If, thirty years ago, you would have told me that in 2013 I would be living in a neo-fascist U.S. ruled by an aspiring military dictator born in East Africa I would have laughed, and laughed hard. If you would have also told me that I would be looking to London-based British filmmakers backed by a nationalized Russian news network streaming for free on U.S. based computer servers, for quality documentaries, I would have laughed all day long.

Well, I am laughing after all, but shaking my head as well. When U.S. based news networks offer propaganda I am left to scrounge around alternative sources like Vice, Russia Today, and a few cable channels for real investigative reporting that does not recognize the Washington Propaganda Ministry as the ultimate source for all truth and good.

At 3 am this morning, after doing a Rip-Van-Winkle imitation, I crawled off my mattress on the floor to begin ghost writing another chapter in someone else’s book—a book that will actually make money—and decided to warm up my brain with some news, hopefully served up by some Manhattan stripper recruited by Czar Putin to broadcast to American dissidents like me.

I was disappointed to find some hairy-arsed Brit giving the rundown on the Syrian Civil War. Then I saw an ad for a documentary, which popped right up half way in: Fear With a Thousand Eyes, about the future of urban surveillance.

The documentary promised a lot and delivered much more. I did not catch Parts 1 or 2. Not a Russian or American was in sight. This was filmed in London and Germany as a series of interviews with cyber specialists and social commentators.

The subjects included data mining, library tracking, ubiquitous computers [including human implantation], the parallel virtual world that now mirrors physical cities, drones, the value of information specificity, facial recognition extrapolation [crime prediction based on facial expressions among pedestrians], locative services, a study of the Google search query process, and more scary stuff.

The creepiest guy was the German cyber war engineer who discussed how vulnerable the stock markets will become to ‘skilled attackers’; that being the use that military cyber programs will gravitate to as if by inertia when the parent military is not actively at war. The narrator concludes, “In the next attack on the financial world no towers will fall.”

There is more though, in less than an hour of film. A study of the upscale Canary Wharf enclave in London serves as a model for privatized urban space, predictive of an urban future without public spaces where ‘rights’ may not be enjoyed, but serving as a type of privately militarized non-space buffer between the citizens and the government.

A description of how computers will be used to track people by data building based on their past, and then making a current action judgment based on that person’s possible future actions, is downright chilling. The modern airport is suggested as the operational model for future urban spaces. With the specter of rising oil prices potentially pushing suburbanites back into urban zones I found this assertion chilling as a person, but thrilling as a sci-fi writer.

I would like to note that on no U.S. produced documentary that I have viewed over the past two years have I heard concerns for personal liberty so often raised by a narrative voice as I have in this piece, which was essentially funded by order of some Soviet thug who likes to ride his horse shirtless with an assault rifle.

Listen Putin, I’m a late night guy. Fire these British dudes and get some more babes for the am shift. Keep that documentary crew. They apparently know that you’re too busy to watch what they’re doing with your blood money.