> in the 80s everyone from the top to the bottom of Soviet society knew that it wasn’t working, knew that it was corrupt, knew that the bosses were looting the system, knew that the politicians had no alternative vision. And they knew that the bosses knew they knew that. Everyone knew it was fake, but because no one had any alternative vision for a different kind of society, they just accepted this sense of total fakeness as normal.
This article's explanation of Hypernormalisation (defined in the excerpt above) was quite interesting to read.
Sadly I see this happening quite a lot in South Africa - a country that 25 years ago was filled with much hope and excitement for the future - but now is on the precipice of rapid economic decline due to similar reasons outlined above (primarily corrupt politicians but also an economy ravaged by Covid).
That being said there are still many South Africans that are nervously excited about the country's future - I guess we just need that alternative vision to drive us forward?
As an aside, I know Elon Musk's ambitious projects get mixed responses here on HN, but one thing he keeps referring to (and which resonates quite strongly with me) is his vision for an alternative future which excites us and inspires us.
I'm not so sure Musk's vision is so exciting. I think he just sees the writing on the wall and wants to become king on Mars while Earth goes down the drain. Look at all the stories surrounding Tesla employee treatment. Musk is not much different than Bezos.
> I think he just sees the writing on the wall and wants to become king on Mars while Earth goes down the drain.
That's a false dichotomy. We could explore and colonise space while also improving conditions on Earth. The same way we could shelter the homeless and feed the hungry; or build rockets/cars and treat employees respectfully.
> I'm not so sure Musk's vision is so exciting.
As an ineffectual prole, without PayPal/emerald money or political connections, I'm happy to watch someone kick the space industry back to life (after ULA & co. turned it into a pork barrel/cash-cow). I'm also happy to call out Musk's poor labour practices (and other crap, like pedogate), for whatever little good my tiny voice will have. If nothing else, I'm also happy to watch giant fuel tanks exploding and crash landing on YouTube.
> Musk is not much different than Bezos.
Of course. Probably worth pointing out Bezos has his own space company too (although I hear he's more focused on space habitats rather than other planets)
Mars can't be independent from Earth for generations until we have set up the necessary industry there to manufacture literally everything locally. I'm pretty sure Elon knows this.
Musk is 50, he’ll be 60 before the first martian settlement and 70 before it starts to pull its own weight. Hell of a way to retire. U.K. his shoes id have taken his billions and bought a nice remote island off a fairly stable country to retire. I’d have bought a few to hedge my bets.
However evil Elon Musk may be, he is a high priest of the religion of progress. Many people (especially highly educated liberals) are not very religious. Scientific and technical progress is the thing they dedicate their lives to like a religious person would dedicate themselves to god.
> Sadly I see this happening quite a lot in South Africa - a country that 25 years ago was filled with much hope and excitement for the future - but now is on the precipice of rapid economic decline due to similar reasons
The politics here is a lot more complicated and these quotes are coming across as quite reductive. That being said I'm a vocal critic of the governments lack of forward thinking despite knowing decades ago that economic shocks and decline were inevitable. The unchecked capital flight since the late 80s is spoken about in hushed tones. The "billonaire" president with the shadiest of pasts. And education ministers hell bent on churning out really dumb black, coloured kids that have no hope of competing on the world stage.
Its micro-politics on the world stage but passionate pain points in the country. And since the global economy is so connected - those with old money certainly have a leg up. It's no excuse to not pull up our own sleeves but to do so you need a shirt with sleeves to begin with.
> but because no one had any alternative vision for a different kind of society, they just accepted this sense of total fakeness as normal.
I don't believe that. Of course there were people with alternative visions. They just happened to be removed by the elite b/c they were threatening their source of luxury.
> As an aside, I know Elon Musk's ambitious projects get mixed responses here on HN, but one thing he keeps referring to (and which resonates quite strongly with me) is his vision for an alternative future which excites us and inspires us.
Mars is not an alternative. And even if we could pull that off it would be a very uncomfortable alternative for a very small portion of the population.
His Mars shenanigans are actually no more and no less than the expensive intellectually stimulating past time of a billionaire.
Personally I don't limit his alternative vision to just Mars.
For me his alternative vision for humanity is making life multi-planetary - and ultimately exploring the stars - and so in that context, Mars is just the beginning.
If we want to colonize space, we have to begin somewhere, right?
I know it's cliché, but the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step - and Mars is just that first step.
The older I get the more that I think that our particular form of government or policies (left/right, socialist/capitalist, authoritarian/libertarian) are less important for overall wellbeing and happiness than stamping out corruption.
