HyperNormalisation
2016 · Film · documentary · 167 min
Directed by Adam Curtis
We live in a world where the powerful deceive us. We know they lie. They know we know they lie. They do not care. We say we care, but we do nothing, and nothing ever changes. It is normal. Welcome to the post-truth world. How we got to where we are now…
58 positive3 negative3 mixed9 neutralfrom 73 commenters
Where to watch
No streaming data for this title.
91 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.
i’ll second this. if you haven’t seen hypernormalisation yet, it’s absolutely worth watching. you can usually find it circling on youtube in various places, just make sure you don’t watch one of the weird copies, the comments will usually indicate.
it will feel entirely disjointed but the way he brings it all together is nothing short of incredible.
ps: the soundtrack is amazing.
pss: nsfw and ya may not want to watch with kids unless documentary footage of some sorta horrific stuff won’t bother them.
HyperNormalisation (2016) is a documentary film by Adam Curtis; the word/concept is from a book, so maybe that's what you're referring to? I have only seen the film myself.
As to your question about Soviet collapse, I don't think I could coalesce the views of the 166 minute documentary to this comment field while doing it justice. I'm not sure that there is a direct casual relationship or arrow of causality between the collapse and use/misuse of language, as much as there is a feedback loop between the two.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperNormalisation
> HyperNormalisation is a 2016 BBC documentary by British filmmaker Adam Curtis. It argues that following the global economic crises of the 1970s, governments, financiers and technological utopians gave up on trying to shape the complex "real world" and instead established a simpler "fake world" for the benefit of multi-national corporations that is kept stable by neoliberal governments.
> The word hypernormalisation was coined by Alexei Yurchak, a professor of anthropology who was born in Leningrad and later went to teach at the University of California, Berkeley. He introduced the word in his book Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (2006), which describes paradoxes of Soviet life during the 1970s and 1980s. He says everyone in the Soviet Union knew the system was failing, but no one could imagine any alternative to the status quo, and politicians and citizens alike were resigned to maintaining the pretense of a functioning society. Over time, the mass delusion became a self-fulfilling prophecy, with everyone accepting it as the new norm rather than pretend, an effect Yurchak termed hypernormalisation. It has since gained further resonance in the social media era in 2025 in the U.S.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yS_c2qqA-6Y
I think you might also like to check out another Adam Curtis documentary series, Russia 1985–1999: TraumaZone. I'm not an expert, but it seems to me that, ironically (or not), after the fall of the USSR, the government no longer controlled the media directly. Oligarchs appear to have taken over nearly everything under privatization, including the media and the nominally democratic government, so it's hard to say that it was better or worse than before the fall, rather than differently bad. Certainly many lost their lives, and that's lamentable to say the least.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russia_1985%E2%80%931999:_TraumaZone
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLSjQL8MYniTTLA3wnZ25U-s6RgR4uJNvL
In researching this response, I learned of a new Adam Curtis doc series that came out last year, which I just started watching. The "talking computer" at the crisps factory with a phone based ordering system was interesting to see.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shifty_(TV_series)
> Shifty is, according to the Guardian columnist Lucy Mangan, a "purely UK-focused dissection of recent history, built around the idea that the growing atomisation of society has ushered in an age in which the concept of a shared reality on which we can all depend has dissolved – and with it any hope of a functioning democracy." The overarching theme is that Britain is haunted by its past, constantly replayed through the media, which prevents it from going forward with a vision for the future.
> Shifty depicts the changing landscape of Britain under Margaret Thatcher, including a shift of focus from politics to finance that saw the collapse of industry in the UK.[8] Curtis argues that this shift towards individualism and consumerism has incurred a dismantling of democracy over the last 45 years.
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPSo2fAdxXUW-y5xCATilyzBO50zBB8xe
Hypernormalisation - A. Curtis (2h46m)
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=dUhVN0UpyH4
//[a story of how] governments, financiers and technological utopians gave up on trying to shape the complex real world and instead established a simpler fake world for the benefit of multi-national corporations that is kept stable by neoliberal governments. The film was released on 16 October 2016//
Curtis' signature style is to propose a thesis and develop it entirely via BBC News video archive segments arranged as an impressionistic, editorial montage. The news segments are bound together by V.O. (or text) narrative, and punctuated by a soundtrack of esoteric pop music to impose a personal perspective and stimulate a gestalt critique.
Curtis' impressionistic style follows an approach popularized by H. Marshall McLuhan that McLuhan termed "probes" and gestalt, which combines the classically Greek intellectual features of the trivium with the tactile sensitivities of an artist to find a whole out of parts.
The probe approach allows an interlocutor to transcend rational (Aristotelian) thought without abdicating the powerful tools of the trivium: grammar, logic, and rhetoric. The intellectual gesture utilized is Hegelian "aufheben": the transcendence of contradictions (thesis vs. antithesis) through a lifting-up into a higher order that accounts for the conflict and places the antagonistic precepts into a position of reconciliation (synthesis).
Gestalt is the human capacity to perform aufheben over the entire range of our sensorium and thus perceive a whole that is at once made of parts and greater than the parts.
