Am I the only one who automatically made the parallel between Musk's show and this excerpt from HyperNormalisation?

Since we got such positive feedback for ‘The Rise Of The Anglofuturists’ from the Adam Curtis community thought I’d share https://youtu.be/GVUbtI9bVKY?

Perhaps I am mistaken but some posts seem like they resonate with his personality. I know Helen Toland heads the team but not much else.

I’ve been wanting to build an AC repository for years, but never got round to it. Then u/Grouchy-Wealth9094 posted their zip archive, and I had a few moments, so I began.

It’s going to take a while to fully populate, but the beginnings can be found at https://auxbuss.com/curtis/ There is basic authentication – mainly to keep the scrapers out, but hopefully it assuages the legal C&D folk too – which can be satisfied with adam/curtis.

I’d appreciate comments, but please keep in mind that the focus is on adding content rather than adding features or redesigning the whole thing.

Note that a key target is linking the videos back to their blog-pages. I’ve also added search, and a separate categories’ page.

The site is built with the static site generator Jekyll, which fashions content via Markdown, and is currently git’d up on a private gitlab repo. I’d appreciate any help adding content, so please message me if you want repo access.

There’s more info about my approach on the curtis/Home page.

I’ll try to add at least one page per day, but some pages are more complex than others, so it’s bound to vary.

Hi all, new to this subreddit but a big AC fan - he has influenced my thought and worldview ever since seeing his films on Newswipe....literally couldn't get him out of my head when I first saw those short, inquiring and deeply unsettling vignettes with such power behind them...anyhow a little story from that time.

2009, newly married and I'm settling down to watch Brooker on a Sunday night, dreading another week in a bullsh*t job. On comes AC's short film on Richard Nixon and I am settling in for another ascerbic takedown of modern culture when the story starts unravelling - Thatcher - boom, politicians - skewered, police on the take and selling drugs - WHAT?!

Sat at the desk with cig in mouth and looking for all to see as if he's fabricating some evidence is my dad at the typewriter. His voice and young face perfectly captured and beamed into my house. He'd been dead four years at this point and being a grief repressed alcoholic in training I was pretty shocked and surprised ....think the Leo DiCaprio whistling and pointing meme!

It was pretty surprising as I don't think anyone would have noticed, especially as the footage came from an obscure Granada TV documentary of 1974 about a Flying Squad type situation in the town i'm from....the existence of which I only found out about two or three weeks before he died, which was bizarre in itself, featuring my mum as a young lady and my sister as a toddler....me ne'er but a twinkle.

Anyway, I basked in this personally for a week or so,, proud as punch that my dad had made it tangentially on to an AC film...but then it dawned on me; if my mum or sister were to have seen it, would they have been shocked by the insinuation, especially so soon since my dad passing, mum still vulnerable from the loss etc.

I wrote an email to the production company (I think) saying how pleased I personally was that my dad had made into the AC canon, but with the circumstances of his recentish death and the alignment between script and visual, could anything be done? For me, it was his voice that cut through the mix that jarred with me, but as was always the way with my dad, he liked to make an impact.

I got a phone call from someone (probs wasn't AC but like to think it was!) and they said that whilst they couldn't do anything about the film as it was put out on the show, they would do something for onward presses/prints....so I am sorry to say that my pearl clutching lead to faces being blanked out on that film...and I've seen it in various other AC films too since then. I was only thinking of my mum at the time, but in a way the blanking out of faces adds a wee bit more to the context. Perhaps.

Anyway, that's the story. Over the past nearly 20 years as I get closer to his age, and realise that he had had issues with drink, I have mixed feelings on it - being a copper in the 60s/70s and 80s was no walk in the park, and I think contributed to his early death...but thats not for here.

Thanks for reading

Plenty in this that chimes with recent Curtis stuff. Fascinating listen.

Hello,

I recently watched The Century of The Self documentary series and found it super interesting. I was just wondering if anyone happened to know any books that cover a similar topic. I already did a little research and Stuart Ewan (in the doc) has written a few books which could be seen as similar, so if anyone has read those, what did you think? Did they cover a similar topic? Any other book recommendations are welcome.

Thanks.

I'm a Sociologist who finds Curtis' work incredibly interesting - both intellectually and in terms of his ability to present social theory in such an intriguing and accessible way.

I'm recently re-reading Escape Attempts by Stan Cohen and Laurie Taylor. The book was originally published in 1976 before an updated, slightly revised edition in 1992. That second edition has a new introduction entitled Life After Postmodernism. While the whole book has some level of Curtis' style, that new introduction in particular takes an incredibly similar narrative.

Something particularly interesting... Laurie Taylor was a very successful and influential sociologist. However, he became known as a broadcaster for the BBC - most notably for his popular Radio 4 show Thinking Allowed. This places him at the BBC during the same time as Curtis, which in itself is interesting to me. I can find no evidential link between the two, other than their overlapping ideas, subject matter and employer. But I'm finding it difficult to believe that Curtis has not engaged with and been influenced by Taylor and Cohen's work in at least some ways - especially with the knowledge that Curtis shifted to journalism after become "disillusioned with academia" (a feeling I'm currently experiencing myself!).