This should not come as a surprise to anyone and I think it's fairly easy to show this link, too. Whenever I'm asked what the best part of living in my country is, I unhesitatingly answer "low corruption". It is the source from which all other nice things flow.
Indeed if you look at the happiest countries list that seems to be true. Finland and Switzerland are near the top and kind of lefty and conservative respectively but both very low corruption.
There's this sliding scale ranging from "lower taxes, fewer public services" to "higher taxes, more public services". Really, anything on that spectrum is going to be workable.
Corruption is where sliding that scale towards "higher taxes" results in most of the additional money finding its way to the pockets of various bureaucrats and their friends, as opposed to being used to deliver services-as-promised.
A country having good economics is definitely vital to its success as well. The introduction of a market economy did wonders for China's productivity, whereas I believe that corruption has been relatively constant.
"in the 80s everyone from the top to the bottom of Soviet society knew that it wasn’t working [...]. Everyone knew it was fake, but because no one had any alternative vision for a different kind of society, they just accepted this sense of total fakeness as normal."
That's not true. Communistic system existed only because it was maintained using brutal force and terror. Alternative vision was known very well, even in Soviet Union people knew how life can look, they knew that people in Germany, France or Denmark are living in much better conditions. Propaganda works only to some extent, if it is totally disconnected with reality, it stops working.
I have witnessed the fall of communism. As soon as people were no longer afraid of Soviet tanks, they knew what to do. Poland, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, Lithuania, etc. switched to democracy and capitalism over the night as soon as they could. This was not an easy process, but there was no doubt what the the vision was and what was the goal.
Adam Curtis is entertaining but his generalised sweeping statements are silly and unnecessary.
Yes the world is complex, but it’s not impossible to understand. For example, Brexit: there were many contributing factors but we can identify major ones: globalisation and those left behind feeling resentful; lack of an outlet for those voices due to a rigged electoral system; anti immigration feeling amidst unprecedented high immigration from the EU; propaganda made possible by unethical social media platforms like Facebook; and ruling class power games.
Most of those problems have plausible corresponding solutions. Complicated, but not insurmountable.
True enough to have become the standard periodization of Russian history from early-1970s to mid-1980s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Era_of_Stagnation The deepening paralysis and apathy of administrative and security apparatus eventually made tanks non-scary. It takes willpower and determination to use them, but that was nowhere to be seen, everyone just sat on their asses and preferred to wait things out instead of doing what the Chinese did on the Tiananmen Square.
I wonder why this is downvoted so much. My reaction was exactly the same - ignoring very real violence and threats of it the regime relied on. It did a lot to keep potential discontent under check. It was milder in the 80ties then before, yes. But it was definitely factor.
And I think that this is general mistake people from human rights mostly respecting places do when they talk about oppressive systems. They completely ignore how large the actual danger can be and how it shapes not just the culture, but also the possibilities people have.
This is an interesting comment, because arguably although those countries did know well what they didn't want (Soviet domination, socialism and the one party system), it's not at all clear, from the developments in these countries, what they did want, or how they intended to achieve it:
- Poland now has an extremely illiberal system of government, without the basic republican separation of powers, secularism, or civic freedoms.
- Hungary also is run by an extremely rightwing government which dismisses most foundations of democratic republics using antisemitic conspiracies. If
- Romania is run by kleptocrats and considered borderline too corrupt to be a full member of the EU.
- Despite the GDR having been integrated very smoothly and quite generously into Western Germany, the exemplar of a stable Western European democracy, around half the voters in the former East support either pro-communist or xenophobic, pro-fascist parties.
- Lithuania fails to guarantee basic rights to minority groups.
- Bulgaria - both communism and fascism remain extremely popular.
- and so on. You also loaded your examples - the countries which did join the EU are generally quite a lot better than the ones which didn't such as Moldova, Ukraine, etc.
To be clear - I think that Poland and Polish people have an absolute right to self-determination, and it was never ok for them to be dominated by the Soviet Union, whether by soft power or by violence. However, I think it's fairly clear that if being a modern Western democracy like Denmark was what they wanted, then they failed to achieve it. They have the absolute right to be what they currently are, but they should at least be honest about it.
There's also an irony that in the 1970s and 1980s, when progressives in Poland claimed that they wanted Western-Europe style liberal democracy, the communist apologists, both in Poland and in the Soviet Union said that they were actually fighting for domination by the Catholic Church, inequality, exploitation by rich capitalist countries such as Germany, antisemitism, and so on. Well, they got rid of communism, and what did they adopt? A right-wing, institutionally antisemitic, illiberal system, socially controlled by the Church, and trapped in an economic system run by richer countries.
