Since the end of the Second World War
the federal government had controlled US capitalism.
Successive governments,
both Democrat and Republican,
had regulated the markets, prevented monopolies
and heavily taxed the rich.
There was little talk of billionaires in America anymore.
But out of the blue, in 1973,
an oil crisis upset the entire economy.
Over the next year, the industrial slowdown
led to a surprising rise in unemployment.
The government was unable to put an end to the slump
which the country was now mired in.
All of a sudden, New York
collapsed under the weight of its welfare state.
Enter the recession. The big banks cut off credit,
inflation pushed the cost of city services way up,
and by late this spring,
New York faced the prospect of going broke.
Overnight, the authorities were forced to lay off
20% of firefighters,
police officers and healthcare workers.
Run-down and overrun by gangs due to the lack of police,
America's flagship city
became Fear City.
Confined to the margins for 50 years,
the conservatives of the Republican Party
were now seen as the only ones capable
of restoring order and prosperity.
For their leader, Ronald Reagan,
America had erred
in going down the path of the New Deal,
an abomination
which conservatives had never gotten over.
He promised
to free the economy from the tyranny of government
and to slash taxes,
leaving Americans free once again
to get as rich as they could.
CALIFORNIA
Meanwhile, over on the west coast,
America's next great fortunes were being made.
Chiefly in the region around San Francisco
and the Santa Clara Valley,
which one journalist,
taking the name of the material
used to make microprocessors,
dubbed Silicon Valley.
On 1 April 1975, Bill Gates and Paul Allen,
two young entrepreneurs
who had caught a whiff of this new El Dorado,
founded Microsoft.
Just a year later Steve Jobs
and Steve Wozniak founded
Apple Computer.
In 1980, the popular vote
triumphantly brought to power the man
who had promised to get wealth in America trickling down.
Let us pledge to each other,
with this great lady looking on,
that we can - and, so help us God,
we will - make America great again.
Thank you very much.
SILICON VALLEY, SUMMERY 1981
Silicon Valley lived by a prophecy:
Moore's prophecy.
The co-founder of Intel
Gordon Moore predicted
that the processing capacity of microprocessors
would double every two years.
If a microprocessor in 1975
was capable of carrying out 1,000 operations a second,
then six years later, in 1981,
according to the prophecy, it should be capable of 8,000.
And that's exactly what happened.
In the summer of 1981
all of Silicon Valley was looking ten years down the line.
If the prophecy continued to be true
then the result would be
256,000 operations a second,
an increase in the capacity of microprocessors
of 25,600%.
The challenge now was to convert
this remarkable prediction
into profit.
Previously, computers had been huge machines
which only governments and very large companies had.
But the revolution in processing power
reduced the size of machines
and gave birth to the first PCs
or personal computers.
Dozens of competitors spring up with new machines,
hoping to grab a piece of the rapidly growing market.
This gold rush rekindled the old myth
of the self-made man, working in an unusual location:
their garages.
In the '70s
teenagers Steve Jobs and Stephen Wozniak,
tinkering in a California garage,
invent the circuitry that becomes the brain
of the revolutionary Apple computer.
But there was nothing spontaneous about this revolution:
its origins could be traced back
much further in Silicon Valley's past.
Legend has it that Silicon Valley was born
in 1939
in this garage, the first of its kind,
in Santa Clara County.
It was here that Bill Hewlett and David Packard
two engineers and Harvard graduates
who were working on a high-precision oscillator,
founded Hewlett-Packard.
Their first client was Hollywood magnate Walt Disney,
who bought eight oscillators from them
to address the previously unsolvable problem
of syncing up sound and pictures.
This enabled him to produce
his symphonic blockbuster Fantasia.
Hewlett-Packard's garage may have provided an origin myth,
but Silicon Valley was actually an ecosystem
drawing on public and private funds
and centred around Stanford University.
In 1951
Stanford created a technological research institute
and an enormous research park
to encourage graduates and professors
to market their research.