Cutis applies a probe / gestalt approach with the BBC news archive to develop a thesis that although subject to the tribal zeitgeist of 20th century electronic media, lifts the news artifacts into a synthesis of a theory of corporate political power. His quandary is democratic. He states this in the form of a quote from David Graeber: "The ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently"
Curtis' is sometimes derided or dismissed as manipulative for his artistic approach, under an observation that propaganda works on the same probe and gestalt principles, but this isn't a serious criticism because the sociological pathos being examined (in this case a question begged by the thesis of hypernormalization) is ideological by nature, and if a more rigorous linear comprehensioned had generated the sociological features under examination, there should have been be no pathos to examine.
Curtis is aware that the creation of (fake) reality is both the social malaise and its cure.
For example, the fact that Newton's celestial mechanics are incomplete according to relativistic and quantum features doesn't preclude a manned moon mission organized according to Newton's laws. But did Artemis really get to the moon?!
The late social critic Mark Fisher, who coined the term "capitalist realism", applied critical theory and post-modernist philosophy to create influential analysis adjacent to Curtis. Fisher also nodded to esoteric TV and pop music to amplify points about corporate ideology and lifestyles, and routinely evoked personal anecdotes about his own work life as probes.
See:
Hauntology, Lost Futures and 80s Nostalgia - Jonas Čeika (11m)
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gSvUqhZcbVg
This scary, yet almost nothing on the news.
We're living in a fake world and pretending everything is fine.
Adam Curtis made a movie HyperNormalisation and we're living it also today.
Adam Curtis:
“HyperNormalisation” is a word that was coined by a brilliant Russian historian who was writing about what it was like to live in the last years of the Soviet Union. What he said, which I thought was absolutely fascinating, was that in the 80s everyone from the top to the bottom of Soviet society knew that it wasn’t working, knew that it was corrupt, knew that the bosses were looting the system, know that the politicians had no alternative vision. And they knew that the bosses knew that they knew that. Everyone knew it was fake, but because no one had any alternative vision for a different kind of society, they just accepted this sense of total fakeness as normal. And this historian, Alexei Yurchak, coined the phrase “HyperNormalisation” to describe that feeling.
I have to say, I'd never heard of Adam Curtis or the HyperNormalisation documentary.
I just watched the first ~30 min and I'm not seeing the "bit picture". Hopefully, it won't take me another 10 years to achieve enlightenment.
HyperNormalisation is one of many great documentaries by Adam Curtis, many of which are available on archive.org [1]. Specifically, I can recommend The Century of the Self and The Power of Nightmares. No need for YouTube :) FWIW, these used to be able on Google Video back when that still existed. And via torrents.
[1] https://archive.org/search?query=creator%3A%22Adam+Curtis%22
Curtis's HyperNormalisation, a BBC documentary, for those unfamiliar:
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperNormalisation>
Video, at BBC Online: <https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p04b183c>
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.
> The reality is it was an entirely fake constructed world designed by advertisers, and to some lesser degree, the political class
Did anyone else hear this narrated in Adam Curtis's voice, or is that just me?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperNormalisation
> HyperNormalisation is a 2016 BBC documentary by British filmmaker Adam Curtis. It argues that following the global economic crises of the 1970s, governments, financiers and technological utopians gave up on trying to shape the complex "real world" and instead established a simpler "fake world" for the benefit of multi-national corporations that is kept stable by neoliberal governments.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MIHC4NNScEI HyperNormalisation explained by Adam Curtis
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=to72IJzQT5k HyperNormalisation (2016)
Adam Curtis‘ excellent documentary Hypernormalisation is available on YouTube:
https://youtu.be/Gr7T07WfIhM?si=ao9n52h4yn6Y40T1
Similarly, you might be interested in the Adam Curtis documentary HyperNormalisation: https://vimeo.com/191817381
What I see and hear around me is a miniscule fraction of the outside world. To have a shared understanding of reality, of what is happening in my town, my city, my state, my country, my continent, the world, requires much more than what is available in your immediate environment.
In the grand scheme of understanding the world at large, our immediate senses are not particularly valuable. So we _have_ to rely on other streams of information. And the trend is towards more of those streams being digital.
The existence of "fake news" and "alt facts", doesn't mean we should accept a further and dramatic worsening of our ability to have a shared reality. To accept that as an inevitability is defeatist and a kind of learned helplessness.
Have you seen the Adam Curtis documentary "Hypernormalisation"? It deals with some similar themes, but on a much smaller scale (at least it is smaller in the context of current and near future tech)
My understand of Hyper Normalisation is that it is the construction of a fake reality that everyone agrees on: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperNormalisation
Which is different to flooding the channels with contradictory information, so that no-one knows what to believe.
The film 'Hyper Normalisation', by Adam Curtis, is well worth watching, BTW.
There is a documentary which is somewhat related - HyperNormalization. It talks about how politics is fake now:
> HyperNormalisation is a 2016 BBC documentary by British filmmaker Adam Curtis. It argues that governments, financiers, and technological utopians have, since the 1970s, given up on trying to model the complex "real world" and instead established a simplified "fake world" for the benefit of corporations and kept stable by neoliberal governments around the world.
Clicked expecting an Adam Curtis documentary, but turns out I was thinking of HyperNormalisation (also 2016).
