Adam Curtis' HyperNormalisation is now on youtube. It was released recently by the BBC and required either a UK ip or downloading a torrent. Highly recommended for anyone interested in post-fact politics. The soundtrack is also quite good.
Worth watching. But don't count on this video remaining up on Youtube for very long. BBC has been shutting down previous youtube copies.
Adam Curtis is amazing. He is the real deal among any serious political documentary maker. I haven't watched this one or his last one, but I've pretty much seen everything else, even the stuffy British political documentaries. He's probably why I'm a bit messed up in my views with politics.
"Half way done" I meant. That is one depressing video. I could dissect this video point by point. I suppose I will wait though to see if more people watch this to discuss it.
Well I love the claims about unreality. It seems so obvious, except that we are inside our own bubble. The bogeyman string of Gaddafi-->Saddam Hussein-->Bin Laden seems totally obvious in retrospect. Of course ISIS is next (the film doesn't say that directly). The film does suggest 9/11 could have been an elaborately prepared Hollywood event: what a montage leading up to it in the film. I remember watching one of those Iron Man movies or whatever in Beijing with a Chinese girl, and the girl said: "In China we could never see Beijing being destroyed like New York in this movie." I told her, "Yeah, Americans somehow enjoy seeing their country get wasted." This film casts that conversation in a different light: I guess we could say American audiences were "normalised," pre-9/11, to images of Empire State Building/Twin Towers/White House getting blown to smithereens, and whaddaya know? It happened! The WMD story that started all the shiz in Iraq (Chapter 2: Son of Shiz): plagiarized from a Nicolas Cage movie, The Rock! UFO's: U.S.A.F. cover story for secret weapons. Trump? Learned from Putin especially (it's easier to see others' bubbles than one's own): reality doesn't fricking matter. Say stuff, say it again: it takes its place in our image world, and we can't get out of our image world very easily because the internet and media have specialized in feeding us what we seem to like. FoxNews people get Fox-type cookies in their browser and Foxy news on the website, HuffPo people get HuffPo-type cookies and HuffPo news; one of the internet's main specializations is feeding us what we want (not what we need or lack). And anyway, Trump supporters and Clinton supporters all know it's an image game: Trump's BS'ing, Hillary's BS'ing, so what! Everyone's BS'ing! WMD's in Irag? Haha. Yeah right, bunch of f$%#ing liars. The government lies, so now we're voting for liars to run it. Makes sense? OK, which way to the polling station.
Further , the film is interesting for its claim that there has been a paradigm shift among political and cultural elites, from trying to change the world to (despairing of that) trying to foresee future problems and preparing for them, which is essentially a conservative stance, bolstering the status quo against catastrophic change. (The Soviet Union demonstrated that the future cannot be managed or fully foreseen.) The implied parallel in the film between the Soviet Union and the U.S. today was chilling. Americans know something in our narrative is out of whack, as the Soviets did, but we are trapped within the bubble of our preferred media, our selfie-style reality. We enjoy, in whatever way, experiencing ourselves reflected or refracted back to us, as in a Facebook page full of personal artifacts. And America has a kind of selfie or Facebook-page image of itself under attack.
