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The antidote to civilisational collapse – An interview with Adam Curtis (2018)

171 points by marton78 6y ago

eecc 6y ago
Curtis just published a new doc: https://youtu.be/MHFrhIAj0ME https://youtu.be/MHFrhIAj0ME
- MaheshC 6y ago
  Which is really good. Recommend.
  - sonthonax 6y ago
    Depending on your point of view. I felt it was a self indulgent sprawling mess. I felt that I watched a random collection of undergraduate essays, which were then stitched together with music that Curtis felt expressed the zeitigest (which he delusionally thought substituted for an actual point or connection between subjects). I watched a bit of the documentary with a friend of mine who’s a pretty senior diplomat; when Curtis came to Iraq, she exclaimed with palatable frustration “this is the most incredible 15 minute oversimplification of what happened”. Curtis documentaries loose much of their lustre when you know what he’s talking about. He becomes less of a BBC patrician who gives you a secret insight into the world of Oxford educated intellectuals; and more of an opinionated old windbag. At the end of an episode, I told my friend “I feel like I’ve been man-splained to for the last hour [and I’m a man]!”.
    - aaaaarghZombies 6y ago
      Have you seen the time span it covers? I don't think calling it a simplification as a criticism is fair, do you want a 1:1 mapping? Also the sprawling messiness isn't just the aesthetic, it's the thesis.
      - sonthonax 6y ago
        Yes. I watched the documentary. I don’t expect to agree 100%, but that doesn’t mean have I to keel over laughing at its chasms. In regards to Iraq, his opinion that Gertrude Bell’s influence led NATO to give tribal sheiks disproportionate power in the new Iraq was a hilarious simplification. It’s just an absurd narrative chasm, that ignored so much about what happened then. An in regards to the civil war in Iraq, that didn’t boil over because NATO stopped paying the militias off. There was so much at play. The China stuff was interesting, but uncontroversial. That stuff is quite an accessible history. The archive footage was fun though. It just felt like I was watching a number of different documentaries. One about race relations and trans rights; and one about China. It all just would have been better as standalone works. He could have even edited things differently, each episode covering a certain subject. He maybe could have had a concluding thesis that was better than “China: it’s not all that it’s cracked up to be”.
        not1ofU 6y ago
        I agree. I lapped up alot of his stuff, without a second thought. After watching a deconstruction video of hypernormalisation I was left thinking I had been suckered again "loose change style" I was recommeded to watch his lastest release (of which the full 8.something hours is available directly on Curtis' own you tube channel) I watched the first 20 / 30 minutes and turned off. It felt like how I imagine brain-washing works. Lots of weird (and jarring) footage un-related to the voice over, werid music (not required for what is supposed to be a documentary IMO) and jumped from topic to topic without any cohesive thread or reason. No longer a fan. Edit: Grammar
- DoingIsLearning 6y ago
  On a side note, did anything change on youtube itself or am I being A/B guinea pigged? I use to be able to watch youtube videos without any youtube app just using /embed/<video-id> on a browser or mpv. Now it seems every link is broken unless you go through there data hoarding app? (On android not desktop)
  - jahnu 6y ago
    If I watch through the Brave browser on my phone I never see ads. Through the offical app I have to watch the same two ads for a month or two before the video starts and then again after 15 or 20 minutes. It's really bad.
    - DoingIsLearning 6y ago
      But that's ad blocking, that's not what I meant exactly, that always works. My issue is 'embeddable' links are no longer playable for me? I can play the video in their app or on the browser after a million data consent forms.
    - sacomo 6y ago
      Also, no ads on YT, or just about any other site, in FF with the uBlock origin plugin.
  - Sander_Marechal 6y ago
    Give NewPipe a try (https://newpipe.net/ https://newpipe.net/). I've been using it for several months and works really well. Only thing I haven't figured out yet is streaming/casting to the youtube app on my TV.
- jahnu 6y ago
  Here he is in interview about that one https://www.vice.com/en/article/4ad8db/adam-curtis-charlie-brooker-cant-get-you-out-of-my-head https://www.vice.com/en/article/4ad8db/adam-curtis-charlie-b...
jahnu 6y ago
Nearly all his documentaries appear to be available to watch here https://thoughtmaybe.com/by/adam-curtis/ https://thoughtmaybe.com/by/adam-curtis/ They are truly excellent. It's really worth going back to some of the early and mid career films. E.g. The Mayfair Set and the ever relevant The Century of the Self.
herodoturtle 6y ago
From the article: > in the 80s everyone from the top to the bottom of Soviet society knew that it wasn’t working, knew that it was corrupt, knew that the bosses were looting the system, knew that the politicians had no alternative vision. And they knew that the bosses knew they knew that. Everyone knew it was fake, but because no one had any alternative vision for a different kind of society, they just accepted this sense of total fakeness as normal. This article's explanation of Hypernormalisation (defined in the excerpt above) was quite interesting to read. Sadly I see this happening quite a lot in South Africa - a country that 25 years ago was filled with much hope and excitement for the future - but now is on the precipice of rapid economic decline due to similar reasons outlined above (primarily corrupt politicians but also an economy ravaged by Covid). That being said there are still many South Africans that are nervously excited about the country's future - I guess we just need that alternative vision to drive us forward? As an aside, I know Elon Musk's ambitious projects get mixed responses here on HN, but one thing he keeps referring to (and which resonates quite strongly with me) is his vision for an alternative future which excites us and inspires us.
- RhodesianHunter 6y ago