Bill Hewlett and David Packard
set up there in 1953,
and this unique environment,
combining pure research and business,
enabled them to develop HP
while inventing a new corporate culture.
At HP staff were given a significant amount of freedom,
the hierarchy was informal
and successful results were shared
equally in the form of bonuses.
Coffee breaks were encouraged
as an opportunity for discussions
aimed at improving projects.
On Friday evenings
they organised BBQs, not just as a way to wind down,
but also to continue
to brainstorm new ideas.
This was all part of 'The HP Way',
a style of management invented by Hewlett and Packard
which would establish itself as the dominant culture
across Silicon Valley.
In 1963, the Stanford Research Institute
invented the first ever
computer mouse,
an invention that was stolen
and improved by Xerox,
before being brought to market by a new company: Apple.
At Apple we understand that business
as usual isn't anymore.
And why soon there'll be just two kinds of people...
Hi.
...those who use computers...
Yeah, I'll be home for breakfast.
...and those who use Apples.
But before they could make their fortune,
they had to sell their machines to a still puzzled customer base.
By simply using the mouse
the user can move an arrow around on the screen and simply point
to English words and point to pictures
and move things around, select things
and exchange information between applications
all through this very simple device.
What's left in development? Is this the ultimate
office computer?
- Today. - Today it is.
This is when the giant IBM entered the fray,
a company which made everything
from professional computers to typewriters.
IBM, old hands at marketing products to the general public,
decided to launch their own PC.
The very first computers seemed as big as houses
and so mysterious that for most of us
the computer was behind a closed door.
But IBM was thinking how to make the computer more useful.
And as one good idea led to another,
it began getting smaller, faster,
less expensive and easier to use.
But IBM had no knowledge whatsoever
of operating systems,
software that was essential in order for a PC to run.
As a result IBM turned
to Microsoft, a tiny company
who suggested a solution they came up with in a rush,
MS DOS, a tongue-in-cheek name which stood for
Microsoft Dirty Operating System.
IBM's PC was such a commercial success
that it was imitated by most other manufacturers,
establishing Microsoft
as the world leader
in operating systems.
This marked the beginning
of the company's remarkable expansion.
As promised, Regan ushered in
the conservative revolution by slashing taxes.
It's been remarked that there are three stages of reaction
to a new idea like our tax proposal.
First stage is, it's crazy, it'll never work.
Don't waste my time.
The second: it's possible, but it's not worth doing.
Finally: I've always said it was a good idea, I'm glad I thought of it.
Well, we're rapidly sweeping up on that third stage.
"A new day is dawning for America",
said excited conservatives.
Inequality, poverty and anything else
that could threaten this euphoria
was simply not mentioned.
The President of the United States and Mrs Reagan!
Reagan re-established the magic of the market,
violated by 50 years of government intervention.
His greatest achievement
was the deregulation of Wall Street.
Highly speculative products,
which had been banned for 50 years, were allowed once more.
Stock prices reached record levels.
Millionaire investor Warren Buffett
saw a sixfold increase in his personal fortune
in the space of just two years.
American millionaires grew rich at a speed
which hadn't been seen since the 1920s.
Meanwhile, the computing market was changing dimension,
resulting in a fierce battle for control.
...we celebrate the first
glorious anniversary of the information purification...
22 JANUARY 1984
In the evening of 22 January 1984,
during halftime in the Super Bowl,
the most watched television event in America,
audiences got their first glimpse
of the new Apple advert directed by Ridley Scott.
...is more powerful a weapon than any fleet
or army on Earth. We are one people...
A reference to George Orwell's totalitarian world,
this was Steve Jobs' angry retort
to the growing supremacy of IBM
and Microsoft.
We shall prevail!
For weeks the Macintosh has been rolling off the line,
one every 27 seconds.
Not compatible with Microsoft,
the Macintosh was the first computer to be sold
as both a technological and marketing revolution.