Elon Musk is laundering military and counterinsurgency technologies as consumer products. SpaceX exists because the ruling class needs always-available global satellite internet to power the new autonomous and conscience-free soldiers they are building. Tesla exists to amp up the surveillance and grid dependence of automobiles, and also to hopefully prevent a nationwide truckers' strike from bringing the economy to a halt by replacing drivers on the long haul routes with autonomous tech.
The "vision" thing is just the shiny object Musk dangles to distract you from what he's really doing.
> SpaceX exists because the ruling class needs always-available global satellite internet to power the new autonomous and conscience-free soldiers they are building.
They already had that. Pre-SpaceX space access was expensive, yet there is no indication the powers that be ever really cared about the price tag for military space hardware, they’d spend whatever it took to get it.
Likewise, if “they” were afraid of strikes by long-distance haulers, rail is a better solution because it doesn’t require inventing new tech that, sadly for the annual death toll due to human drivers, still isn’t a solved problem.
It’s not like governments are even subtle with this sort is thing: in the long-term the UK broke the power of coal miners by switching to nuclear and gas, and in the USA Regan fired all the striking air traffic controllers, which was ~90% of the entire sector.
Wow! This is the first time I've learned about Adam Curtis, and he doesn't mince any words. This article is a crash course into the trajectory of politics over the last few decades. The interviewer must be commended here too!
As someone who's been fascinated by Richard Dawkins' motivations, it was revealing that as Obama pushed religion outside the White House, the whole Dawkins counter-culture against religion was made irrelevant.
It is, however, interesting that Adam Curtis says that people will find a purpose again with the resurgence of religion (Dawkins has a second chance then? Are we in a loop?). I wonder what HN thinks about that.
You're in for a treat then, he's made lots of documentaries about the subjects in the interview, easily found online. They're permanently available on BBC iPlayer if you're in the UK too.
I was intrigued that "religion will provide the vision of the future" and also "religion is way of dealing with our fear of death" (I paraphrase). I don't really see how both can be true.
I see religion becoming more marginalised and less relevant as time goes on. The evangelists are going further away from the rest of society, which is becoming less religious. Trump helped, I think, by exposing how irrational the religious right are becoming. Also, any religion is increasingly being associated with right-wing, traditionalist, conservative, reactionary politics. There's no religious voice welcoming fluid gender identity or supporting UBI.
I don't see religion making a comeback any time soon (thank god).
But we do need a replacement for it. Something that gives us meaning. Some use for all those redundant church spaces in our communities - if we're not going to use them for worshipping sky fairies, what are we going to use them for? Because it would be useful to find something that brought the whole community in one place once a week.
This is so much better than his films. I used to find his films exciting, but the more I thought about them the more I found them conceptually soupy and completely lacking in rigour - just finding narratives that felt satisying. When he's challenged by someone smart like this he's able to articulate his ideas in a much better way than in film. This interview has raised my opinion of him again. He's an interesting thinker, but I really think film is in fact the one medium he shouldn't use because it allows him to weave unchallenged grand narratives that don't really stack up.
Really interesting, there's a smart comment in there about capitalism appropriating its critics and their criticisms.
Now the question is: is Curtis the person first doing the appropriation of capitalist criticism and is this guy actually doing an appropriation of the appropriation of capitalist criticism? Again, I find it very interesting nonetheless.
I kind of see all documentaries this way. All documentaries rely so much on manipulation to drive a narrative that it's difficult to classify it as anything other than art. They can still be informative for sure, but I will never watch a documentary and think I've done any kind of research.
Depending on your point of view. I felt it was a self indulgent sprawling mess.
I felt that I watched a random collection of undergraduate essays, which were then stitched together with music that Curtis felt expressed the zeitigest (which he delusionally thought substituted for an actual point or connection between subjects).
I watched a bit of the documentary with a friend of mine who’s a pretty senior diplomat; when Curtis came to Iraq, she exclaimed with palatable frustration “this is the most incredible 15 minute oversimplification of what happened”.
Curtis documentaries loose much of their lustre when you know what he’s talking about. He becomes less of a BBC patrician who gives you a secret insight into the world of Oxford educated intellectuals; and more of an opinionated old windbag.
At the end of an episode, I told my friend “I feel like I’ve been man-splained to for the last hour [and I’m a man]!”.
