See here for my
review of Part 5: https://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2021/05/cant-get-you-out-of-my-head-part-5.html.
Part 6 is called:
Are we the Pigeon or
Are we the Dancer?. This is the final episode of
Can't Get You Out of my Head. See here for Part 6:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p093x1c1/cant-get-you-out-of-my-head-series-1-6-part-six-are-we-pigeon-or-are-we-dancer
and:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_C4Dn2-Pk3I.
In this two-hour concluding episode, we find out how the
story ends, with the exception of Jiang Qing; we already know how it ended for
her. Following World War II many prominent thinkers turned towards the idea of
the individual rather than us being seen as a collective of any kind. Earlier
episodes discussed Ayn Rand who was the most prominent of these pioneers. There
was a photography exhibition in the 1950's called
The Family of Man that presented five hundred and three photographs
from sixty-three countries of ordinary people. The idea was that everybody
could use the information in them information to build their own life story. Another
person who questioned official reality was Tupac Shakur, the famous rapper. His
mother Afeni Shakur was a leading figure in the Black Panther movement and had
her own remarkable experience of the depth and normality of fraudulent
life-hacking, as we've seen previously. The programme shows a video of Tupac in
1988 as a high schoolboy showing extraordinary awareness. Later on in his
career, he wrote songs about the destructiveness of drug addiction. He thought
that the aggression shown by street gangs in the
USA
could be transformed into something positive, a way of striking back against
the oppressive political class. Yet this unlocked a terrible paradox in which
his own success seemed to indicate that he had joined the establishment.
However more and more people, especially black Americans, began to understand
the "conspiracy theory" that crack cocaine was a biochemical psychological
weapon being used by the CIA against American citizens. That is true actually
and President Bill Clinton was involved. Mark Devlin questions the randomness of
Tupac's death in a supposed drive by shooting in 1996, see:
https://www.mixcloud.com/djmarkdevlin/good-vibrations-podcast-vol-90-sonia-poulton-tupac-biggie-20th-anniversaries/.
The narrative then moves to the
Middle East. There in
Saudi
Arabia was born Abu Zubaydah, a Palestinian.
His ethnic origin meant that he was a second class citizen in the oil-soaked desert
nation and as a result this led him to become angry. He saw the Saudi elite as
just pretending to be Muslims while obsessed with money and materialism. Then,
rather like Sayyid Qutb, he promoted Islamism to give people meaning to their
lives. He became a jihadist and fought for the Taliban in
Afghanistan.
There he suffered a head wound in 1991 during the war to oust the post-Soviet
socialist regime in
Kabul. He was
left with brain damage that affected his memory and ability to organize his
thoughts. He was famously captured by the CIA and given "enhanced
interrogation" by psychologists, including water boarding. This combined
with his brain damage meant he just began giving out random statements, but
they were taken seriously by the US government and adopted as policy because
they exaggerated the public image of the terrorist threat which was used to
give the state enormous power during the first decade of this century. He was
oddly similar to Tupac Shakur in his idea that a life without meaning is a worthless
life. It's not a new idea; in fact it can be found in that pivotal moment in
history, the French Revolution. However, ironically, at the very moment Tupac
and Zubaydah were rediscovering this idea; scientists in the West were denying
not only the existence of life's meaning, but the existence of the very thing
that understands it, the self. Dr Michael Gazzaniga is a psychiatrist who
proposed curing severe epilepsy by severing the corpus callosum, the bridge
between the two hemispheres of the brain. The strange effects this had led him
to conclude that there is no single conscious self; just a series of selves
organized by a "storyteller" which can be found in the left brain. As
Curtis puts it: "Human consciousness was being sidelined". Gazzaniga's
theory has been criticized by numerous other thinkers. This documentary is an
excellent introduction to the subject, see:
https://vimeo.com/575140944 and:
https://vimeo.com/575144116.
There's an amusing clip in the programme of Google's
headquarters in 1998, when the company was founded. Believe it or not, it was
in a garage in the home of its founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin. It's
obviously moved upmarket since then. In a late '90's interview, Brin says that
he wants to make the world a better place, just like in the photo exhibition
fifty years earlier. Brin truly believed that his goal was to make information
accessible to all completely freely and without censorship... the irony is not
lost on me. Following the bursting of the
Silicon Valley
bubble in 2000, Google made a deal with the devil; sponsorship in exchange for
their users' information being put into a database. In some instances this was
just for relatively benign advertising purposes, like I have experienced
myself, see:
https://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2013/07/big-spammer-is-watching-you.html;
but it was only a matter of time before intelligence services came knocking at
their door. What used to be harmless browsing cookies became CCTV on our
selves. Children's dolls, cleaning robots and even sex toys were hooked up to a
system that allowed authorities to snoop on our lives, as Edward Snowden has
warned us of, see:
https://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2017/03/vault-7.html.