When you bought a Macintosh, you weren't just buying a machine.
You were entering the myth of Steve Jobs,
the visionary genius who started out in his garage,
and who was now liberating
and transforming the world singlehandedly.
Apple is perceived to be the only hope
to offer IBM a run for its money.
Dealers, initially welcoming IBM with open arms,
now fear an IBM-dominated
and controlled future.
They are increasingly and desperately turning back to Apple
as the only force that can ensure their future freedom.
Steve Jobs had carefully honed
his image as a genius,
but the Macintosh arrived too late to upset a market
already built around Microsoft.
The dynamism of Silicon Valley
attracted the best minds in the country.
In tech, people were working much more than anywhere else in America.
Well, we'll hire people of any age
as long as they're super energetic
and they want to make personal computers easier to use.
But employees had the highest wages in America,
with bonuses paid in shares in the company
in the hope that they might get rich
when the company was floated on the stock market.
The New York Times 19 September 1985.
The tale of Mr Jobs's visionary leadership at Apple
came to a bitter end on Tuesday
when he resigned as the company's chairman.
According to associates,
the same vision, drive and ego that helped Mr Jobs
make Apple into a leading company
also prevented him from heeding the advice of others
to the point that Apple
is in worse financial shape than it has ever been.
The New York Times
18 March 1986.
Software company Microsoft
went public last Thursday at 21 dollars a share,
and ended the week at 29 dollars.
This sensational stock market launch
made 12,000 employees and former employees of Microsoft
into overnight millionaires.
Bill Gates, meanwhile, not even 31 years old,
was now a billionaire.
Biographies then began to appear,
bestsellers which described him as heartless
and concerned only with money.
And within the mythology of tech,
which championed the selfless genius,
Bill Gates came to represent
the horrible businessman.
In the early 1990s,
the revolution in processing power
fed the entire US economy.
The computer became an everyday object,
reshaping work
for millions of Americans,
while the country got ready
for the next technological revolution.
Running counter to the gospel of private initiative,
this change would be financed by the federal government
through public investment. Given unanimous approval,
the money would go
to universities and Silicon Valley
to enable them to invent
'the information superhighway',
which would go on to become the internet.
On 12 December 1991
Stanford University trialled
America's first ever internet server.
This is Lusk, Wyoming.
Cows outnumber people here 100 to 1.
The thing that isn't apparent about Lusk is it's wired.
Lusk has strong fibre optic cable
for the future of high-speed internet.
The schools have 320 computers for 500 kids.
Home businesses on PCs are common. Why?
They're practical people.
In 1996,
Americans began using the internet in large numbers.
Technology is a tool. Software is a tool.
These are the dreams it's made for.
So, that's why we make it.
With the infrastructure now ready,
a new generation rushed
to see who would be
the next visionary entrepreneur.
If it's in print they can get it.
Their database contains 1.1 million titles.
If you were to print the Amazon.com catalogue,
it would be the size of seven New York City phone books.
Amazon.com has been online
for a little more than a year now, and it has yet to turn a profit.
But that doesn't bother the man who came up with this idea.
In fact, if we make a profit any time in the next two years,
I'd say it would strictly be an accident.
Zip2, a California company
that provides online access
to information about cities around the country,
everything from where to eat,
to how to get around.
Imagine the possibilities.
The company's chief engineer and founder
is 27-year-old Elon Musk.
And how old were you when you started
this company or what became this company?
Twenty three.
Some from this new generation
flaunted their supposed genius
and their carefully cultivated egocentrism,
close to an old, radical strain of thought
that had previously been foreign to Silicon Valley:
libertarianism.
LIBERTARIANISM
The libertarian movement,
which dates back to the American revolution,
is typified by its stubborn defence
of individual freedom.
In the 1950s,
Ayn Rand, a Russian-born American writer,
advocated an extreme form of libertarianism
totally at odds with the prevailing mood at the time.
