Adam Curtis Explains It All
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
They are smarter than conspiracy theories but they still follow a conspiracy logic. Finding patterns where there are none, spinning coincidences and correspondences into connections. Instead of making a claim about cause and effect he will just juxtapose some images.
I think this is a very corrosive style of thinking, and a big problem for society. Adam Curtis makes good movies but it seems bad to get more people practicing this kind of reasoning.
If you watch an Adam Curtis movie you’ll get the sensation you learned how things happened, but just try to explain in plain English what you learned afterwards.
The problem is the length. If he cut the length by 50 % the problem would be solved.
I think his documentaries show how complex the causes of some things are.
Okay I'll give it a go for the films of his I've seen.
Century of the Self - Cohesive social structures in the West that once helped produce progressive movements have been hollowed out and decayed due to post-WW2 consumerism and an endless emphasis on the "individual" over the community to the benefit of financial elites. Curtis frames this development by following the rise of psychoanalysis and personalized advertising.
Hypernormalization - Media and governmental forces have become so intertwined with the rise of social media and big tech that there is a crisis of faith in Western democratic societies in which suspicion and cynicism have filled the gap. This leads to sham democracies and consolidation of power by technocrats who play people's fears and anxieties against one another, much like Vladislav Surkov did in Russia in the late 2000s to help secure Putin's position.
Curtis traces two failed socio-political movements, the US neocons and the islamic jihadists, who both have similar and similarly idiotic ideologies. The reason they failed is that they relied on the masses adopting their idiotic ideologies, but the masses simply saw no reason to do that.
Then they found each other, and the rest is history. Each movement could use a grotesquely distorted and magnified projection of the other to justify its existence and power, the power of the nightmare represented by The Other.
Each bit (the idiocy, the similarities, the parallel failures, early practice with projections, the finding each other, the magnified projection etc.) is fleshed out in great detail.
But the stuff in the middle just isn't there. It strongly feels like he's explaining how one point follows from the next, but he isn't.
For instance: in Hypernormalization he tries to make the point that there's some kind of relationship between Western algorithmic social media and terrorism. A lot of people would agree this is plausible.
But he doesn't actually explore this point. Instead he just observes that Judea Pearl is a machine learning researcher, and his son Daniel Pearl was beheaded by al-Qaeda members, with the videos uploaded to YouTube, which also uses machine learning (never mind that it's not the kind Judea Pearl worked on).
It's just a bunch of correspondences without any actual relationship.
I think his early style was far less unique, but much stronger in making an argument, see "The Great British Housing Disaster" (1984) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ch5VorymiL4
Also - believe it or not you can actually be entertained by people like Alex Jones without believing what he says. He's incredibly entertaining. IMO in the same way as the Tiger king is entertaining. I hate that these clever intellectuals think that somehow I can't think or read up about things and decide for myself.
Example? Also if they are such compelling stories, why do only "non-establishment" media companies run them?
I can't respond to something as vague as what you are saying.
And I never made that claim.
I find his films thought provoking, but I look to them for truth with the same skepticism I have for reading some Nietzsche — I never look for one source to get everything right, I just hope to learn something in the process.
In many systems with hysteresis there is also often risk that a false positive implies a greater risk of a false negative elsewhere (if the system erroneously switches into scanning for 'X' mode, this effectively raises a risk of false negatives scanning for 'Y'). In such cases a false positive would carry greater weight than a false negative.
Maybe the point is not to learn but to think? It's food for thought.
If you make something for audience that consumes information actively (thinks), you can make a very deep, complex and narrow opinionated argument. The viewpoint is not fully developed. Audience neither accept or rejects it (hopefully).
(does not apply to specialized fields, like scientific writing with their own standards)
I think there is not enough awareness of how manipulative moving images really are. It's probably really difficult to make a movie or documentary that is not highly manipulative, intentionally or not.
The underlying thesis for his works is that the modern era has divorced us from any sort of narrative about why anything is happening. Instead of understanding personal and global events through the lens of political ideology or some cultural/religious understanding, people just observe these things as fragmented, random events.
Most Curtis movies attempt (sometimes successfully, sometimes not) to string together some context about the underlying political and intellectual forces driving these events.
It is cultural analysis, so it should not be understood as a straight reporting of facts. You see more of this type of thinking in literary publications than you do in film, but he has proven that the mode of thought transfers well to the medium.
Likewise the problem with dismissing things as “conspiracy theories” out of hand is it ignores the fact that yes, the world does have actual conspiracies, and some of them are hidden, while others exist in plain sight. The visible ones are hardest to see.
Adam Curtis' documentaries warn us against systemic effects, and they are warnings that what we're presented with isn't always the truth. It's basically what Chomsky has warned about for most of his career.
I think if these other theories had explanations as well crystallized as the action of gravity, the other poster would not object to presenting them. It's not an interesting analogy, it's a trick to legitimize hand waving about other things.
