Hypernormalisation

There It Is Again, That Funny Feeling

Everyone knew that what their leader said was not real, because they could see with their own eyes that the economy was falling apart. But everybody had to play along and pretend that it was real, because no one could imagine any alternative . . . you were so much a part of the system that it was impossible to see beyond it. The fakeness was hypernormal.

Adam Curtis, Hypernormalisation (2016)

Nearly half a year ago now¹, I watched the BBC documentary Hypernormalisation by filmmaker Adam Curtis. It details the ways in which our society has changed so that political power became trumped by the power of Wall Street and Silicon Valley and “perception management”² became the modus operandi of those with power to control the masses. Politicians were not meant to change things, but rather “manage a post-political world”.

Curtis quotes German sociologist Ulrich Beck

Any politician who believed that they could take control of society and drive it forward to build a better future was now seen as dangerous. In the past, politicians might have been able to do this but now they were faced with what he called “a runaway world” where things were so complex and interconnected and modern technologies were potentially so dangerous that it was impossible to predict the outcomes of anything you did. The catalog of environmental disasters proved this. Politicians would have to give up any idea of trying to change the world. Instead, their new aim would be to try and predict the dangers in the future and then find ways to avoid those risks.

Scott describes “a political class reduced to trying to steer society into a dark and frightening future. Constantly peering forward and trying to see the risks coming toward them. Their only aim to avoid those risks and keep society stable.” He then goes on to describe the systems being built to anticipate the future and keep society stable in Silicon Valley, saying that, “in an age of individuals, what made people feel secure was having themselves reflected back to them, just like in a mirror.”

This mirror, found in AI and social media algorithms, silos us into individual echo chambers that show us only what we want to see. No two TikTok feeds are alike and the content we consume reassures us that our opinions and experiences are valid. If information conflicts with our worldview, we need only scroll down to the comment section to find reassurance that there are still like-minded individuals out there who believe the “truth”, even though many of the comments are AI generated propaganda using talking points meant to manipulate us. And as we “tell the machine about [our] feelings and incredibly intimate details about [our] lives” (Curtis), it continues to compile our data quietly in the background, learning ever more about us.

It was a system that ordered the world in a way that was centered around you. And in an age of anxious individuals, frightened of the future, that was reassuring . . . [it was] a safe bubble that protected you from the complexities of the world outside.

Adam Curtis, Hypernormalisation (2016)

The “tentacles” of this new system pervaded our lives: “Finance promised that it could control the unpredictability of the free market while individuals were more and more monitored to stabilize their physical and mental states”. And “in a world where the overriding aim was now stability, politics became just part of a wider system that was now managing the world. The old idea of democratic politics, that it gave a voice to the weak against the powerful was eroded” (Curtis).

Americans looked up, focused on a foreboding and dangerous future, while ignoring the complexities of our past and present. It was easier to imagine an “arch criminal who wanted to terrorize the world” rather than contemplate the politics of power (Curtis), just as now it seems easier for many to view Trump as a villainous aberration rather than the logical outcome of a government founded by a group of white, wealthy, tax evading men determined to conquer and control as much land and as many people as possible.

I highly recommend watching this documentary to better understand the situation we find ourselves in today and why may be so difficult for many to imagine a better world or a path towards real systemic change. We must stop allowing ourselves to be seduced by comfort and convenience while the murders of our neighbors are being normalized on our TikTok feeds and the nightly news. There will never be an easy or convenient time to strike and the demand for justice will never be met without sacrifice, but if we are not willing to risk anything for the possibility of a better world, we will inevitably end up in a much worse one.

We must begin to seed the world we want today, regardless of whether we will ever see it bloom. We must have hope that a better world is possible and we must act on that hope. This is not how things have always been. This is not how things have to be.

There is no safety when masked henchmen who specialize in human trafficking can shoot you with “absolute immunity”. So instead of seeking safety through silence we must recognize that the threat to our neighbors is a threat to ourselves and stand up to protect our communities.

1. I apologize if this is not particularly well-written or cohesive. I wrote the initial draft of this last summer and then found myself unable to write anything for months. ↩︎
2. Curtis says that “the aim [of perception management] was to tell dramatic stories that grabbed the public imagination. Not just about the Middle East but about Central America and the Soviet Union. And it didn’t matter if the stories were true or not, providing they distracted people and the politician from having to deal with the intractable complexities of the real world” and thus “reality became less and less of an important factor in American politics . . . And in the process reality becomes what? Reality becomes simply something to play with . . . Reality is simply something that you handle.” Curtis compares Donald Trump to Vladislav Surkov, who turned Russian politics into incomprehensible theatre, describing him as “a ceaseless shapeshifter that is unstoppable because it is undefinable”. If the purpose of journalism is to “expose lies and tell the truth”, then “Trump has defeated journalism” because the truth is “irrelevant” with Trump. ↩︎