I don't know if this comment will be found in the sea of great comments in this thread, but I think this article is the answer to Adam Curtis' film Hypernormalisation.
The premise is that humans are currently trapped in an endless cycle and we have no concept of how to break out of it, but I think this might at least provide some context as to why.
I highly recommend watching it (along with his other documentaries) if you found this article fascinating. It's like this in video form.
> I have reached a point where this crap isn’t even interesting to me anymore.
Adam Curtis covers this effect wonderfully in his film Hypernormalisation: https://archive.org/details/HyperNormalisation
Adam Curtis documentaries (e.g., Century of Self[1], All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace[2], HyperNormalisation[3])
[1]https://youtu.be/eJ3RzGoQC4s
[2]https://youtu.be/I6EBpLfLHCA
[3]https://youtu.be/VzqDMnUG4kk
We have no longer any "great struggle" to concern ourselves with. Recommended film: Adam Curtis' Hypernormalisation.
It is a confluence of a great many things.
Here is Bertrand Russell on his meeting with Vladimir Lenin in 1920: https://youtu.be/6TK9c-caEcw?t=65
Lenin: Oh we're not establishing peasant proprietorship, it is, you see there are poor peasants and rich peasants and we stirred up the poor peasants against the rich peasants and they soon hang them from the nearest tree. *cackle*
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iskra
It predates modern day Russian, Soviets, or even Bolsheviks. It goes back to Mensheviks who initially developed such psyops to get into and hold power. They had their own inspirations of course but this is really where this evil exploded. It isn't some big secret - the ends justify the means, so lie, make false equivalencies, get people all stirred up and questioning reality and sow distrust as much as possible. Once you get in power you'll put things in order what could possibly go wrong? Things are dire and can't get any worse, so get in power by all means necessary.
With the backdrop of the Cold War they turned it outwards, if you aren't familiar you can get a good feel for the vibe from any Adam Curtis documentary, for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperNormalisation
The problem is that once trust collapses and nobody believes in the media, the institutions, and everybody is aware that people lie -- the trick really is to get you to lie also, even a little bit -- a society can get completely untethered from reality.
> It's absolutely fantastic to me how people can just suspend reality and start believing the most absurd notions.
A lot of conspiracies do end up true, coverups are a thing, who can you trust? What even is real?
It is not that your friends are bad people or lack critical reasoning skills. They got shaken out of solid ground and now are in a question-everything mindset.
Very effective. Tragically so.
You're either too young or you were living in the West during the USSR years. I think you should watch Adam Curtis' Hypernormalisation documentary. It equally applies to the USSR and today's Western world.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperNormalisation
> The so-called Russian Firehose of Propaganda model, described in a 2016 Rand report, is about creating a fog of misinformation; it focuses on volume, and on creating uncertainty. It doesn't matter if the "large language models" are inconsistent, if they can greatly escalate volume. And it's clear that that is exactly what large language models make possible. They are aiming to create a world in which we are unable to know what we can trust; with these new tools, they might succeed.
I would encourage anyone who wants to look into this more to see the part of the 2016 documentary/film project "Hypernormalisation" about Vladislav Surkov:
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=hypernormalisation+vladislav+surkov
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lI27qk1irg0
> even when it's only about surface style
There's such thing as respect for the viewer. Idk about Curtis, but the grossly manipulative style of popular political documentaries doesn't show that respect. I also don't think it's about the ‘surface’ when it's designed to tug at the emotions every second of the film.
P.S.: looked through the filmography, turns out Curtis is the author of ‘HyperNormalisation’. At least based on that I'm gonna say he does use style close-ish to what I described above: perhaps less drones, more hyperactive editing. Can't remember what the narration was like in that film, but I wasn't impressed in any positive way.
This is the most important worry.
Populism from the far right has adopted a strategy of re-defining key terms such as nation, citizen, fairness, representation.
Under these conditions, a highly diverse council will either not be able to decide or will need to decide in favor of maximum leniency.
By the way, Adam Curtis made this point in his documentary "HyperNormalisation", where he argued that Trump had hijacked "fair and balanced" reporting.
This is a reasonable question, but at the present moment people pretend that the manufactured doubts, e.g. about climate change, are tantamount to real doubts, when they aren't. We live in an atmosphere where doubt, disinformation, and confusion is an active strategy. It isn't even so much about claiming "alternative facts" as it is keeping people triggered. I would recommend watching "Hypernormalisation" by Adam Curtis to understand what is going on.
I recommend the documentary Hypernormalisation for further background and commentary about these events.
https://invidious.weblibre.org/watch?v=thLgkQBFTPw
The documentary Hypernormalisation talks about the strategies Bezmenov lines out the four basic stages from a slightly different angle. Worth a watch. Things have gotten even more frightening since this warning. Bezmenov talks as if it's only the left that's targeted by ideological subversion, and maybe that was the primary strategy at the time, but it sure seems like both sides are are in play now.
https://www.filmsforaction.org/watch/hypernormalisation-2016/
HyperNormalisation is an excellent movie. I don't necessarily agree with everything in it but it gave me something to think about.
