In 2016, under the new British Rights Act (England and Wales,) the deregulated BBC was bought by a conglomerate of investors promising to fund the organisation on the basis of subtle targeted advertisements based on the latest GoogleHome technology, which had been implanted in all new televisions in line with the new Home Security legislation.
This ensured that individually-tailored content could be broadcast directly to televisions, as it had on browsers for years before. Viewing habits were also providing more data than had previously been available through the two-way system, which delivered statistics of channel, length of viewing, sitting position, interaction, telephone and email communications directly to the ministry of information. This was processed by Baidu, having been outsourced to China in a move that slashed millions of pounds from the UK's defence budget.
Based on these metrics, plus Amazon Prime data, media was able to pinpoint the exact times of day that individuals were most open to emotionally-charged content, news, movies, chatshows and cartoons.
To the surprise of many analysts, it was also found that as most people by now were checking phones, with browsers open on tablets, wearables and laptops at the same time as the television was on, the actual linguistic content of the majority of shows was not as important as the tonal information within the speech.The formants were discovered that delivered the exact frequencies found to effect the brainwave activity associated with emotion, and sound engineers across the UK were mobilised to work on zero hours contracts in order to EQ the output accordingly.
This led to a reappraisal of past programmes, which were re-edited accordingly with the words replaced by mellifluously talented voice artists; those who could make the equivalent of a swannee whistle were in great demand for clip shows, the news was delivered by sombre-sounding gibberish-scatters and sport was soundtracked entirely by cats being poked by sharp sticks.
Concurrently, social media networks were lauded as the New Wealth Creators for their now-valuable databases which they were free to sell under new user contracts which nobody read. Facebook took full advantage of this by their new Free Forever scheme, which its estimated 6 billion users clicked through all ten pages before its implementation.
This was prime real estate on a worldwide level, which re-started the BRIC countries' stalled economies, which were rebooted to take advantage of the vast swathes of new user data. Sale of user-mapped location and consumption data took Facebook's shares to an all-time high, and the Tory government duly invested eight billion pounds per year in the company under the new 'Together Better' banner, which did not include the Scottish or Northern Irish governments.
By 2018 the UK's 'closed tunnel' scheme was in full action; every car under the value of 20,000 was turned back at the country's ports, unless the driver could prove a bank account held more than that in UK-taxable savings. This brought a huge increase in zero hours contracts for newly-employed Port Checkers, who had to provide their own visibility jackets and truncheons and assemble in special holding pubs hourly as shift changes occurred. All people of working age were placed on unpaid constant standby within a half-hour radius of the ports, in case of high volume of traffic, which for the first time brought the unemployment statistics down under half a million people.
This initially brought claims that these individuals were in fact civil servants, to which the government moved swiftly to point out that technically the workers were signed up to GazProm, which owned the port contract and was incorporated in Russia. In return for their labour, that company provided cheap fracking equipment to the UK.
The Trident system, long-derided by opponents of the government prior to the Dissent Act (Control of Extremism), was now considered to be one of the world's foremost anti-war mechanisms and was voted 'Man of the Year' at the Peace Defense Awards (formerly World Arms Dealers of Somalia.) To celebrate, the government called a special Hour Off, during which the population was encouraged not to assemble in large crowds but to stay at work and watch the ceremony, which was broadcast on all televisual, wearable, tablet, computer and implants in lieu of other programming.
In line with the Dissent Act (Control of Extremism), the remaining half a million technically unemployed people were pronounced legally dead, for the purposes of ease of statistics. A new initiative from the Ministry of Family enabled previously dead relatives to be re-labelled as technically alive if they had been employed and paying tax for over 10 years prior to their demise. These new 're-lifed' citizens added to the government's figures of negative unemployment, which by 2019 had soared to an unprecedented minus 20 million.
In 2020, the government announced via its new British Broadcasting Conservatives channel that the budget deficit had been wiped out, by virtue of its new accounting software courtesy of Alan Sugar's Amstrad RoboTheft. This incredible boost in technology allowed the government to directly redistribute funds from its budgets toward its new WealthHealth system, which replaced the NHS with a series of Soma Centres in which the ill, elderly, infirm, poor and ugly were medicated with ultra-cheap medicinal opium and stacked in boxes around nuclear waste in the Isle of Man.
Workers were imported from third world countries like Wales to facilitate the project and due to the high radiation content were released into their communities as cleansing agents, particularly in households that Baidu had identified as having left-leaning values.