  The older I get the more that I think that our particular form of government or policies (left/right, socialist/capitalist, authoritarian/libertarian) are less important for overall wellbeing and happiness than stamping out corruption.
  - kqr 6y ago
    This should not come as a surprise to anyone and I think it's fairly easy to show this link, too. Whenever I'm asked what the best part of living in my country is, I unhesitatingly answer "low corruption". It is the source from which all other nice things flow.
    - Gupie 6y ago
      But what is the cause of low or high corruption in a society? One method is a free press, which can highlight corruption, along with free elections where corrupt politicians can get kicked out. Is there an alternative?
frereubu 6y ago
This is so much better than his films. I used to find his films exciting, but the more I thought about them the more I found them conceptually soupy and completely lacking in rigour - just finding narratives that felt satisying. When he's challenged by someone smart like this he's able to articulate his ideas in a much better way than in film. This interview has raised my opinion of him again. He's an interesting thinker, but I really think film is in fact the one medium he shouldn't use because it allows him to weave unchallenged grand narratives that don't really stack up.
- neartheplain 6y ago
  You may appreciate this parody and deconstruction of his filmmaking style: https://youtube.com/watch?v=x1bX3F7uTrg https://youtube.com/watch?v=x1bX3F7uTrg
  - paganel 6y ago
    Really interesting, there's a smart comment in there about capitalism appropriating its critics and their criticisms. Now the question is: is Curtis the person first doing the appropriation of capitalist criticism and is this guy actually doing an appropriation of the appropriation of capitalist criticism? Again, I find it very interesting nonetheless.
- sirsinsalot 6y ago
  I see his documentaries more as art than fact, that makes them easier to consume and be provoked by.
  - jonnyone 6y ago
    I kind of see all documentaries this way. All documentaries rely so much on manipulation to drive a narrative that it's difficult to classify it as anything other than art. They can still be informative for sure, but I will never watch a documentary and think I've done any kind of research.
DoingIsLearning 6y ago
Does anybody else get this feeling of fear and hopelessness watching his documentaries. It really feels like a mental hangover, not knowing what actions to take to make things better for us a society?
- alexf95 6y ago
  Yes somewhat this is also true for me. However I think this "HyperNormalisation" has to happen in some way, because if people would constantly worry about how bad and corrupt the world/systems are it wouldnt help anyone going forward because not everyone has the chance to make a change.
- hkt 6y ago
  They actually leave me quite hopeful because they reinforce my view of the world and are popular. What I'm reasonably convinced of is that when millennials and younger cohorts start to tip the electoral scales in 15 years time, there will be an outbreak of harmony and consensus on an awful lot of things, and people like Curtis will have shaped really quite a lot of that.
  - Mediterraneo10 6y ago
    I don’t see grounds for optimism. People believed in a bright future that would come when the generation of May '68 got more involved in voting, and were able for stand for election themselves. Yet what happened was those idealistic young people became less radical in the interim, and many signed up to a vogue of mercenary privatization and bourgeois urban development that was virtually the opposite of their earlier views.
- DoreenMichele 6y ago
  I've never seen any of them. I've never heard of this guy before. But I ended up skimming most of the article because the tone and direction of the piece in no way match what I expected from the title. I can well imagine his documentaries are probably pretty depressing. He seems to have only complaints, not solutions. He seems to describe where we are and how we got here but he seems to have absolutely nothing to say about how to go from where we are to something better. It's not my cup of tea at all. I was hoping for something meaty and meaningful to add to my existing set of ideas and tools and ended up being all "Yikes! I don't think it would be good for my mental health to drink too deeply of this stuff." So I skimmed, hoping I was wrong, hoping it would get better and grab me later. Hoping I would trip across something that would hook me and tell me to start over, that it will be worth the slow start. I never ran into that.
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kumarvvr 6y ago
Love his documentaries. I highly recommend everyone watch them.
sebmellen 6y ago
Gosh, really accurate. Reminds me of Eric Weinstein's "Kayfabe Politics" concept a bit as well [0]. From the article: > Mr Curtis: No one is really sure what Trump represents. My working theory is that he’s part of the pantomime-isation of politics. Every morning Donald Trump wakes up in the White House, he tweets something absolutely outrageous which he knows the liberals will get upset by, the liberals read his tweets and go “This is terrible, this is outrageous,” and then tell each other via social media how terrible it all is. It becomes a feedback loop in which they are locked together. In my mind, it’s like they’re together in a theatre watching a pantomime villain. The pantomime villain comes forward into the light, looks at them and says something terrible, and they go “Boo!!”. Meanwhile, outside the theatre, real power is carrying on but no one is really analysing it. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mRGVk4d6Gkk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mRGVk4d6Gkk
- HourglassFR 6y ago
  This idea can be traced even further back to Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Society_of_the_Spectacle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Society_of_the_Spectacle It's not that surprising to find it here, the Situationist had a lasting impact on the intellectual theory of the left.
- esyir 6y ago
  This is basically the same thing as the "deep state" narrative that's popular in right-aligned, just with different window dressing.
  - sebmellen 6y ago