Adam Curtis, in his movie HyperNormalisation, talked of a theory that this kind of activism disappeared around the 70s and 80s. It's the kind that requires banding into groups, to a significant extent giving up individuality. According to the theory this is also the death of politics: the hyper individuality took away politic's power and left only spectacle and populism. The way he told it was that the hippy revolution back-fired: the look-within insight turned into consumerism and heightened individuality. My retelling is a bit scattered. The movie is well worth a watch.
This text was included in Adam Curtis's film 'HyperNormalisation' which I'd highly recommend. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperNormalisation
I agree. I lapped up alot of his stuff, without a second thought. After watching a deconstruction video of hypernormalisation I was left thinking I had been suckered again "loose change style" I was recommeded to watch his lastest release (of which the full 8.something hours is available directly on Curtis' own you tube channel) I watched the first 20 / 30 minutes and turned off. It felt like how I imagine brain-washing works. Lots of weird (and jarring) footage un-related to the voice over, werid music (not required for what is supposed to be a documentary IMO) and jumped from topic to topic without any cohesive thread or reason. No longer a fan.
Edit: Grammar
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.
So many, but in recent years 'Hypernormalisation' by Adam Curtis.
Curtis's style and tone and bias can grate, and is not for everyone, but in this documentary his typical format gels. It describes a bunch of seemingly disparate world events that eventually appear integrated. No one comes out a hero. It subtly reminded me to not take 'positive change' for granted and for that there is no final victory, nor final defeat. The same arguments must continue to be put forward to each generation.
> Why does it seem like we can argue only about object level matters, and almost no one [1] can see that the framework we run politics on top of is fundamentally flawed?
> Would it maybe help if we were to consciously force ourselves to conceptualize society/humanity as a video game, that has parameters and behaviors, and the state of the system can be acted on, but our actions will only be effective if the game allows it?
For those interested in the first question, and the answer to why the second question is not the right way to go, check out Adam Curtis's most recent film, HyperNormalisation [0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperNormalisation
The gap that separates us is too wide. The only thing I can suggest is this, please watch Adam Curtis's documentary 'Hypernormalisation':
https://vimeo.com/191817381/comments
(Watch at your own risk, be aware it is a BBC propaganda piece.)
I recommend watching Adam Curtis' documentary called Hypernormalisation to get a sense of how badly this can get abused by political operatives. Especially this clip: https://youtu.be/Y5ubluwNkqg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fny99f8amM
Ooh yeah i found Hypernormalisation quiet een eye opener, my first thought was wtf for conspiracy movie did i just clicked on. But it kinda got me searching and made me end up becoming a casual consumer of geopolitical articles and think tank talks on youtube.
Adam Curtis is a brilliant film maker. "Hypernormalisation" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fny99f8amM) and "Bitter Lake" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=84P4dzow1Bw) are well worth watching too.
Maybe this is more than what people usually understand when they hear the term "class struggle" but this is actually exactly what Marx is talking about when he describes the "system" of capitalism and how all of the classes are dependent on it even though they are in conflict. This is related to the "inherent contradictions" built into the system which he also discusses.
One word you mention though -- "Hypernormalisation" -- reminds me of a film that made me see the world differently. I don't know if you intentionally used that term, but the Adam Curtis film Hypernormalisation is, I believe, an absolute must watch, probing for some clarification on the logic of the last 40-50 years of history in our capitalist/neoliberal society.
HyperNormalisation is amazing, as are all of Adam Curtis's other documentaries. I especially liked Bitter Lake as well. All highly recommended.
My own picks would be HyperNormalisation, The Pervert's Guide to Cinema, and Koyaanisqatsi
It doesn't matter. Null votes don't count. They should have voted for the other guy if they didn't like Bolsonaro.
Mandatory voting is just another useless attempt to mask the fact that today's politicians are not actual leaders but rather worthless reality TV personas. Like in Ukraine where people picked an actual actor in an attempt to mock the worthless political class. It's typical Eastern European absurd humour. Adam Curtis' HyperNormalisation documentary explains it quite well.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperNormalisation
i highly recommend the work of adam curtis, in particular his documentary "bitter lake", and perhaps "hypernormalisation".
he was influenced by baudrillard's critiques of narrative as well, one of baudrillard's essays that always sticks with me is "pataphysics of the year 2000", in which he predicts the 'news loops' in which narratives are obliterated in the 24-hour news cycle of our information age.
in the Matrix, at the beginning of the film, Neo hides some discs in a hollowed-out copy of a Baudrillard work, which isn't coincidental - baudrillard spent alot of time talking about how narratives often were confused with reality, though this is a very simplified explanation
my favorite essays he did to critique narrative were a series he did in the early 90's: -"The Gulf War Will Not Happen" -"The Gulf War Isn't Happening" -"The Gulf War Didn't Happen"
i might be misremembering the exact titles, but the sort of point he was trying to make is that in our minds, the 'gulf war' is a story about iraq invading a country, and us saving the day. The reality of it was so much more complex, involving centuries of background involving way more participants.
Great recommendation. His newest long work "HyperNormalisation" (2016) [0][1] is even more timely and covers PR in a modern context, and explores how it fits in with modern hacktivism, international proxy wars, warlords current and former, Occupy movements and Arab Spring, and he even manages to fit in the Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Barlow's Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, and early phreaker culture icons Phiber Optik and Acid Phreak.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperNormalisation
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fh2cDKyFdyU (full 166 minute documentary)
You could watch Adam Curtis' HyperNormalisation documentary for further insight into this. It's about the current political elite but comoares the current situation with the one in the USSR before the fall of the Iron Curtain.