Additionally, Curtis has spoken about the narratives in his films as essentially reflecting conversations he was having with friends. Again - I have no evidence for this, but I love the picture I'm imagining from these little threads of Curtis sat in a pub with Laurie Taylor discussing the changing world we live in.

Of course, Taylor and Cohen are essentially just drawing upon similar sources that clearly inspire Curtis - Foucault, Baudrillard, etc. It should not be surprising they construct similar narratives from the sources they use. But again, I find the similarities in this introduction to be striking enough to become noteworthy.

Stan Cohen was also a giant in sociology. He wrote a book called Folk Devils and Moral Panics, which also had an enormous impact on sociology. I'd go so far as to say that Cohen's findings in that book developed into one of the most influential concepts in all of social science - who today has not encountered the term 'moral panic'? While I don't see the crossover as strongly, there is no world in which Curtis has not engaged with Cohen's work.

Anyway, I strongly recommend Escape Attempts to any and all fans of Adam Curtis. Even if you just read the new introduction (Life After Postmodernism) to the second edition, you'll find a lot to riff on.

I was on a long drive and ended up stumbling into the final 3 EG videos on youtube.

I didn’t expect them to hit so hard - and realized this guy has a Tom Green approach to an incredibly serious and disturbing subject matter which has affected millions of young American men and has influenced political outcomes. Into the second episode it hit me and i realized this kid is an AC contemporary even if it’s unintentional, and it made me realize how much I miss the older AC docs with his narration over BBC archival and spliced in audio + edgy soundtrack.

If you haven’t checked it out - do so and tell me i’m crazy?

Any other recs in this vain i’d be stoked to hear about.

I was struck by something Curtis' said on the 'The Rest is Entertainment' podcast after releasing Shifty, about how if he was going to write a ghost story about how it feels to be alive now, he'd write about AI and the way it presents us with fragments of our past and present.

Taking this thread, and filtering it through my own aesthetic, I wrote a short prose work that tries to parry with the concept of AI, closed/open knowledge loops, authorship and memory. It's free, I hope it isn't considered spam to share it here, but rather seen as a genuine response to the train of thought Adam Curtis has generated:

PDF: https://archive.org/details/TMAPO

ePub: https://novel.wrenasmir.com/text/Their_Most_August_Public_Organ.epub

It was surprising to hear a familiar voice as a sample in this song

Does anyone know of any other artists that did this?

Hoping there's someone like Akira The Don

i've tried to save the full BBC blog 71 posts - BUGGER + RUPERT MURDOCH archive.ph included - original rushes lost, screenshots only surviving copy - download + timecode map for long films: https://archive.org/details/adam-curtis-entity-bbccanonical-name-bbc-blog-71-posts

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Apologies to all you lot who have heard this but this is new to me and one hell of an interview

I am searching for the televised interview with Andrey Makarevich mentioned at the beginning of Alexei Yurchak's book "Everything Was Forever Until It Was No More". Does a recording of this exist anywhere online? The quote from the interview to begin Yurchak's book is:

"It had never occurred to me that in the Soviet Union, anything could ever change, let alone that it could disappear. No one expected it, neither children nor adults. There was a complete impression that everything was forever."

There's so many significant events, people, places, ideas, how did he find all these interesting things that seem to be relevant? There's so much info, how does he process all this knowledge?

Highly recommended if you haven’t seen it

It goes back to Silicon Valley in the 70s, Steve jobs era, with a utopian vision for technology to break away from politics and usher in a decentralized world that works together. Using technology/computer networks to manage it.

Safe to say that hasn’t happened!

I was most fascinated by Jay forester, (I think), the investor of system design that was a big way to understand the world through diagram. When he died in the early 90s, this was of thinking died too, replaced with different theories.

Their belief was that we need to achieve a self sustaining ecosystem like nature, otherwise, their models showed in the 70s, we are heading to impending doom.

It was released in 2011, before a lot of the horrors of the internet today

Any genre/theme/era is valid, as long as it’s good.

I am just obsessed with HyperNormalization at this point. The talking points, the editing style, the soundtrack and the footage; all of it. It doesn’t matter if it’s fiction or non fiction.

Hi, today I talked about a scene in an Adam Curtis movie where a former patient talks about standing in front of her wardrobe an her subconscious mind takes over and grabs something for her. I belive this was after she had a lobotomy or something similiar.

Do you know where exactly I can find that scene?

EDIT: solved!

Can't Get You Out Of My Head, Episode 6: Are We Pigeon Or Are We Dancer. The section with Vicky and Michael Gazzaniga starts around 24min30sec.

Much thanks to u/Mussycat

I’ve seen everything he’s done in this century but nothing before that. Is there anything you recommend from his earlier works or is it mostly for completists?