    To say there's no "deep state" is a contradiction of very clear reality. Whatever you call them, the doyens of the DC establishment are permanent members of our government. Chomsky and Peter Dale Scott were some of the first to use the "deep state" terminology, and I have no idea how you could call them or their philosophy "right-aligned." The deep state, as Eisenhower warned of it (though by the name of the military-industrial complex), is very real. Further to your point that pointing this out is to be "right-aligned," Weinstein is/was a Bernie supporter. If you want to argue that opposing these sick and deeply entrenched power structures is "right-aligned," I'll gladly adopt the label.
activatedgeek 6y ago
Wow! This is the first time I've learned about Adam Curtis, and he doesn't mince any words. This article is a crash course into the trajectory of politics over the last few decades. The interviewer must be commended here too! As someone who's been fascinated by Richard Dawkins' motivations, it was revealing that as Obama pushed religion outside the White House, the whole Dawkins counter-culture against religion was made irrelevant. It is, however, interesting that Adam Curtis says that people will find a purpose again with the resurgence of religion (Dawkins has a second chance then? Are we in a loop?). I wonder what HN thinks about that.
- sleavey 6y ago
  You're in for a treat then, he's made lots of documentaries about the subjects in the interview, easily found online. They're permanently available on BBC iPlayer if you're in the UK too.
- marcus_holmes 6y ago
  I was intrigued that "religion will provide the vision of the future" and also "religion is way of dealing with our fear of death" (I paraphrase). I don't really see how both can be true. I see religion becoming more marginalised and less relevant as time goes on. The evangelists are going further away from the rest of society, which is becoming less religious. Trump helped, I think, by exposing how irrational the religious right are becoming. Also, any religion is increasingly being associated with right-wing, traditionalist, conservative, reactionary politics. There's no religious voice welcoming fluid gender identity or supporting UBI. I don't see religion making a comeback any time soon (thank god). But we do need a replacement for it. Something that gives us meaning. Some use for all those redundant church spaces in our communities - if we're not going to use them for worshipping sky fairies, what are we going to use them for? Because it would be useful to find something that brought the whole community in one place once a week.
  - the-dude 6y ago
    Recently I was asked here on HN if I believed in climate science. So there you go.
deleted 6y ago
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wslh 6y ago
I mistakenly read: "the antidote to civilization: collapse'. The mind play unfair tricks.
- twic 6y ago
  There's a monograph called "Industrial Society and Its Future" which you may find interesting. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/225468.Industrial_Society_and_Its_Future https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/225468.Industrial_Societ...
  - wslh 6y ago
    Yes, I read it. A very well written text but I don't agree that we really know how the future will be.
young_unixer 6y ago
> Everyone [..] knows that the system that they are living under isn’t working as it is supposed to; that there is a lot of corruption at the top. But whenever the journalists point it out, everyone goes “Wow that’s terrible!” and then nothing happens and the system remains the same. Everyone agrees that the system isn't working as suposed, but we don't agree on how and why it isn't working. The resulting system is an unappealing mix of all the different values and beliefs we have about the hows and whys. The more different the values, the more unappealing the mix.
- waihtis 6y ago
  I've found Nassim Taleb's Pricipia Politica to be an interesting suggestion of how to move from abstract universalism to fractal localism. This specifically has the intent of avoiding top-down power structures and the fragility associated with it. https://acataleptico.files.wordpress.com/2019/05/principia_politicasep2019.pdf https://acataleptico.files.wordpress.com/2019/05/principia_p...
- hnick 6y ago
  Give the population bikesheds to paint, and plunder while they bicker.
- jjk166 6y ago
  But if we agree it isn't working, we shouldn't need to agree on how or why to decide to change it. Even if you are reasonably sure that something won't work, it makes more sense to spend a bit of time giving it a try than to stick with what you know for certain doesn't. Even if the proposal might make things worse, the potential downside is bounded by it being temporary. In the absolute worst case scenario where you have tried multiple options and all of them are worse than what you started with, you can always go back to the status quo but now with more knowledge.
Jerry2 6y ago
>Everyone knew it was fake, but because no one had any alternative vision for a different kind of society, they just accepted this sense of total fakeness as normal. And this historian, Alexei Yurchak, coined the phrase “HyperNormalisation” to describe that feeling. >I thought “that’s a brilliant title” because, although we are not in any way really like the Soviet Union, there is a similar feeling in our present day. Everyone in my country and in America and throughout Europe knows that the system that they are living under isn’t working as it is supposed to; that there is a lot of corruption at the top. But whenever the journalists point it out, everyone goes “Wow that’s terrible!” and then nothing happens and the system remains the same. That's a brilliant description of our current system. I'm just worried that our hypernormalization won't last as long as the Soviet one.
sirsinsalot 6y ago
Curtis has some amazing thought piece "documentary" series out. While you may not agree with the world view they take, they're food for thought and come with amazing music and wonderful editing. "All watched over by machines of loving grace" is a lovely look at the Randian SV mindset.
deleted 6y ago
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cblconfederate 6y ago
> I think it’s going to come out of religion, I really do. I think there’s going to be a resurgence of religion. Well, not religion but identity (which could be cultural or national). People no longer want to hang around with people of different persuasions just because they were forced in the same space at birth. There's an opening for radical new movements like charter cities and a new nomadism. It looks like the nation state may be a bad fit for the 21st century
