[HN Gopher] Adam Curtis Explains It All
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Adam Curtis Explains It All
Author : clydethefrog
Score : 99 points
Date : 2021-01-28 19:29 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.newyorker.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.newyorker.com)
| bmitc wrote:
| I really enjoy Adam Curtis' documentaries. He hits the nail on
| the head and is great viewing for anyone that likes systems level
| thinking. I'm looking forward to his new film and have seen most
| of his prior films.
|
| 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?
| rapsey wrote:
| One thing you should keep in mind is never to trust a narrative
| explanation of events and history. Human brains are hard wired
| to believe and think in narratives. Reality however is not some
| grand story arc.
| bmitc wrote:
| I keep that in mind, as already alluded to, but I disagree
| because sometimes there is an actual narrative. That's the
| difficulty I was mentioning.
| adamcstephens wrote:
| While I haven't obviously seen this new series yet, this
| article portrays it to be about how our lack of collective
| narrative is holding us back. Perhaps we need to be open to
| new narratives, which will never be perfect, but can help us
| move toward a better future.
|
| 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.
| everybodyknows wrote:
| For a good read on selecting evidence to fit the desired
| narrative, try Richard Feynman's critique of the Challenger
| investigation. In one of his as-told-to autobiographies:
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:BookSources/0-393-01.
| ..
| olivermarks wrote:
| Your ISBN link didn't arrive at Feynman's book, here it is
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Do_You_Care_What_Other_P
| e...
|
| 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.
| Krasnol wrote:
| I like the term "conspiracy myth".
|
| It spreads in Germany now and I find it's quite useful.
| olivermarks wrote:
| Why is that useful? The challenge with overuse of the
| term 'conspiracy' is that like the suddenly common term
| 'baseless' it all too often ignores conjecture based on
| facts and events that arouse suspicions.
|
| 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...
| AndrewBissell wrote:
| A really funny thing recently was various media
| dismissing "baseless conspiracy theories" about "the
| Great Reset," when there is clearly a very public and
| well documented foundation of various public officials
| using the term in the broader context of pushing certain
| agendas. One can still argue whether each of the various
| theories spun out of this is true or not, but it's silly
| to call them "baseless."
| currymj wrote:
| I've watched a couple of Adam Curtis's films. He is a very
| skilled artist and they are entertaining, but I find them
| frustrating.
|
| 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.
| nr2x wrote:
| The article spends a lot of time talking about how the style is
| dreamlike (with quotes from Adam Moore). For me it's more like
| abstract Impressionism than "documentary". I don't agree with a
| lot of his conclusions, but it makes me questions my own
| assumptions using a different frame and method.
|
| 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.
| mcphilip wrote:
| My enjoyment of his films comes from appreciating his attempt
| to thread a narrative through a complex series of events and
| images. The linked New Yorker article makes it clear that he's
| well versed in the postmodern rejection of grand narratives,
| but it doesn't stop him from trying.
|
| 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.
| herewegoagain2 wrote:
| That sounds like almost everything on TV. I can't stand any of
| it anymore.
|
| 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.
| pan69 wrote:
| > 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.
|
| 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.
| atoav wrote:
| Curtis would probably argue that seeing no connections where
| there _are_ connections is equally dangerous.
| blululu wrote:
| False Positives and False Negatives are both dangerous, but
| often in different ways. It would be hard to draw a simple
| equivalence outside of the context. Sometimes not seeing a
| connection is much more dangerous, than finding a spurious
| connection. It is a question of whether erroneous action is
| better than erroneous inaction as well as the relative likely
| hood of these two. Many times erroneous inaction is better
| than erroneous inaction since it is easier to fix later -
| though the likelihood matters.
|
| 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.
| thewarrior wrote:
| I'd say it's only partly true as a criticism. His documentary
| on the emergence of Islamic terrorism for eg is quite eye
| opening. It takes people through how some of the ideological
| progenitors were tortured in jails by US backed dictatorships.
| How they were armed and funded indirectly by the CIA and US
| backed regimes. And how the existence of these radicals was
| then used by the neocons to wage two destructive wars that are
| partly responsible for America's stagnation.
|
| 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.
| genericacct wrote:
| He's aware of the length issue i believe; he's also aware of
| the fact that more episodes equal more pay.
| bmitc wrote:
| I get it to a degree, but it's a very dangerous line of
| thinking to write off systems level thinking as conspiracies.
