread fear,

uncertainty and doubt -

and undermine the already failing authority of western politicians.

The effect of the attacks shocked Europe and America

and gave powerful force to the new politics of uncertainty and anxiety.

I'm sure that you, with me,

share the absolute horror and total revulsion

at what happened in Paris last Friday.

And I'm afraid there is,

and we have to be honest and frank about this

and talk about these things without being fearful,

there is a problem with some of the Muslim community in this country.

There is a problem. And we have to be honest about it.

Our politicians, I'm afraid, haven't had the guts.

APPLAUSE

This could be the great Trojan horse of all time,

because you look at the migration... Study it, look at it.

Now they'll start infiltrating with women and children.

Both the Brexit campaign in Britain

and Donald Trump in America

did exactly what al-Suri had predicted.

They used the fear to dramatise a world where everything -

even going to a restaurant - had become a risky event.

And what had been seen as doomed campaigns on the fringes of society

that could never win became frighteningly real.

I am genuinely freaked out right now about this whole Brexit thing.

Because we'd all been told that it wasn't going to happen,

like it was going away, it was going away from Brexiting

and on to the staying.

And because I had this, like bedrock belief...

I have friends who, like, live and work in London,

and they said, "Don't worry, we're a very sensible people."

LAUGHTER

"This isn't going to happen. It's a lot of talk,

"but we don't do that sort of stuff here."

Um...they were wrong.

LAUGHTER

And that really kind of crushes my view of,

like, what can happen that is bad

that we don't think is going to happen.

Like it's just not supposed to happen.

CROWD GASPS

CLANKING

DRIPPING

CLANKING

I fear that we are watching

the stirrings of fascism in Europe again.

And I genuinely never thought it would be my country

that did that.

I thought this would be America.

I thought America was the people who were so filled with hate.

Not us.

And I'm so disappointed.

I'm so hurt.

Zee.

MUSIC: Standing Room Only by Barbara Mandrell.

# You must think my bed's a bus stop

# The way you come and go HE COUGHS

# I ain't seen you with the lights on

# Two nights in a row

# So pack your rusty razor

# Don't bother with goodbye

# Your cup runneth open

# But mine is always dry

# Standing room only

# I can't stand no more

# Standing room only

# Outside my door

# Don't help me set the table

# Cos now there's one less place

# I won't lay Mama's silver

# For a man who won't say grace

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

This is my right to free speech going on here, OK?

# Then your home's on the streets

# Me, I'll read a good book

# Turn out the lights and go to sleep

# Standing room only

# I can't stand no more, no more

# Standing room only

# Outside my door... #

TINNY MUSIC PLAYS

INDISTINCT SPEECH

Oh.

You're on video.Oh.

Say bye, Heather.

VIDEO OFF