A weird article, but the title reminded me of this documentary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperNormalisation
I think everyone should watch it.
The documentary HyperNormalisation[1] argues that this deluge of low quality information is intentional.
> "In Russia, Vladimir Putin and his cabinet of political technologists create mass confusion. Vladislav Surkov uses ideas from art to turn Russian politics into a bewildering piece of theatre. Donald Trump used the same techniques in his presidential campaign by using language from Occupy Wall Street and the extreme racist right-wing. Curtis asserts that Trump "defeated journalism" by rendering its fact-checking abilities irrelevant."
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperNormalisation
This reminds me of the HyperNormalisation documentary. You're instinct is to verify the information by reading about it elsewhere but it's hard to verify something so obscure.
You can see this beginning in roughly 2011 when the Occupy Wallstreet protests start to fracture. This was when Starbucks began advocating for anti-racist policy (why? they make money selling permutations of coffee and milk) and a bunch of other corporations chimed in. The 99% movement quickly splintered off into anti-racist memes and whirled into Third Wave Feminism + needs for "inclusion" and "intersectionality" and whatever terms the Wallstreet-backed Left felt best to appease the working poor and working lower-middle class of academics and journalists (who are basically working poor now, but would not like to admit it).
So when you say: >Today's western progressivism is taken hostage by the elite.
I agree. In fact, there is likely evidence that it was manufactured by the elite. This discussion is heading to the territory of Hypernormalisation[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yS_c2qqA-6Y], a film I recommend.
I also recommend Adam Curtis’s four part documentary “The Century of the Self”, the first episode of which is here: https://youtu.be/DnPmg0R1M04
The first episode deals exclusively with Bernays, and the following three episodes follow a political narrative of impact.
I believe Curtis’s “Hypernormalisation” would be more salient to the narrative here, which discusses the funding of misinformation as an alternative to traditional authoritarian power structures like censorship: https://youtu.be/fh2cDKyFdyU
The, ahem, documentary ‘HyperNormalisation’ seems to have the exact same footage: https://youtu.be/fh2cDKyFdyU?t=4947
(The use of Eliza in the film is hilariously nonsequitous, though.)
However, half of the clip looks like stock videos of people typing or looking at the screen, so not too much value in that.
Sounds similar to the BBC documentary "Hyper-normalization":
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperNormalisation
There is a nice exploration of this in the Adam Curtis documentary Hypernormalisation
That's the fallacy of technocrats. The Soviets used to think that with their centrally planned economy. You should probably see Adam Curtis' Hypernormalisation documentary. It's an eye opener.
What I took away from Adam Curtis's film HyperNormalisation is that the internet didn't cause these issues, but it is to blame for us not being able to do anything about it.
I love all the films I've seen by him, but I feel like Hypernormalisation was a cut above the rest. Adam Curtis feels like a continental philosopher (yes, I know he's British) making films instead of writing books and Hypernormalisation feels like his Magnum Opus. This interview is probably a great way to get the same in writing.
Adam Curtis is great. He's been making films for about 30 years and has a large fimography. Early in his career he's made some 20th century history documentary series, very recommended. Lately he's been making great films about contemporary phenomenon, I loved both of his last films, Bitter Lake (2015) and HyperNormalisation (2016). Highly recommended, especially the latter.
In the UK it can still be seen on iplayer: https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p02gyz6b/adam-curtis-bitter-lake
(As with the equally amazing Hypernormalisation: https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p04b183c/adam-curtis-hypernormalisation )
This type of article about PKD comes around more and more often these days.
What Dick really got his fingernails under was the idea that our subjective reality, our semantic map of the real, has become more real to us than any objective reality. He probes this at many levels, from that of our individual perceptron driving our subjective reality (eg. Dr Bloodmoney, A Scanner Darkly) or even the perceptron of others or another being so overwhelmingly powerful that it drives our reality (eg. Flow my Tears, Our Friends from Frolix 8). He also explores more directly manufactured realities, as in Ubik and The Simulacra, where forces actively set out to deceive, both out of compassion and cruelty - and sometimes just because.
Jean Baudrillard formulated much of PKD’s weltanschauung in his Simulacra and Simulation, which is as mind-bending a collection of essays as one is ever likely to read.
A particular recurrent topic for both is the idea that “The Empire Never Ended” - that we live in the latter-day Roman Empire, having inherited our fundamental western Judeo-Christian semantic symbol set from the commingling of Roman culture (Mithratic cult, god co-option, etc.) with first century Palestinian culture. Our map of reality is that which was last substantially updated then, and everything we have done since is on the map, rather than the underlying reality.
It all gets very gnostic (another favourite theme of PKD’s), but I do think that there’s a fundamental and valid observation that is made and expounded upon about the malleable nature of human reality.
In today’s world of ubiquitous hyperreality, sensationalised and manufactured narratives, instantaneous and often wildly speculative coverage of ambiguous events so far removed from us yet seemingly right on our doorstep, this philosophy becomes deeply compelling.