(we may not fully understand the mechanisms by which gravity acts, but we understand the effect it has quite well, to the point where we can GPS for instance, because we can precisely account for the very small differences in the way time passes in orbit)
I highly recommend Stafford Beer’s writings and the Designing Freedom book and/or lectures.
https://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/the-1973-cbc-massey-lectures-...
For instance he calls public servants 'devious' when they 'game' the system. This is not what happens at a personal level, the system is 'devious' if anything. It also doesn't address if overall people in the system are better off -
https://youtu.be/l1So7lNUD0E?t=2387
(Rewind 60 seconds for when they are measuring bird calls across Great Britain for quality of life, that's actually pretty cool)
"The Trap" was early internet, pre the popularisation of shoving ideas at people for the dopamine rush without an actual understanding.
I am interested to see if he adapts to the newer world where ideas are more common place, understanding is still lacking.
the idea of an all encompassing force that affects everyone on Earth is hard to fathom, and yet gravity is an accepted idea today, where it wasn't at the start
And yet it turns out that gravity is not a force at all. Gravity is just the shape of space.
https://www.santafe.edu/culture/podcast
If you feel like it, pls do listen to this popular podcast by the Santa Fe Institute, and you'll hear them connecting things rather frenetically. Some adherents ground all this in rigorous science, but others participate very effectively as amateurs, guided by pure intuition/creativity that's often complementary and comparably fruitful. Complexity science offers an approach that elevates metaphor to a curious form of information/knowledge. Some amateurs in the community just participate in this "rhyming game" of networks, and leave the hard science to others in the community. That works fine.
Cormac McCarthy (of "The Road" and "No Country For Old Men" fame) has been hanging out with these folks for decades, and participating in their discussions even though he lacks the scientific underpinnings. These's a symbiosis of sorts between the hard and soft "scientists" doing this work. Adam Curtis sounds like he's one of the "soft" researchers. If you can't straddle this fuzzy boundary, it doesn't mean it's not real wisdom they're chewing on -- it's just not the sort everyone can easily stomach/navigate/sift imho, just as some don't have the neurotype to excel in deep programmatic thinking)
Anyhow, thanks for the opportunity to think this through out loud :)
Another place that takes a similar but more applicative view, but is less well known, is College of the Atlantic.
Thanks so so much! I feel like some kid in my "future sphere of influence" -- whatever that might be -- could very well end up there, so your comment feels impactful.
https://www.amazon.com/Chaos-Dynamical-Systems-Primers-Compl...
College of the Atlantic actually has a lot of neat videos on YouTube, and below is a tour of the campus by the college president.
This is really a distraction from the discussion. Why is this semantical argument important to discuss? Although, if I were to answer it, "is" is not well-defined in physics. But "is" typically is understood to be "is modeled by". Yes, in general relativity, gravity is modeled by something different than what it is modeled by in Newtonian gravity, which is a force. General relativity didn't exist 300 years ago when gravity was difficult to accept. Newtonian gravity did. Models evolve but sometimes old models remain useful.
My entire point in this discussion was that we need new models to understand the complexity of modern society and human behavior. The old models aren't good enough. That's why I react somewhat negatively to complaining of conspiracy theories at an attempt to understand the complexity of the systems we've created and participate in.
This stuff is tough to understand and wrap one's head around. Even something as deductive, in a way, as Newtonian gravity and general relativity was met with great resistance, if not outright rejection. We shouldn't follow these patterns.
Thinking for yourself requires being able to make claims without having mapped an exact cause and effect - even without having evidence at hand.
It's about understanding connections and patterns and who benefits.
As for the "actual proof" sometimes those who you depend to provide it (and only hold it) are either your open enemies or are supposedly friendly (e.g. your government or Big Tech) but profit from hiding it.
People who can't connect the dots for themselves are taken advantage of (by governments, "experts" with conflicts of interests, media pundits, etc.) and are gullible.
People who over-connect the dots are conspiracy theorists (and might be gullible to different things).
One needs to hit the sweet spot (which is not that narrow, your theories don't have to be perfect, just useful to predict what will happen and understand whose your friend or your enemy).
I think this is about right.
I think of it as: "conspiracy theorists" (those who actually match the silly strawman characterization) and "anti-conspiracy-theorists" both suffer from the very same problems:
- loose epistemology...an undisciplined, over-eagerness to form illogical conclusions without sufficient evidence to substantiate them
- not being mindful of the fact that there is a very real (and very important) distinction between one's perception of reality and reality itself
I think this is exactly what Curtis is trying to instill on his viewers. The sense that the world we live in is a complex world. It made sense when you were watching it but afterwards you have difficulty explaining what you actually saw. Just like the real world.
The question I have of Curtis is whether he starts with a premise and then finds video to support it, or whether he derives his ideas from watching random archive video, or both. It would be fascinating to watch a "making of" documentary that shows how he finds the right archival footage.
Ideas like the above about MSM are the easy, obvious ones. It may reinforce what we already feel we know.
But his films are also filled with deeper reflections that are less obvious, which he can illustrate with obscure, memorable visuals.
If his films did not touch on the obvious ideas they might be too alienating, more like avant-garde art film.
