9 ms·

I’ve watched a couple of Adam Curtis’s films. He is a very skilled artist and they are entertaining, but I find them frustrating. They are smarter than conspir

I’ve watched a couple of Adam Curtis’s films. He is a very skilled artist and they are entertaining, but I find them frustrating. They are smarter than conspiracy theories but they still follow a conspiracy logic. Finding patterns where there are none, spinning coincidences and correspondences into connections. Instead of making a claim about cause and effect he will just juxtapose some images. I think this is a very corrosive style of thinking, and a big problem for society. Adam Curtis makes good movies but it seems bad to get more people practicing this kind of reasoning. If you watch an Adam Curtis movie you’ll get the sensation you learned how things happened, but just try to explain in plain English what you learned afterwards.

monadic3 6y ago
> Finding patterns where there are none What are you referring to?
thewarrior 6y ago
I’d say it’s only partly true as a criticism. His documentary on the emergence of Islamic terrorism for eg is quite eye opening. It takes people through how some of the ideological progenitors were tortured in jails by US backed dictatorships. How they were armed and funded indirectly by the CIA and US backed regimes. And how the existence of these radicals was then used by the neocons to wage two destructive wars that are partly responsible for America’s stagnation. The problem is the length. If he cut the length by 50 % the problem would be solved. I think his documentaries show how complex the causes of some things are.
- genericacct 6y ago
  He's aware of the length issue i believe; he's also aware of the fact that more episodes equal more pay.
  - thewarrior 6y ago
    And I’m aware of the 2x speed button
xkeysc0re 6y ago
>but just try to explain in plain English what you learned afterwards. Okay I'll give it a go for the films of his I've seen. Century of the Self - Cohesive social structures in the West that once helped produce progressive movements have been hollowed out and decayed due to post-WW2 consumerism and an endless emphasis on the "individual" over the community to the benefit of financial elites. Curtis frames this development by following the rise of psychoanalysis and personalized advertising. Hypernormalization - Media and governmental forces have become so intertwined with the rise of social media and big tech that there is a crisis of faith in Western democratic societies in which suspicion and cynicism have filled the gap. This leads to sham democracies and consolidation of power by technocrats who play people's fears and anxieties against one another, much like Vladislav Surkov did in Russia in the late 2000s to help secure Putin's position.
- mcphilip 6y ago
  The Power of Nightmares - Curtis traces back the history of leaders abandoning the approach of holding on to power through a shared vision of a better tomorrow that people can rally around. Curtis using the rise of suicide bombing as an example of a powerful nightmare that leaders can use to gain and keep power by convincing the people that their leadership is the only thing holding back the abyss.
  - mpweiher 6y ago
    That's a good summary of the introduction, but the real stuff is a lot more fun (and awful): Curtis traces two failed socio-political movements, the US neocons and the islamic jihadists, who both have similar and similarly idiotic ideologies. The reason they failed is that they relied on the masses adopting their idiotic ideologies, but the masses simply saw no reason to do that. Then they found each other, and the rest is history. Each movement could use a grotesquely distorted and magnified projection of the other to justify its existence and power, the power of the nightmare represented by The Other. Each bit (the idiocy, the similarities, the parallel failures, early practice with projections, the finding each other, the magnified projection etc.) is fleshed out in great detail.
  - 6y ago
rawTruthHurts 6y ago
I have a hard time understanding the "Adam curtis => conspiracy theories" trope. Everything he talks about is fairly well documented and easy to find in the open.
- mopsi 6y ago
  It's his presentation style, which is difficult to tell apart from conspiracy theories. Conspiracy theories also throw a series of images and narration at you and expect you to make certain logical connections, which may or may not be valid. I think his early style was far less unique, but much stronger in making an argument, see "The Great British Housing Disaster" (1984) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ch5VorymiL4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ch5VorymiL4
- zpeti 6y ago
  You clearly don't follow enough left wing media that has been calling every non-establishment storyline a conspiracy theory and making readers/viewers completely paranoid about them. Also - believe it or not you can actually be entertained by people like Alex Jones without believing what he says. He's incredibly entertaining. IMO in the same way as the Tiger king is entertaining. I hate that these clever intellectuals think that somehow I can't think or read up about things and decide for myself.
  - chillwaves 6y ago
    > left wing media that has been calling every non-establishment storyline a conspiracy theory Example? Also if they are such compelling stories, why do only "non-establishment" media companies run them?
    - breakfastduck 6y ago
      I'm not jumping on the same opinion as the guy you've replied to, but completely ignoring the consideration that news publishers don't run certain compelling stories because they're not allowed to due to political bias of the publisher is extraordinarily naive.
mcphilip 6y ago
My enjoyment of his films comes from appreciating his attempt to thread a narrative through a complex series of events and images. The linked New Yorker article makes it clear that he’s well versed in the postmodern rejection of grand narratives, but it doesn’t stop him from trying. I find his films thought provoking, but I look to them for truth with the same skepticism I have for reading some Nietzsche — I never look for one source to get everything right, I just hope to learn something in the process.
- whatshisface 6y ago
  But isn't a narrative that both the producer and the consumer know is fake guaranteed to be a waste of time? If there's going to be a narrative there should be a real one.