That reminds me - Hypernormalisation, an Adam Curtis documentary, provides a light introduction to many of these ideas, if a bit of Baudrillard is a steep start.
If you like Hypernormalisation you should definitely look into his other documentaries, especially Century of the Self.
It explores the rise of advertising in the 20th century, revealing how it emerged from propaganda during the wars and deeply wove itself into social norms. It might be the most powerful documentary that I've seen, because I watched it as an advertising undergrad and it unnerved me enough to move away from the field.
For example, it wasn't socially acceptable for women to smoke until the 20's, when the American Tobacco Company paid a group of suffragettes to prominently light up cigarettes whilst on public display during the Easter Day Parade. They positioned smoking as a display of independence for women, piggybacking the feminist movement and calling cigarettes "Torches of Freedom". There are several examples like this in the documentary, along with interviews from their creators.
It's shocking how easily public opinion can be swayed, and the techniques are far more powerful now through the Internet and social media. If I could ask every human to watch a documentary, it would be this one followed by Hypernormalisation.
You can watch most of Curtis' work for free at https://thoughtmaybe.com/by/adam-curtis/
Hypernormalisation from Adam Curtis. I have been looking for another documentary as visual appealing, as evolving as this one but haven't found any other documentary. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fny99f8amM
Do you know another documentary as good as this one?
Glad to see this comment has risen from the [Dead]. As always, I would encourage HNers to think critically and fight bad language/ideas with better language/ideas, rather than downvoting or reporting anything that conflicts with your personal opinions.
Say what you will about Adam Curtis, he's no Alex Jones, which I hope would be obvious from his Wikipedia entry and filmography below.
I heard a lot about Hypernormalization online and finally gave in and watched it. I almost gave up 20 minutes in or so as there's no doubt it has a conspiracy theory feel to it, but am I glad I hung in there as it gets much, much better as it progresses. I found the portions on the history of Syria and the US Government's on again, off again, conveniently malleable relationship with Muammar Gaddafi particularly interesting.
I should also note, this documentary isn't a one-sided hit piece by any means, there's something for people of all political stripes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Curtis
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Curtis#Filmography
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperNormalisation
To look at it optimistically, or maybe naively, ever increasing centralization will increase our incentive to devise decentralized alternatives and generally decrease our tolerance for such colossal clusters of power. Facebook and the like are already profanely large and important. That could be the only reason to give more power to Facebooks of the world – to quicken their downfall.
A sort-of test of this theory is the current US administration. During the election, some anti-establishment and left activists called for Trump to be elected. They felt like society didn't want to be fixed, or was beyond fixing. Dishearted, they decided that the faster this unsustainable state of affairs reaches its climax the better. Enter Trump.
There's a noteworthy counteracting force though. As, the documentary maker, Adam Curtis argues in HyperNormalisation, for the last few decades, the principal objective of our ruling class is to maintain stability and reduce risk. Risk, as a word, has actually been bizzarely relevant during this time. Look at how its use in the Google Books corpus shoots up starting in the seventies [0]. Of course, virtually any ruling class always opposed power redistribution, but what Curtis is trying to demonstrate is that our current establishment has become extremely adept at it, in part thanks to the advent of computing and internet.
An interesting area of focus for socioeconomic studies is how specifically stability of power distribution is maintained, in this day, and how those mechanisms could be compromised.
[0] https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=risk&year_start=1800&year_end=2018&corpus=15&smoothing=0
Adam Curtis has made quite a few documentaries that are really worth watching. A few that spring to mind are:
The Trap All watched over by machines of loving grace (Essential viewing for hackernews readers, I think this is his best work) Bitter Lake HyperNormalisation
They are not without flaws, and sometimes I think some of the connections made between events are a little far fetched.
However they are thought provoking and extremely well made.
I am constantly on the lookout for people whose studies are related to what the f has "suddenly" gone wrong with humanity. I really think Jonathan is on to something (although at the same time, I sense he's trying to sell a lot of books, but what can you do).
I just listened to:
#03 Under The Skin with Russell Brand & Adam Curtis - Do We Really Want Change?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xBy08P7tHPQ
Adam Curtis is a documentary film maker, his most recent one is fairly famous, Hypernormalization. I haven't seen it because I thought it was a hardcore conspiracy theorist movie, but now I think that's not the case.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Curtis#Filmography
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperNormalisation
If you can recommend anyone else with interesting opinions on the insanity of the current world, please share.
Certainly does.
Here is where I overlap with you. I've watched the documentary version of manufacturing consent but not read the book. (Don't tell anyone.) I watched The Century of the Self and Hypernormalisation plus a couple of others by Curtis. McLuhan is on my radar but I've never done a deep dive though of course I'm aware of him. I've read The Master Switch by Wu but not Attention Merchants, this man obviously is someone to keep an eye on.
So that leaves McChesney and Toffler. They are now on my radar, thank you. Under general media scholars you mention: H.L. Mencken, I.F. Stone, and perhaps Walter Lippmann and John Dewey. I thought Mencken a critic, Dewey a pragmatist–Rorty rates Dewey very highly, Lippmann I seem to recall to coming across…, Stone, don't think so. Interesting list.
