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Adam Curtis’ HyperNormalisation

Another thread of the skein:

 
Does this sound like independent journalism?


Not to worry, these outlets have nothing to do with independent journalism. Just blow-dried muppets singing from the company hymnal.

Phony outrage over business as usual.
 
Not to worry, these outlets have nothing to do with independent journalism. Just blow-dried muppets singing from the company hymnal.

Phony outrage over business as usual.

I'm sorry--their outrage is phony or the outrage about passing this off as journalism is phony?
 
This may whet your appetite:


I like the idea of personalised discrimination--like the insurance industry gone super-specific. You will be discriminated against based on facets of your behaviour, personality, preferences and genetics and it will be fair because it will be true--and there will be far less you can do about it because you don't share your selfhood with others so natural allies will be lacking.

Full meal:


What he says at 3.42 in the first video makes me think how this is certainly true about our digestive systems, they haven't evolved at the same rate as our ability to cook. What if our mental health is being adversely affected by this rapid development of media/communication tech.
 
What if our mental health is being adversely affected by this rapid development of media/communication tech.

I think we can safely assume that this is true. There is certainly a lot of scholarly rumbling about the effects of social media on our society/culture/mental development. When the history of our times is written, I suspect the conclusion will be that television (heck, maybe even radio) set in motion an erosion of our societal fabric and culture, maybe by subjecting us to a greater flow of information than our brains can comfortably process.
 
He's back! New series appeared on iPlayer today, called Can't Get You Out of My Head, and it's an epic. I watched the first episode tonight, and I know he's probably overdue a backlash, but I find this stuff fascinating. It's all about the push for individualism, the loss of power, how computers using binary systems made people who use them see everything in binary good/bad with no room for in between, and so on.

So far it's featured Lee Harvey Oswald, Mao Tse-tung and his film star missus, the woman who found the Voynich Manuscript, MK Ultra, Russian ballet, the Mau-Mau uprising, just loads of stuff in a terrific collage. Six episodes, none of them under an hour long! I'm not going to watch them all at once, going to savour them.
 
He is a brilliant film-maker; I gather he has access to acres of material he gleaned years ago. He has the energy and motivation to weave a lot of inconvenient truths into some jaw-dropping documentaries.

I look forward to catching up with his latest - it got ***** in the Guardian.

Motivational? That would asking too much. :thought:
 
He is a brilliant film-maker; I gather he has access to acres of material he gleaned years ago. He has the energy and motivation to weave a lot of inconvenient truths into some jaw-dropping documentaries.

I look forward to catching up with his latest - it got ***** in the Guardian.

Motivational? That would asking too much. :thought:
I look forward to his next one on how a fluffy Pink Revolutionary rules a despotic regime outwardly organised by a bespectacled Apparatchik ordering the headscarved Proletariat to mend all the broken things and create a new dawn of the means of production.

Using just footage from Bagpuss.
 
Using just footage from Bagpuss.

But in that case, we could mend it . . . :sos:

"It would take a decade, before a bell-ended puppet would claim he could fix it . . .

"Bob - the Builder - was created by a team of psychonauts in a mysteriously-funded Unit, known to its servants as . . . "

Ooof, gerroff, this is being typed live, you know . . . :willy:
 
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A conceptual artist acquaintance said he thought Curtis was an artist that used the documentary form as his medium to explore his ideas.

I think it fits.
 
He is a brilliant film-maker; I gather he has access to acres of material he gleaned years ago. He has the energy and motivation to weave a lot of inconvenient truths into some jaw-dropping documentaries.

I look forward to catching up with his latest - it got ***** in the Guardian.

Motivational? That would asking too much. :thought:

I heard him interviewed on the radio and he says he has access to anything he wants in the BBC archive, he just orders the tapes (though maybe they're digitised now) and watches them for anything that catches his eye. He also says he has a very good memory, and can use it to make connections and remember where relevant items are. It seems he sometimes surprises himself with what he finds.
 
I've checked with the BBC, they strangely have no plans to broadcast it.
 
The whole series is on iPlayer. I'm halfway through, watching one a day. Scorching, amazingly coherent and compelling. Can't recommend it enough.
 
Absolutely fantastic. Watched it over 3 days and my brain feels bigger. I also loved how it was
Cummings not "Boris"
that featured towards the end.
 
Just started watching it. Noticing the menacing discordant music tone over basic neutral narrative exposition.
 
‘As the British Empire was falling apart, there was a growing sense that something was going badly wrong under the surface’.

Was there? I’m just over a minute in and questioning this. I doubt it.

It’s a great ‘look over there’ using retropop references but I’m wondering whether this is a hugely selective time arrow of where we are now and ’this is how I THINK it came to be‘ which will later be replaced with a different way of thinking. Let’s see where it goes.
 
Seaside music. Old white people in deckchairs at the seaside. Over which the narrative features the words ‘Fear’ and ‘Hatred’. What is going on? This is a tight edit to a narrative and a chosen clip to create a response.
Outwardly, it all seems vague, hypnotic and disjointed but this is very, very clever.
 
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I can see why people describe the technique of Curtis as hypnotic. Discordant music, odd vintage visuals, keywords being heavily implanted in a narrative leading to an ultimately unifying viewpoint. It’s heady stuff.
 
I’m watching Can’t Get You Out Of My Head by Adam Curtis on iplayer

It’s a marathon at more than 7 hours long but it's chopped into 6 segments. The connections he makes are interesting & the work gone into finding footage from archives extraordinary.

A wealth of interesting details emerge - I didn’t know Tupac Shakur was the son of one of the original Black Panthers. She defended herself in court in the 70s after being accused of planning terrorist acts but it emerged that the most active three Panthers involved in planning & actions were in fact undercover Police. She & fellow defendants were acquitted.

Many other events from history that you’ll remember, others you won’t.

Really too much to cover in one post. I’m watching an episode a day.
 
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