@jamalrob @csalisbury thoughts?

So that's what he's been up to. I'll watch it some time soon. Thanks for posting.

Thanks for the link, I had't heard anything about the new series.

Watched the first three last night. I like it a lot. (the rest of this will sound critical, but its from a place of love, I'm into this series)

I've gone back and forth on Adam Curtis, but where I've landed is something like: you can count on him for really good history-entertainment (amazing stoned, highly recommend, it's like if don delillo were a warm bath)

I trust his facts to be right, but I think you have to take his narrative/framing approach as an aesthetic device.If you're willing to temporarily suspend your disbelief, it's a thrill, but once you've watched 3 or 4 of his movies, you realize he's going to tell the same story, and use the same emotional cues to create a massively over-simplified story, with a radiohead paranoia tone. Again, I love it aesthetically, and love learning the facts themselves, but his framing is ...it's weird, it's doing the same thing he's always getting conspiratorial about.

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By the early 21st century, millions had grown accustomed to chaos. There was a growing feeling that nothing had any meaning. The world had lost hope. But in 2021, A filmmaker from BBC offered a way of understanding reality. HIs claim was that, by sifting video fragments from the past 100 years, we could trace the patterns of power through the century . This new narrative would give us a full understanding. But this was just a fantasy [shot of people dancing, set to a different song than what they were dancing to originally]

By the early 21st century, millions had grown accustomed to chaos. There was a growing feeling that nothing had any meaning. The world had lost hope. But in 2021, A filmmaker from BBC offered a way of understanding reality. HIs claim was that, by sifting video fragments from the past 100 years, we could trace the patterns of power through the century . This new narrative would give us a full understanding. But this was just a fantasy [shot of people dancing, set to a different song than what they were dancing to originally] — csalisbury

Wonderful! :starstruck:

I just watched part1, and I'm reminded of ideas about control and stability being inversely related. The more control humans have the more unstable humanity becomes, and this is just the way the world is.

I just watched part1, and I'm reminded of ideas about control and stability being inversely related. The more control humans have the more unstable humanity becomes, and this is just the way the world is. — unenlightened

I wonder which way the cause flows, or if that question is even valid here. I know that I'm more tempted by forms of control (including addiction, which is a kind of control because it simplifies) when I'm feeling more unstable, but I guess it could also be an mc escher hand thing. Like, I'm also more unstable when I'm engaging in addictive behaviors. Maybe Mao and his wife has a similar dynamic with the youth of their nation during the cultural revolution.

Did you know Muammar Gaddafi wrote a book of short stories? One of those stories is called Suicide of the Astronaut. It's an interesting look into a dictator's mind. Part of clinging to power is not knowing what else to do.

I trust his facts to be right, but I think you have to take his narrative/framing approach as an aesthetic device.If you're willing to temporarily suspend your disbelief, it's a thrill, but once you've watched 3 or 4 of his movies, you realize he's going to tell the same story, and use the same emotional cues to create a massively over-simplified story, — csalisbury

Exactly. Fantastic archive material and lots of weird links. It is great as art video, but lacks grounding in theory.

I’ve only watched first part, so he may stick the landing. The bit I am liking is the angle that power is its own abstraction flowing through the circuits of modern human society. It shapes the individual psyche with its constraining memes.

The irony is how modern individualism was born as a way to enslave people to this very system. People were not freed (as in the Romantic notion of selfhood) but constructed to have greater degrees of freedom. That is shaped to act more abstractly as a vessel for ideas. The suitable ideas are then supplied by the social power system. We call it being civilised and educated.

This is a naturalistic phenomenon. The way natural systems evolve. And now we’ve seen it all move past the rational/mechanical image of the ideal human to the woke/Trumpian era where conspiracy theory and emotion rule. The power game feels a step more naked and direct.

Feelings beat reason. And that is the next step for the evolving organism. Curtis seems to be saying this.

I just watched part1, and I'm reminded of ideas about control and stability being inversely related. The more control humans have the more unstable humanity becomes, and this is just the way the world is. — unenlightened

Watched part 2 now. Commenting on this, I would say that systems biology gives a more functional reading of the relation.

It is true that an excess of top-down control (or constraint) creates a brittle and over-regulated system (social or otherwise). Stan Salthe calls this a senescent system - one grown to be too ruled by ingrained habit. The component parts of the system lack creative freedoms - an ability to adapt - and so become prone to erratic responses in the face of challenges. The system starts to fray because of this form of instability.

But the human story - as being told by Curtis - is at a quite different stage of its lifecycle. Society is more immature than senescent. Senescence sets in when a system has arrived at a very stable energy throughput. A steady-state power flow.

A highly functional ecosystem, like a rainforest, is senescent in the sense that it has evolved so many feedback regulatory controls - a mass of interlocking biological activity - that this becomes both its great strength and great vulnerability. If the wider world - the energy and resources flux that sustains it - remains itself stable, then the rainforest flourishes due to its vast weight of accumulated adaptations. But if the Earth climate systems start altering even slightly, the rainforest can collapse rather catastrophically and get replaced by some less complex ecology.

An immature system is the opposite in existing in a realm of increasing energy throughput - in the way the weeds suddenly have open light when the forest canopy disappears. The equation now is the system is under-regulated and so has plenty of local freedom to adapt as it likes. There are no habits in place and so free experimentation is in play. A second form of "instability" to complement the fragility of being over-regulated and prone to breakage.