And if I may be so bold. Have you considered The Revolt of the Masses by Ortega y Gasset? A prescient work. Somewhat more obscure is The Reality of the Mass Media by Niklas Luhmann, Curtis mentions nearly every cyberneticist and cybernetic theorist bar Luhmann, probably for good reason come to think of it. New media theorists: Walter Benjamin obviously for his The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (but maybe others?), The Language of New Media by Lev Manovich, and finally anything by Wendy Hui Kyong Chun (Wendy Chun).
I gather that media-philosophie is an actual research programme in German-land whereas here we'd call it media studies or communication studies or new media studies and it's looked down upon to the same extent as cultural studies programmes are or courses on semiotics. I'd like to see media-philosophy (what you use to communicate your message) become an actual branch of philosophy like aesthetics/rhetoric (how you communicate your message).
It's been stimulating, ciao!
It is worthwhile to consider Barlow's legacy--particularly this utopian rhetoric about cyberspace--as examined by Adam Curtis in his 2016 film Hypernormalisation (starting at 40m 35s):-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fny99f8amM&feature=youtu.be&t=40m35s
I on the other hand like the style for its own sake but enjoyed HyperNormalisation a lot less than Bitter Lake or The Power of Nightmares. But the style really does not help the credibility of the story or allows following the argument and spotting potential holes in it. In the end I am left with the feeling to either forget about it or having to fact check the whole thing. There are certainly interesting points in his films but they are almost impossible to evaluate without consulting other sources.
If you want some more depth to the Californian Ideology critique consider watching the Adam Curtis documentary "All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Watched_Over_by_Machines_of_Loving_Grace_(TV_series)
Hypernormalisation also covers some of the same ideas and is more recent.
https://archive.org/details/HyperNormalisation
If you think Gaddafi was a particularly bad guy, you need to watch Adam Curtis' excellent documentary 'Hypernormalisation', still available on the BBC iplayer, and probably elsewhere too
The author manages to completely rip off Adam Curtis's excellent documentary film Hypernormalisation without a single reference to it. Well done.
All his documentary series are worth watching. These are
Hypernormalisation
Bitter Lake
All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace
Every Day is like Sunday
The Power of Nightmares
The Century of the Self
The Trap
Pandora's Box
The Mayfair Set
Inside Story
Inquiry. The Great British Housing Disaster
The last one is particularly relevant after the Grenfell Tower Fire.
I used to love his documentaries. I'm a fan of the music, and the aesthetic. I haven't seen HyperNormalisation, and plan to.
But, years later I look back and kind of think, 'huh, was there really substance to these films, or are the more art piece than legit documentary?"
From what I recall, they're not exactly clear on the sources for claims, and the filmmaking style is fairly manipulative – dramatic music and ominous stock footage that would make almost any politicians look like lizard people.
edit: Also, not saying they'd be 'bad' if they're more 'art' than 'documentary', but that context is important and I know from experience it's easy to take films at face value.
Adam Curtis is, by far, the best documentary maker I know. His origin-of-terrorism doc "Bitter Lake" gives an insight no one else will.
Hypernormalisation is, also because it is simply the most recent, his best docu imho. If you liked this, take a look at The Century of the Self as well.
It's timely this should come up as I've been on a bit of an Adam Curtis binge lately, having recently watched half of HyperNormalisation and then the entirety of the 'The Power Of Nightmares' series. I'm looking forward to watching the rest of his work.
One question I have for those that have seen his stuff - a recurring criticism I see of Curtis' work is that he states his opinions as if they are historical facts and heavily editorialises, leaving out important chunks of history because they don't support the view he's trying to push.
Are these accurate criticisms? I don't want to feel like I'm learning about history when in actuality I'm being fed something that's inaccurate (thanks 'King of Kong' for ruining my trust in documentaries, but I digress!). For example after watching 'The Power Of Nightmares' I feel like I know much more about what was going on in the world of geopolitics in the 80s and 90s, but I'd hate to think that I've just picked up a series of falsehoods (doubt this is the case though).
I really enjoyed this documentary when I saw it, and also ended up watching Bitter Lake and (half of) Century of the Self. The concepts were quite bold and the seemed nearly-self-evident. But then I asked myself, "so why am I just only now hearing about all this?" as a heuristic of the measure of the sufficient strength of supporting evidence.
It dawned upon me that some of the techniques of desire-manufacturing/advertising that used psychological techniques, as mentioned in Century of the Self, were also used to compel the viewer about the curated historical web of causality. And I really think that Hanlon's razor supplants to much of the powers that be mentioned movie.
I almost feel like this movie really displays the enouement of neoliberalism: nothing ever changes in this world any more (thus we're near "the end of history"), we're stuck in a massive deadlocked monetary system that has only "unrealistic" alternatives, "humanitarian interventions" in conflicts are necessary crusades and we cede that they may have the same power dynamics of imperial invasions but since they are done in the name of freedom and democracy they are to be absolved for their ambitions, and so on. I think that in that regard, the documentary falls short of exploring things that are subversive to hegemony.
I was unsatisfied with the idea of watching a powerful documentary about hypernormalisation without searching for a critical explanation of the hypernormalisation of the documentary maker, too. Here's one such: That said, I did genuinely enjoy the movie and appreciate that it inspired me to reflect on modern history.