If they only addressed obvious ideas the films might be too boring, more like documentaries on Netflix.
He somehow finds the right balance.
But I think these overarching general theories tying all these disparate clips together that he presents via voiceover... the "leaps" as this article describes them... these are what make his films worth the watch.
He has a true talent for that. He stretches but is careful not to go too far. That is what make his films unique, IMO.
His "general theories" are similar in effect to conspiracy theories perhaps. They can be very appealing to certain receptive audiences.
The big difference is the former seem to be designed to make you think while the latter (along with political correctness) seem to be designed to relieve you of thinking and appeal straight to emotion. His films always seem to suggest we cannot remove ourselves as factors in any outcome. We have to take some amount of responsibility. We cannot view ourselves as pure victims nor others as sole culprits.
As for this article, he reveals no overt objection to populism.
The title of this film is an homage to the author of "Bullshit Jobs", a self-described anarchist.
You should read the article then, as it is discussed in there. He has access to the complete BBC archives and just scrolls through material on fast forwards until he stumbles onto interesting threads that he saves and then later finds patterns in.
> This new series of films tells the story of how we got to the strange days we are now experiencing. And why both those in power - and we - find it so difficult to move on.
> The films trace different forces across the world that have led to now, not just in the West, but in China and Russia as well. It covers a wide range - including the strange roots of modern conspiracy theories, the history of China, opium and opiods, the history of Artificial Intelligence, melancholy over the loss of empire and, love and power. And explores whether modern culture, despite its radicalism, is really just part of the new system of power.
I'm glad this was mentioned, because i think it's hilarious:
One curious thing is that after watching his documentaries, I do find myself a bit confused about what it all means. His theories weave sometimes complex narratives, and it’s a lot to take in. I think the hardest thing to reconcile is the intent of the people behind or at least catalyze the phenomena that arise. Is the world essentially driven by emergent incompetence and narcissism or is there something more sinister and intentional about it all?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:BookSources/0-393-01...
Separately I loathe the lazy term 'conspiracy theory', which essentially means a suspicion that a secretive group of people have/are trying to conspire to take advantage.
The term is endlessly used as a vague, dismissive pejorative of everything from investigative journalism the speaker/writer doesn't like to close down any sort of open ended questioning conversation. It's even abbreviated to 'conspiracy' which makes little sense.
It spreads in Germany now and I find it's quite useful.
One man's hilariously mad tin foil hat conspiracy theorist is another man's investigative journalist...and imo opinion we can't have enough of those...
Also: it's not a "theory". A theory is something you can research and come up with a result based upon evidence.
Therefore "conspiracy theory" is just just wrong. A "conspiracy myth" fits perfectly since it's a myth with a conspiracy in it's core.
So saying that some fascists spread "conspiracy myths" about the holocaust makes sense while it legitimises their bs saying that they spread "conspiracy theories".
I would say that it also seems to be a sort of heuristic method that has been carefully planted in the minds of (I would estimate) well over 50% of the Western population, that can be remotely executed when needed (say, in news articles). It also has characteristics of self-reinforcement (social media, forums) and self-protection (observances of it can be dismissed simply by invoking it).
From what I’ve learned, narratives are not the only sources to withhold trust from. Information presented as fact or truth from seemingly reputable sources also should receive the same critical thought.
- Michael Aquino and PSYOP/MindWar
- Project MKULTRA and its connections to certain mass phenomena such as widespread distribution of LSD in counterculture circles in the 1960s, or even to domestic television programming: https://twitter.com/paulkleinfancam/status/13011978908876021...
- Iran/Contra and the War on Drugs as a stark example of "playing both sides," i.e. trafficking drugs into the U.S. and whipping up public panic and domestic military crackdown in response. I find this to be a particularly case where intentionality is hard to dismiss in favor of incompetence because so many of the players are present on both "sides" of the operation
- Brian Hayden's examination of the role of secret societies in indigenous civilizations, where it has been observed that an occulted elite of "aggrandizers" would use various means of terror and ritual to control the mass of people to direct wealth and power to themselves (article here: https://www.templeton.org/grant/the-role-of-religion-in-soci... podcast here: https://auticulture.com/the-liminalist-223-the-arrival-of-th...)
He takes a broad look at the change in motivation, the pyschological effects of believing we have no power over what happens in the future, a kind of answer to Curtis's "Hypernormalization" that explores how we thought we were in power, that we could rationalize outcomes, but in fact the world will always throw a wrench in your plans, and maybe there's no way to keep the world under control
Franco doesn't see this as a reason to be nihilistic, but outlines how nihilism became a common response to the global financial and political trends.
This one isn't a book but a written piece by Curtis in 2014, detailing one way the automated financial markets are an effort to keep things stable:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/entries/78691781-c9b7...
> “Can’t Get You Out of My Head” grew out of Curtis’s response to the populist insurgencies of 2016. Curtis was struck by the fury of mainstream liberals and their simultaneous lack of a meaningful vision of the future that might counter the visceral appeal of nationalism and xenophobia. “Those who were against all that didn’t really seem to have an alternative,” he said.