carschno 6y ago
Mark Fisher's "Capitalist Realism" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalist_Realism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalist_Realism) should be mentioned in this context, with his references to the "big Other", for instance Stalin's White Sea Canal project: > [...] the workers and the engineers were never allowed the time, money or equipment necessary to build a canal that would be deep enough and safe enough to carry twentieth-century cargoes; consequently, the canal has never played any significant role in Soviet commerce or industry. All the canal could support, apparently, were tourist steamers, which in the 1930s were abundantly stocked with Soviet and foreign writers who obligingly proclaimed the glories of the work. The canal was a triumph of publicity; but if half the care that went into the public relations campaign had been devoted to the work itself, there would have been far fewer victims and far more real developments - and the project would have been a genuine tragedy, rather than a brutal farce in which real people were killed by pseudo-events.
novaRom 6y ago
If EU, Canada, and USA will become a kind of political and economic union (like EU today), meaning no borders and a single market, then there's a good chance that union can compete with China. Separated and divided, everyone is weak today.
yigitcakar 6y ago
The interview improved my understanding of our civilization's current situation. I was aware of Hypernormalization we have been feeling in Turkey, and thought that it is similar to Soviet Society, but I didn't understand that the reason for the static nature of the world in general was pattern analysis. I should have suspected this. I used to spend my time painting and worked as a graphic designer. A couple months ago I changed my role in the company and have been working as a copywriter/editor. Even though for the past couple months, I have been spending all my time devouring books about writing, and understanding this new behemoth, the internet still suggest me things only about art. I have changed, but the algorithms didn't catch up yet. I wonder how long will it take until the algorithms catch up. This was a major change in my life, and I can easily see the lag, but I wonder how does the algorithms that recommend stuff to me guides my thinking, especially on subjects smaller in scale. How does the spiral of recommendations change our perception of the world? Moreover, do the big tech companies create this systems consciously? Is there a plot dividing the individuals into manageable groups? Definitely the machines don't look at us as a narrative, so I think as long as my searches and inventory of items related to art is bigger than the ones about writing, the world will continue treating me as an artist.
- deleted 6y ago
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- luckylion 6y ago
  > I have changed, but the algorithms didn't catch up yet. I wonder how long will it take until the algorithms catch up. That's a good point, and an interesting question. If you change, but the algorithms don't acknowledge that change and treat you the same, how much is you identity in your own hands, how fungible is it? We could add lots of "I no longer think that" forms, but I suppose a lot of it isn't because you're sorted into the artist-folder, but recommendations because of your past actions that aren't easily changed. > Is there a plot dividing the individuals into manageable groups? I don't think so, but I'm not sure it matters. The end result is similar, only that there's not one large conspiracy that's trying to herd you into thinking a certain way. Instead, it's a multitude of interests that are pulling you into their direction and you kind of get pulled to where most of them are in your niche of the world. But in either way, you do get pulled. Can you opt out? I'm not sure, but you can probably limit your exposure by e.g. not watching television, not reading news sites, not spending time on Twitter.
RegW 6y ago
> investigative journalism ... “When you tell me that a lot of rich people aren't paying tax, I’m shocked but I’m not surprised because I know that. I don’t want to read another article that tells me that”. What I want is an article that tells me why, when I’m told that, nothing happens and nothing changes. Well that's a big ask. Who do we hold responsible for nothing changing? Hmm. May be it's me. Not sure I'm up for getting out and confronting the police today.
Balgair 6y ago
Holy crap, this is a good interview. "That we are far more similar to each other than we might think, that my desire for an iPhone as a way of expressing my identity is mirrored by millions of other people who feel exactly the same. We’re not actually that individualistic. We’re very similar to each other and computers know that dirty secret. But because we feel like we’re in control when we hold the magic screen, it allows us to feel like we’re still individuals. And that’s a wonderful way of managing the world." The matrices and tensors may store that secret, but can anyone at FB extract that info? Or are the algos so complex that we humans cannot tease out the truth from the mass of math? "They’re constantly playing back to you the ghosts of your own behaviour. We live in a modern ghost story. We are haunted by our past behaviour played back to us through the machines in its comparison to millions of other people’s behaviour. We are guided and nudged and shaped by that. " Oh man, I'm barely 1/5th of the way through this and I already know this is a classic I'll be quoting from (and linking to) for years.
tim333 6y ago
>...people are waiting for are some big stories. Nationalism is the easiest story to go for. And what I’m speculating about is that there might be stories that we haven’t even imagined yet... I like the idea we could be a bit more imaginative in how we do things. Left / right etc is all a bit tedious. Maybe happiness and beauty or some such.
fumblebee 6y ago
Yesterday I didn't know who Adam Curtis was. Today I've seen him referenced twice. Here, and a fresh off the press Talking Politics interview with him. Baader-Meinhof effect in action.