  - devindotcom 6y ago
    The narrative isn't "fake." The worst you could say is it's an oversimplification of the forces and systems at play, and if you've watched any of Curtis's films you'll know that even the simplification is quite complex.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
atoav 6y ago
Curtis would probably argue that seeing no connections where there are connections is equally dangerous.
- blululu 6y ago
  False Positives and False Negatives are both dangerous, but often in different ways. It would be hard to draw a simple equivalence outside of the context. Sometimes not seeing a connection is much more dangerous, than finding a spurious connection. It is a question of whether erroneous action is better than erroneous inaction as well as the relative likely hood of these two. Many times erroneous inaction is better than erroneous inaction since it is easier to fix later - though the likelihood matters. In many systems with hysteresis there is also often risk that a false positive implies a greater risk of a false negative elsewhere (if the system erroneously switches into scanning for 'X' mode, this effectively raises a risk of false negatives scanning for 'Y'). In such cases a false positive would carry greater weight than a false negative.
nabla9 6y ago
> but just try to explain in plain English what you learned Maybe the point is not to learn but to think? It's food for thought. If you make something for audience that consumes information actively (thinks), you can make a very deep, complex and narrow opinionated argument. The viewpoint is not fully developed. Audience neither accept or rejects it (hopefully). (does not apply to specialized fields, like scientific writing with their own standards)
- Bakary 6y ago
  Wouldn't an audience self-identifying as consuming information "actively" inevitably fool themselves into adopting narratives and consider them to be the product of thought?
erentz 6y ago
I don’t remember his stuff being conspiracy theory. More that he is telling of these emergent phenomena he sees and the various forces he sees that created them. Usually forces that aren’t organized, and that take place over long slow timelines. They weren’t unified and coordinated with intent to end up at the final picture he paints.
- frombody 6y ago
  This is the only logical conclusion to draw from his films, IMHO.
EVdotIO 6y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1bX3F7uTrg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1bX3F7uTrg
- currymj 6y ago
  this is a little too mean, but still very funny and gets at the point quite clearly.
- sn41 6y ago
  I was about to post this. The parody is so brilliant that I never took any Curtis documentary seriously after this.
- adolph 6y ago
  Adam Curtis believed that two hundred thousand Guardian readers watching BBC2 could change the world. But this was a fantasy, in fact he had created the televising equivalent of a drunken midnight Wikipedia binge with the <something Brit accented> narrative coherence
mushbino 6y ago
Honestly, I think they're perfect just the way they are. I've seen every one of his documentaries at least a few times and I don't know of anyone who uses his material as a foundation for any of their beliefs. If you're viewing his documentaries as a source of actual news, you're missing the entire purpose. They're a mixture of documentary, social commentary, thought experiment, and art.
viburnum 6y ago
The funny thing is his blog posts are really solid and well-argued. I think his movies are cool but I’ve never actually made it to the end of one, all the drama is too much for me.
herewegoagain2 6y ago
That sounds like almost everything on TV. I can't stand any of it anymore. I think there is not enough awareness of how manipulative moving images really are. It's probably really difficult to make a movie or documentary that is not highly manipulative, intentionally or not.
bparsons 6y ago
That is sort of the point of his recent films. The underlying thesis for his works is that the modern era has divorced us from any sort of narrative about why anything is happening. Instead of understanding personal and global events through the lens of political ideology or some cultural/religious understanding, people just observe these things as fragmented, random events. Most Curtis movies attempt (sometimes successfully, sometimes not) to string together some context about the underlying political and intellectual forces driving these events. It is cultural analysis, so it should not be understood as a straight reporting of facts. You see more of this type of thinking in literary publications than you do in film, but he has proven that the mode of thought transfers well to the medium.
nr2x 6y ago
The article spends a lot of time talking about how the style is dreamlike (with quotes from Adam Moore). For me it’s more like abstract Impressionism than “documentary”. I don’t agree with a lot of his conclusions, but it makes me questions my own assumptions using a different frame and method. Likewise the problem with dismissing things as “conspiracy theories” out of hand is it ignores the fact that yes, the world does have actual conspiracies, and some of them are hidden, while others exist in plain sight. The visible ones are hardest to see.
Fricken 6y ago
The whole meta narrative of an Adam curtis doc is to bring you to awareness of when and where you are being manipulated, presumably to help you become aware of manipulations from less compassionate sources.
bmitc 6y ago
I get it to a degree, but it's a very dangerous line of thinking to write off systems level thinking as conspiracies. Stafford Beer points out, as an analogy in Designing Freedom, that the idea of an all encompassing force that affects everyone on Earth is hard to fathom, and yet gravity is an accepted idea today, where it wasn't at the start. Making connections between wide ranging events, people, and ideas doesn't make a conspiracy. Adam Curtis' documentaries warn us against systemic effects, and they are warnings that what we're presented with isn't always the truth. It's basically what Chomsky has warned about for most of his career.
- maxerickson 6y ago
