Discussion · bonfire.cafe

@strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz · 2 weeks ago

"I was taught that one week you would go and film a talking dog, and then the next week you'd go off and do some journalism about the corruption of a housing estate built on polluted land. And I began to realise you could put the two together. You could have pretentious shit, and trash ...

It was the idea that you could bolt [together] high end and low end, and just get rid of the middle."

#AdamCurtis, 2025

https://pdst.fm/e/chrt.fm/track/A27C8C/traffic.megaphone.fm/GLT8110019720.mp3?updated=1750246534

#podcasts #GoalHanger #TheRestIsEntertainment

Strypey

@strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz replied · 2 weeks ago

"Someone pointed out to me the other day that when you watch comedy shows on YouTube, you're listening to the laughter of the dead most of the time. It's a haunting."

#AdamCurtis, 2025

https://pdst.fm/e/chrt.fm/track/A27C8C/traffic.megaphone.fm/GLT8110019720.mp3?updated=1750246534

Last year I posted a piece on the future of television, arguing that if it has a future, it's in live broadcasting;

https://disintermedia.net.nz/a-future-for-television-in-aotearoa/

A TV channel as locally curated platform for livestreams, combining the "pretentious shit, and trash" as Curtis put it, as they've always done.

Jack Yan (甄爵恩)

@jackyan@mastodon.social replied · 2 weeks ago

@strypey I love Curtis. Have you seen Shifty? Only thing missing from the new series is his VO.

Strypey

@strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz replied · 2 weeks ago

@jackyan
> I love Curtis

I usually enjoy watching his films. I really like that he isn't coming from a fixed position on the left/right political spectrum (as conceptualised by news media). He can be insightful, but some of his assumptions are profoundly wrong IMHO (especially about tech politics), and he has some pretty major blind spots;

https://culturepowerpolitics.org/2025/09/04/what-adam-curtis-wont-tell-you/

> Have you seen Shifty?

Not yet. Just finished watching Can't Get You Out Of My Head, which I found deeply unsatisfying.

Culture, Power and Politics

What Adam Curtis Won’t Tell You

In this episode, Jem offers a critical response to Adam Curtis’ oeuvre: an extraordinary series of fascinating, yet never-fully-satisfying, films about culture, power and politics in the epoc…

Jack Yan (甄爵恩)

@jackyan@mastodon.social replied · 2 weeks ago

@strypey I agree. Canʼt Get You out of My Head dragged on and was less compelling. The Russian cosmonaut story wasnʼt totally accurate, either, though being the USSR, who knows for sure? Sadly, Shifty is more in that vein.

Strypey

@strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz replied · 2 weeks ago

@jackyan
> Canʼt Get You out of My Head dragged on and was less compelling

I think Jeremy Gilbert made a good point that some episodes are better than others.

The stuff about the Cultural Revolution I found quite insightful. I knew the broad strokes of that history, but there's a lot to explore. It definitely shifted my perspective on Deng Xiaoping, who I'd mistakenly seen as a less doctrinaire reformer.

@jonathanharker recommended Russia Trauma Zone, so this looks like my next Curtis watch.

Jonathan Harker

@jonathanharker@cloudisland.nz replied · 2 weeks ago

@strypey @jackyan it's different from his usual schtick, this time there's no narration and he lets the archive footage and subtitles do the talking. Which actually just makes it somehow more intense.

Strypey

@strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz replied · 2 weeks ago

"I'm extremely suspicious of all the theories about whether AI is good or bad, because I don't think anyone knows. They're just projecting their own fears or their optimism onto it ... let's look at how it works.

It's the ghost of our time. Because what it does is, it goes back and scrapes all our past ... and it mashes [it] up into this complex thing, which then feeds itself back to us."

#AdamCurtis, The Rest is Entertainment, Jan 19, 2025

https://pdst.fm/e/chrt.fm/track/A27C8C/traffic.megaphone.fm/GLT8110019720.mp3?updated=1750246534

(1/?)

#MOLE #AI

Strypey

@strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz replied · 2 weeks ago

"They are actually taking our own past and haunting us with it ... Telling us it's new, but actually, maybe, keeping us stuck in the past.

I mean, as I was saying, we're surrounded by images, dreams, music, films of the past. What AI is doing is taking it much further. It's actually going back to our own past. It's going back to our own images, our own language, the words we wrote, our own emotions.

#AdamCurtis, The Rest is Entertainment, Jan 19, 2025

https://pdst.fm/e/chrt.fm/track/A27C8C/traffic.megaphone.fm/GLT8110019720.mp3?updated=1750246534

(2/?)

Strypey

@strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz replied · 2 weeks ago

"Because out there, in the server farms, are our feelings, written down in fragmentary form. Little images, little moments, little intense moments of fear, and love. And it's just scraping it all, putting it all together in some strange, almost like cubist form, and playing back to us a world built out of that."

#AdamCurtis, The Rest is Entertainment, Jan 19, 2025

https://pdst.fm/e/chrt.fm/track/A27C8C/traffic.megaphone.fm/GLT8110019720.mp3?updated=1750246534

(3/?)

Strypey

@strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz replied · 2 weeks ago

"And if I was going to write a ghost story of now, I would do it about that, we are haunted ... Which makes me suspect - for which I have no evidence at all - that AI is not the future, it's the final end of the past. It's the moment at which the past came for us. We will have to escape from it."

#AdamCurtis, The Rest is Entertainment, Jan 19, 2025

https://pdst.fm/e/chrt.fm/track/A27C8C/traffic.megaphone.fm/GLT8110019720.mp3?updated=1750246534

I've read and heard a *lot* of commentary on the cult of #MOLE Training, and this is the most insightful so far.

(4/?)

Strypey

@strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz replied · 2 weeks ago

This is sort of insight I hoped for from Douglas @Rushkoff. Especially given that his beat crosses media analysis, tech, online culture and political economy, and he's written fierce criticism of the business models and self-aggrandising billionaires who've dressed up the Trained #MOLE as "AI".

To be fair, I don't listen to Team Human as often as I used to. But so far he seems to have been taken in by the myth that these MOLEs are intelligent in some way.

(5/5)

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