September 29, 2019

Surveillance, Conspiracy, and Secrets from the Archives

45 minutes

"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

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By BBC Radio 4

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