For human society, as an evolving biological entity, the story has been about how we have been continually reinventing our way of life so as to be able to step up the energy throughput and hence remain in an immature state. The industrial era was built on fossil fuel and the machinery (the epitome of regulatory habit in nature) that could harness it.

Humans have become more unstable partly because they become victims of now senescing forms of society - its economic and political order - and because they are also part of the creative experimentation to take the system to its next stage of development. Immaturity - the vigour of youth - is restored by society finding the behaviours that allow it to create more entropy.

So this is one of the confusions in Curtis's presentation. There is both the crumbling of the old and the invention of the new taking place in the same moment. And it is always heading for the same "functional" outcome - even more energy throughput through the human ecosystem.

It is not about some malign human power or instinct that maintains and reasserts itself - the re-imposition of control over the individual spirit. This is the Romantic myth of humanity in moral decline.

Instead, it is a much more natural and biophysical story of nature finding better routes to maximise entropy production. And the idea of the modern individual results from continually re-discovering the next mode of operation that keeps that biophysical project going.

The British Empire perfected a stage of planetary resource exploitation. It created a colonial management system in which the natives would be educated to think and behave in ways that actively supported a UK power structure that could biophysically out-compete other less intelligent colonial empires. The civil service was a semiotic machinery for a certain form of mind control that fostered a willing and creative participation by those being colonised.

Then we had the era of the machine man - rational, efficient, time managed, etc. Followed by the corporate era of the passive consumer (Curtis was spot-on about the hippies becoming a consumable life style and fashion choice). Then the high finance era where every individual is a go-getting entrepreneur.

From this biophysical point of view - where the only driving imperative is to maintain the human social system in its accelerating phase of constantly growing energy throughput - the current era of Trump and woke irrationalism becomes much more explicable.

The script for being a human individual must get rewritten in ways that keep the big show going. And what we get is thus the functional product. We get what works in the current circumstance.

Trump and Wokism represent the kind of instability that currently flourishes where a more rationally-trained mind believes it shouldn't.

And it is pointless putting a moral lens on this story - as Curtis is largely doing. It is only going to make sense as a tale of systems biology or biosemiotics.

The Romantic myth is that humanity aspires to be on some virtuous and Platonic life path. But the beast within keeps dragging us down. Christianity 101. It is the familiar moral philosophy diagnosis.

But Nature will just evolve its way towards the goal of maximum entropy production. That is the telos baked in to life itself. Humanity simply represents that urge at a collective social level where we have ourselves evolved the further semiotic tools of words and numbers.

Biology is based on genes and neurons. We created the further steps that allowed us to exploit fossil fuels and even dream of removing energy constraints completely. System senescence could be postponed indefinitely by the combination of general technological structure and local human ingenuity.

Curtis is spending too much time talking about human psychology and moral dilemmas - the myth that humans are somehow something special and beyond nature. The way to unlock what is going on in the world is to focus on humanity as what Vaclav Smil dubs the planetary anthropomass - humans as a biosemiotic entropy production system with the new conscious ambition of staying forever within the immature growth phase of the canonical ecosystem lifecycle.

Steady-state is flourishing for a rain forest, but anathema to the "modern human spirit". So the goal is not perfect top-down control over the individual. It is to breed the kind of creative instability that fuels the further social change needed to keep the whole crazy game going.

It really does work best if you just smoke a little and vibe out to it. The General Structure of Everything will still be there when you come back to it. Elias Canetti, in his general-structure-of -everything (-human) book, Crowds & Power, wrote of 'crowd-crystals' - little organizations of people around whom crowds can spontaneously form. 'crowd-crystals' always remain the same, sometimes activate crowds (in the presence of a stimulus), sometimes remain dormant.

I think there's probably Everything-crystals of thought too, thoughts that pop up saying 'hey, doesn't this remind you of that huge, other thing?' At that point you can entertain them, and get schlupped out of what you're doing back to compulsively describing the Everything Structure, or you can say 'I hear you, but I'm gonna let that go for now. I've done a lot of describing it lately, and I don't need to right at this moment'

An interview ... Yeah, but what's it really about Adam?

So, because nothing was happening, it prompted me to examine how we got to this frozen state, where everyone is hysterical, but actually nothing was happening. — Adam Curtis

https://time.com/5941744/adam-curtis-cant-get-you-out-of-my-head/?utm_source=pocket-newtab-global-en-GB

There’s a great story which I threw out of the film, because it’s just too complicated. An economist working for eBay a couple of years ago was very suspicious about this. He persuaded the marketing department of eBay to give up advertising on Google for a third of the North American continent for three months. And the marketing company went, this will be a disaster. But nothing happened. They tried it for another three months. The sales remained exactly the same. And the economist said: what Google might really be up to is the pizza leaflet thing. If you and I are both advertising pizzas, and you go out on the streets and hand out leaflets, but I go to the lobby of a pizza pickup joint, it looks like I’ve got a 100% success rate, but they’re already coming there to buy the pizzas. I couldn’t put it in the films. But this terrible thing is that really, you’re just targeting somebody with something they’re already going to buy.