How do we build roads,
sanitation facilities, hospitals, schools,
if the government is not permitted
to force, if you will, by vote, taxation?
You admit that someone
is producing the money, the wealth
that will make those roads possible.
Now, you have no right to tell the man who produced the wealth
in what way you want him to spend it.
If you need his money, you can obtain it
only by his voluntary consent.
And you believe in the eventual goodwill
of all human beings, or at least that top
echelon of human beings,
whom you believe will give willingly.
No goodwill is necessary, only self-interest.
I believe in private roads,
private post offices, private schools.
When industry breaks down...
Ayn Rand reduced society
to a competition pitting everyone against each other,
from which only a small elite of creatives
could emerge victorious.
To regulate was to strangle a person's freedom,
while to tax them was to steal their talent.
Half a century later
her ideas chimed perfectly
with the myth of the genius entrepreneur,
the visionary hero of Silicon Valley
who owed nothing to anyone.
A myth which stood in total contradiction
to the ecosystem that helped innovations to emerge
and built the valley's legendary success.
FEBRUARY 1997
Speaking of legends, Apple sent out an SOS to Steve Jobs
to save them from bankruptcy.
If we want to move forward
and see Apple healthy and prospering again,
we have to let go of a few things here.
We have to let go
of this notion that for Apple to win Microsoft has to lose.
I happen to have a special guest with me today
via satellite downlink.
And if we could get him up on the stage right now.
Good morning!
Microsoft invested
150 million dollars
to kickstart its last remaining competitor.
This was in response to critics
now that Bill Gates' company,
which equipped 90% of personal computers,
enjoyed a near-total monopoly
that could see it broken up by the courts.
Bill Gates, now the richest man in the world,
was keen to counteract the image of him as this horrible businessman,
and used a tried and trusted method to do so.
The man with more money than anyone else on the planet
today giving away more than he ever has before:
1 billion dollars over the next 20 years
to send minority students - Asians, Blacks,
Latinos, and Native Americans -
to college and graduate school.
The unprecedented sums he spent on philanthropy
gave him considerable influence, including at the very top
of the World Health Organization.
He has sought to defend
the almost state-like influence he has.
Certainly, when it comes to saving children's lives,
I don't think there's anything
politically controversial about that.
And if we give mothers the tools to save their children,
they're going to want to do that.
Partnering with governments on that
is something that we've taken as a very exciting cause.
MAY 1998
But Microsoft was still under threat of being broken up.
The company was accused of abusing its dominant position
in order to promote its browser,
Internet Explorer,
at the expense of its main competitor, Netscape.
Computer emails show Microsoft first
tried to join forces with Netscape.
When Netscape refused Microsoft allegedly launched
a relentless campaign to destroy the company,
telling one of its business partners,
"How much do we have to pay you to screw Netscape?
This is your lucky day."
And everyone in Silicon Valley
is keeping an eye on the battleground
a continent away
at federal courthouse in Washington.
It's here where it will be decided whether Microsoft
and its founder, Bill Gates...
I don't remember sending it.
...are our generation's equivalent
of John D. Rockefeller
and his Standard Oil.
The trial is expected to last for weeks,
and the stakes are so high
the case may end up in the Supreme Court.
While this was happening, a startup
was celebrating its first birthday.
SEPTEMBER 1999
Google was a revolutionary search engine
with the capacity to map and index
the labyrinth that was the internet at that time.
The company had been founded by two Stanford PhD students,
Larry Page and Sergey Brin.
And in keeping with the fashion,
Google was also officially founded in a garage.
Google was based on a simple concept.
Every search on a search engine
produces pages of returns,
but also a trail of invisible data
including the number of searches,
the time spent by users on individual pages,
and all manner of personal data.
This data is known as 'behavioural surplus',
surplus because it had previously been considered waste
clogging up the servers of search engines.
