Comment by 3m4r
8 hours ago
This is the story of how one user spent too much time writing why he became disenchanted with Adam Curtis, how he had been a longtime fan. But eventually he saw through the same smoke and mirrors. He learned to see it all as uncharitable nonsense to convince others that technocracy is unassailable. He thought the parody was funny.
But this was a fantasy.
(Curtis's entire ouevre can be summarized in 18 seconds: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3YSwCJIpSXQ )
That's a good parody.
I like the Curtis stuff because it hits like old internet-core. It is entertainment that makes you think, but entertainment. Otherwise it would have been written work. But damn the guy can weave a story with some old videos and a soundtrack. As a genre, it's extremely approachable to make your own.
Sometimes it seems like shorts and tiktoks are like a bad Adam Curtis film. 30s highlights stitched together with no relation, garing transitions, ads.
Maybe I can put together a greasemonkey script to make YT shorts Adam Curtis themed. Maybe I won't feel as guilty, maybe it will all make sense.
I have seen these parodies before, and while they are accurate in style, they seem to misunderstand or misrepresent Curtis' message. A message which is not that hard to understand, except that it falls comfortably outside of the Overton window:
"Driven by the seductive post-war fantasy that human beings and nature are self-regulating machines -- a cybernetic delusion shared equally by California tech-utopians, holistic ecologists, and free-market economists -- we willingly surrendered political power and moral responsibility to automated, network-driven systems, only to find ourselves trapped in a static, dehumanizing loop that cannot envision an alternative future and leaves the existing, unaccountable hierarchies of power completely intact."
No, I understand his message.
And again, this is exactly what I meant by "uncharitable nonsense to convince others that technocracy is unassailable." He regularly claims his job isn't to provide solutions or that solutions are increasingly unimaginable, yet that's the only thing that does matter.
If knowing more about how civilization got to this point suggests nothing to Curtis about how to escape from it and hasn't for three decades, despite his supposedly privileged epistemic position, why listen to him in the first place? The man obviously isn't interested in proposing or "raising awareness" of solutions, only problems.
I don't need another six hours explaining why I'm right to be dissatisfied. I already am. Tell me what you've learned that might make me less powerless, not more.