I really enjoyed this documentary when I saw it, and also ended up watching Bitter Lake and (half of) Century of the Self. The concepts were quite bold and the

I really enjoyed this documentary when I saw it, and also ended up watching Bitter Lake and (half of) Century of the Self. The concepts were quite bold and the seemed nearly-self-evident. But then I asked myself, "so why am I just only now hearing about all this?" as a heuristic of the measure of the sufficient strength of supporting evidence. It dawned upon me that some of the techniques of desire-manufacturing/advertising that used psychological techniques, as mentioned in Century of the Self, were also used to compel the viewer about the curated historical web of causality. And I really think that Hanlon's razor supplants to much of the powers that be mentioned movie. I almost feel like this movie really displays the enouement of neoliberalism: nothing ever changes in this world any more (thus we're near "the end of history"), we're stuck in a massive deadlocked monetary system that has only "unrealistic" alternatives, "humanitarian interventions" in conflicts are necessary crusades and we cede that they may have the same power dynamics of imperial invasions but since they are done in the name of freedom and democracy they are to be absolved for their ambitions, and so on. I think that in that regard, the documentary falls short of exploring things that are subversive to hegemony. I was unsatisfied with the idea of watching a powerful documentary about hypernormalisation without searching for a critical explanation of the hypernormalisation of the documentary maker, too. Here's one such: That said, I did genuinely enjoy the movie and appreciate that it inspired me to reflect on modern history. To counterbalance Curtis' fairly conservative view of modernity, this talk by the late Mark Fisher is really good: the slow cancellation of the future [1] [0] http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/adam-curtiss-essential-counterhistories http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/adam-curtiss-e... [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCgkLICTskQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCgkLICTskQ