New six-film series from Adam Curtis | Hacker News Reader

New six-film series from Adam Curtis

bbc.com

256 pointsDonaldFisk143 comments

Curtis documentaries are in this weird uncanny valley that I intensely enjoy, but deeply uneasily. They're very pleasurable. They string together a grand narrative that says...something. Not quite sure exactly what. But man it sure does feel like you're learning a deep truth when you watch them. As much as I like them, I suspect they are essentially poison. They're Alex Jones for smart people. Half cocked ideas strung together in a deeply aesthetic, but mostly meaningless way.

I don't want to impugn him too much. He seems like a good guy and I genuinely enjoy his work. But it really does feel like there's something narcotic about it, something insidious about the way it creates the feeling of insight without actually teaching you anything.

I think his work is a great jumping off point. After watching Century of the Self, I started reading pretty heavily into Walter Lippman, Edward Bernays, and the general development of neoliberal thought. Most all of what I read backed up his thesis with much more concrete details.

I think it would be great if he released a reading list alongside each of his documentaries - let the films serve as a compelling aesthetic work and the reading as essentially a citation. Alternatively, maybe I should try to compile some for each of his films.

> let the films serve as a compelling aesthetic work and the reading as essentially a citation. Alternatively, maybe I should try to compile some for each of his films.

Yes, that would be awesome, and would add much more weight to the arguments he makes in his documentaries.

I would absolutely love that and use it.

Curtis is the reason I got into Max Weber and Jacques Ellul. I cannot remember which of his series led me into that rabbit hole though.

What from Weber? Connection between religion and capitalism?

About rationalization. That the world has not always been as bureaucratic as it is now. And then Jacques Ellul who says that this bureaucracy, which he calls technique, is a self-reinforcing entity on its own outside of the people that make it happen.

Some of his Eastern Bloc stuff in Hypernormalization echoes to this day. It's fair to say he orchestrates feelings, it's semi-fair to object that he's not outlining a detailed plan for how to fix and run everything (to which I would reply that's not his job), but I don't like seeing his work written off as meaningless. It seems to be to be journalism of a very high level, in that he outlines things clearly and understandably that are newsworthy and that matter.

I guess the take-away there is that news is not enough. You can document the human condition all you like, and then if we do nothing to evolve it away from its darkest aspects it's just depressing. Knowing that I still like that he's doing that reporting, the way he's doing it. He's making abstractions concrete for people.

This is usually what's missing from people criticizing Curtis. It's a form of superficiality where people feel that they don't need to look further into the subjects before drawing fundamental conclusions. I've spoken to so many people that loudly proclaim that Curtis' work is just conspiracy theory, totally oblivious of the instagram level of depth such a conclusion requires.

It would be great with a solid text to go along his films. For now I would urge everyone who get that uncanny feeling after watching Curtis' work to read up on the subjects covered. I promise you that feeling will go away!

That would be a useful website. Reading lists for documentaries and movies

Absolutely. He taps into the same need for narrative coherence that fuels more conventional conspiracy theories.

His work is meticulously researched, fantastically edited, entertaining and I feel, especially since the mid-00s, quite problematic. He wants to be seen as revealing how our conventional narratives are constructs but then replaces them with just another construct and apparently lacks the self awareness or intellectual honesty to realise that his version is just another way to frame a bunch of things which aren’t (and have no reason to be) a neat story.

That said, I expect I’ll give the new series a shot.

> but then replaces them with just another construct

I don’t see this as a problem. I think his work would be far more cumbersome if he exhaustively detailed all the different possibilities ...

I like the idea of constructing a powerful alternative narrative that I can compare and contrast with the conventional one.

I think for me at least the “danger” of Adam Curtis is somewhat mitigated because I know how to take it. I always presumed most other people that enjoy Curtis think similarly but I guess that could be a dangerous assumption...

Thanks, that's described my thoughts about his films really well, I could never quite explainy problem with them.

I think they are good, but they are almost too well made, too persuasive. If they were less well made I'd come away thinking "that's an interesting idea/insight to add to how I think about the world", instead they give you the feeling of "this is how it is, and all it is". They are too definitive.

Really, that's interesting, I've always thought about his work the opposite way. As if he's saying 'this is a story about the way the world works, you can take it or leave it'.

Yes, his work is literally thought provoking. You have to think about it, read about the history presented, think about it some more and come to your own conclusions.

They'd be dangerous if they were your only source of information, but if you take them on board with the right perspective they're fine, I think.

I'd put Adam Curtis in the same category as Zizek, where they're about aesthetics and moods with heavy artistic licence, rather than a literal documentary exposition.

Zizek writes serious books. He's often known by the public for making jokes because that's what the public consumes: they don't read serious books.

Might you or someone else recommend which book or books might be a good introduction to Zizek? Thanks.

Zizek has made a joke once, that he has essentially written one book, but that about 60 times. If you want to seriously engage in his philosphical thought: "The Sublime Object of Ideology" is a good pick.

I watched one of his films. can't remember what. super disappointed. huge conspiracy claims that sort of sounded clever/insightful, but actually totally empty with zero evidence.

https://youtu.be/x1bX3F7uTrg

Thank you for bringing this. When I saw this thread, I immediately thought of this parody. Clicked your link and was not disappointed.

>something insidious about the way it creates the feeling of insight without actually teaching you anything.

I always thought that was on purpose. I've never come away from one of his shows and thought he has tried to persuade me to subscribe to a particular narrative. I enjoy his exposition and interesting revelations of connections that exist in the vast web of life. I think it's only dangerous if you consider it a source of truth on any particular subject.

Amazed nobody has posted it yet - Infinite Adam Curtis by Tom Scott: https://www.tomscott.com/infinite-adam-curtis/

I love Adam Curtis documentaries. The century of self, Power of nightmares, The trap and Hypernormalisation were all amazing. I might not agree with everything he says, but there is no denying that they are thought provoking, beautifully narrated and spectacularly well edited films.

If you haven't watched them yet, I would encourage you to do so.

Just watching Bitter Lake, fascinating one!

Bitter Lake's got to be my favorite!

>> I love Adam Curtis documentaries.

Me too. But I think you have to enjoy them as a performance. People looking for historical detail and justification can be frustrated by his very broad sweeps.

When we're trying to make sense of things in the big picture, forest from the trees sort of thing, we have to take broad sweeps. We should be able to address counter-points when making high level arguments. Their existence doesn't mean broad sweeps are useless or incorrect.

Arguments in the weeds are disingenuous when they're not challenging the actual pattern. They believe to invalidate an argument as if by demonstrating an axiom in a mathematics proof false, when they may actually demonstrate ignorance of variance.

Adam Curtis films are horror movies to me. Existential horror, the worst kind. I haven't found conventional horror films to be scary since my mid-teens, but Adam Curtis knows how to keep me awake at night.

They're like Michel Foucault books, fascinating history with a clear slant that serves a central thesis.

Especially relevant to the HN crowd is AC's "Machines of Loving Grace" [0], critiquing a sort of techno-utopianism endemic to Western culture generally, and Silicon Valley specifically. While I'm still bullish on technology (sometimes!) making the world a better place, AC's perspective provides an insightful counterpoint.

[0] https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x60xjdl

>AC's perspective provides an insightful counterpoint.

As the saying goes, nothing cools you down like AC.

I don't know if I'd call it pessimistic. I felt like he wanted to highlight how we've failed thus far at realizing the (techno-utopian) dreams of the early pioneers of computing. He wanted to show how technology was supposed to be a force to set us free, but somehow we lost our way, and by reminding us of that earlier vision we might be able to get back to work at realizing it.

Democracy + Capitalism was supposed to bring freedom to the world.. instead it bought domination, and realization, that it all comes down to who holds the power. The typical classical reality fundamentals.

Techno-utopianism was supposed to bring freedom to the world... instead it bought domination by the Big Tech, and realization that it all comes down to who holds the power. The classical reality fundamentals.

There are a few more cases.. it's Faust all over again, that turns into kind of a half-scam along the way to attract VC money or your money, then culminates into a power grab.

"The next revolution in X"!, blah, blah.. blahblah.. blah.

"We're no better than believing in or living in a Harry Potter novel sometimes" is more like his message - but it's a fact that societies like to look at the least of all facts. After all, that might prevent the next high-yield psychotic mass scam from occurring.

