HyperNormalisation Page #12

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.

INDISTINC 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...

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