171 points by marton78 6y ago

eecc 6y ago

Curtis just published a new doc: https://youtu.be/MHFrhIAj0ME https://youtu.be/MHFrhIAj0ME

MaheshC 6y ago
Which is really good. Recommend.
- sonthonax 6y ago
  Depending on your point of view. I felt it was a self indulgent sprawling mess. I felt that I watched a random collection of undergraduate essays, which were then stitched together with music that Curtis felt expressed the zeitigest (which he delusionally thought substituted for an actual point or connection between subjects). I watched a bit of the documentary with a friend of mine who’s a pretty senior diplomat; when Curtis came to Iraq, she exclaimed with palatable frustration “this is the most incredible 15 minute oversimplification of what happened”. Curtis documentaries loose much of their lustre when you know what he’s talking about. He becomes less of a BBC patrician who gives you a secret insight into the world of Oxford educated intellectuals; and more of an opinionated old windbag. At the end of an episode, I told my friend “I feel like I’ve been man-splained to for the last hour [and I’m a man]!”.
  - aaaaarghZombies 6y ago
    Have you seen the time span it covers? I don't think calling it a simplification as a criticism is fair, do you want a 1:1 mapping? Also the sprawling messiness isn't just the aesthetic, it's the thesis.
    - sonthonax 6y ago
      Yes. I watched the documentary. I don’t expect to agree 100%, but that doesn’t mean have I to keel over laughing at its chasms. In regards to Iraq, his opinion that Gertrude Bell’s influence led NATO to give tribal sheiks disproportionate power in the new Iraq was a hilarious simplification. It’s just an absurd narrative chasm, that ignored so much about what happened then. An in regards to the civil war in Iraq, that didn’t boil over because NATO stopped paying the militias off. There was so much at play. The China stuff was interesting, but uncontroversial. That stuff is quite an accessible history. The archive footage was fun though. It just felt like I was watching a number of different documentaries. One about race relations and trans rights; and one about China. It all just would have been better as standalone works. He could have even edited things differently, each episode covering a certain subject. He maybe could have had a concluding thesis that was better than “China: it’s not all that it’s cracked up to be”.
      - not1ofU 6y ago
        I agree. I lapped up alot of his stuff, without a second thought. After watching a deconstruction video of hypernormalisation I was left thinking I had been suckered again "loose change style" I was recommeded to watch his lastest release (of which the full 8.something hours is available directly on Curtis' own you tube channel) I watched the first 20 / 30 minutes and turned off. It felt like how I imagine brain-washing works. Lots of weird (and jarring) footage un-related to the voice over, werid music (not required for what is supposed to be a documentary IMO) and jumped from topic to topic without any cohesive thread or reason. No longer a fan. Edit: Grammar
DoingIsLearning 6y ago
On a side note, did anything change on youtube itself or am I being A/B guinea pigged? I use to be able to watch youtube videos without any youtube app just using /embed/<video-id> on a browser or mpv. Now it seems every link is broken unless you go through there data hoarding app? (On android not desktop)
- jahnu 6y ago
  If I watch through the Brave browser on my phone I never see ads. Through the offical app I have to watch the same two ads for a month or two before the video starts and then again after 15 or 20 minutes. It's really bad.
  - DoingIsLearning 6y ago
    But that's ad blocking, that's not what I meant exactly, that always works. My issue is 'embeddable' links are no longer playable for me? I can play the video in their app or on the browser after a million data consent forms.
  - sacomo 6y ago
    Also, no ads on YT, or just about any other site, in FF with the uBlock origin plugin.
- Sander_Marechal 6y ago
  Give NewPipe a try (https://newpipe.net/ https://newpipe.net/). I've been using it for several months and works really well. Only thing I haven't figured out yet is streaming/casting to the youtube app on my TV.
jahnu 6y ago
Here he is in interview about that one https://www.vice.com/en/article/4ad8db/adam-curtis-charlie-brooker-cant-get-you-out-of-my-head https://www.vice.com/en/article/4ad8db/adam-curtis-charlie-b...

jahnu 6y ago

Nearly all his documentaries appear to be available to watch here https://thoughtmaybe.com/by/adam-curtis/ https://thoughtmaybe.com/by/adam-curtis/ They are truly excellent. It's really worth going back to some of the early and mid career films. E.g. The Mayfair Set and the ever relevant The Century of the Self.

herodoturtle 6y ago

From the article: > in the 80s everyone from the top to the bottom of Soviet society knew that it wasn’t working, knew that it was corrupt, knew that the bosses were looting the system, knew that the politicians had no alternative vision. And they knew that the bosses knew they knew that. Everyone knew it was fake, but because no one had any alternative vision for a different kind of society, they just accepted this sense of total fakeness as normal. This article's explanation of Hypernormalisation (defined in the excerpt above) was quite interesting to read. Sadly I see this happening quite a lot in South Africa - a country that 25 years ago was filled with much hope and excitement for the future - but now is on the precipice of rapid economic decline due to similar reasons outlined above (primarily corrupt politicians but also an economy ravaged by Covid). That being said there are still many South Africans that are nervously excited about the country's future - I guess we just need that alternative vision to drive us forward? As an aside, I know Elon Musk's ambitious projects get mixed responses here on HN, but one thing he keeps referring to (and which resonates quite strongly with me) is his vision for an alternative future which excites us and inspires us.

