"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.

"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/?)

"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/?)

"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/?)

"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

@worik
> the candle here is the use of quota, not the use of AI

I take your point, but in this case (and many others) the one is clearly driven by the other. It's technocracy on generative steroids. Exactly the kind of thing Adam Curtis focused on in one of his best TV series; The Trap: What Happened to Our Dreams of Freedom (2007).

Here's the full series as one 3 hour video;

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TbdRAIpH_I4

#documentary #AdamCurtis #TheTrap #technocracy

But being human beings, they then turned them to fantastic, elaborate stories. They were called conspiracy theories."

#AdamCurtis, Can't Get You Out of My Head, e06

Pot, kettle, black?

(2/2)

"But then it got more complicated, because human beings were also exposed to the avalanche of data online, and they started to behave in very much the same way as Geoffrey Hinton's artificial intelligence machines. They too, spent vast amounts of time searching through all the data, looking for patterns, links and coincidences that had no obvious meaning."

#AdamCurtis, Can't Get You Out of My Head, e06

(1/2)

"From the 1950s onwards, the CIA rigged elections, destabilised governments through fake information, and organised violent coups, in Italy, Greece, Syria, Iran, Guatamala, South Vietnam, Indonesia, and Chile. In all, the US ran covert operations to otherthrow 66 foreign governments, and in 26 cases, they succeeded."

#AdamCurtis, Can't Get You Out of My Head, e05

#documentary #BBC #CIA

I just finished the first episode of Can't Get You Out of My Head, a 2021 documentary series by Adam Curtis. Curtis is an intriguing filmmaker. The best of his work deep dives the political history of the 20th century in surprising and insightful ways; The Century of the Self (2002), The Power of Nightmares (2004), The Trap (2007), Bitter Lake (2015) and Hypernormalization (2017).

(1/3)

#film #documentary #AdamCurtis #CantGetYouOutOfMyHead