HyperNormalisation Page #9

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 SHOU 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

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