I don't know - I'm not a westerner, so perhaps it's "normal" for high IQ individuals to create or mis-use abstract mini-ideologies, mini-religions really, dress them as a New world, a Revolution really, to exploit individuals like workhorses over the span of many decades, until they realize that this was an illusion.

Btw we can't spin it like "Ooh, but if it wasn't for this silliness, we wouldn't have computers or the internet now". I disagree. You can't know that. Perhaps the ideology wasn't needed at all for technological development. Maybe it made for inspiration here and there, but that's it.

So.. I don't think that "try again" is his message at all. Watch more of his documentaries and it will become clear.

I see a lot of complaints about the dominance of big tech etc., but can you honestly say you’re less free in 2021 than in 2001? I’d say there’s a few things that could be done better but technology has really elevated all our lives. I think the biggest problem is the people that are left behind or don’t know how to use it all properly rather than the technology itself ... and at root these are sociopolitical ... and we’ve always had those problems but at least now we have many many good (as well as bad) platforms to discuss this stuff and promote change. And yes I do realise that some of this “discussion” is counterproductive at least recently but I think it’s important that these things get aired rather than fester, and the decision to dismiss these people from popular discussion is also a sociopolitical failure. Hopefully we are seeing the beginnings of a more unified approach in the last few weeks.

Techno utopianism can't really work under capitalism, because the machines will always be owned by a fraction of people who use them to enrich themselves.

>Democracy + Capitalism was supposed to bring freedom to the world.. instead it bought domination

I would say Democracy + Capitalism was supposed to bring freedom to the world.. instead it was used to bring domination. I don't think it had to happen that way because of some endemic property of Democracy and Capitalism. The same goes for other ideologies as well. And who is to say they were used to bring more domination than any other timeline which used other ideological frameworks?

Yes, that's fair. I'm going off of a fuzzy recollection, I haven't seen it in nearly a decade (and I was much more techno-utopian myself at the time; I remember feeling conflicted).

Setting aside the broader critiques of capitalism and materialism, I think the crux of the matter is that technology can only ever be a tool, and seldom represents an automatic win for humanist values on its own (and indeed, it can just as easily be co-opted by authoritarian governments, monopolistic corporations, ideologues, etc).

This is my favorite documentary.

Also available here: https://thoughtmaybe.com/all-watched-over-by-machines-of-lov...

This was fantastic - thanks for the recommendation. I had seen (and liked) some of his other documentaries but not heard of this series before.

His piece on conspiracies[1], mistrust of the ruling class and the early days of Rupert Murdock bugging conversations of powerful people is fascinating too.

He also did an interview after he snuck into Bohemian Grove with Alex Jones (yes that one). He maintained that Jones made up a bunch of stuff about what was going on there afterwards.

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/entries/8b69a786-56d5...

Are you not thinking of Jon Ronson sneaking into Bohemian Grove with Alex Jones?

Yes, indeed you're right, my apologies!

> Get You Out Of My Head is an epic history that shows how and why that happened. How we made this particular world. And that it was not inevitable.

Oh no he won't. He never explains why or how anything happened. He might attribute the present state of affairs to the bankruptcy of new york city in the seventies. Or to shady deals the west made with middle Eastern regimes. But none of it adds up to a coherent argument. It's just a long lamenting binge.

I'll still watch it of course.

I think he tends to portrait a thread of events, but they aren't always the only thread.

I'm very proud to say I flew from California to NYC to see Adam Curtis vs Massive Attack at the Armory in 2013 and it was probably the best live show I have ever seen. Huge video monitors, live Massive Attack behind them (gauzy) and Curtis voice booming out.

It was superb. https://youtu.be/3e3I1mLc3RM

I really hope this new Curtis work is as thought provoking as his previous series!

I really miss his BBC blog which is hidden now but still there, those posts were terrific too.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/entries/2989a78a-ee94...

I regret missing Adam Curtis and Massive Attack to this day.

Loved his blog. My favourite post was this one on interventionism:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/2011/03/goodies_and_b...

You may need to enable flash temporarily, the archival videos are half the fun.

I saw Massive Attack in their 2019 reunion tour, and Adam Curtis did all the visuals.

Without those visuals it would've just been old timers playing their old hits, but instead the show was visually arresting, challenging, political, and indeed, superb.