RhodesianHunter 6y ago
The older I get the more that I think that our particular form of government or policies (left/right, socialist/capitalist, authoritarian/libertarian) are less important for overall wellbeing and happiness than stamping out corruption.
- kqr 6y ago
  This should not come as a surprise to anyone and I think it's fairly easy to show this link, too. Whenever I'm asked what the best part of living in my country is, I unhesitatingly answer "low corruption". It is the source from which all other nice things flow.
  - Gupie 6y ago
    But what is the cause of low or high corruption in a society? One method is a free press, which can highlight corruption, along with free elections where corrupt politicians can get kicked out. Is there an alternative?

frereubu 6y ago

This is so much better than his films. I used to find his films exciting, but the more I thought about them the more I found them conceptually soupy and completely lacking in rigour - just finding narratives that felt satisying. When he's challenged by someone smart like this he's able to articulate his ideas in a much better way than in film. This interview has raised my opinion of him again. He's an interesting thinker, but I really think film is in fact the one medium he shouldn't use because it allows him to weave unchallenged grand narratives that don't really stack up.

neartheplain 6y ago
You may appreciate this parody and deconstruction of his filmmaking style: https://youtube.com/watch?v=x1bX3F7uTrg https://youtube.com/watch?v=x1bX3F7uTrg
- paganel 6y ago
  Really interesting, there's a smart comment in there about capitalism appropriating its critics and their criticisms. Now the question is: is Curtis the person first doing the appropriation of capitalist criticism and is this guy actually doing an appropriation of the appropriation of capitalist criticism? Again, I find it very interesting nonetheless.
sirsinsalot 6y ago
I see his documentaries more as art than fact, that makes them easier to consume and be provoked by.
- jonnyone 6y ago
  I kind of see all documentaries this way. All documentaries rely so much on manipulation to drive a narrative that it's difficult to classify it as anything other than art. They can still be informative for sure, but I will never watch a documentary and think I've done any kind of research.

DoingIsLearning 6y ago

Does anybody else get this feeling of fear and hopelessness watching his documentaries. It really feels like a mental hangover, not knowing what actions to take to make things better for us a society?

alexf95 6y ago
Yes somewhat this is also true for me. However I think this "HyperNormalisation" has to happen in some way, because if people would constantly worry about how bad and corrupt the world/systems are it wouldnt help anyone going forward because not everyone has the chance to make a change.
hkt 6y ago
They actually leave me quite hopeful because they reinforce my view of the world and are popular. What I'm reasonably convinced of is that when millennials and younger cohorts start to tip the electoral scales in 15 years time, there will be an outbreak of harmony and consensus on an awful lot of things, and people like Curtis will have shaped really quite a lot of that.
- Mediterraneo10 6y ago
  I don’t see grounds for optimism. People believed in a bright future that would come when the generation of May '68 got more involved in voting, and were able for stand for election themselves. Yet what happened was those idealistic young people became less radical in the interim, and many signed up to a vogue of mercenary privatization and bourgeois urban development that was virtually the opposite of their earlier views.
DoreenMichele 6y ago
I've never seen any of them. I've never heard of this guy before. But I ended up skimming most of the article because the tone and direction of the piece in no way match what I expected from the title. I can well imagine his documentaries are probably pretty depressing. He seems to have only complaints, not solutions. He seems to describe where we are and how we got here but he seems to have absolutely nothing to say about how to go from where we are to something better. It's not my cup of tea at all. I was hoping for something meaty and meaningful to add to my existing set of ideas and tools and ended up being all "Yikes! I don't think it would be good for my mental health to drink too deeply of this stuff." So I skimmed, hoping I was wrong, hoping it would get better and grab me later. Hoping I would trip across something that would hook me and tell me to start over, that it will be worth the slow start. I never ran into that.

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kumarvvr 6y ago

Love his documentaries. I highly recommend everyone watch them.

sebmellen 6y ago

Gosh, really accurate. Reminds me of Eric Weinstein's "Kayfabe Politics" concept a bit as well [0]. From the article: > Mr Curtis: No one is really sure what Trump represents. My working theory is that he’s part of the pantomime-isation of politics. Every morning Donald Trump wakes up in the White House, he tweets something absolutely outrageous which he knows the liberals will get upset by, the liberals read his tweets and go “This is terrible, this is outrageous,” and then tell each other via social media how terrible it all is. It becomes a feedback loop in which they are locked together. In my mind, it’s like they’re together in a theatre watching a pantomime villain. The pantomime villain comes forward into the light, looks at them and says something terrible, and they go “Boo!!”. Meanwhile, outside the theatre, real power is carrying on but no one is really analysing it. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mRGVk4d6Gkk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mRGVk4d6Gkk