To counterbalance Curtis' fairly conservative view of modernity, this talk by the late Mark Fisher is really good: the slow cancellation of the future [1]
[0] http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/adam-curtiss-essential-counterhistories
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCgkLICTskQ
I strongly recommend watching the documentary "Hypernormalisation" by Adam Curtis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperNormalisation).
The main focus of the documentary compares the styles of Trump and Vladimir Poutine, but has interesting recap/point of view on the evolution of terrorism in the middle east.
(his previous documentary, Bitter Lake, was on Wahhabism from Saudi Arabia, also interesting, but the visual/narrative style kind of annoyed me)
I think it's easily misleading to look at these things only by the numbers. We need a better understanding of the background. Numbers can support your argument/context, but you need a better argument.
Also one of the threads in the latest Adam Curtis film [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperNormalisation
Hypernormalisation is an awesome documentary that actually covers this subject. If you've got a couple hours to kill I highly recommend it.
It can be watched on youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fny99f8amM
No joke, just finished watching HyperNormalisation[1].
The most depressing part to me is that Adam Curtis isn't off on an easily dismissed tangent in this documentary, he's essentially cross cut the last 40 years into a 3 hour cliff notes guide to some of the darker corners of postmodern philosophy.
Specifically, Baudrillard. His 2002 essay, The Violence of the Global[2] has some interesting food for thought:
>We believe that the ideal purpose of any value is to become universal. But we do not really assess the deadly danger that such a quest presents. Far from being an uplifting move, it is instead a downward trend toward a zero degree in all values. In the Enlightenment, universalization was viewed as unlimited growth and forward progress. Today, by contrast, universalization exists by default and is expressed as a forward escape, which aims to reach the most minimally common value. This is precisely the fate of human rights, democracy, and liberty today. Their expansion is in reality their weakest expression.
HyperNormalism is bleak and offers no solutions for course correcting international affairs, and there's the rub: universal solutions may not exist.
For me, my mind's left reeling by the complexity of the times, leaving me at a loss for how to integrate information from sources like Baudrillard into my worldview guiding day-to-day behavior. My typical response is a hyperlocal focus on the people around me in meatspace and trying to at least get the basics right like the golden rule.
[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fny99f8amM
[2]http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=385
it's gotten a lot of buzz lately, including on HN, but if you're interested in going down the gaddafi hole a bit further i'd recommend the recent adam curtis film, hypernormalisation. his films tend to be a bit like getting lost in a wikipedia hole in their own right, though.
There's a great documentary about this by Adam Curtis called [HyperNormalisation](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fny99f8amM), discussing how truth is seriously under fire right now.
I shared this on HN a while back. It's an interesting watch (at nearly 3 hours, Curtis keeps you entertained throughout). For those in the UK, you can watch the whole thing on iPlayer here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p04b183c/adam-curtis-hypernormalisation
Seconding this recommendation. American viewers can watch the film here:
https://thoughtmaybe.com/hypernormalisation/
Very relevant to understanding today's media and politics is Adam Curtis' new documentary film Hypernormalisation. It's long but very worth it
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p04b183c
If anyone has links to the BBC iplayer for the US, if there is one, or another legit source for outside the UK, please do reply with it.
I strongly encourage you to watch it, and if you can only find it from a dodgy source, buy someone a classic BBC DVD of something for Festivus so support their making more. (lots of things, Dr Who, Jeeves and Wooster, the Century of the Self...)
"If you liked that, you'll love this." - Adam Curtis on his new documentary Hypernormalisation. I really recommend it. You can also read this: http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/2011/03/goodies_and_baddies.html
This could as well be some organization's military machine that they're experimenting with. Just like how mysterious objects in the sky could be explained. It's actually the most logical explanation in most of these mysterious cases. This is explained well in the awesome recent documentary "Hypernormalisation". Check it out!
International mirror.
https://thoughtmaybe.com/hypernormalisation/?lang=en
And here [1] is a review of this great film, which also touches upon that Adam Curtis is more like a storyteller than a documentarian or journalist. I think it's better if you approach his work as artistic and thought-provoking essays.
[1] https://www.list.co.uk/article/85421-tv-review-hypernormalisation-by-adam-curtis-bbc-iplayer/
This is the new film by Adam Curtis, the maker of The Century of the Self and other great documentaries. Worth a watch. It was just shown on the BBC TV and http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p04b183c/adam-curtis-hypernormalisation here , and ought to be available to those with BBC Worldwide subscriptions.
Note: I hope it's available in other ways, so that others can buy this this public service institution is rewarded more so it can make more such things in the future. (ie, if you torent it, please find a way to contribute back, like buying old DVDs of Fawlty Towers, Jeeves and Wooster, Ab Fab, etc)
I see this differently. I see a world heading towards basic income.
Adam Curtis - HyperNormalisation was released last night (http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p04b183c/adam-curtis-hypernormalisation).
Haven't watched it yet but I do think there seems to be a certain type of crazy happening in the world and I can't put my finger on it.
We have whole generations of young people that have been disenfranchised and are having to carry the financial burden of baby boomers. A group in our society, that as it ages, becomes selfish and politically more conservative in their approach.
Something big needs to change and the idea "you must work to survive" within our society is beginning to sound very disjointed.