Give NewPipe a try (https://newpipe.net/). I've been using it for several months and works really well. Only thing I haven't figured out yet is streaming/casting to the youtube app on my TV.
If I watch through the Brave browser on my phone I never see ads. Through the offical app I have to watch the same two ads for a month or two before the video starts and then again after 15 or 20 minutes. It's really bad.
> Everyone [..] knows that the system that they are living under isn’t working as it is supposed to; that there is a lot of corruption at the top. But whenever the journalists point it out, everyone goes “Wow that’s terrible!” and then nothing happens and the system remains the same.
Everyone agrees that the system isn't working as suposed, but we don't agree on how and why it isn't working.
The resulting system is an unappealing mix of all the different values and beliefs we have about the hows and whys. The more different the values, the more unappealing the mix.
I've found Nassim Taleb's Pricipia Politica to be an interesting suggestion of how to move from abstract universalism to fractal localism. This specifically has the intent of avoiding top-down power structures and the fragility associated with it.
But if we agree it isn't working, we shouldn't need to agree on how or why to decide to change it. Even if you are reasonably sure that something won't work, it makes more sense to spend a bit of time giving it a try than to stick with what you know for certain doesn't. Even if the proposal might make things worse, the potential downside is bounded by it being temporary. In the absolute worst case scenario where you have tried multiple options and all of them are worse than what you started with, you can always go back to the status quo but now with more knowledge.
>Everyone knew it was fake, but because no one had any alternative vision for a different kind of society, they just accepted this sense of total fakeness as normal. And this historian, Alexei Yurchak, coined the phrase “HyperNormalisation” to describe that feeling.
>I thought “that’s a brilliant title” because, although we are not in any way really like the Soviet Union, there is a similar feeling in our present day. Everyone in my country and in America and throughout Europe knows that the system that they are living under isn’t working as it is supposed to; that there is a lot of corruption at the top. But whenever the journalists point it out, everyone goes “Wow that’s terrible!” and then nothing happens and the system remains the same.
That's a brilliant description of our current system. I'm just worried that our hypernormalization won't last as long as the Soviet one.
The interview improved my understanding of our civilization's current situation. I was aware of Hypernormalization we have been feeling in Turkey, and thought that it is similar to Soviet Society, but I didn't understand that the reason for the static nature of the world in general was pattern analysis.
I should have suspected this. I used to spend my time painting and worked as a graphic designer. A couple months ago I changed my role in the company and have been working as a copywriter/editor. Even though for the past couple months, I have been spending all my time devouring books about writing, and understanding this new behemoth, the internet still suggest me things only about art. I have changed, but the algorithms didn't catch up yet. I wonder how long will it take until the algorithms catch up.
This was a major change in my life, and I can easily see the lag, but I wonder how does the algorithms that recommend stuff to me guides my thinking, especially on subjects smaller in scale. How does the spiral of recommendations change our perception of the world? Moreover, do the big tech companies create this systems consciously? Is there a plot dividing the individuals into manageable groups?
Definitely the machines don't look at us as a narrative, so I think as long as my searches and inventory of items related to art is bigger than the ones about writing, the world will continue treating me as an artist.
> I have changed, but the algorithms didn't catch up yet. I wonder how long will it take until the algorithms catch up.
That's a good point, and an interesting question. If you change, but the algorithms don't acknowledge that change and treat you the same, how much is you identity in your own hands, how fungible is it?
We could add lots of "I no longer think that" forms, but I suppose a lot of it isn't because you're sorted into the artist-folder, but recommendations because of your past actions that aren't easily changed.
> Is there a plot dividing the individuals into manageable groups?
I don't think so, but I'm not sure it matters. The end result is similar, only that there's not one large conspiracy that's trying to herd you into thinking a certain way. Instead, it's a multitude of interests that are pulling you into their direction and you kind of get pulled to where most of them are in your niche of the world. But in either way, you do get pulled. Can you opt out? I'm not sure, but you can probably limit your exposure by e.g. not watching television, not reading news sites, not spending time on Twitter.
> If you change, but the algorithms don't acknowledge that change and treat you the same, how much is you identity in your own hands, how fungible is it?
I don't think algorithms doesn't change my identity, but I am curious whether people I am loosely connected or the algorithms will acknowledge this change first.
> I don't think so, but I'm not sure it matters. The end result is similar, only that there's not one large conspiracy that's trying to herd you into thinking a certain way.
