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.
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 is 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.
From videos of animals, personal
moments of experience, extraordinary events, to horrific terror
videos, more and more was uploaded. And in a strange, sad twist, the
first terrorist beheading video that was posted online, was that of
Judea Pearl's son, Daniel Pearl. He was a journalist for the Wall
Street Journal and had been kidnapped by radical Islamists in
Pakistan. They recorded was they said was his confession and then his
killing.
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: “Unfortunately, there are issues with
undesirable images within the data. It would appear that a surprising
number of people are using webcam conversations to show intimate
parts of their body to the other person. Also, the fact that the
software allows more than one person to view a webcam stream means
that it appears to being used to broadcast pornography."
But, increasingly, people were
using the internet in other ways - to present themselves as they
wanted to be seen. The web drew people in because it was mesmerising.
It was somewhere that you could explore and get lost, 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.
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.
From
the documentary
HyperNormalisation
by
Adam
Curtis
*
GCHQ’s 'Optic Nerve' programme, used to capture
the personal images of millions of Yahoo webcam users. It suggests
that there are no limits to what the intelligence agencies are ready
to do. [fa.ev/enint]
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