An interview with the documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis
This is very interesting, and Curtis has a lot of great insights, but it seems like moves from accurate insight to hyperbolic and emotional conclusion many times during the interview.<p>For example:<p>&quot;No one is really sure what Trump represents. My working theory is that he’s part of the pantomime-isation of politics. Every morning Donald Trump wakes up in the White House, he tweets something absolutely outrageous which he knows the liberals will get upset by, the liberals read his tweets and go “This is terrible, this is outrageous,” and then tell each other via social media how terrible it all is. It becomes a feedback loop in which they are locked together. In my mind, it’s like they’re together in a theatre watching a pantomime villain. The pantomime villain comes forward into the light, looks at them and says something terrible, and they go “Boo!!”. Meanwhile, outside the theatre, real power is carrying on but <i>no one is really analysing it.</i>&quot;<p>I think this is a great insight, and it&#x27;s true: but is &quot;no one&quot; paying attention to any other news? Surely many organizations are provably doing so every day. Why don&#x27;t they count as &quot;someone?&quot; Presumably because they don&#x27;t fit Curtis&#x27; definition of the cultural mainstream. But, Curtis (at least in the interview) never defines the cultural mainstream. What is inside it, what is outside it, and why? Would two individuals define the cultural mainstream the same way? What if my cultural mainstream does include people who are &quot;analyzing the real power?&quot; It seems that the conclusion based on his insight is meant to be emotionally powerful and impactful, except that anyone should be able to think of counterexamples.<p>He makes this mistake the whole article. Here&#x27;s another extraordinarily brilliant insight: (I&#x27;m not being sarcastic here, I think this is genius and he&#x27;s really onto something)<p>&quot;I think the old mass democracies sort of died in the early 90s and have been replaced by a system that manages us as individuals. Because the fundamental problem is that politicians can’t manage individuals, they need us to join parties and support them and let them represent us as a group identified with them. What modern management systems worked out, especially when computer networks came into being, was that you could actually manage people as groups by using data to understand how they were behaving in the mass, but you could create a system that allowed them to keep on thinking that they were individuals.&quot;<p>He expands on this idea, adding more insight and precision until finally stumbles into this:<p>&quot;They’re constantly playing back to you the ghosts of your own behaviour. We live in a modern ghost story. We are haunted by our past behaviour played back to us through the machines in its comparison to millions of other people’s behaviour. We are guided and nudged and shaped by that. It’s benign in a way and it’s an alternative to the old kind of politics. But it locks us into a static world because it’s always looking to the past. <i>It can never imagine something new.</i>&quot;<p>I can&#x27;t possibly see how this can be true. Creativity is dead? We can&#x27;t imagine new things because facebook (or the internet, or modern media) exists? I&#x27;m being a bit dismissive here, but I don&#x27;t see how he can support this claim. People are coming up with new ideas all the time.<p>Again, his insight about how the internet and algorithms allow systems to cater to and control individuals was genius. But, the conclusion he draws from that insight is deeply emotional, catastrophic, and not very well constructed. It sounds like the sort of emotional mistake someone might make in therapy: &quot;I&#x27;ll never find another girlfriend again,&quot; or &quot;I&#x27;ll always be socially unpopular,&quot; etc.