I think there might be though, since marketers always think about market segmentation and creating the systems that guide people into herds will be the first thing they would think. If you consider almost all the big tech companies are funded by advertising, shifting people into manageable segments might be intentional.
There are no quick solutions. But it sure does feel good to get rocked by the brunt of what he says, in my opinion. And I think some of Can't Get You Out Of My Head gets at what should come next. Then again, he's a journalist, not a leader.
I've never seen any of them. I've never heard of this guy before.
But I ended up skimming most of the article because the tone and direction of the piece in no way match what I expected from the title. I can well imagine his documentaries are probably pretty depressing.
He seems to have only complaints, not solutions. He seems to describe where we are and how we got here but he seems to have absolutely nothing to say about how to go from where we are to something better.
It's not my cup of tea at all. I was hoping for something meaty and meaningful to add to my existing set of ideas and tools and ended up being all "Yikes! I don't think it would be good for my mental health to drink too deeply of this stuff." So I skimmed, hoping I was wrong, hoping it would get better and grab me later. Hoping I would trip across something that would hook me and tell me to start over, that it will be worth the slow start. I never ran into that.
> He seems to have only complaints, not solutions.
That might be because giving a diagnosis can be made to be perceived as somewhat objective, while suggesting a solution would get into politics really quick and thus risk reflexive dismissal of even the diagnosis itself.
> He seems to have only complaints, not solutions.
I don't see his documentaries as 'his complaints', but more like a view from the current general situation we're in. I see the point of the 'no solutions', but even so, isn't it relevant to discuss and think about the problems?
> I was hoping for something meaty and meaningful to add to my existing set of ideas and tools
maybe someone else is able to come up with meaty part. Not always the problem must have the answer/alternative/solution together with it (math is like that as well, some mathematical problems stayed without solutions for decades, until someone else comes up with a clever/smarter solution to it).
They're not so much complaints in the documentaries but "think of it like this" observations through a specific world-view lense. I think Curtis views the world as interesting chaos and presents a certain filter on the chaos that is interesting.
That fear and hopelesness is more or less exactly what drives the hypernormalization. For me these documentaries present a small hope that we may actually get out of this mess. First step to taking action should be trying to understand the problems.
We don't know what actions will make things better for sure, and probably never will. That's no reason not to take action, but perhaps a reason to not to expect nice and simple solutions.
They actually leave me quite hopeful because they reinforce my view of the world and are popular.
What I'm reasonably convinced of is that when millennials and younger cohorts start to tip the electoral scales in 15 years time, there will be an outbreak of harmony and consensus on an awful lot of things, and people like Curtis will have shaped really quite a lot of that.
I don’t see grounds for optimism. People believed in a bright future that would come when the generation of May '68 got more involved in voting, and were able for stand for election themselves. Yet what happened was those idealistic young people became less radical in the interim, and many signed up to a vogue of mercenary privatization and bourgeois urban development that was virtually the opposite of their earlier views.
> Does anybody else get this feeling of fear and hopelessness watching his documentaries.
To an extent, yes. But on the other hand it's interesting to see how particular events have such dramatic long-term effects, because it implies that in the future very different outcomes are possible even without massive world-scale changes.
Yes somewhat this is also true for me. However I think this "HyperNormalisation" has to happen in some way, because if people would constantly worry about how bad and corrupt the world/systems are it wouldnt help anyone going forward because not everyone has the chance to make a change.
Readit News
> in the 80s everyone from the top to the bottom of Soviet society knew that it wasn’t working, knew that it was corrupt, knew that the bosses were looting the system, knew that the politicians had no alternative vision. And they knew that the bosses knew they knew that. Everyone knew it was fake, but because no one had any alternative vision for a different kind of society, they just accepted this sense of total fakeness as normal.
This article's explanation of Hypernormalisation (defined in the excerpt above) was quite interesting to read.
Sadly I see this happening quite a lot in South Africa - a country that 25 years ago was filled with much hope and excitement for the future - but now is on the precipice of rapid economic decline due to similar reasons outlined above (primarily corrupt politicians but also an economy ravaged by Covid).
That being said there are still many South Africans that are nervously excited about the country's future - I guess we just need that alternative vision to drive us forward?
As an aside, I know Elon Musk's ambitious projects get mixed responses here on HN, but one thing he keeps referring to (and which resonates quite strongly with me) is his vision for an alternative future which excites us and inspires us.
That's a false dichotomy. We could explore and colonise space while also improving conditions on Earth. The same way we could shelter the homeless and feed the hungry; or build rockets/cars and treat employees respectfully.
