Hacker Cinema
Can't Get You Out of My Head
2021 · TV series · documentary · 80 min episodes · 1 season
Created by Adam Curtis
In six films, Adam Curtis traces the different forces across the world that have led to now. It covers a wide range—including the strange roots of modern conspiracy theories, the history of China, opium and opioids, 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.
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10 comments on Hacker News
I think the "nothing I can do will change anything" is actually a predominant theme that's emerged over the past decade. I don't know if you've watched any of Adam Curtis' documentaries, but his documentary HyperNormalisation explores this in great detail (most of this documentaries have a similar theme I've found).
Edit: Apologies, I think I mean his documentary: Can't Get You Out of My Head. Essentially it asserts that all revolutions fail, because the people who attempt to overthrow simply become the new guard.
The term's context belongs to the USSR right before it broke apart.
If you look at Adam Curtis' wealth of documentaries, one of which helped popularize the term hypernormalization:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Curtis
you will find Curtis oeuvre relies on mashing up content extracted from BBC's massive news archive arranged according to themes chosen by Curtis.
Once of Curtis' central themes is the observation of an intellectual gap between rationalist comprehension of the world through the news, and the wobbliness of how the world actually manifests, especially in the context of politics and leadership. The implicit, recurring question being what are the limits of our science to account for ourselves.
Curtis offers many views into the Soviets, especially in a series devoted to riffing on the mood of Soviet society during the 80s and 90s titled Traumazone.
Curtis' picks from the archives may help you gain a sense for distinctions between the political preconditions of the end of the USSR and ongoing mess of U.S. politics.
One take is that since the 20th century, the orientation of political leadership has profoundly changed: politicians no longer seek to offer coherent solutions in a mechanical nation, they seek the necessity of their own power in an electoral marketplace of influence within an organism of society.
Under such view, the question can be formed: Did the USSR may come undone because its bureaucrats couldn't account for everything well enough to coherently operate an economically coherent centralized state?
Curtis tries to form the same question for Thatchers' & Blair's UK when observing how the British Empire fell apart.
The intro to his film Hypernormalization sets forth the essential observation leading to such questions:
//"How we got to this strange time of great uncertainty and confusion where those who are supposed to be in power are paralysed and have no idea what to do".//
If this observation is true-- which question is begged through the survey of news-- then should it be expected that more centralized societies, however well controlled, might be more vulnerable to limits of understanding of their leadership, and by corollary as no society's leadership has a complete understanding of itself, churn and crisis are inevitable.
All of Curtis' docs deal with variations on the question of the limits of rationalism. His work now amounts large trove on the topic (see filmography):
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Curtis
A excellent aspect of Curtis' work is that he is careful to always veer away from simple proscriptive judgements. He does not pursue belief that there's any specific way that societies are supposed to work, but rather continuously questions how and why they work as they do, embracing the possibility that minds can change and adapt in the face of uncertainty and crisis.
—
PICKS
For this thread, the obvious place to start is:
1 Hypernormalisation.
After this consider the following, in order:
2 All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace
3 Oceans Apart
4 Can't Get You Out of My Head
5 Century of the Self
6 Bitter Lake
and then on in any order that suits your interests.
As these docs produce an effect much like good music as well as offering high-quality narrative insights, they can be revisited and appreciated in changing ways with experience.
(2018)? This is a 2021 repost of a (2018) interview.
> With the arrival of Adam Curtis’s new series Can’t Get You out of My Head on BBC iPlayer, we publish editor Tom Hodgkinson’s 2018 interview with the documentary maker
(Side note, Can't Get You Out of My Head massively won me over as a Curtis fan.)
What you're referring to is society's attempt to re-build itself based on rationality and individualism as a replacement to political and religious institutions. A canonical response to your point would be that we're seeking to build a society where the rational action would be for the head of NASA further the aims of NASA. This follows from an ideology set out by Ayn Rand. There are a collection of documentaries by Adam Curtis covering the arc of this philosophy: "All watched over by machines of loving grace." is probably the main one here, but "Century of the Self", and "Can't get you out of my head" are also very good.
Naturally, the problem with society's attempt to do this is that rationality is not sufficient for the head of NASA to not go against her duty as NASA's head. A utopia of radical individuals free from any ideology or institution hasn't (yet?) been realized. It's probably not a good idea, but it's the central dogma of silicon valley, the blockchain movement, the AGI movement (especially the sentience-heavy ones), much of the modern scientific community, and (as it happens) hacker news. So here we are.
