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What I find frustrating about Adam Curtis is that his films reports important facts like this, while weaving them into narratives as ambitiously speculative as anything Graham Hancock ever came up with. But unlike Hancock, Curtis never admits to any doubt about the validity of his narratives.
Nor does he ever appears on camera. Arguably exploiting the documentary convention that anything delivered as a disembodied narration is unadorned, factual reporting.
What I find frustrating about Adam Curtis is that his films reports important facts like this, while weaving them into narratives as ambitiously speculative as anything Graham Hancock ever came up with. But unlike Hancock, Curtis never admits to any doubt about the validity of his narratives.
Nor does he ever appears on camera. Arguably exploiting the documentary convention that anything delivered as a disembodied narration is unadorned, factual reporting.
@strypey Jeremy Gilbert put out a really good podcast about Adam Curtis recently.
I really enjoy the aesthetics and pacing of his films, as well as the fact that he produces work that tries to make sense of the world in a thoughtful and detailed way that is pretty rare to encounter these days... But I'm often frustrated by the lack of attention to left movements, the frequent claims that no one could imagine what would happen next when there were a great many people who did so, Curtis just tends to ignore them, and the tendency to focus on individuals rather than structures.
@sy
> Jeremy Gilbert put out a really good podcast about Adam Curtis recently
Sounds intriguing, link please?
> the frequent claims that no one could imagine what would happen next when there were a great many people who did so, Curtis just tends to ignore them, and the tendency to focus on individuals rather than structures
I agree with these criticisms. He also routinely ignores the collective movements of hacker culture, treating us as indistinguishable from SillyCon Valley capitalists.
"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
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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?
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"Now that produces in a rat, or a pidgeon, or a monkey - and in a man - a very high rate of activity. And if you build up you can get enormous amounts of behaviour out of these organisms, for very little pay. You don't need to give them very much to induce a lot of that. Now a world in which a great many productive things occur on this schedule would be a wonderful world."
#BFSkinner, Can't Get You Out of My Head, e06
Towards the end of ep06 of Can't Get You Out of My Head, released in 2021, Adam Curtis summarily dismisses nudging as ineffective. An argument regularly made by @pluralistic. But research is far from unanimous on this, eg;
2024, Nature: Nudging against consent is effective but lowers welfare: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-024-65122-0
2025, Bioethics: comprehensive meta‐analyses as well as high‐quality experiments show that nudging is much less effective than previously assumed. https://doi.org/10.1111/bioe.70000
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It seems logical to me that nudging is comparable to hypnotism. It is real, and can affect people's behaviour, but no, it's not mind control.
People can be induced to do things they wouldn't necessarily have chosen to do. But only within the range of things they might have chosen to do under different circumstances. What the post-hypnotic suggestion and/or digital nudges do is provide those a simulation of those different circumstances.
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