Comment by xkeysc0re | Hacker News Reader

Comment by xkeysc0re | Hacker News Reader

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>but just try to explain in plain English what you learned afterwards.

Okay I'll give it a go for the films of his I've seen.

Century of the Self - Cohesive social structures in the West that once helped produce progressive movements have been hollowed out and decayed due to post-WW2 consumerism and an endless emphasis on the "individual" over the community to the benefit of financial elites. Curtis frames this development by following the rise of psychoanalysis and personalized advertising.

Hypernormalization - Media and governmental forces have become so intertwined with the rise of social media and big tech that there is a crisis of faith in Western democratic societies in which suspicion and cynicism have filled the gap. This leads to sham democracies and consolidation of power by technocrats who play people's fears and anxieties against one another, much like Vladislav Surkov did in Russia in the late 2000s to help secure Putin's position.

The Power of Nightmares - Curtis traces back the history of leaders abandoning the approach of holding on to power through a shared vision of a better tomorrow that people can rally around. Curtis using the rise of suicide bombing as an example of a powerful nightmare that leaders can use to gain and keep power by convincing the people that their leadership is the only thing holding back the abyss.

That's a good summary of the introduction, but the real stuff is a lot more fun (and awful):

Curtis traces two failed socio-political movements, the US neocons and the islamic jihadists, who both have similar and similarly idiotic ideologies. The reason they failed is that they relied on the masses adopting their idiotic ideologies, but the masses simply saw no reason to do that.

Then they found each other, and the rest is history. Each movement could use a grotesquely distorted and magnified projection of the other to justify its existence and power, the power of the nightmare represented by The Other.

Each bit (the idiocy, the similarities, the parallel failures, early practice with projections, the finding each other, the magnified projection etc.) is fleshed out in great detail.

Most importantly he introduces the idea, that both sides need each other and basically follow the same neocon philosophy to express influence and organize society. This dependency is pretty problematic for resolving the issue...

I guess the thing with these movies is the high level narrative is interesting, and at the low level, all the individual historical events discussed are interesting.

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.

That is a pretty crazy coincidence though. It has a certain aesthetic and narrative beauty.

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