But when the scientists did this, the computers began to reveal something they hadn’t expected. One tiny change in their equations could have massive catastrophic consequences which they could never have predicted: it was called Chaos Theory. Chaos Theory had a very powerful influence in the West because it rose up at the very moment the Soviet Union was collapsing. And it seemed to explain why all attempts at revolution had led to disaster: the world was just too complex for human beings to change in a predictable way. ibid.
Complexity Theory: Murray Gell-Mann: he believed that there were underlying patterns at every level of the universe, not just in the particles but in the way people think, and the structure in human societies … ‘And it’s fascinating to try and figure out what these laws are.’ ibid.
Maybe many people didn’t want to change. They were happy living in their own fairytale world of gangs and violence. ibid.
President Clinton had brought in tough new crime laws. Even though in reality crime was falling. Hundreds of thousands of young black men were now imprisoned with no hope of parole, even for minor offences. It seemed to show that President Clinton cared more about the fears of the white middle-class voters than he did about the lives of young black men. ibid.
But in the West scientists were beginning to ask whether the very idea of an integrated self was actually a fiction for everyone. ibid.
Inside their brains, human beings have all kinds of different selves. The conscious mind had no awareness of it at all. ibid.
The one self that is conscious constantly makes up stories to explain what all the other selves are doing. But when the connection between the two halves of the brain is cut, it can’t do it … All human beings live in a dream world of stories. ibid.
The 1990s was the high point of the idea of individualism. ibid.
In Russia that same dream seemed to have led to disaster … Russia had been taken over by a small group called the oligarchs who had looted the country of much of its wealth … No-one believed in communism or democracy any longer … They had been promised a democracy but what they got was chaos and corruption on a vast scale. ibid.
What Google was doing was gathering vast amounts of data on millions of people without them being fully aware of it … Google was now making billions, and at the heart of it was data. It had become a new gold rush. ibid.
The [US] Government passed the Patriot Act: it said that everyone’s personal data must be open to examination to stop further attacks. Privacy of the individual now became irrelevant in the face of a much higher need: security. ibid.
They [US] called it enhanced interrogation, and they did it by waterboarding Zubaydah 83 times, by repeated smashing him against the wall, and locking him naked in a freezing box for weeks at a time. The CIA videotaped the interrogations but later destroyed the tapes. ibid.
Out in the margins of western societies there was a growing anger and a total disillusion with the system because it offered hundreds of thousands of people nothing and gave their lives no purpose or meaning. ibid.
Dominic Cummings worked as a political adviser for the Conservative Party, and he believed that all politicians, left and right, had completely lost touch with the people they were supposed to represent … Cummings was fascinated by the founder of Complexity Theory … Cummings wanted to use data and computers to see the underlying patterns in modern society, and then use that knowledge to take power back from the unelected elites who had seized control. ibid.
Since Putin had come to power the global price of oil had increased drastically. And money had poured into Russia … ibid.
One of the most pervasive mythologies … The world is too complicated for us as human beings to understand but nothing is too complicated for the machines and the data, for they can see the hidden reality under the surface. ibid.
Millions of people became convinced that all the major stars, from Britney Spears to Beyoncé were being manipulated and controlled by the Illuminati. ibid.
His [Tupac’s] message was simple: that suspicion was just another form of control. ibid.
Governments in Britain and America rescued the banks, but they then decided to transfer the debt that incurred away from the private sector to the public sector. And what was called austerity began. ibid.
All the major banks had been rigging interest rates, and many of them had been laundering money for organised crime, including the drug cartels of Mexico. ibid.
Suspicions grew that there was a dark frightening world of dictators, drug lords, Russian gangsters, arms dealers and international bankers all thriving together in the shadows of the City of London. ibid.
In the West the corruptions and the inequalities also continued to grow. And the politicians seemed unable to do anything about it. ibid.
Much of the evidence for priming wasn’t there … You might be able to keep millions of people in a state of constant anxiety online by bombarding them with memes, but you couldn’t alter underneath what they thought and what they believed. ibid.
Once you believe you are being manipulated there is no way back. ibid.
Vladimir Putin, whose power in reality was becoming increasingly fragile at home in Russia, became in the eyes of the West a dark malevolent force, which made him seem far stronger than he really was. ibid.
For Donald Trump the paranoia allowed him to hide the fact that he was doing nothing to get rid of the corruption in America as he had promised. ibid.
Millions had become addicted to opioids and yet no-one in power had come to rescue them. But the liberals couldn’t face this because they too had no idea how to solve those problems. ibid.
The virus was a force that came from completely outside the systems of power. But it has come at a moment when many of the old certainties of this age are already cracking. ibid.
One possible feature is that individualism will disappear, and with it the very idea of individual freedom … Another possibility is that the future will be like the past … The third possibility is to try to imagine genuinely new kinds of futures. ibid.
The reality is that all these societies, not just America and Britain but China and Russia too, are exhausted, empty of any new ideas. All of them have corruption that has burrowed deep into their institutions. ibid.
The psychological theories that tell us we are weak and manipulable are cracking. And more and more people are beginning to realise that the fragmented emotions of anxiety and suspicion that they feel inside them may really be just the raw material for the technology corporations to feed off. It may be that we are really far stronger than we think. ibid.
The question is whether privileged elites should dominate mass communication and should use this power as they tell us they must, namely to impose necessary illusions to manipulate and deceive the stupid majority and remove them from the public arena. The question in brief is whether democracy and freedom are values to be preserved or threats to be avoided. In this possibly terminal phase of human existence democracy and freedom are more than values to treasure; they may be essential to survival. Professor Noam Chomsky
There is no reason to accept the doctrines crafted to sustain power and privilege, or to believe that we are constrained by mysterious and unknown social laws. These are simply decisions made within institutions that are subject to human will and that must face the test of legitimacy. And if they do not meet the test, they can be replaced by other institutions that are more free and more just, as has happened often in the past. Noam Chomsky
The third consequence is the extreme elite hostility to democracy. The reason is plain: a functioning democracy will be responsive to appeals from the masses of the population, and likely to succumb to excessive nationalism. Noam Chomsky, Deterring Democracy p58
Democratic forms can be tolerated, even admired, if only for propaganda purposes. But this stance can be adopted only when the distribution of effective power ensures that meaningful participation of the ‘popular classes’ had been barred. When they organize and threaten the control of the political system by the business-landowner elite and the military, strong measures must be taken, with tactical variations depending on the ranking of the target population on the scale of importance. At the lowest rank, in the Third World, virtually no holds are barred. ibid.
The democratic ideal, at home and abroad, is simple and straightforward: You are free to do what you want, as long as it is what we want you to do. ibid.
Such ideas have ample resonance until today, including Locke’s stern doctrine that common people should be denied the right even to discuss public affairs. This doctrine remains a basic principle of modern democratic states, now implemented by a variety of means to protect the operations of the state from public scrutiny: classification of documents on the largely fraudulent pretext of national security, clandestine operations, and other measures to bar the rascal multitude from the political arena. ibid.
The good and the few may be the gentry or industrialists, or the vanguard Party and the central committee, or the intellectuals who qualify as ‘experts’ because they articulate the consensus of the powerful (to paraphrase one of Henry Kissinger’s insights). ibid.
After the American revolution, rebellious and independent farmers had to be taught by force that the ideals expressed in the pamphlets of 1776 were not to be taken seriously. The common people were not to be represented by countrymen like themselves, that know the people’s sores, but by gentry, merchants, lawyers, and others who hold or serve private power. Jefferson and Madison believed that power should be in the hands of the ‘natural aristocracy’. ibid.