Also, your logic holds that swearing on a Bible is — in the limit — more likely to lead to moral behavior than swearing on Carl Sagan's work. Nobody believes that Carl will punish wrongdoers (he might even reward them for being rational, or face questions on why he's pushing morality on others). However, people do believe that God punishes. So regardless of whether a deity exists, swearing on religious texts is more likely to alter behavior than on Sagan's.
If you enjoyed this - I highly recommend watching Adam Curtis' Can't Get You Out of My Head: https://thoughtmaybe.com/cant-get-you-out-of-my-head/
You might find some of Adam Curtis's films help you feel less baffled. Not that they have 'answers' but good contextual analysis that will give better understanding. Century of the Self, and Can't Get You Out of My Head are the most relevant here. Power of Nightmares, Bitter Lake and Hypernormalization are great too.
Collage historical/philosophical/political documentary maker Adam Curtis uses Burial a lot, has great things to say[1][2],
> "I think Burial is the genius of our time... The most important Burial song to listen to, which will tell you everything about him, is Come Down to Us... Why it's so incredible, because what Burial does is he takes what is essentially industrial noise - and songs - but fuses them together to create something that is epic and romantic, and sort of gives you a clue of the sort of thing that might be coming, culturally - which is a higher [?] system, I think. And I think he's there ahead of everyone. It's so emotional; yet, at the same time, just noise. And, I don't know, it's just, I can't - sorry, this is me being inarticulate - it's just... wonderful... It takes you into another world."
HyperNormalization & Can't Get You Out Of My Head are both amazing modern Curtis works. Going back & watching some of his older stuff like Bitter Lake has been as ever intense & powerful & stunning. Keeping a real eye on the world, really seeing it, is a talent Fisher & his writing showed off. Curtis gives us a wiser, more understandable interlace of the tapestry, through his documentaries, to see with. Just... be prepared for even more self-care afterwards.
[1] https://www.dazeddigital.com/artsandculture/article/33496/1/adam-curtis-hypernormalization-bbc-film-power https://www.reddit.com/r/burial/comments/6dg2or/adam_buxton_interviews_adam_curtis_talks_about/
I would argue that there is a thesis—one that is fairly explicit, shared among various Curtis works, and not even particularly controversial, although it can sometimes feel slippery when presented via Curtis' cinematic techniques.
He suggests that the 20th century was a period of intensely competing utopian ideologies, all of which ended in chaos, disaster, and disillusion as they intersected with problems of individual freedom and weakness. What proved most "stable" for Western societies were cynical policies in which the health of financial markets, and the suppression of contra-modern movements through overwhelming military force, were prioritized over sweeping social reforms that reeked of the old failed ideologies. This led to a period of brief peace and prosperity in the West during the 1990s which is sometimes called "The End of History," and which led some people to believe that financialization was not merely a cynical tool, but in fact the best means to also ensure individual happiness and prosperity.
However, he argues that Western political leaders have proven unable or unwilling to change these policies in the face of the increasingly serious crises of the 21st Century, as they believe their personal fortunes and the stability of the societies they manage are tethered to the goodwill of markets. In the face of this stasis, various elements of Western societies most affected by repressed upheaval have turned to nostalgic or otherwise magical thinking, recalling the old failed ideologies of the previous century. Both those who govern and the governed seem trapped, unable to conceive of anything genuinely new.
Curtis' documentaries, in particular "Can't Get You Out of My Head," attempt a kind of psycho-history of 20th Century ideologies, their ultimate failure, and the consolidation of forces that led to the End of History. They further attempt to restore a sense of absurdity to present-day political and social thrashing-about, and ultimately suggest that none of our present conditions are inevitable, and can be changed through will, imagination, and consciousness of our past.
(Happy to be corrected by any Curtis obsessives if I've missed anything.)
That YouTube channel that definitely maybe isn't actually run by Adam Curtis uploaded his latest BBC docuseries Can't Get You Out of My Head.
"In "Can't Get You Out of My Head," Curtis plays a long montage of talking heads on U.S. cable news repeating the phrase "the walls are closing in," during the final days of the Mueller investigation. He accuses media organizations, including the Times and magazines like this one, of profiting from the frenzy and uncertainty of the past four years, obsessing over Trump's personal corruption and mendacity rather than the alienation and anger that brought about his Presidency in the first place."
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.