| Stafford Beer points out, as an analogy in _Designing Freedom_
| , that 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. Making
| connections between wide ranging events, people, and ideas
| doesn't make a conspiracy.
|
| 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.
| maxerickson wrote:
| _that the idea of an all encompassing force that affects
| everyone on Earth is hard to fathom_
|
| 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)
| bmitc wrote:
| It's not a trick. It's that we don't know how to study
| these things yet, but that shouldn't be an excuse for
| throwing our hands up in the air and not trying to
| investigate them. Gravity wasn't always well crystallized.
| It took us time to develop and understand it.
|
| 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-...
| nabla9 wrote:
| > but just try to explain in plain English what you learned
|
| 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)
| Bakary wrote:
| Wouldn't an audience self-identifying as consuming
| information "actively" inevitably fool themselves into
| adopting narratives and consider them to be the product of
| thought?
| mushbino wrote:
| Honestly, I think they're perfect just the way they are. I've
| seen every one of his documentaries at least a few times and I
| don't know of anyone who uses his material as a foundation for
| any of their beliefs. If you're viewing his documentaries as a
| source of actual news, you're missing the entire purpose.
| They're a mixture of documentary, social commentary, thought
| experiment, and art.
| EVdotIO wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1bX3F7uTrg
| currymj wrote:
| this is a little too mean, but still very funny and gets at
| the point quite clearly.
| xkeysc0re wrote:
| >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.
| currymj wrote:
| 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.
| thewarrior wrote:
| That is a pretty crazy coincidence though. It has a certain
| aesthetic and narrative beauty.
| mcphilip wrote:
| 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.
| mpweiher wrote:
| 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.
| rawTruthHurts wrote:
| I have a hard time understanding the "Adam curtis => conspiracy
| theories" trope. Everything he talks about is fairly well
| documented and easy to find in the open.
| mopsi wrote:
| It's his presentation style, which is difficult to tell apart
| from conspiracy theories. Conspiracy theories also throw a
| series of images and narration at you and expect you to make
| certain logical connections, which may or may not be valid.
|
| 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
| zpeti wrote:
| You clearly don't follow enough left wing media that has been
| calling every non-establishment storyline a conspiracy theory
| and making readers/viewers completely paranoid about them.
|
| 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.
| chillwaves wrote:
| > left wing media that has been calling every non-
| establishment storyline a conspiracy theory
|
| Example? Also if they are such compelling stories, why do
| only "non-establishment" media companies run them?
| breakfastduck wrote:
| I'm not jumping on the same opinion as the guy you've
| replied to, but completely ignoring the consideration
| that news publishers don't run certain compelling stories
| because they're _not allowed to due to political bias of
| the publisher_ is extraordinarily naive.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _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._
|
| 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).
| bparsons wrote:
| That is sort of the point of his recent films.
|
| 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.
| viburnum wrote:
| The funny thing is his blog posts are really solid and well-
| argued. I think his movies are cool but I've never actually
| made it to the end of one, all the drama is too much for me.
| monadic3 wrote:
| > Finding patterns where there are none
|
| What are you referring to?
| erentz wrote:
| I don't remember his stuff being conspiracy theory. More that
| he is telling of these emergent phenomena he sees and the
| various forces he sees that created them. Usually forces that
| aren't organized, and that take place over long slow timelines.
| They weren't unified and coordinated with intent to end up at
| the final picture he paints.
| Fricken wrote:
| The whole meta narrative of an Adam curtis doc is to bring you
| to awareness of when and where you are being manipulated,
| presumably to help you become aware of manipulations from less
| compassionate sources.
| fortran77 wrote:
| Here's a great observation:
|
| > _"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._
| js2 wrote:
| This article is a review of a six-part series by filmmaker Adam
| Curtis that will air on BBC starting Feb 11th. Synopsis:
|
| > 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.
|
| https://www.bbc.com/mediacentre/2021/cgyoomh
| cambalache wrote:
| I admit I just recently learned about Curtis (I am not a native
| English speaker) but the ideas of his documentaries seem
| fascinating, so I am planing to watch some of them. Now, my
| question is, What books would you consider in the same style? By
| that I mean content not form.
| bmitc wrote:
| Others that cover these sort of system connections that I can
| think of are David Graeber and Noam Chomsky.
| rusk wrote:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gulf_War_Did_Not_Take_Pl...
| neonate wrote:
| https://archive.is/CbDDL
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