HyperNormalisation (2016) helped me frame the decline they (and we) allowed. The people at the top have been trending towards dumber, less conscientious, less hopeful, less moral, and more corrupt when it doesn't have to be this way; plus, it's easier than ever for billionaires and private equity to buy up corporate media and manipulate social media to shape narratives favorable to their interests. It's trending this way because the very rich seem to believe they aren't stakeholders in society or planet Earth, and that they can breathe and eat money, and so they are extracting as much of it as possible before it all comes crashing down rather than doing anything to reset, rebuild, or prevent it.
Beware times when private edifices rival, or subsume, the states' majesty.
"HyperNormalisation" was interesting but gave me tinfoil hat vibes such that I kept everything they claimed at arms length. But there we are, in a "post truth" world you have to be skeptical of everything. (At the same time, I am conflicted because I tend also to be skeptical of skepticism itself and try to maintain a dogged optimism.)
I'm familiar with it. In my opinion, Adam Curtis's moviemaking style is strongly informed by attention-getting, which is relevant to his subject matter: it's like how the youtuber Harry Litman produces salient and reasoned content (albeit opinionated) but never fails to label it with completely clickbait titles and thumbnails.
If your concept is that your work should be heard, you're obligated to take whatever steps are accepted to meet the bar for 'culturally being heard', a bar that you don't yourself set.
I think Adam Curtis makes non-tinfoil points and takes pains to present them as explosively as possible, something he's good at doing. I sympathize with the idea that it's distasteful to do that, but within the culture that hosts him, it's correct action.
He makes cause and effect statements and posits them as definitive. This person does this and that reaction occurs. These are the causal illusions we build history from after the fact. It's a kind of game that becomes addictive. He happens to have a skillset that makes it more addictive then the usual History channel offering. Our problem though, is that history as we design it, is not really there. Sayyd Qutb going to a sock hop no more caused 9/11 than a chance encounter bin Laden had with a courier in 1977. There are thousands of factors, mistakes, etc that lead to 9/11. Designing a casual narrative out of it is an illusion.
That we are entranced like moths to history is not well-understood by the general population. We like well-designed narratives that simplify what are only validly scientifically correlated events. The real question now is how do we evade the addiction and grow up to become self-sufficient using information.
I like American strategy of allowing views to be discussed but not let them affect Elite club's strategy. In this regard, China has failed. They should allow ample discussions about tiananmen square and strip away emotional value so that whenever these topics are brought up again they lose their relevance.
Baehr and Curtis are still trapped behind the edifice of evolution. We're primates, we compete for status at any cost that has better benefits, including epistemological loss.
The problem is actually quite simple, we use words, which are lossy, arbitrary, and narratives which are rhetorical same.
There's no virtue ability that overtakes these incredibly leaky systems, they're illusions laypeople accept while those in higher status operate as bypasses to extract value. Narratives are not only illusions, they entrance audiences into whatever deception the control system requires: they're state-mythical, they're time-wasters in entertainment, they convince the audience that events are knowable, like news, they convince people that behaviors are malleable as in history. Yet we know we make the same mistakes as countries, as families, as individuals.