> I'm not so sure Musk's vision is so exciting.
As an ineffectual prole, without PayPal/emerald money or political connections, I'm happy to watch someone kick the space industry back to life (after ULA & co. turned it into a pork barrel/cash-cow). I'm also happy to call out Musk's poor labour practices (and other crap, like pedogate), for whatever little good my tiny voice will have. If nothing else, I'm also happy to watch giant fuel tanks exploding and crash landing on YouTube.
> Musk is not much different than Bezos.
Of course. Probably worth pointing out Bezos has his own space company too (although I hear he's more focused on space habitats rather than other planets)
Full respect to him.
https://www.salon.com/2019/04/13/why-some-in-silicon-valley-...
Dead Comment
Maybe those are hard enough problems that you just can't tolerate employees not pulling their weight.
> Sadly I see this happening quite a lot in South Africa - a country that 25 years ago was filled with much hope and excitement for the future - but now is on the precipice of rapid economic decline due to similar reasons
The politics here is a lot more complicated and these quotes are coming across as quite reductive. That being said I'm a vocal critic of the governments lack of forward thinking despite knowing decades ago that economic shocks and decline were inevitable. The unchecked capital flight since the late 80s is spoken about in hushed tones. The "billonaire" president with the shadiest of pasts. And education ministers hell bent on churning out really dumb black, coloured kids that have no hope of competing on the world stage.
Its micro-politics on the world stage but passionate pain points in the country. And since the global economy is so connected - those with old money certainly have a leg up. It's no excuse to not pull up our own sleeves but to do so you need a shirt with sleeves to begin with.
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I don't believe that. Of course there were people with alternative visions. They just happened to be removed by the elite b/c they were threatening their source of luxury.
Mars is not an alternative. And even if we could pull that off it would be a very uncomfortable alternative for a very small portion of the population.
His Mars shenanigans are actually no more and no less than the expensive intellectually stimulating past time of a billionaire.
Personally I don't limit his alternative vision to just Mars.
For me his alternative vision for humanity is making life multi-planetary - and ultimately exploring the stars - and so in that context, Mars is just the beginning.
If we want to colonize space, we have to begin somewhere, right?
I know it's cliché, but the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step - and Mars is just that first step.
There's this sliding scale ranging from "lower taxes, fewer public services" to "higher taxes, more public services". Really, anything on that spectrum is going to be workable.
Corruption is where sliding that scale towards "higher taxes" results in most of the additional money finding its way to the pockets of various bureaucrats and their friends, as opposed to being used to deliver services-as-promised.
Gandhi had to get kicked of a train to wake up. Otherwise he was perfectly satisfied wandering about being a mediocre lawyer.
Dead Comment
That's not true. Communistic system existed only because it was maintained using brutal force and terror. Alternative vision was known very well, even in Soviet Union people knew how life can look, they knew that people in Germany, France or Denmark are living in much better conditions. Propaganda works only to some extent, if it is totally disconnected with reality, it stops working.
I have witnessed the fall of communism. As soon as people were no longer afraid of Soviet tanks, they knew what to do. Poland, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, Lithuania, etc. switched to democracy and capitalism over the night as soon as they could. This was not an easy process, but there was no doubt what the the vision was and what was the goal.
Yes the world is complex, but it’s not impossible to understand. For example, Brexit: there were many contributing factors but we can identify major ones: globalisation and those left behind feeling resentful; lack of an outlet for those voices due to a rigged electoral system; anti immigration feeling amidst unprecedented high immigration from the EU; propaganda made possible by unethical social media platforms like Facebook; and ruling class power games.
Most of those problems have plausible corresponding solutions. Complicated, but not insurmountable.
True enough to have become the standard periodization of Russian history from early-1970s to mid-1980s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Era_of_Stagnation The deepening paralysis and apathy of administrative and security apparatus eventually made tanks non-scary. It takes willpower and determination to use them, but that was nowhere to be seen, everyone just sat on their asses and preferred to wait things out instead of doing what the Chinese did on the Tiananmen Square.
And I think that this is general mistake people from human rights mostly respecting places do when they talk about oppressive systems. They completely ignore how large the actual danger can be and how it shapes not just the culture, but also the possibilities people have.