More computer experts rose from the woodpile like Geoffrey Hinton and BF Skinner.
Hinton is the great-great-grandson of George Boole whom we met in episode one.
Together they imagined a world in which society could be governed by computers
called "neural nets", modelled on the human brain and be able to
learn new things independently. Hinton called it "Vector-World" and
Skinner wrote an allegorical novel about such a future utopia called
Walden Two. In this system, humans were stripped
of their humanity and would be regarded like pigeons pecking at lights to be
rewarded with food in the classic Pavlovian response experiments. Hinton wrote
a programme that could be used to calculate people's credit status. The
USA
hasn't developed that further, but another country has. In
China
an official called Bo Xilai came up with a similar idea to the other people
Curtis has covered, including Leo Strauss, that obsessive hedonism and an obsession
with meaningless pleasure leads to societal collapse. However the Chinese
regime were already adopting the methods of Hinton and Skinner to create their
"social credit" system. Bo Xilai was arrested on a charge of fraud
and embezzlement after his businessparter Neil Haywood was mysteriously found
dead. When he went to trial thousands of protesters assembled outside because
it seemed obvious that Bo Xilai was framed while trying to expose the very
crime he was accused of.
Russia
in the 1990's was a terrible place. The organized criminals called "oligarchs"
had plundered the corpse of the
Soviet Union and now
were effectively running the country. In 2000 the submarine
Kursk
sank with the loss of all on board while Putin used the opportunity to set
himself up as a nationalist populist, blaming the oligarchs for the tragedy, or
so we're told. An opposition politician called Alexei Navalny emerged calling
Putin's government "a party of crooks and thieves". Curtis'
documentary presents a very cynical view of Vladimir Putin. However, like so
many individuals in history, maybe he doesn't deserve the label of hatred that
has been stuck onto him. These HPANWO Radio shows tell a different story about
both Putin and Navalny, see:
http://hpanwo-radio.blogspot.com/2020/11/programme-395-podcast-nick-kollerstrom.html
and:
https://hpanwo-radio.blogspot.com/2021/03/programme-410-podcast-nick-kollerstrom.html.
Adam Curtis compares Hinton's Vector-World to conspiracy
theories. In his view, people like me mimic perfectly the mindless building of
connections between different pieces of unconnected information in the same way
these computer programmes do. He demonstrates how Google's DeepDream program
can find pictures of dogs in random patterns in the same way we build our own
mental pictures of the world around us, even where no such picture exists objectively.
This takes us back to episode one and the prank played by Kerry Thornley and
Greg Hill. I suspect it has also inspired Umberto Eco's novel
Foucault's Pendulum, about a fake
conspiracy theory being generated by people's delusions reinforcing themselves
in a feedback exaggeration spiral. Obviously I reject this notion because I
believe many conspiracy theories to be factually correct; and indeed history has
verified that position. One of the last things Tupac Shakur did before his
suspicious death was a performance called "Killuminati" which was a
repudiation of conspiratorial ideas. My complete objection to this can be found
here:
https://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2013/11/illuminati-pamphlet.html.
2016 was a massive upset to the elite. See:
https://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2019/10/brexit-portal.html
and:
http://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2021/01/donald-trump-portal.html.
Adam Curtis strangely rejects Neil Sanders' view that the whole thing was
engineered by Cambridge Analytica. I had supposed up till then that the two
were on the same side over this. Many social psychologists, or should I say
mindbenders, began to reassess everything they had thought true and wonder if
humans are harder to manipulate than they had previously thought. We are, and
they ain't seen nothing yet! "Into this fragile structure came a
catastrophe: Covid." says Adam Curtis. He predicts four futures and I
disagree with his very premise about them all. He regards the supposed
"election" of Joe Biden a "return to stability"... I don't
need to repeat what I think of that. There may be an increase of populism and
maybe another 2016-like situation; hope so! There may be more control and surveillance;
and Curtis rightly fears the expansion of the social credit system into the
rest of the world. On the other hand, there may be a third future that nobody
has imagined yet that will be better than both of the other two options. I
think that this fourth option will in some way be connected to the second, but
Curtis is quite right to cite the late anthropologist and activist David
Graeber with the quotation that launched the entire series of six episodes: "The
ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something we make and could
just as easily make differently". According to Curtis, both QAnon and
Russiagate served the same purpose, to give the government an excuse why they
can't find a solution the real social problems in this world. No, Q and Trump
are not that at all. They are the solution. They are the means to end
Illuminati rule on this planet forever in a way Adam Curtis doesn't grasp and
whose foundation he has rejected to his discredit.
