"Computers can see us as large groups, but they’re glum and only aggregate us to sell us stuff. In reality, the computers give great insight into the power of common identity between groups. No one’s using that."
That's from 2017. Unfortunately, that's no longer the case. From ISIL to Q-Anon to MAGA to LGBTxx, finding dispersed but like-minded people and using them to build a political movement is now common. Worse, automated blithering with LLMs works all too well.
"The history of modern self-expression dates from the hippies."
It goes back further than that. Find a copy of "Swing Kids". The "music is the weapon" concept of the 1960s and 1970s was mainstream for a while. Back when being in a band was a big deal.
Before Live Nation got to decide who performs where. Now music is just a business. Even rap.
We have a huge problem trying to get society to go in useful directions. People have forgotten how to make democracies work. So we get autocrats.
It goes even further back to the days of late 19th/early 20th century and artistic communes. The first time someone monetised it on a large scale was Bernays who repackaged Freud's psychoanalysis and sold it to US government and companies. His "torches of freedom" campaign tapped into the women's right movement and desire for self-expression. The tobacco industry was very pleased with the outcomes, because until then women did not smoke cigarettes. Bernays also wrote "Engineering Consent" and "Propaganda", which he renamed as Public Relations after WWII. Curtis has an interesting documentary on the subject.
Exactly. In the US culture specifically, in the XX century before the hippies, there were limited pockets of "self-expression" (discarding previous culture, really) as depicted by Henry Miller, and later the whole Beat Generation. Only after that, this tendency picked up enough steam so that the masses picked it up, in the form the Hippies movement.
That wasn't true in 2017, either. Though the author makes some interesting points, he conflates catalysts, causes, and cultural movements and just calls it all self-expression, and casually makes some rather eyebrow-raising assertions in the process. This reads more like an idea he was trying to hash it for himself rather than a well-considered piece.
I love his stuff but you really need to treat it as "thought provoking but utterly lacking in rigour". Treat it as a jumping off point for topics that might be new to you and as a nudge to view things from a different angle.
In the post-LLM era, that just isn't good enough. Now that we have well-written automated probabilistic meandering text generation, "thought provoking but utterly lacking in rigour" copy is everywhere. Usually followed by a clickbait link.
It's the end of a whole second-tier literary genre.
Yeah new to me, and I think I've had my fill. There are people saying things just as interesting that aren't shamelessly glib about it. As I said in my reply to your sibling comment: I'm an art school guy, so I'm well-versed in the idea of imprecise conceptual thinking and conveying how things feel rather than how they actually are-- that's art. But presenting how things feel as how they are isn't called art, it's called bullshit.
To be honest, his forte isn't the written word. Watch a documentary or two. He has a fascinating style and is eminently (maybe too eminently) watchable.
"New Adam Curtis documentary just dropped" was really a thing for a fair while in the UK.
I would say he massages his facts until they fit the narrative. Not saying he misrepresents things but he often comes to conclusions that are not based on the data IMO
> I would say he massages his facts until they fit the narrative. Not saying he misrepresents things but he often comes to conclusions that are not based on the data IMO
This is a great answer, and is a very good definition of propaganda, especially in this context - his propaganda, if defined as such, is good/effective, because his motivated reasoning just so stories are broken clocks that are coincidentally right because he is a master of set and setting, cleverly telling stories at precisely the time and place of his choosing and in such a situated context/Situationist (International) way that they are not even wrong, and may even be correct, but not for the reasons he claims, or even for any reason at all.
I was hoping to draw out an explanation of what his narrative(s) seek to be an explication of, and in light of what I’ve written above, maybe he’s an author of selective revisionist history? Aspects of his oeuvre remind me of Fukuyama’s end of history, possibly the way that Curtis’ archival crate digging pastiche, his overarching yet hopscotching mode of storytelling, seeks to overwhelm the viewer with Gish galloping shaggy dog stories that are almost immune to shallow dismissal.
Curtis, like Daedalus and his son Icarus, constructs a garden path (sentence) through a Minotaur’s Labyrinth of meaning; like the maze’s solver Theseus, Curtis’ ball of thread weaves a tangled web of meaning through a hedgerow inherently devoid of meaning, and like Theseus, he accidentally/purposefully neglects to raise a black flag of ambiguity announcing his return to Athens/to meaning, instead hoisting the traditional white flag of discursive arrival at certainty, resulting in Theseus/Curtis securing the throne of power/discourse for himself, indirectly crowning himself king of the hill in terms of (a)historical victors.
I always was a sucker for mixed metaphors, though, and I might be wrong or perhaps biased. I always found Fukuyama’s end of history narrative subconsciously off-putting for some reason, while being drawn all the same to Curtis’ clarion call, but perhaps Curtis’ is a siren song sung by a wolf in sheep’s clothing?
Yeah I hadn't actually read anything from him before, and maybe this was just the wrong piece to start on, but this doesn't inspire me to find out. The points were interesting, but not nearly enough to justify being that glib when there are people making more interesting points who know what they're talking about. I'm an art school guy, so I'm well-versed in the idea of imprecise conceptual thinking and conveying how things feel rather than how they actually are-- that's art. But presenting how things feel as how they are isn't called art, it's called bullshit.
"Computers can see us as large groups, but they’re glum and only aggregate us to sell us stuff. In reality, the computers give great insight into the power of common identity between groups. No one’s using that."
That's from 2017. Unfortunately, that's no longer the case. From ISIL to Q-Anon to MAGA to LGBTxx, finding dispersed but like-minded people and using them to build a political movement is now common. Worse, automated blithering with LLMs works all too well.
"The history of modern self-expression dates from the hippies."
It goes back further than that. Find a copy of "Swing Kids". The "music is the weapon" concept of the 1960s and 1970s was mainstream for a while. Back when being in a band was a big deal. Before Live Nation got to decide who performs where. Now music is just a business. Even rap.
We have a huge problem trying to get society to go in useful directions. People have forgotten how to make democracies work. So we get autocrats.