- Poland now has an extremely illiberal system of government, without the basic republican separation of powers, secularism, or civic freedoms. - Hungary also is run by an extremely rightwing government which dismisses most foundations of democratic republics using antisemitic conspiracies. If - Romania is run by kleptocrats and considered borderline too corrupt to be a full member of the EU. - Despite the GDR having been integrated very smoothly and quite generously into Western Germany, the exemplar of a stable Western European democracy, around half the voters in the former East support either pro-communist or xenophobic, pro-fascist parties. - Lithuania fails to guarantee basic rights to minority groups. - Bulgaria - both communism and fascism remain extremely popular. - and so on. You also loaded your examples - the countries which did join the EU are generally quite a lot better than the ones which didn't such as Moldova, Ukraine, etc.
To be clear - I think that Poland and Polish people have an absolute right to self-determination, and it was never ok for them to be dominated by the Soviet Union, whether by soft power or by violence. However, I think it's fairly clear that if being a modern Western democracy like Denmark was what they wanted, then they failed to achieve it. They have the absolute right to be what they currently are, but they should at least be honest about it.
There's also an irony that in the 1970s and 1980s, when progressives in Poland claimed that they wanted Western-Europe style liberal democracy, the communist apologists, both in Poland and in the Soviet Union said that they were actually fighting for domination by the Catholic Church, inequality, exploitation by rich capitalist countries such as Germany, antisemitism, and so on. Well, they got rid of communism, and what did they adopt? A right-wing, institutionally antisemitic, illiberal system, socially controlled by the Church, and trapped in an economic system run by richer countries.
The "vision" thing is just the shiny object Musk dangles to distract you from what he's really doing.
They already had that. Pre-SpaceX space access was expensive, yet there is no indication the powers that be ever really cared about the price tag for military space hardware, they’d spend whatever it took to get it.
Likewise, if “they” were afraid of strikes by long-distance haulers, rail is a better solution because it doesn’t require inventing new tech that, sadly for the annual death toll due to human drivers, still isn’t a solved problem.
It’s not like governments are even subtle with this sort is thing: in the long-term the UK broke the power of coal miners by switching to nuclear and gas, and in the USA Regan fired all the striking air traffic controllers, which was ~90% of the entire sector.
The Bircher and conspiratorialist influence on the American body politic is truly criminal.
As someone who's been fascinated by Richard Dawkins' motivations, it was revealing that as Obama pushed religion outside the White House, the whole Dawkins counter-culture against religion was made irrelevant.
It is, however, interesting that Adam Curtis says that people will find a purpose again with the resurgence of religion (Dawkins has a second chance then? Are we in a loop?). I wonder what HN thinks about that.
I see religion becoming more marginalised and less relevant as time goes on. The evangelists are going further away from the rest of society, which is becoming less religious. Trump helped, I think, by exposing how irrational the religious right are becoming. Also, any religion is increasingly being associated with right-wing, traditionalist, conservative, reactionary politics. There's no religious voice welcoming fluid gender identity or supporting UBI.
I don't see religion making a comeback any time soon (thank god).
But we do need a replacement for it. Something that gives us meaning. Some use for all those redundant church spaces in our communities - if we're not going to use them for worshipping sky fairies, what are we going to use them for? Because it would be useful to find something that brought the whole community in one place once a week.
There are among the nonconformists, although they won't be given media coverage.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=x1bX3F7uTrg
Now the question is: is Curtis the person first doing the appropriation of capitalist criticism and is this guy actually doing an appropriation of the appropriation of capitalist criticism? Again, I find it very interesting nonetheless.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/4ad8db/adam-curtis-charlie-b...
I felt that I watched a random collection of undergraduate essays, which were then stitched together with music that Curtis felt expressed the zeitigest (which he delusionally thought substituted for an actual point or connection between subjects).
I watched a bit of the documentary with a friend of mine who’s a pretty senior diplomat; when Curtis came to Iraq, she exclaimed with palatable frustration “this is the most incredible 15 minute oversimplification of what happened”.
Curtis documentaries loose much of their lustre when you know what he’s talking about. He becomes less of a BBC patrician who gives you a secret insight into the world of Oxford educated intellectuals; and more of an opinionated old windbag.
At the end of an episode, I told my friend “I feel like I’ve been man-splained to for the last hour [and I’m a man]!”.
I use to be able to watch youtube videos without any youtube app just using /embed/<video-id> on a browser or mpv.
Now it seems every link is broken unless you go through there data hoarding app? (On android not desktop)
Everyone agrees that the system isn't working as suposed, but we don't agree on how and why it isn't working.
The resulting system is an unappealing mix of all the different values and beliefs we have about the hows and whys. The more different the values, the more unappealing the mix.
https://acataleptico.files.wordpress.com/2019/05/principia_p...