  that the idea of an all encompassing force that affects everyone on Earth is hard to fathom I think if these other theories had explanations as well crystallized as the action of gravity, the other poster would not object to presenting them. It's not an interesting analogy, it's a trick to legitimize hand waving about other things. (we may not fully understand the mechanisms by which gravity acts, but we understand the effect it has quite well, to the point where we can GPS for instance, because we can precisely account for the very small differences in the way time passes in orbit)
  - bmitc 6y ago
    It’s not a trick. It’s that we don’t know how to study these things yet, but that shouldn’t be an excuse for throwing our hands up in the air and not trying to investigate them. Gravity wasn’t always well crystallized. It took us time to develop and understand it. I highly recommend Stafford Beer’s writings and the Designing Freedom book and/or lectures. https://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/the-1973-cbc-massey-lectures-designing-freedom-1.2946819 https://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/the-1973-cbc-massey-lectures-...
    - shaunxcode 6y ago
      I concur and am also a stafford beer fan. I also dig Adam Curtis body of work - however his demonization of cybernetics is frustrating.
coldtea 6y ago
>They are smarter than conspiracy theories but they still follow a conspiracy logic. Finding patterns where there are none, spinning coincidences and correspondences into connections. Instead of making a claim about cause and effect he will just juxtapose some images. Thinking for yourself requires being able to make claims without having mapped an exact cause and effect - even without having evidence at hand. It's about understanding connections and patterns and who benefits. As for the "actual proof" sometimes those who you depend to provide it (and only hold it) are either your open enemies or are supposedly friendly (e.g. your government or Big Tech) but profit from hiding it. People who can't connect the dots for themselves are taken advantage of (by governments, "experts" with conflicts of interests, media pundits, etc.) and are gullible. People who over-connect the dots are conspiracy theorists (and might be gullible to different things). One needs to hit the sweet spot (which is not that narrow, your theories don't have to be perfect, just useful to predict what will happen and understand whose your friend or your enemy).
- mistermann 6y ago
  > One needs to hit the sweet spot (which is not that narrow, your theories don't have to be perfect, just useful to predict what will happen and understand whose your friend or your enemy). I think this is about right. I think of it as: "conspiracy theorists" (those who actually match the silly strawman characterization) and "anti-conspiracy-theorists" both suffer from the very same problems: - loose epistemology...an undisciplined, over-eagerness to form illogical conclusions without sufficient evidence to substantiate them - not being mindful of the fact that there is a very real (and very important) distinction between one's perception of reality and reality itself
pan69 6y ago
> If you watch an Adam Curtis movie you’ll get the sensation you learned how things happened, but just try to explain in plain English what you learned afterwards. I think this is exactly what Curtis is trying to instill on his viewers. The sense that the world we live in is a complex world. It made sense when you were watching it but afterwards you have difficulty explaining what you actually saw. Just like the real world.
apple_innocent 6y ago
"In "Can't Get You Out of My Head," Curtis plays a long montage of talking heads on U.S. cable news repeating the phrase "the walls are closing in," during the final days of the Mueller investigation. He accuses media organizations, including the Times and magazines like this one, of profiting from the frenzy and uncertainty of the past four years, obsessing over Trump's personal corruption and mendacity rather than the alienation and anger that brought about his Presidency in the first place." The question I have of Curtis is whether he starts with a premise and then finds video to support it, or whether he derives his ideas from watching random archive video, or both. It would be fascinating to watch a "making of" documentary that shows how he finds the right archival footage. Ideas like the above about MSM are the easy, obvious ones. It may reinforce what we already feel we know. But his films are also filled with deeper reflections that are less obvious, which he can illustrate with obscure, memorable visuals. If his films did not touch on the obvious ideas they might be too alienating, more like avant-garde art film. If they only addressed obvious ideas the films might be too boring, more like documentaries on Netflix. He somehow finds the right balance. But I think these overarching general theories tying all these disparate clips together that he presents via voiceover... the "leaps" as this article describes them... these are what make his films worth the watch. He has a true talent for that. He stretches but is careful not to go too far. That is what make his films unique, IMO. His "general theories" are similar in effect to conspiracy theories perhaps. They can be very appealing to certain receptive audiences. The big difference is the former seem to be designed to make you think while the latter (along with political correctness) seem to be designed to relieve you of thinking and appeal straight to emotion. His films always seem to suggest we cannot remove ourselves as factors in any outcome. We have to take some amount of responsibility. We cannot view ourselves as pure victims nor others as sole culprits. As for this article, he reveals no overt objection to populism. The title of this film is an homage to the author of "Bullshit Jobs", a self-described anarchist.
- polytely 6y ago
  >The question I have of Curtis is whether he starts with a premise and then finds video to support it, or whether he derives his ideas from watching random archive video, or both. It would be fascinating to watch a "making of" documentary that shows how he finds the right archival footage. You should read the article then, as it is discussed in there. He has access to the complete BBC archives and just scrolls through material on fast forwards until he stumbles onto interesting threads that he saves and then later finds patterns in.
2OEH8eoCRo0 6y ago
I think everyone thinks of Curtis this way yet they're still interesting.

