Surveillance, Conspiracy, and Secrets from the Archives
Arts & Ideas
BBC
4.2 • 598 Ratings
🗓️ 29 September 2019
⏱️ 46 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
"They do not come into our house in jackboots... This is not totalitarianism. This is a new kind of power." Shoshana Zuboff discusses surveillance capitalism, the links between Pokémon Go and BF Skinner, the behavioural psychologist she studied with at Harvard in the 1970s. Plus the mystery of the cuckoo clock in The Third Man. To mark the 70th anniversary of Carol Reed's classic post-War thriller, Matthew Sweet visits the archive of the British Film Institute with Angela Allen, the script supervisor for the film. And we retrace Stieg Larsson's investigation into the unsolved assassination of Olof Palme in 1986 with Jan Stocklassa, author of the book The Man Who Played With Fire.
If you look up Free Thinking and Learning from Sweden you can hear about British and Swedish cultural exchange from Abba to Ikea https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09z68sn and our programme called Dark Sweden gives you journalist Kajsa Norman on crime in modern Sweden.
Shoshana Zuboff's book is called The Age of Surveillance Capitalism.
Films about emotions from anger and joy to the manipulation of adverts made at our Free Thinking Festival can be found on https://www.bbc.com/ideas/playlists/free-thinking-2019. The discussions include a debate about the manipulative power of advertising How They Manipulate Our Emotions https://bbc.in/2WYmOlO and you can see a film about it on bbc.com/ideas/videos/how-ads-manipulate
Produced by Luke Mulhall
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that is some level of genius. It also helps that it's a long time ago, right? |
| 0:23.3 | It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream van plays music when it's out of ice cream. |
| 0:28.8 | Listen to Evil Genius on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:32.4 | This is the BBC. |
| 0:37.1 | Hello, I'm Matthew Sweet. Welcome to BBC Radio 3's Arts and Ideas discussion programme, |
| 0:42.8 | which brings together leading artists, writers and thinkers in conversation and debate. If you |
| 0:48.4 | enjoy what you hear, do subscribe. Search for the Arts and Ideas podcast. And while you're there, please rate and review us. It'll help other people find us. |
| 0:58.9 | I never knew the old Vienna before the war, with its Strauss music, its glamour, an easy charm. |
| 1:05.8 | But I do know the third man, Carol Reid's 1949 masterpiece, a film with a riddle inside a mystery |
| 1:12.8 | called Lime, Harry Lime, |
| 1:15.1 | the baby-faced black marketeer |
| 1:17.1 | played by Orson Wells. |
| 1:20.6 | He's just one of the puzzles we're trying |
| 1:22.6 | to decode on this edition of free thinking. |
| 1:25.5 | We're going back to the assassination |
| 1:26.9 | of the Swedish Prime Minister Olaf Palmer, |
| 1:29.9 | unsolved since 1986. |
| 1:32.2 | We'll discover how Stieg Larsson, the author of the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, |
| 1:37.1 | turned detective to crack the case himself. |
| 1:40.0 | And we'll hear about a conspiracy from the modern world, |
| 1:43.6 | the one that the multidisciplinary academic Shoshana Zuboff |
| 1:47.1 | argues is already in progress. |
... |
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