No one talks about power these days. We are encouraged to see ourselves as free, independent individuals not controlled by anybody, and we despise politicians as corrupt and empty of all ideas.
But power is all around us. It's just that it has shifted and mutated into a massive system of management and control, whose tentacles reach into all parts of our lives. But we can't see it because we still think of power in the old terms – of politicians telling us what to do.
The aim of the film I have made, HyperNormalisation, is to bring that new power into focus, and show its true dimensions. It ranges from a giant computer high up in the mountains of northeast America that manages and controls over 7 percent of the worlds total wealth, to the complex algorithms that constantly monitor every move and choice you make online, to modern scientific ideas about what the normal human being should be – in the their weight and in their feelings and moods.
If you pull back and look at the everyday life all around you, you can see the cracks appearing through the shiny surface of the cocoon we are living in. So much of the modern world is beginning to feel odd, unreal and sometimes fake. I think these are the dynamic forces outside beginning to pierce through as the system begins to fail.
- Adam Curtis
Vocab:
think tank
Watch:
Excerpts from HyperNormalisation
True or false?
Tall buildings are essentially worthless.
The Brexit showed us that we live in a dream world.
The original vision of social media was to create an echo chamber.
The reality opens us up to more perspectives.
Your real job is shopping.
The original idea of cool was more political.
Politicians are cool.
Their real job is to make us click more.
Ours is the first all-encompassing system.
Hypernormalisation means pretending everything is normal when it isn't.
No comments:
Post a Comment