The experience of all my vision and peripheral vision being dominated by huge screens at the 2013 Armory show was incredible. Massive Attack (who I'm pretty luke warm on apart from Karmacoma) were pretty much the backing band to a lengthy Curtis documentary.

This was the trailer for the show that made me instantly buy a plane ticket to NYC https://youtu.be/yv_S8GdylEA

Is that the one with the war footage and the radio chatter transcripts in the background? I’ve seen that a couple of times now. Didn’t realise Adam Curtis was involved with it but it makes perfect sense now!

“This is the story of men who thought they could control the world, and a virus they couldn’t.”

[stock footage of McDonald’s from 1986]

https://youtu.be/x1bX3F7uTrg

> https://youtu.be/x1bX3F7uTrg

LOL!

I had paused Hypernormilzation on the mid point when it got to AI and the picture of the screen was a one of these guys [0] and I just had it that way and kind of wondered why I prefer to just hear his work as as podcast as I do other stuff rather than hyper focus on the screen.

This explains my latent feelings of the absurdity on screen rather well.

His documentaries have so much exposition that you can kind of look up the topics on your own as you go along to try and compare and contrast the facts as they're narrated, his work is probably my first foray with interactive TV.

0: https://youtu.be/MRx2nskdAgY?t=12

That comes from a place of love, hilarious.

It's an artsy version of the Gish Gallop.

I enjoy the aesthetics of the documentaries though.

I really disliked Curtis after many people had told me that I would love him. I think it was because people talk about his films as if they he was a historian, or they were documentaries. Then I read someone refer to him as a political artist, and through that framing I now think he's pretty interesting.

Your reminder that documentaries are the absolute worst medium for learning the truth about complicated subjects. The nature of the medium is to construct emotional appeals and narratives at the expense of truth. Articles and books are much better in this regard.

Documentaries shine for slice of life type things.

Narrative is how most people communicate. This is hardly a bad thing. This idea that a medium can do anything but communicate narrative is ridiculous.

Anyway, I wouldn't trust anything purporting to communicate the unadulterated Truth with a ten-foot pole. Name your bias and we're in business!

I wouldnt class Adam Curtis's work as documentaries. More like... interesting stories and moods crafted from a collage of archive footage. They're just an interesting take, not necessarily claiming to be the capital-T 'Truth'...

BBC’s Horizon, especially before roughly 2012, was great for going to an hours worth of depth into a subject. Since then they’ve gone too emotional and narrative for me, no longer requiring gsce science.

We joked that you could play a drinking game with the post-scienrlce era Horizon. Take a shot every time the narrator rhetorically asked "But why did it happen?"

I really love his documentaries, but he is essentially a conspiracy theorist for the thinking man. He always tries to glue different disconnected stories into one overarching narrative.

The world is not that coherent. Things happen for no reason at all.

I disagree. There is often no conspiracy or intent by the people in the individual stories he uses, he is putting them together to show in broad strokes things in society which were not there before or which he thinks are changing.

You need to read Max Weber or David Graeber, and you will recognize the sociologist or even anthropologist lens he uses to look at the modern world.

Thanks, I was not educated in the humanities, but I know of Max Weber. David Graeber's works sounds interesting; I will read some of it when I have time. Sorry he passed away.

Connecting ideas in a historical narrative is not equal to alleging conspiracy. Reading that into his documentaries says more about your perspective.

> Things happen for no reason at all.

Correction, some things happen for no reason at all. Some things do happen for a reason. Deductive and inductive logic helps us decide which is which. I greatly dislike this "all conspiracies are false" approach to understanding the world, as it feels like a "logical safe space" that is intellectually bankrupt, but especially given the state of public discourse and other events, there is such a stigma for being associated with any sort of belief in "conspiracy" that there seems to be a huge knee-jerk avoidance that just doesn't stand up to the test of history.

Conspiracies are real, and are the breadstuffs of history. Failure to acknowledge this will leave one always a few feet off the mark when trying to understand the past, which means failure to understand the present and hence, is an obstacle in helping one to guide the future.

"We live in a world where the powerful deceive us. We know they lie. They know, we know they lie. They don’t care. We say we care, but we do nothing. And nothing ever changes. It’s normal. Welcome to the post-truth world."