monadic3 6y ago

> Finding patterns where there are none What are you referring to?

thewarrior 6y ago

I’d say it’s only partly true as a criticism. His documentary on the emergence of Islamic terrorism for eg is quite eye opening. It takes people through how some of the ideological progenitors were tortured in jails by US backed dictatorships. How they were armed and funded indirectly by the CIA and US backed regimes. And how the existence of these radicals was then used by the neocons to wage two destructive wars that are partly responsible for America’s stagnation. The problem is the length. If he cut the length by 50 % the problem would be solved. I think his documentaries show how complex the causes of some things are.

genericacct 6y ago
He's aware of the length issue i believe; he's also aware of the fact that more episodes equal more pay.
- thewarrior 6y ago
  And I’m aware of the 2x speed button

xkeysc0re 6y ago

>but just try to explain in plain English what you learned afterwards. Okay I'll give it a go for the films of his I've seen. Century of the Self - Cohesive social structures in the West that once helped produce progressive movements have been hollowed out and decayed due to post-WW2 consumerism and an endless emphasis on the "individual" over the community to the benefit of financial elites. Curtis frames this development by following the rise of psychoanalysis and personalized advertising. Hypernormalization - Media and governmental forces have become so intertwined with the rise of social media and big tech that there is a crisis of faith in Western democratic societies in which suspicion and cynicism have filled the gap. This leads to sham democracies and consolidation of power by technocrats who play people's fears and anxieties against one another, much like Vladislav Surkov did in Russia in the late 2000s to help secure Putin's position.

