Adam Curtis

sufi

lala
it's hard to get at the message past all the technique and entertainment and all, but the message is basically that there's a big gap, isnt it?
everything everyone believed is fake so, in the immortal words of a lost festival tripper at 4am wandering in circles "we need to find someone who knows where we're going" but we can't even remember who that might be who or where we are or how many we've had
 

luka

Well-known member
And a load of stuff about how we got here. The emotional weight of the footage he uses carries a lot of the argument so if you don't factor that in you're lost.
 

luka

Well-known member
Curtis is friends with Alan Moore, the former comic-book writer, who lives in Northampton, in the East Midlands. (Moore, who describes himself as an anarchist, wrote “V for Vendetta,” “From Hell,” and “Watchmen,” but he has since disassociated himself from the industry.) During Britain’s first coronavirus lockdown, Curtis sent Moore and his wife, Melinda Gebbie, a thumb drive loaded with all his films. Watching Curtis’s back catalogue put Moore into a state that he likened to a lucid dream. “We tend as individuals to acquire a massive image bank, a massive archive of experiences and things that we’ve seen, and so the archives that Adam has access to, that’s almost like our collective cultural memory,” he said. “And, by juxtaposing those images, one with another, he makes these startling convergences of meaning, exactly like a dream does—where you perhaps don’t understand it all on first experience but where it is haunting.” Moore told me that he felt “quite neurologically fizzy” after each film. At the end of the binge-watch, he sent Curtis a postcard, comparing his work to “the kind of dream where we become aware that we are dreaming and can thus attain agency over the torrent of nonsense.”
 

sufi

lala
Curtis is friends with Alan Moore, the former comic-book writer, who lives in Northampton, in the East Midlands. (Moore, who describes himself as an anarchist, wrote “V for Vendetta,” “From Hell,” and “Watchmen,” but he has since disassociated himself from the industry.) During Britain’s first coronavirus lockdown, Curtis sent Moore and his wife, Melinda Gebbie, a thumb drive loaded with all his films. Watching Curtis’s back catalogue put Moore into a state that he likened to a lucid dream. “We tend as individuals to acquire a massive image bank, a massive archive of experiences and things that we’ve seen, and so the archives that Adam has access to, that’s almost like our collective cultural memory,” he said. “And, by juxtaposing those images, one with another, he makes these startling convergences of meaning, exactly like a dream does—where you perhaps don’t understand it all on first experience but where it is haunting.” Moore told me that he felt “quite neurologically fizzy” after each film. At the end of the binge-watch, he sent Curtis a postcard, comparing his work to “the kind of dream where we become aware that we are dreaming and can thus attain agency over the torrent of nonsense.”
is alan moore unable to access bbc iplayer for some reason?
maybe he refuses the tv license
 

sus

Well-known member
Wonder what @suspended mskes of the last one. Goes into complexity theory and emergence and computers and stuff. I like to

The new one's about the failures of individualism, yeah?

There've been a ton of "what if meritocracy is bad?" takes lately too. I'm in full support of people re-investigating bedrock principles of our society every time we hit a crisis. The world changes. Rules get established and people forget why they exist. Chesterton's fence: you better damn well figure out why something exists before you tear it down.

Still, in trying to envision these alternate worlds, you have a local vs global maxima problem though that is really really hard to make heads or tails on. You have to suspend too many givens from your assumption frame, you have to entertain too many complex hypotheticals.

At the end of the day, actual social experimentation (including scaling problems) are the only way to actually figure out whether these bedrock principles or good or bad. And at the end of the day, you don't wanna fuck around on master.

This is why seasteading and other exit-voice-loyalty libertarian dreams are Actually Good. The USA used to and still sorta does have the "states are the laboratory of democracy" mindset—The Fed's way bigger and stronger than in Ye Olde Days, but recent innovations from the states lab include gay marriage and cannabis legalization. You try it locally, and if it works, other states can freely adopt it. Top-down imposition, so that the entire country fails as some poorly laid plan is implemented nationally, not so hot.

I've heard arguments that in a big population, you have people who flourish and prefer liberal, consequentialist, individualist, consent-based moral regimes, and people who flourish and prefer societies with more deontological and traditional ethics, with operationalized disgust & sacredness, etc. If you're not gonna get all dogmatic on this carving, and claim your preferred social model is Just Objectively The Best One For Everyone, this seems like a pretty reasonable idea. It does run into invisible veil problems though—genetics isn't destiny, and you'll have offspring in one society that would do better in another
 

luka

Well-known member
I like how he starts with British torture camps and mass executions from the 1950s. One of those things you know but don't know. That always wrench things out of shape every time you're reminded of them.

There are a lot of these known acknowledged facts that haven't been properly integrated into the official story and so cause a kind of indigestion every time they're brought up
 
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sufi

lala
I’m a hack. I’m a journalist.
is he really?
i don't think he has the necessary objectivity to be a journalist, he doesnt even pretend to, he's too impressionistic,
so what is he?
 

sufi

lala
The new one's about the failures of individualism, yeah?

There've been a ton of "what if meritocracy is bad?" takes lately too. I'm in full support of people re-investigating bedrock principles of our society every time we hit a crisis. The world changes. Rules get established and people forget why they exist. Chesterton's fence: you better damn well figure out why something exists before you tear it down.

Still, in trying to envision these alternate worlds, you have a local vs global maxima problem though that is really really hard to make heads or tails on. You have to suspend too many givens from your assumption frame, you have to entertain too many complex hypotheticals.

At the end of the day, actual social experimentation (including scaling problems) are the only way to actually figure out whether these bedrock principles or good or bad. And at the end of the day, you don't wanna fuck around on master.

This is why seasteading and other exit-voice-loyalty libertarian dreams are Actually Good. The USA used to and still sorta does have the "states are the laboratory of democracy" mindset—The Fed's way bigger and stronger than in Ye Olde Days, but recent innovations from the states lab include gay marriage and cannabis legalization. You try it locally, and if it works, other states can freely adopt it. Top-down imposition, so that the entire country fails as some poorly laid plan is implemented nationally, not so hot.

I've heard arguments that in a big population, you have people who flourish and prefer liberal, consequentialist, individualist, consent-based moral regimes, and people who flourish and prefer societies with more deontological and traditional ethics, with operationalized disgust & sacredness, etc. If you're not gonna get all dogmatic on this carving, and claim your preferred social model is Just Objectively The Best One For Everyone, this seems like a pretty reasonable idea. It does run into invisible veil problems though—genetics isn't destiny, and you'll have offspring in one society that would do better in another
"what if meritocracy is bad? :ROFLMAO:
 

luka

Well-known member
My friend who is also a famous poet pointed out to me that one brilliant argument the film makes is that Nixon ditching the gold standard led to the climate moving from a stable system to a chaotic one.
 

luka

Well-known member
I like how he shows communism is Evil and that individualism is beautiful but at the same time he shows the weakness of it too and how we are a bit fucked at the moment because of it but we can't get rid of it because it is the most precious thing in the world. This is why I always say everyone on dissensus is a liberal because no one here could bear to live in a world without individualism.
 

luka

Well-known member
I also like the way he makes it very clear that the Left need martyrs and demonstrations and protests are for making martyrs, that is their ultimate purpose. They are for human sacrifice
 

luka

Well-known member
I also like the way he says some generations are born to dash themselves against the rocks
 

luka

Well-known member
I also like the way he said if you can't kill you will get taken advantage of like Bob gedolf did
 
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