HyperNormalisation; https://thoughtmaybe.com/hypernormalisation/

Something Adam Curtis has been going on about lately with more emphasis in each production is the assertion that we as a society are so blinded by the illusions we live in that we are incapable of imagining what a better world would look like.

Often conspicuously absent is what such a world ought to be, in his view.

As brilliant as his works are and have been, the longer he keeps asking the same question without providing an answer the more it becomes a well-researched “we live in a society.”

If that interests you I highly recommend Mark Fisher's Capitalist Realism.

It is entirely possible that there is actually no significantly better way for us to go about this. The assumption that life can be good and happy for all is just fundamentally flawed in the face of the human condition and physical reality.

In the absence of infinite and exploitable energy it's hard to see how you wont have a society that is going to directly or indirectly impose limits upon the individuals life and well being.

And given the differences in the human psyche it seems inheritently impossible to please all of the people all of the time.

There's a gulf between something better and utopia.

Better can be very subjective. What you think is better may not align with what I think is better.

One of us may feel individual freedom at all costs, one might be the greater good trumps the individual.

You want individual freedom at all costs? Go to live in a jungle. Take the complete freedom with the dangers it brings with itself.

Otherwise you want the benefits of living in a society? The only way is you're going to sacrifice your freedom.

And your immediate black and white view shows how impossible it will actually be.

I've shown two sides of the most obvious dichotomy and you've show how intractable this will be by instantly expelling me, theoretically.

There's no moderate view available for me until people keep starving or are forced to slave away their life just for mere survival.

> it seems inheritently impossible to please all of the people all of the time.

But it's actually really easy. Every single human has the same basic needs. Cover those and you've already done a great step towards collective happiness.

> In the absence of infinite and exploitable energy it's hard to see how you wont have a society that is going to directly or indirectly impose limits upon the individuals life and well being.

How, besides lying to ourselves, can we then justify the fact that in some countries children starve to death, while in others people's biggest issue is what model of smartphone they're going to buy next?

Aren't we already imposing material limits to billions of people who don't have access to basic resources? Is that kind of limit somehow less important than the limit we might impose on someone else to not own a yacht?

And so we can all live with what is deemed essential and doled out by the state? Guess what? I don't think that's better.

Also there is a massive assumption that the person with the smart phone or fancy car is actually happy and fulfilled. That may or may not be true. There is a high degree of relativity in our feeling of contentment.

> massive assumption that the person with the smart phone or fancy car is actually happy and fulfilled

Never made this assumption. Quite the opposite, I'm saying the very fundamental basis to "happiness" is to have your basic needs covered at all times. Only then, you can start to build something on top.

It might not be better for you, but it is for the great majority of the world's population.

For this very reason, I want you to have everything you need to live with dignity. I don't care at all if you want more, if that means someone else is going to lack anything essential as a consequence.

The documentarian shouldn’t be required to provide an answer or an alternative. Their job is to present material and it’s up to us to respond.

In fact what I _really_ dislike about Netflix documentaries is how heavy-handed they are with the solutions that they dictate, James Cameron’s veganism propaganda being the most obvious example - completely coincidental that he owns a plant-based protein manufacturing company

I think they should at least present an outline of how they'd improve the status quo, otherwise it's just like filing a bug report and walking away.

It's very easy to say "this is broken", and to present that in a glossy and slick manner, but the real challenge is contributing to the fix.

A documentary creator isn’t necessarily a leader. A bug filer isn’t necessarily a coder.

Why should we assume that someone with the capability to see the problems needs to also be the one to posit solutions? We have plenty of people in society whose job solving problems actually is.

The 1983 utopian fantasy "Bolo'Bolo" proposes an extremely workable strategy for a better ordering of the human species: bolos -- that is, micronational formations of 300-500 people. I've been trying for the last ten years to create an MVP for such a bolo, and will continue to do so until a more viable path presents itself or, I find myself living in Bolo'Bolo.

https://libcom.org/files/pm_bolo_bolo.pdf

His answer to that is a grand vision of change, but he also aknowledges that is a dangerous concept. Listen to his answer in this interview (transcript in comments)

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=mlaPZ-xMPGY&feature=youtu.be

I was at an interview with him a few years ago. I think his view of the world was basically nihilistic. Not pessimistic but a kind of anti optimism

Is BBC iPLayer still geolocked to the UK? There are bunch of BBC productions that I would love to watch, that I would gladly pay money for online access, but I have not been able to.