Google was the first to systematically
collect and analyse this behavioural surplus
in order to improve their services
and provide increasingly accurate
and speedy answers to the questions asked of it.
The better it got,
the more people used it, and the more people used it,
the better it got.
Eventually it was capable
of predicting certain behaviour.
Google could now target advertising
with previously unseen accuracy,
transforming whims into purchases.
Larry Page and Sergey Brin
had their hands on an incalculably large potential fortune.
Google would go on to upset every economic model
for decades to come.
After a two-year court case the Federal Court
returned its verdict on Microsoft's monopoly.
The New York Times 7 June 2000.
In the Netscape case a federal judge
ordered the breakup of Microsoft,
believing this to be necessary
in order to end its monopoly.
But Microsoft had strong grounds for an appeal.
Bill Gates read out
a press release written by his lawyers,
mentioning one key word twice.
Despite this ruling
we believe the courts will ultimately find
that all of Microsoft's actions
have been completely legal and good for consumers.
We don't think this decision matches the reality
of the high technology industry,
the intense competition, the rapid innovation
and lots of consumer benefits.
The reason for choosing to stress the point about consumers
was that, influenced by the conservative revolution,
courts were increasingly judging monopolies
based not on
their actual position on the market,
but on the well-being of their customers.
And so if Microsoft's lawyers
were able to show
that consumers hadn't been wronged,
then there was no monopoly.
The New York Times 28 June 2001.
In a twist in the Microsoft case,
the Federal Court of Appeal
annulled the break-up of the leading software company.
The cornerstone of American capitalism
is mastery of the law.
Whether it's privatising pastureland
in the 18th century
or protecting Microsoft in 2001,
if you're powerful enough and smart enough
then you can get the law and the courts
to serve your interests.
11 SEPTEMBER 2001
The September 11 attacks dragged America
into an all-out war on terrorism.
As the only ones with the capacity to store
and analyse infinite quantities of data,
Silicon Valley received public investment like never before
to conduct cyberwarfare,
furthering the technological advantage
of the American intelligence apparatus.
Essentially, this meant pumping
the Valley's whole ecosystem full of steroids for the next 20 years.
The major players of Silicon Valley
began to grow at an exponential rate.
Here, coming around, we have North America.
- Look at that. - Google co-founder Sergey Brin
is showing us an electronic globe
that displays the mountains of Google searches
happening around the world at any given moment.
So, every little dot represents a certain number of searches.
You can see there are thousands of searches going on every second.
Now you can see Europe.
These are all different languages, right? All the different colours.
Yeah.
Wow, Europe is really going strong.
200 million times a day
someone somewhere uses Google
to search for something on the internet.
Users churning out behavioural surplus
that was instantly converted
into targeted adverts and offers.
In just 24 months
the startup's turnover rose
by 3,600%,
a new record for American capitalism.
This required colossal processing power,
but fortunately Moore's prophecy
had continued to come true for 30 years.
By this time Moore was
the richest retired prophet in Hawai'i.
Some supercomputers
now had the capacity to carry out 1,000 billion
operations a second.
And after the legend of the garage
came the legend of the student dorm room.
For college students the website called Facebook
is a must-visit destination.
Seven million college and high school students
use this online student directory every day,
a phenomenon that Emily Murphy and Nadia Barbar,
students at Georgetown, describe as an addiction.
You can entertain yourself for hours.
- Doing what? - Looking at people's pictures,
their interests and hobbies.
There will always be
new technology that helps...
The creator of Facebook,
21-year-old Mark Zuckerberg, should still be in college.
But he invented this by accident.
Mark was at Harvard when someone simply asked
why there wasn't an online directory.
I just threw it together one week in January
and launched it for Harvard.
- This was in your dorm room? - Yeah.
You launched Facebook in your dorm room?
Yeah.
Seeking investors
for Facebook's global roll-out,
Mark Zuckerberg headed for the promised land.
Facebook spread across the world
like wildfire.