>I thought “that’s a brilliant title” because, although we are not in any way really like the Soviet Union, there is a similar feeling in our present day. Everyone in my country and in America and throughout Europe knows that the system that they are living under isn’t working as it is supposed to; that there is a lot of corruption at the top. But whenever the journalists point it out, everyone goes “Wow that’s terrible!” and then nothing happens and the system remains the same.
That's a brilliant description of our current system. I'm just worried that our hypernormalization won't last as long as the Soviet one.
I should have suspected this. I used to spend my time painting and worked as a graphic designer. A couple months ago I changed my role in the company and have been working as a copywriter/editor. Even though for the past couple months, I have been spending all my time devouring books about writing, and understanding this new behemoth, the internet still suggest me things only about art. I have changed, but the algorithms didn't catch up yet. I wonder how long will it take until the algorithms catch up.
This was a major change in my life, and I can easily see the lag, but I wonder how does the algorithms that recommend stuff to me guides my thinking, especially on subjects smaller in scale. How does the spiral of recommendations change our perception of the world? Moreover, do the big tech companies create this systems consciously? Is there a plot dividing the individuals into manageable groups?
Definitely the machines don't look at us as a narrative, so I think as long as my searches and inventory of items related to art is bigger than the ones about writing, the world will continue treating me as an artist.
That's a good point, and an interesting question. If you change, but the algorithms don't acknowledge that change and treat you the same, how much is you identity in your own hands, how fungible is it?
We could add lots of "I no longer think that" forms, but I suppose a lot of it isn't because you're sorted into the artist-folder, but recommendations because of your past actions that aren't easily changed.
> Is there a plot dividing the individuals into manageable groups?
I don't think so, but I'm not sure it matters. The end result is similar, only that there's not one large conspiracy that's trying to herd you into thinking a certain way. Instead, it's a multitude of interests that are pulling you into their direction and you kind of get pulled to where most of them are in your niche of the world. But in either way, you do get pulled. Can you opt out? I'm not sure, but you can probably limit your exposure by e.g. not watching television, not reading news sites, not spending time on Twitter.
I don't think algorithms doesn't change my identity, but I am curious whether people I am loosely connected or the algorithms will acknowledge this change first.
> I don't think so, but I'm not sure it matters. The end result is similar, only that there's not one large conspiracy that's trying to herd you into thinking a certain way.
I think there might be though, since marketers always think about market segmentation and creating the systems that guide people into herds will be the first thing they would think. If you consider almost all the big tech companies are funded by advertising, shifting people into manageable segments might be intentional.
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It really feels like a mental hangover, not knowing what actions to take to make things better for us a society?
But I ended up skimming most of the article because the tone and direction of the piece in no way match what I expected from the title. I can well imagine his documentaries are probably pretty depressing.
He seems to have only complaints, not solutions. He seems to describe where we are and how we got here but he seems to have absolutely nothing to say about how to go from where we are to something better.
It's not my cup of tea at all. I was hoping for something meaty and meaningful to add to my existing set of ideas and tools and ended up being all "Yikes! I don't think it would be good for my mental health to drink too deeply of this stuff." So I skimmed, hoping I was wrong, hoping it would get better and grab me later. Hoping I would trip across something that would hook me and tell me to start over, that it will be worth the slow start. I never ran into that.
That might be because giving a diagnosis can be made to be perceived as somewhat objective, while suggesting a solution would get into politics really quick and thus risk reflexive dismissal of even the diagnosis itself.
I don't see his documentaries as 'his complaints', but more like a view from the current general situation we're in. I see the point of the 'no solutions', but even so, isn't it relevant to discuss and think about the problems?
> I was hoping for something meaty and meaningful to add to my existing set of ideas and tools
maybe someone else is able to come up with meaty part. Not always the problem must have the answer/alternative/solution together with it (math is like that as well, some mathematical problems stayed without solutions for decades, until someone else comes up with a clever/smarter solution to it).
We don't know what actions will make things better for sure, and probably never will. That's no reason not to take action, but perhaps a reason to not to expect nice and simple solutions.
What I'm reasonably convinced of is that when millennials and younger cohorts start to tip the electoral scales in 15 years time, there will be an outbreak of harmony and consensus on an awful lot of things, and people like Curtis will have shaped really quite a lot of that.
To an extent, yes. But on the other hand it's interesting to see how particular events have such dramatic long-term effects, because it implies that in the future very different outcomes are possible even without massive world-scale changes.