HourglassFR 6y ago
This idea can be traced even further back to Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Society_of_the_Spectacle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Society_of_the_Spectacle It's not that surprising to find it here, the Situationist had a lasting impact on the intellectual theory of the left.
esyir 6y ago
This is basically the same thing as the "deep state" narrative that's popular in right-aligned, just with different window dressing.
- sebmellen 6y ago
  To say there's no "deep state" is a contradiction of very clear reality. Whatever you call them, the doyens of the DC establishment are permanent members of our government. Chomsky and Peter Dale Scott were some of the first to use the "deep state" terminology, and I have no idea how you could call them or their philosophy "right-aligned." The deep state, as Eisenhower warned of it (though by the name of the military-industrial complex), is very real. Further to your point that pointing this out is to be "right-aligned," Weinstein is/was a Bernie supporter. If you want to argue that opposing these sick and deeply entrenched power structures is "right-aligned," I'll gladly adopt the label.

activatedgeek 6y ago

Wow! This is the first time I've learned about Adam Curtis, and he doesn't mince any words. This article is a crash course into the trajectory of politics over the last few decades. The interviewer must be commended here too! As someone who's been fascinated by Richard Dawkins' motivations, it was revealing that as Obama pushed religion outside the White House, the whole Dawkins counter-culture against religion was made irrelevant. It is, however, interesting that Adam Curtis says that people will find a purpose again with the resurgence of religion (Dawkins has a second chance then? Are we in a loop?). I wonder what HN thinks about that.

sleavey 6y ago
You're in for a treat then, he's made lots of documentaries about the subjects in the interview, easily found online. They're permanently available on BBC iPlayer if you're in the UK too.
marcus_holmes 6y ago
I was intrigued that "religion will provide the vision of the future" and also "religion is way of dealing with our fear of death" (I paraphrase). I don't really see how both can be true. I see religion becoming more marginalised and less relevant as time goes on. The evangelists are going further away from the rest of society, which is becoming less religious. Trump helped, I think, by exposing how irrational the religious right are becoming. Also, any religion is increasingly being associated with right-wing, traditionalist, conservative, reactionary politics. There's no religious voice welcoming fluid gender identity or supporting UBI. I don't see religion making a comeback any time soon (thank god). But we do need a replacement for it. Something that gives us meaning. Some use for all those redundant church spaces in our communities - if we're not going to use them for worshipping sky fairies, what are we going to use them for? Because it would be useful to find something that brought the whole community in one place once a week.
- the-dude 6y ago
  Recently I was asked here on HN if I believed in climate science. So there you go.

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wslh 6y ago

I mistakenly read: "the antidote to civilization: collapse'. The mind play unfair tricks.

twic 6y ago
There's a monograph called "Industrial Society and Its Future" which you may find interesting. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/225468.Industrial_Society_and_Its_Future https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/225468.Industrial_Societ...
- wslh 6y ago
  Yes, I read it. A very well written text but I don't agree that we really know how the future will be.

young_unixer 6y ago

> Everyone [..] knows that the system that they are living under isn’t working as it is supposed to; that there is a lot of corruption at the top. But whenever the journalists point it out, everyone goes “Wow that’s terrible!” and then nothing happens and the system remains the same. Everyone agrees that the system isn't working as suposed, but we don't agree on how and why it isn't working. The resulting system is an unappealing mix of all the different values and beliefs we have about the hows and whys. The more different the values, the more unappealing the mix.

waihtis 6y ago
I've found Nassim Taleb's Pricipia Politica to be an interesting suggestion of how to move from abstract universalism to fractal localism. This specifically has the intent of avoiding top-down power structures and the fragility associated with it. https://acataleptico.files.wordpress.com/2019/05/principia_politicasep2019.pdf https://acataleptico.files.wordpress.com/2019/05/principia_p...
hnick 6y ago
Give the population bikesheds to paint, and plunder while they bicker.
jjk166 6y ago
But if we agree it isn't working, we shouldn't need to agree on how or why to decide to change it. Even if you are reasonably sure that something won't work, it makes more sense to spend a bit of time giving it a try than to stick with what you know for certain doesn't. Even if the proposal might make things worse, the potential downside is bounded by it being temporary. In the absolute worst case scenario where you have tried multiple options and all of them are worse than what you started with, you can always go back to the status quo but now with more knowledge.

Jerry2 6y ago

>Everyone knew it was fake, but because no one had any alternative vision for a different kind of society, they just accepted this sense of total fakeness as normal. And this historian, Alexei Yurchak, coined the phrase “HyperNormalisation” to describe that feeling. >I thought “that’s a brilliant title” because, although we are not in any way really like the Soviet Union, there is a similar feeling in our present day. Everyone in my country and in America and throughout Europe knows that the system that they are living under isn’t working as it is supposed to; that there is a lot of corruption at the top. But whenever the journalists point it out, everyone goes “Wow that’s terrible!” and then nothing happens and the system remains the same. That's a brilliant description of our current system. I'm just worried that our hypernormalization won't last as long as the Soviet one.

sirsinsalot 6y ago

Curtis has some amazing thought piece "documentary" series out. While you may not agree with the world view they take, they're food for thought and come with amazing music and wonderful editing. "All watched over by machines of loving grace" is a lovely look at the Randian SV mindset.