It has been some time since, I tried, so I don't know if they have changed.

"BritBox" is the "iPlayer for the world", but it's not the same content. https://www.britbox.com/

The BBC content on BritBox should be free for all UK residents, seeing as we paid for it to be made via the TV Licence and shouldn't be asked to pay for it twice. For this reason alone I will never subscribe to BritBox, and encourage other people (in the UK) not to either.

I may be mistaken but really we don’t pay for the full production cost and don’t really own them per se.

Do you think DVDs of BBC content should be free in the UK as well?

> Is BBC iPLayer still geolocked to the UK? There are bunch of BBC productions that I would love to watch, that I would gladly pay money for online access, but I have not been able to.

Get a VPN (Nord is practically spamming it with 1/2 pricing on every podcast) and donate 100 quid to the BBC as a write off. Done. That's what I did.

Or better yet since this is YC, buy a laptop (or a few used ones off of ebay depending on your budget) to help kids in the UK without one in their charity drive [0].

This was one of the first things I used to do with TOR before it was a simple thing and required you to build your own SOCKS proxy setting back in the day (2008?) and had to learn to bypass the iplayer Geo-restrictions. I even did it when I lived in the UK for a bit just for the hell of it to prove that I could do it. Fun times!

Honestly, I wish I would have created backups of Saturday Kitchen archives from back in the day; it had so many Michelin star chefs from all over Europe/US as guests just screwing around and making dishes from their flagships in a casual setting, drinking wine the shows 'wacky' sommelier picked out and just generally BSing on screen with omelette challenges and taking guest calls that made me think it was worth going to Europe to try my hand in.

And now being retired from that Industry and seeing how COVID has shaken out for the culinary Industry I wanted to go back and watch them just to cheer up about the 'good ol days' but even youtube has very limited options for those episodes.

They had a 1.5 month back catalog if I recall correctly, but I'm not even sure if that show is still on the air anymore.

0: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/5SqHJMTKZx5sYhlltX...

Saturday Kitchen is definitely still on air and the format is more or less the same as it's been since the Anthony Worral Thompson days. It's become a bit of an institution I think.

> Saturday Kitchen is definitely still on air and the format is more or less the same as it's been since the Anthony Worral Thompson days. It's become a bit of an institution I think.

That's good to hear, James Martin was my favorite host, as he came up the hard way despite going through the culinary school route; but to be honest I liked when they were rotating TV 'chefs' as presenters as it showed how they varied and their respective approaches and cuisines.

Are there any torrents or archive Online?

Yes. I agree he was a great host. Not sure if there are torrents/archives but you can find it on iPlayer catchup if you're interested in watching the current ones (assuming you have a way to access iPlayer).

I've recently been on an Adam Curtis binge after watching HyperNormalisation and Century of the Self. I am very keen for this. There's something about his style that just sticks with you. Bonus points for watching while stoned.

Absolutely one of the best mushroom/thc enabled TV shows. The fuzzy abstraction layer that all these other comments are mentioning basically glues the universe together when you are tripping.

Could someone please summarize Curtis' opinions and claims, aggregated across his documentaries?

"power corrupts"

Thanks for the info. The guy is not an oracle but I enjoy his docs like Power of Nightmares, etc., as much as Pilger's docs. True quality in a sea of crap.

This is excellent news. My first encounter with Adam Curtis was The Mayfair Set back in 2000 or so, and I've been an avid follower of his work since then. There's something oddly satisfying about his films, and there's always something new to go and learn more about afterwards.

One of the major themes of this series is the genesis of modern conspiracy theories, and I'm definitely ready to hear Curtis' take on the matter. I feel like he's had to scrap several projects over the past few years as events overtook one's ability to digest.

I'm hoping he mentions something about the liberal/russiagate conspiracy theories as the emotional counterbalance to the rightwing/qanon-kenyan theories. Also a discussion of how the current dismissal of all conspiracy theories as axiomatically untrue is foolish.

This comment appears to be an attempt to paint these conspiracy theories as equivalent.