mcphilip 6y ago
The Power of Nightmares - Curtis traces back the history of leaders abandoning the approach of holding on to power through a shared vision of a better tomorrow that people can rally around. Curtis using the rise of suicide bombing as an example of a powerful nightmare that leaders can use to gain and keep power by convincing the people that their leadership is the only thing holding back the abyss.
- mpweiher 6y ago
  That's a good summary of the introduction, but the real stuff is a lot more fun (and awful): Curtis traces two failed socio-political movements, the US neocons and the islamic jihadists, who both have similar and similarly idiotic ideologies. The reason they failed is that they relied on the masses adopting their idiotic ideologies, but the masses simply saw no reason to do that. Then they found each other, and the rest is history. Each movement could use a grotesquely distorted and magnified projection of the other to justify its existence and power, the power of the nightmare represented by The Other. Each bit (the idiocy, the similarities, the parallel failures, early practice with projections, the finding each other, the magnified projection etc.) is fleshed out in great detail.
- 6y ago

rawTruthHurts 6y ago

I have a hard time understanding the "Adam curtis => conspiracy theories" trope. Everything he talks about is fairly well documented and easy to find in the open.

mopsi 6y ago
It's his presentation style, which is difficult to tell apart from conspiracy theories. Conspiracy theories also throw a series of images and narration at you and expect you to make certain logical connections, which may or may not be valid. I think his early style was far less unique, but much stronger in making an argument, see "The Great British Housing Disaster" (1984) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ch5VorymiL4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ch5VorymiL4
zpeti 6y ago
You clearly don't follow enough left wing media that has been calling every non-establishment storyline a conspiracy theory and making readers/viewers completely paranoid about them. Also - believe it or not you can actually be entertained by people like Alex Jones without believing what he says. He's incredibly entertaining. IMO in the same way as the Tiger king is entertaining. I hate that these clever intellectuals think that somehow I can't think or read up about things and decide for myself.
- chillwaves 6y ago
  > left wing media that has been calling every non-establishment storyline a conspiracy theory Example? Also if they are such compelling stories, why do only "non-establishment" media companies run them?
  - breakfastduck 6y ago
    I'm not jumping on the same opinion as the guy you've replied to, but completely ignoring the consideration that news publishers don't run certain compelling stories because they're not allowed to due to political bias of the publisher is extraordinarily naive.

mcphilip 6y ago

My enjoyment of his films comes from appreciating his attempt to thread a narrative through a complex series of events and images. The linked New Yorker article makes it clear that he’s well versed in the postmodern rejection of grand narratives, but it doesn’t stop him from trying. I find his films thought provoking, but I look to them for truth with the same skepticism I have for reading some Nietzsche — I never look for one source to get everything right, I just hope to learn something in the process.

whatshisface 6y ago
But isn't a narrative that both the producer and the consumer know is fake guaranteed to be a waste of time? If there's going to be a narrative there should be a real one.
- devindotcom 6y ago
  The narrative isn't "fake." The worst you could say is it's an oversimplification of the forces and systems at play, and if you've watched any of Curtis's films you'll know that even the simplification is quite complex.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

atoav 6y ago

Curtis would probably argue that seeing no connections where there are connections is equally dangerous.

blululu 6y ago
False Positives and False Negatives are both dangerous, but often in different ways. It would be hard to draw a simple equivalence outside of the context. Sometimes not seeing a connection is much more dangerous, than finding a spurious connection. It is a question of whether erroneous action is better than erroneous inaction as well as the relative likely hood of these two. Many times erroneous inaction is better than erroneous inaction since it is easier to fix later - though the likelihood matters. In many systems with hysteresis there is also often risk that a false positive implies a greater risk of a false negative elsewhere (if the system erroneously switches into scanning for 'X' mode, this effectively raises a risk of false negatives scanning for 'Y'). In such cases a false positive would carry greater weight than a false negative.

nabla9 6y ago

> but just try to explain in plain English what you learned Maybe the point is not to learn but to think? It's food for thought. If you make something for audience that consumes information actively (thinks), you can make a very deep, complex and narrow opinionated argument. The viewpoint is not fully developed. Audience neither accept or rejects it (hopefully). (does not apply to specialized fields, like scientific writing with their own standards)

Bakary 6y ago
Wouldn't an audience self-identifying as consuming information "actively" inevitably fool themselves into adopting narratives and consider them to be the product of thought?

erentz 6y ago

I don’t remember his stuff being conspiracy theory. More that he is telling of these emergent phenomena he sees and the various forces he sees that created them. Usually forces that aren’t organized, and that take place over long slow timelines. They weren’t unified and coordinated with intent to end up at the final picture he paints.

frombody 6y ago
This is the only logical conclusion to draw from his films, IMHO.