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cblconfederate 6y ago

> I think it’s going to come out of religion, I really do. I think there’s going to be a resurgence of religion. Well, not religion but identity (which could be cultural or national). People no longer want to hang around with people of different persuasions just because they were forced in the same space at birth. There's an opening for radical new movements like charter cities and a new nomadism. It looks like the nation state may be a bad fit for the 21st century

carschno 6y ago

Mark Fisher's "Capitalist Realism" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalist_Realism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalist_Realism) should be mentioned in this context, with his references to the "big Other", for instance Stalin's White Sea Canal project: > [...] the workers and the engineers were never allowed the time, money or equipment necessary to build a canal that would be deep enough and safe enough to carry twentieth-century cargoes; consequently, the canal has never played any significant role in Soviet commerce or industry. All the canal could support, apparently, were tourist steamers, which in the 1930s were abundantly stocked with Soviet and foreign writers who obligingly proclaimed the glories of the work. The canal was a triumph of publicity; but if half the care that went into the public relations campaign had been devoted to the work itself, there would have been far fewer victims and far more real developments - and the project would have been a genuine tragedy, rather than a brutal farce in which real people were killed by pseudo-events.

novaRom 6y ago

If EU, Canada, and USA will become a kind of political and economic union (like EU today), meaning no borders and a single market, then there's a good chance that union can compete with China. Separated and divided, everyone is weak today.

yigitcakar 6y ago

The interview improved my understanding of our civilization's current situation. I was aware of Hypernormalization we have been feeling in Turkey, and thought that it is similar to Soviet Society, but I didn't understand that the reason for the static nature of the world in general was pattern analysis. I should have suspected this. I used to spend my time painting and worked as a graphic designer. A couple months ago I changed my role in the company and have been working as a copywriter/editor. Even though for the past couple months, I have been spending all my time devouring books about writing, and understanding this new behemoth, the internet still suggest me things only about art. I have changed, but the algorithms didn't catch up yet. I wonder how long will it take until the algorithms catch up. This was a major change in my life, and I can easily see the lag, but I wonder how does the algorithms that recommend stuff to me guides my thinking, especially on subjects smaller in scale. How does the spiral of recommendations change our perception of the world? Moreover, do the big tech companies create this systems consciously? Is there a plot dividing the individuals into manageable groups? Definitely the machines don't look at us as a narrative, so I think as long as my searches and inventory of items related to art is bigger than the ones about writing, the world will continue treating me as an artist.

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luckylion 6y ago
> I have changed, but the algorithms didn't catch up yet. I wonder how long will it take until the algorithms catch up. That's a good point, and an interesting question. If you change, but the algorithms don't acknowledge that change and treat you the same, how much is you identity in your own hands, how fungible is it? We could add lots of "I no longer think that" forms, but I suppose a lot of it isn't because you're sorted into the artist-folder, but recommendations because of your past actions that aren't easily changed. > Is there a plot dividing the individuals into manageable groups? I don't think so, but I'm not sure it matters. The end result is similar, only that there's not one large conspiracy that's trying to herd you into thinking a certain way. Instead, it's a multitude of interests that are pulling you into their direction and you kind of get pulled to where most of them are in your niche of the world. But in either way, you do get pulled. Can you opt out? I'm not sure, but you can probably limit your exposure by e.g. not watching television, not reading news sites, not spending time on Twitter.

RegW 6y ago

> investigative journalism ... “When you tell me that a lot of rich people aren't paying tax, I’m shocked but I’m not surprised because I know that. I don’t want to read another article that tells me that”. What I want is an article that tells me why, when I’m told that, nothing happens and nothing changes. Well that's a big ask. Who do we hold responsible for nothing changing? Hmm. May be it's me. Not sure I'm up for getting out and confronting the police today.

Balgair 6y ago

Holy crap, this is a good interview. "That we are far more similar to each other than we might think, that my desire for an iPhone as a way of expressing my identity is mirrored by millions of other people who feel exactly the same. We’re not actually that individualistic. We’re very similar to each other and computers know that dirty secret. But because we feel like we’re in control when we hold the magic screen, it allows us to feel like we’re still individuals. And that’s a wonderful way of managing the world." The matrices and tensors may store that secret, but can anyone at FB extract that info? Or are the algos so complex that we humans cannot tease out the truth from the mass of math? "They’re constantly playing back to you the ghosts of your own behaviour. We live in a modern ghost story. We are haunted by our past behaviour played back to us through the machines in its comparison to millions of other people’s behaviour. We are guided and nudged and shaped by that. " Oh man, I'm barely 1/5th of the way through this and I already know this is a classic I'll be quoting from (and linking to) for years.

tim333 6y ago

>...people are waiting for are some big stories. Nationalism is the easiest story to go for. And what I’m speculating about is that there might be stories that we haven’t even imagined yet... I like the idea we could be a bit more imaginative in how we do things. Left / right etc is all a bit tedious. Maybe happiness and beauty or some such.

fumblebee 6y ago

Yesterday I didn't know who Adam Curtis was. Today I've seen him referenced twice. Here, and a fresh off the press Talking Politics interview with him. Baader-Meinhof effect in action.