Adam Curtis

The Kurds had always had a bad time. They were oppressed by the Ottoman empire. Then, at the end of the First World War, they were promised a homeland, but the new Turkish state refused to give them any land, while the British went and created the new state of Iraq and sent aircraft to bomb the Kurds there into submission.

In our age of individualism, we see computers as ways through which we can express our individuality. But the truth is that the computers are really good at spotting the very opposite. The computers can see how similar we are, and they then have the ability to agglomerate us together into groups that have the same behaviours.

We live in a time when all elites, whether on the left or the right, believe in rigid rules that say there is no alternative to the present political and economic system.

Nobody trusts anyone in authority today. It is one of the main features of our age. Wherever you look, there are lying politicians, crooked bankers, corrupt police officers, cheating journalists and double-dealing media barons, sinister children's entertainers, rotten and greedy energy companies, and out-of-control security services.

As well as our relationship with Afghanistan, I am researching the legacy of other European empires - in Africa. We think of those empires as history, but actually, they still haunt our everyday lives in the strangest of ways.

James Goldsmith is important because he used the power of the markets to break up the cosy patrician elite that ran Britain and its industries in the 1950s and '60s. In the process, Goldsmith helped transfer power in this country away from politics and towards the markets and the financial sector.

The problem with wonks is that they can't deal with emotion and feeling, and they don't like stories. It means that they cannot connect at all with the feelings and imaginations of the voters.

Al-Qaida became the new Soviet Union, and in the process, Bin Laden became a demonic, terrifyingly powerful figure brooding in a cave while he controlled and directed the al-Qaida network throughout the world. In this way, a serious but manageable terrorist threat became grossly exaggerated.

I have a suspicion that the politicians' revival of the old behaviourist ideas and techniques will be helped and reinforced by a powerful ally - the machines we have built. The computers.