EVdotIO 6y ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1bX3F7uTrg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1bX3F7uTrg

currymj 6y ago
this is a little too mean, but still very funny and gets at the point quite clearly.
sn41 6y ago
I was about to post this. The parody is so brilliant that I never took any Curtis documentary seriously after this.
adolph 6y ago
Adam Curtis believed that two hundred thousand Guardian readers watching BBC2 could change the world. But this was a fantasy, in fact he had created the televising equivalent of a drunken midnight Wikipedia binge with the <something Brit accented> narrative coherence

mushbino 6y ago

Honestly, I think they're perfect just the way they are. I've seen every one of his documentaries at least a few times and I don't know of anyone who uses his material as a foundation for any of their beliefs. If you're viewing his documentaries as a source of actual news, you're missing the entire purpose. They're a mixture of documentary, social commentary, thought experiment, and art.

viburnum 6y ago

The funny thing is his blog posts are really solid and well-argued. I think his movies are cool but I’ve never actually made it to the end of one, all the drama is too much for me.

herewegoagain2 6y ago

That sounds like almost everything on TV. I can't stand any of it anymore. I think there is not enough awareness of how manipulative moving images really are. It's probably really difficult to make a movie or documentary that is not highly manipulative, intentionally or not.

bparsons 6y ago

That is sort of the point of his recent films. The underlying thesis for his works is that the modern era has divorced us from any sort of narrative about why anything is happening. Instead of understanding personal and global events through the lens of political ideology or some cultural/religious understanding, people just observe these things as fragmented, random events. Most Curtis movies attempt (sometimes successfully, sometimes not) to string together some context about the underlying political and intellectual forces driving these events. It is cultural analysis, so it should not be understood as a straight reporting of facts. You see more of this type of thinking in literary publications than you do in film, but he has proven that the mode of thought transfers well to the medium.

nr2x 6y ago

The article spends a lot of time talking about how the style is dreamlike (with quotes from Adam Moore). For me it’s more like abstract Impressionism than “documentary”. I don’t agree with a lot of his conclusions, but it makes me questions my own assumptions using a different frame and method. Likewise the problem with dismissing things as “conspiracy theories” out of hand is it ignores the fact that yes, the world does have actual conspiracies, and some of them are hidden, while others exist in plain sight. The visible ones are hardest to see.

Fricken 6y ago

The whole meta narrative of an Adam curtis doc is to bring you to awareness of when and where you are being manipulated, presumably to help you become aware of manipulations from less compassionate sources.

bmitc 6y ago

I get it to a degree, but it's a very dangerous line of thinking to write off systems level thinking as conspiracies. Stafford Beer points out, as an analogy in Designing Freedom, that the idea of an all encompassing force that affects everyone on Earth is hard to fathom, and yet gravity is an accepted idea today, where it wasn't at the start. Making connections between wide ranging events, people, and ideas doesn't make a conspiracy. Adam Curtis' documentaries warn us against systemic effects, and they are warnings that what we're presented with isn't always the truth. It's basically what Chomsky has warned about for most of his career.

maxerickson 6y ago
that the idea of an all encompassing force that affects everyone on Earth is hard to fathom I think if these other theories had explanations as well crystallized as the action of gravity, the other poster would not object to presenting them. It's not an interesting analogy, it's a trick to legitimize hand waving about other things. (we may not fully understand the mechanisms by which gravity acts, but we understand the effect it has quite well, to the point where we can GPS for instance, because we can precisely account for the very small differences in the way time passes in orbit)
- bmitc 6y ago
  It’s not a trick. It’s that we don’t know how to study these things yet, but that shouldn’t be an excuse for throwing our hands up in the air and not trying to investigate them. Gravity wasn’t always well crystallized. It took us time to develop and understand it. I highly recommend Stafford Beer’s writings and the Designing Freedom book and/or lectures. https://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/the-1973-cbc-massey-lectures-designing-freedom-1.2946819 https://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/the-1973-cbc-massey-lectures-...
  - shaunxcode 6y ago
    I concur and am also a stafford beer fan. I also dig Adam Curtis body of work - however his demonization of cybernetics is frustrating.

