HYERNORMALISATION (2016) — Adam Curtis
The term gipernormalizatsiya Гипернормализация, as first described by Alexei Yurchak in his 2006 book Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More, originally described the social phase that took hold during the final stages of the Soviet Union; it’s applied in a way that implies the decay and dysfunction is apparent, and yet the social mechanisms of the ideology systems both prevent acknowledgement as well as imagining the alternatives.
Adam Curtis deploys this term to identify the moment American counterculture retreated into an indifferent coolness of the 80s while a major global economic restructuring was taking place at a scale safely abstracted from public engagement. What occurred in the political absence was the American city being held hostage by capital, setting the stage for power structures that began to play out near the mid 2010s.
However, the events of the mid 2010s caught most people off guard because, as Curtis argues, so much of the counter-cultural mechanisms had failed to engage these key changes of global power structures and got lost dealing with simple significations.
Adam Curtis’s storytelling is very elegant; he establishes a historical counterpart, explains a chunk the lore then draws the comparison, returning to the primary subject again to weave more similarities together. If stated more linearly, the premise might actually be too overwhelming to accept. However, in this storytelling mechanism, it becomes actually very hard not to be compelled by his comparisons.
He argues that Gibson’s sci fi work was attempting to explain a coalescence of data, wealth and power on the internet happening invisibly, unseen. But this vision of cyberspace was harnessed by Silicon Tech Corporations to sell as a Utopia — quite the opposite of his project. (at about 40mintes)
He talks about the LSD junkies who worked hard to ruthlessly rebrand the internet as a space a total freedom from corporate coercion, when that in fact was the total opposite of what it was. (45minutes) — names Barlow’s “declaration of independence.”
In response, Phiber Optik and his friend hacked Barlow to prove that there was in fact informational hierarchies, and it was not in fact the case. They hacked the banks with athe credit information and published Barlow’s history online.
“Reality is simple something that you handle.”
This quote always stands out to me the most — politics in the age of the spectacle focused way less on true and far more on optics. Truth didn’t matter anymore, truth was just a situation that had to be dealt with while the spectacle was what we believed in.
Trying to change the world became too difficult; so we retreated inwards, narcissistically self obsessed since that was the one thing we could control.
Prozac and SSRIs taking off within this context, at least as Curtis sees it.
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