Users happily and willingly
shared their private lives and their personal data.
Combined with the invention of the infinite scroll,
which kept pages going for ever,
Facebook was nothing short of a factory
for behavioural surplus.
So much so that Google immediately offered to buy it
for three billion dollars.
Microsoft put in an offer
five times that: 15 billion dollars.
Zuckerberg, whose business card read,
"I'm CEO, b*tch",
rejected every offer.
I knew that the books
business was going to be successful in the first 30 days.
I was shocked
at how many books we sold, we were ill-prepared.
We had all the...
We had only 10 people in the company at that time,
most of them were software engineers, and so everybody
including me and the engineers were all packing boxes.
We didn't even have packing tables.
We were on our hands and knees on a concrete floor
packing the boxes,
and at about one or two in the morning I said to
one of my software engineering colleagues,
"Paul, this is killing my knees.
We need to get knee pads."
And Paul looked at me and he's like, "Jeff,
we need to get packing tables."
Behind the endlessly repeated story about starting in his garage,
Jeff Bezos' strategy turned out to be identical
to that of John Rockefeller a century earlier,
which is why Wall Street
has always supported Amazon.
For years, the more money Amazon lost,
the higher its stock price rose.
Years of loss-making growth
destroyed all competition
without breaking any laws.
Once Amazon started turning a profit
the company established itself as the world's leader,
and continued its expansion.
What we have seen
is the ultra-fast concentration of capital
around a handful of companies with the capacity to buy up
ideas and innovations,
the most powerful being Google,
Amazon, Facebook, Apple
and Microsoft, the GAFAM.
The GAFAM had entered into
a fierce global battle to sell their products
while also collecting as much personal data as possible.
But there were limitations to this model.
They needed users
to be in front of a computer connected to the internet.
It was Apple who solved this problem,
granting the GAFAM near-permanent access
to billions of customers.
An iPod,
a phone
and an internet communicator.
An iPod,
a phone...
Are you getting it?
These are not three separate devices.
This is one device
and we are calling it
iPhone.
Today Apple is going to reinvent the phone.
The iPhone and the other smartphones inspired by it
were handheld, connected computers
which, in accordance with Moore's law,
would be obsolete every 24 months,
and which would be sold by the billion.
Over the next decade,
they created new ways of using the internet,
brought about an explosion in e-commerce
and became essential
for dozens of everyday activities.
They also revolutionised people's use of media,
while making the GAFAM richer and more powerful
than they could ever have imagined.
But in 2008
Americans would be shown
just how rotten
their financial system was.
SEPTEMBER 2008
On 14 September 2008 Lehman Brothers,
one of Wall Street's most powerful investment banks,
declared bankruptcy
and sacked all of their staff.
This extraordinary event
worsened a financial crisis that had been going on for months,
the worst since 1929.
Behind this was the collapse of a system of property loans
targeted at the poorest people in America.
Stockton, California is a city
of 280,000 people in the Central Valley,
80 miles east of San Francisco,
80 miles north of San Jose.
A few years ago it was one of
the hottest real estate markets in the country.
Today it's the foreclosure capital of America.
Most of the mortgages issued in Stockton
and a half of those now in default or foreclosure
were something called subprime loans,
meaning less than prime quality.
The borrowers often had sketchy credit,
were financially strapped,
or lacked sufficient income to qualify for a standard mortgage.
Brokers encouraged insolvent buyers
to borrow up to double the value of their homes,
and scored huge commissions on each transaction.
Wall Street then turned these rotten loans
into good quality securities.
Firms like Bear Stearns and Merrill Lynch
sliced the loans into little pieces,
packaged them up with other investments,
then sold them to their best customers around the world
as high-yield, mortgage-backed securities.
All with the blessing of the rating agencies
like Standard and Poor's.
Everyone took their share
and closed their eyes.
Ignoring the abnormal growth
in the number of foreclosures for default on payments.