One posits there was a Russian influence on an election(which is probably true if not likely in all of our elections for the past 50 years) and the other is an almost comical rejection of reality.

For what it’s worth the parent likely knows this and I don’t think the person I’m responding to is making this comment in good faith.

This is a classic motte and bailey argument.

You are holding the factual motte: that Russian intelligence agencies bought some adds on social media and pretending it's the same as the bailey of the larger conspiracy theory: that Russian agents did everything up to an including hacking into voting machines, changing tallies in swing states, having blackmail on Trump, Trump having a Russian handler, Trump being a Russian asset and all sorts of other nonsense.

Russia gate is Qanon for liberals.

We even have a factual Jewish pedophile with ties to Clinton, the British Crown and the CIA who died in 'mysterious' circumstances for the Qanon motte.

There's an interesting kind of reverse motte and bailey I've noticed happening with QAnon too.

Motte: Trump was not an undercover operative working to undermine a deep state cabal with patriots who have secretly arrested almost every major politician and celebrity and replaced them with holograms.

Bailey: there's no such thing as elite pedophile rings.

Likewise, you're doing the reverse motte and bailey of: that Trump clearly was not a super-spy being directed out of Moscow as part of a Cold War style operation where a host of right wing Americans were controlled and micromanaged by Russian spymasters: THEREFORE there was nothing Russia could have been doing that would be useful to them, and it's all just made up nonsense, 'russiagate'.

Adam Curtis himself outlined some background for the counter-argument in Hypernormalization: Putin's very successful politics of chaos. This is a practice where Putin supported a number of contradictory political actors to produce 'the Zone', a condition where you couldn't really know who was real and who was being supported by Putin and putting forth fake argument.

THAT, not the Cold War style micro-management, is what ended up doing the real damage, and it's been dismayingly effective. Adam Curtis had observed and reported on it years ago.

Or we did it to ourselves with a media that gave Trump 2 billion dollars in free air time because he was the best thing to happen to ratings, 40 years of falling living standards only buoyed up by more work, mortgages and credit cards, of politicians lies that left 80% of the country sinking while making life at the top better than it ever was.

It is easy to blame someone outside for our problem, much less so to admit that there wasn't an evil master mind smart enough to play 20 dimensional chess yet foolish enough to be brought down by a few plucky reporters with a mac book.

No, Russia is an excuse and if the next Trump is what people lied this Trump was we would be indeed doomed.

It's not 20 dimensional chess. It's simple Chapayev[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chapayev_(game)

It is not a reversible relation.

Denial of the totality of Russiagate (shadowy foreign powers are using the scary, technological internet to reach into the minds of innocent Americans who would otherwise be happily eating apple pie and going to work on time in the porn and missile factory) does not imply that the motte is untrue.

It is very possible that Russia, or some element of the Russian elite, have sought to propagandize the USA. But here is zero proof that it was effective, let alone that there was control of Trump, zero proof of voting irregularities, zero proof of a change in foreign policy advantageous to Russia.

Russiagate is irrational. Maybe not as lurid as QAnon, but similarly lacking in support for its major theses.

Do we even have solid proof that IRA bought the ads? The last I saw it was "a Kremlin-linked company".

there was a Russian influence on an election(which is probably true if not likely in all of our elections for the past 50 years)

I think anyone advancing the hard line that Russia has influenced US elections for the last 50 years still has not emerged from the rabbit hole dug for protection from nuclear attacks 50 years ago.

Russia may revel and delight in anything that weakens the pre-eminent superpower, they surely have cyberwarfare teams reacting to constant US attacks. But the idea that US election results were swayed is far-fetched. The "division" that was supposedly sowed by clever Russian propaganda was manufactured by the economic engine running out of control in the USA and the resulting impoverishment of many.

Like many conspiracy theories the Russiagate hysteria seeks to replace complexity with simplicity. From my cultural and economic background it is less obviously crazy than QAnon, but if I seek to find solid grounds for either of them I end up dropping both of them into the same asylum.

Reality, as Curtis has reminded us, is not something we have direct access to, we are working off imperfect models. When those models stop working we should change them. Clinging on to them is irrational. It looks like our current models are very poor at describing the complexity of the world.

"The notion of Satanic ritual child abuse may seem crazy. But have you ever heard of the strange case of Michael Aquino?"

