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Comment by labrador | Hacker News Reader

I enjoy Adam Curtis films the way I used to enjoy Jame Burke's Connections: As impressionistic history, entertaining art, montages of feelings, ideas and suspicions. They are daydreams and hallucinations of the past that offer explanations where there are none, not to be taken seriously but as a way of mulling things over. For our consideration. Like Bill Hicks said, life is a ride. Curtis films make that clear, fun and sometimes enjoyable, sometimes frightening. Many people think art is supposed to mean something, but that's not the case.

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I see it the same, not as a film that presents a chain of facts and truths, but as something that showcases a certain way of looking at the world. "I now know how X happened because Adam Curtis told me so", is a thought that has never once crossed my mind. Instead, after watching a film by him I feel a heightened sense of curiosity to look deeper into things myself. And as a filmmaker myself I'd say he does that on purpose.

This in itself is an aspect that should not be undervalued.

>>I now know how X happened because Adam Curtis told me so

I feel like I wouldn't have known about the whole Gadaffi situation if not for Hypernomalisation, but then it's a singular example.

I wouldn't know of the Rwandan genocide and how it started with the Dutch.

Dutch classified people into Tutsi and Hutu, and how their records helped Hutu find and exterminate Tutsi. The big gotcha being Tutsi and Hutu were genetically similar people with some slight differences.

Sure, there might have been new stuff in there that I have never heard about, but extrapolating from how he speaks about the stuff I know about I also take the exact phrasing and the sometimes implied causality with a grain of salt.

Oh yeah, I definitely had to go away and read up on some of the stuff using other sources, I wouldn't quote him on any of it. But he made me aware of it.

When I watched Traumezone I often thought "Oh man, when that or that happend I was probably sitting at home playing Mario or Zelda on my NES, and couldn't care less about the historic events happening over there." So Adam Curtis movies for me are just a way to reflect on my past but also human civilization as a whole, that's what I like them for.

One thing that they share in common (Adam Curtis and James Burke), as well as Myth Busters, is that they have plenty of good footage/film (or whatever you call it).

Most news stories have 30 seconds of footage, and loop it repeatedly. No historical footage, no old interviews being brought up, nothing filmed to help put a story into context.

Even many documentaries I watch, suffer the same problem, a bit of real footage, then jumping straight to interviews with people. Not much historical footage, nothing extra filmed, expect interviews with people.

It has the quality of a lot of popular stuff where it's glib and amusing and you nod your head, but then if you stop and think about it for a moment some of the arguments are not all that strong.

Like what?

For instance, one I watched described the Clinton administration as being aimless because its policy was too driven by the whims of the public as expressed by polling. In context it seemed convincing but if I’m sitting here now thinking about it I don’t think it is remotely true.

Considering that Clinton et al. gleefully adopted the moniker of "technocrat" in a period where the Internet, and digital connectivity more broadly, was ascendant, I'd say that probably even Bill would agree with that assessment.

I challenge you to find a serious political commentator who can identify a coherent vision that governed the administration's decisions beyond "whatever gets my approval rating up".

I don't see how that supports the argument. What does being a technocrat have to do with being "populist" or poll-driven? I'd see these things as opposed. And I think that Clinton and the New Democrats rather dramatically reshaped the Democratic Party in ways we're all still living with.

The questions present in polls or surveys, especially their phrasing, largely dictate the scope of what's considered debatable politics. When that scope is defined from above, populism cannot exist. Technocrats act under the auspices of "campaigns" and "programs" which start with questions defined by technocratic thinktanks, which are then inevitably justified by the polls due to their imposition of narrow Overton windows, and then operationalized according to the whims of the techno-utopians with their fetishism of statistics (read: tyranny of the majority). It is this pattern that was pioneered by the Clinton administration. It's why everyone now has such gloomy views of "political consultants".

I’m sympathetic to this view, but if we’re talking about using push polls it’s not a matter of letting polling dictate what they do. The polling is instead of a method of legitimation for their desired policy.

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