Eventually there were too many people
who were unable to pay back their loans,
and the subprime bomb exploded.
In the 1920s,
Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon
happily exploited the predatory financial system
which led to the crash of 1929.
His distant successor,
Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson,
was also very well-placed to know what was going on.
Before becoming a minister,
he had been chairman and CEO of the investment bank Goldman Sachs,
Lehman Brothers' main competitor.
And Goldman Sachs had been just as implicated
in ripping off the poor using the subprime swindle.
The whole financial system stood on the brink of collapse,
bringing the rest of the economy down with it
like in the 1930s.
If there are these severe stresses
continue or get worse
and we don't have financial flows in our systems,
then the problems are going to be
very big problems with small businesses.
It's not just going to be their inability to get loans to grow,
it's going to be their inability to sustain themselves.
Unless taxpayers halted the catastrophe
by agreeing to foot the bill.
The nation's top financial official made the rounds this morning.
He was pleading his case to the American people
for the largest financial bailout since the US Depression.
He's seeking 700 billion dollars
for the US Treasury to buy up those subprime mortgages
and other risky loans and securities
that brought Wall Street to its knees.
Some in Congress, where they're working with treasury staff
on a draft rescue bill, want to know:
why save the lenders and not the borrowers
who can't pay off those loans?
The 700 billion dollars
collected from American taxpayers
saved Wall Street.
The economy went into recession,
but the general chaos seen in the 1930s was avoided.
The three million American families
who lost their homes were seen
as acceptable collateral damage.
The recession also led to a sharp rise in suicide rates,
and amplified an epidemic of self-medication with opioids,
with at least 700,000 Americans
dying from overdoses.
In the 1930s, Congress inquiries
led to laws being passed
prohibiting financial products like these subprimes.
But in 2009 the same inquiries
concluded that Congress only had itself to blame.
Congress now seems shocked and outraged
by the consequences of its decision eight years ago
to effectively deregulate swaps and derivatives.
Please stand and raise your right hand.
GOLDMAN SACHS DIRECTORS
But Americans wanted to know
why they had been forced to pay 700 billion dollars.
Got it, 105?
Yes, Mr Chairman.
Look what your sales team was saying about Timberwolf.
Timberwolf was a financial product
that was loaded with subprimes.
Boy, that Timberwolf
was one shitty deal.
- They sold that shitty deal. - Mr Chairman...
This email was from the head of the division,
- not the sales force. - Whatever it was,
it's an internal Goldman document.
This was an email to me in late June
after the transaction.
No, you sold Timberwolf after as well.
We did trades after that.
Yeah, OK. It's the trades after...
Some context might be helpful.
Let me tell you the context is mighty clear.
June 22 is the date of this email.
Boy, that Timberwolf was one shitty deal.
How much of that shitty deal
did you sell to your clients
after June 22, 2007?
The pitiful banker, the irate politician.
But this was all just theatre
designed to appease the anger of citizens.
It made no impression on Wall Street financiers,
nor did it change their feelings of impunity.
I do not think that we did anything wrong.
Not only did Congress not take any proper measures
to regulate anything,
but Goldman Sachs
and America's 24 biggest investment banks
would use part of the bailout
to pay themselves record bonuses.
THE BUILDING OF THE FREEDOM TOWER
TO REPLACE THE TWIN TOWERS
In 30 years the average wealth of Americans
has risen by 20%.
Meanwhile, for the wealthiest 0.1%
it has risen by 6,000%.
Which doesn't look much like trickling down.
This simply reflects the extent to which capital
has rewritten the statute book over the past three decades.
The US Supreme court today
overturned laws on the books for nearly a century
and ruled that corporations
can spend freely now on political campaigns.
Those who like this decision say it's a victory
for free speech. Those who don't
say campaigns will now be drowning
in corporate cash and influence.
US CONGRESS
In the name of freedom of speech,
private companies
can now spend as much as they like
on US democracy.