Not saying that will actually be Curtis's tack (almost certainly not) but it sure would be entertaining.

"The Russian government interfered in the 2016 U.S. presidential election with the goals of harming the campaign of Hillary Clinton, boosting the candidacy of Donald Trump, and increasing political and social discord in the United States. According to U.S. intelligence agencies, the operation — code named Project Lakhta[1] — was ordered directly by Russian President Vladimir Putin.[2]"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_interference_in_the_20...

577 references. Enjoy.

I've always been skeptical of Curtis documentaries but I have to give props to the BBC for airing. I can't imagine any major network in the US touching these projects with a 10 foot pole.

One of my favourite day dreams is imagining what, in 20 years time, will the Adam Curtis documentary on the Coronavirus be like.

How would one go about watching this in the US?

If iPlayer is blocked, his documentaries usually show up later on Youtube and topdocumentaryfilms.com

his catalog is available here, i expect it to pop up there as well: https://thoughtmaybe.com/

docuwiki.net

wow, this is great!

is it pirated content or all legit?

It is all copyright infringing, unfortunately.

Opera with proxy turned on + pirate bay (don’t forget to delete the trackers out of your magnet links)

https://youtu.be/x1bX3F7uTrg

Can't Get You Out Of My Head: An Emotional History of the Modern World premieres on BBC iPlayer in February

I thought this was the one he was making on Dick Cheney [0]. But it isn't.

This guy is really not a journalist. If your to ask me, he is an investigator of complex systems.

The complex system being humans societies.

[0]: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/jan/18/adam-curtis-and...

Something between a sociologist and an anthropologist, but making video art rather than books.

this forum needs a downvote botton

This is my favourite Adam Curtis documentary...

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

Only 3 mins long.

It's a parody.

That was rather good and highlights in 3 minutes the significant problems with his stylish yet incoherent films.

They’re convincing on an emotional level in the way that a speech from a politician or a well crafted advert is - by appealing to secret desires, fears and aspirations rather than persuading with the truth.

Who?

I was a fan, but then as I got older, and better at critical thinking, I realised that his films are basically a rant with a backing track of b-roll from the 8/16mm bin.

I think the thing that tipped me over was the assertion that alan greenspan and a few others were all in league together because they read Ayn Rand.

After that I realised that hes basically peddling left of centre rants in a pretty style[1].

[1] Left of british centre, and mid 2000s centre. There is nothing wrong with this. I am vaguely sympathetic of his views. But they should not be represented as either fact, or balanced.

Ah you essentially answered my question about summarizing his views.

It's quite scary that what seems like a conspiracy club lite is getting such a huge amount respect from the highly educated HN audience.

It seems the near future is converging to a bunch of conspiracy theorists duking it out with each other in front of the captive audience -- the general electorate.

Maybe it will make things easier for everyone involved if some conspirators actually do take over the world, thus making this spectacle slightly less surreal.

IMO it's a strange misinterpretation of his work to think he's a conspiracy theorist. I think it is undeniable that every era has an ideology that captures the zeitgeist of the times, I think Curtis just explores the origins of those ideologies and what motivated their progenitors, he is not alleging they had shadowy plans for world domination...

Oh I read that not as a literal "it's a conspiracy" but more that the echos of Ayn Rand's worldview are visible in how the people in power view the world and their role within it.

Calm down, his films are just interesting takes on the ideologies that govern our times, combined artfully with arresting archive footage and music. They're not always claiming to be capital-t 'truth'...

> the assertion that alan greenspan and a few others were all in league together because they read Ayn Rand.

That's a pretty facile reading of it. It might surprise you that Curtis is centre right himself.

He self identifies as a liberal in this interview https://www.haaretz.com/us-news/.premium.MAGAZINE-who-s-real.... He also supports the Occupy movement, which I suspect is not a right of center movement.

Liberalism is centre-right. Please remember that Adam Curtis is British, the American political spectrum doesn't really apply here.

Ah thanks for clarifying. I actually didn't know that.

So IIUC, UK liberals are kinda like US libertarians?

> Liberalism is centre-right.

No, the liberal democrats are centre-left. Liberalism/authoritarian is mostly a different axis to left/right.

Its perfectly possible to be a left/right leaning liberal in UK politics.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com