coldtea 6y ago

>They are smarter than conspiracy theories but they still follow a conspiracy logic. Finding patterns where there are none, spinning coincidences and correspondences into connections. Instead of making a claim about cause and effect he will just juxtapose some images. Thinking for yourself requires being able to make claims without having mapped an exact cause and effect - even without having evidence at hand. It's about understanding connections and patterns and who benefits. As for the "actual proof" sometimes those who you depend to provide it (and only hold it) are either your open enemies or are supposedly friendly (e.g. your government or Big Tech) but profit from hiding it. People who can't connect the dots for themselves are taken advantage of (by governments, "experts" with conflicts of interests, media pundits, etc.) and are gullible. People who over-connect the dots are conspiracy theorists (and might be gullible to different things). One needs to hit the sweet spot (which is not that narrow, your theories don't have to be perfect, just useful to predict what will happen and understand whose your friend or your enemy).

mistermann 6y ago
> One needs to hit the sweet spot (which is not that narrow, your theories don't have to be perfect, just useful to predict what will happen and understand whose your friend or your enemy). I think this is about right. I think of it as: "conspiracy theorists" (those who actually match the silly strawman characterization) and "anti-conspiracy-theorists" both suffer from the very same problems: - loose epistemology...an undisciplined, over-eagerness to form illogical conclusions without sufficient evidence to substantiate them - not being mindful of the fact that there is a very real (and very important) distinction between one's perception of reality and reality itself

pan69 6y ago

> If you watch an Adam Curtis movie you’ll get the sensation you learned how things happened, but just try to explain in plain English what you learned afterwards. I think this is exactly what Curtis is trying to instill on his viewers. The sense that the world we live in is a complex world. It made sense when you were watching it but afterwards you have difficulty explaining what you actually saw. Just like the real world.

apple_innocent 6y ago

"In "Can't Get You Out of My Head," Curtis plays a long montage of talking heads on U.S. cable news repeating the phrase "the walls are closing in," during the final days of the Mueller investigation. He accuses media organizations, including the Times and magazines like this one, of profiting from the frenzy and uncertainty of the past four years, obsessing over Trump's personal corruption and mendacity rather than the alienation and anger that brought about his Presidency in the first place." The question I have of Curtis is whether he starts with a premise and then finds video to support it, or whether he derives his ideas from watching random archive video, or both. It would be fascinating to watch a "making of" documentary that shows how he finds the right archival footage. Ideas like the above about MSM are the easy, obvious ones. It may reinforce what we already feel we know. But his films are also filled with deeper reflections that are less obvious, which he can illustrate with obscure, memorable visuals. If his films did not touch on the obvious ideas they might be too alienating, more like avant-garde art film. If they only addressed obvious ideas the films might be too boring, more like documentaries on Netflix. He somehow finds the right balance. But I think these overarching general theories tying all these disparate clips together that he presents via voiceover... the "leaps" as this article describes them... these are what make his films worth the watch. He has a true talent for that. He stretches but is careful not to go too far. That is what make his films unique, IMO. His "general theories" are similar in effect to conspiracy theories perhaps. They can be very appealing to certain receptive audiences. The big difference is the former seem to be designed to make you think while the latter (along with political correctness) seem to be designed to relieve you of thinking and appeal straight to emotion. His films always seem to suggest we cannot remove ourselves as factors in any outcome. We have to take some amount of responsibility. We cannot view ourselves as pure victims nor others as sole culprits. As for this article, he reveals no overt objection to populism. The title of this film is an homage to the author of "Bullshit Jobs", a self-described anarchist.

polytely 6y ago
>The question I have of Curtis is whether he starts with a premise and then finds video to support it, or whether he derives his ideas from watching random archive video, or both. It would be fascinating to watch a "making of" documentary that shows how he finds the right archival footage. You should read the article then, as it is discussed in there. He has access to the complete BBC archives and just scrolls through material on fast forwards until he stumbles onto interesting threads that he saves and then later finds patterns in.

2OEH8eoCRo0 6y ago

I think everyone thinks of Curtis this way yet they're still interesting.