Like during the industrial revolution,
it is once again the richest
who are calling the shots in America.
And like before, ostentatious philanthropy
is used to neutralise any critics.
But while some famous billionaires
have agreed to give away
99% of their wealth,
this conceals the fact that the rest of America's rich
actually give very little:
less than 0.2% of their fortunes
on average each year.
722 billionaires
and 22 million millionaires who never speak
or appear in public,
but who use all the legal tricks at their disposal
to avoid paying taxes.
Their favourite ploy is actually very simple, and involves
only paying themselves a very small income,
just enough to pay back the interest on the money
their banker lends them
for their daily expenses.
The super-rich prefer to live on credit
rather than pay tax.
As for American multinationals,
they legally avoid paying tax
through the state of Delaware,
a tax haven that was originally designed
by and for the local favourite,
the petrochemical company DuPont.
And the pretty town of Wilmington
is used as the tax domicile
for hundreds of multinationals,
including Apple,
Google, Coca-Cola, Ford,
General Electric and J.P. Morgan,
all brought together in this unassuming building
at 1209 Orange Street,
where a legal firm keeps a letterbox for them
for the modest sum of 43 dollars.
The New York Times 5 October 2011.
Steve Jobs, the visionary co-founder of Apple
who transformed our lives has died from cancer.
He was 56 years old.
Social media has been filled
with tributes to this genius creator.
Apple's market capitalisation
was now the highest in the world,
stimulated by the sale of two billion iPhones,
the most expensive smartphones on the market.
Nine years later, there were supercomputers
capable of carrying out
one million billion operations a second.
And algorithms always want more profit.
Welcome to Amazon Go.
Use the Amazon Go app to enter,
then put away your phone and start shopping.
It's really that simple.
Take whatever you like:
anything you pick up
is automatically added to your virtual cart.
If you change your mind about that cupcake,
just put it back.
Our technology will update your virtual cart automatically.
So, how does it work?
We used computer vision, deep learning algorithms
and sensor fusion,
much like you'd find in self-driving cars.
We call it 'just walk out' technology.
Because you don't feel as though you're paying,
you're more prone to impulse buys.
These supermarkets also collect huge amounts of personal data.
And this is just the beginning.
The GAFAM are in fierce competition
to sell dozens of connected objects
which provide a range of helpful services,
from the bathroom to your kids' bedrooms,
but which also record everything that goes on in the home,
including conversations,
which are automatically analysed by algorithms
and regurgitated when the time is right
in the form of commercial offers.
Some might call this an assault on freedom,
or surveillance capitalism,
but the GAFAM don't care much
about what people say or think.
Their only aim is to exploit
all of the available technology
to accumulate ever greater profits,
and will continue to do so
as long as customers continue to pay.
It's as simple as that.
In the meantime, Google has become a behemoth
that has bought out 100 companies
across the tech sector,
a sprawling giant with a stranglehold
on most people's digital lives.
Apple has new headquarters of a size
in keeping with its turnover,
even if its letterbox is still in Delaware.
American capitalism was founded on the quest
for individual profit
and free enterprise.
Within such a system
the concentration of ever more wealth
in the hands of just a few is inevitable.
And for the past 40 years
American capitalism has gone unchecked.
By establishing a new capitalist narrative,
the conservative revolution erased the main protagonist:
the US government, which retains strict control
over the world's leading economic,
technological and military power.
To maintain its position, America is only able to spend
and invest such enormous sums of money
thanks to the taxes paid by the cash cows of the system,
small to medium companies,
the poor and the middle class.
The other notable absentee in this narrative is its sole beneficiary,
the industrial and financial elite,
who grow wealthy in complete secrecy.
The only ones to take the spotlight
are the heroic, visionary geniuses,
whose only purpose is to perpetuate the myth
that in America, anyone can become a billionaire.
Anything that might contradict this narrative
is simply ignored.
SUBTITLES BY PAUL MULLANEY