Organic intelligence, artificially presented
Sorry for the radio silence. I’ve been busy. There will be some updates about, inter alia, the Caucasus, the origins of wine, and the Religious Futurisms project imminently.
In the meantime, I hope you may be satisfied with this talk I gave on WW3 last November.
There’s a lot of REALLY great points raised in this article here, by a Georgian journalist and media scholar, but unfortunately I disagree with most of the author’s conclusions. She claims that noise (ie everything from clickbait to fake news – all the bullshit online, basically) is the new censorship, because it’s drowning out the signal, ie all that is truthful.
Let me clarify. Noise is a major problem, but it’s still not the new censorship. The old censorship is very much still censorship (just ask Chinese people, or North Koreans, or indeed any citizen of a nation propping up the Global Press Freedom Index, or indeed a few near the top too.)
And new forms of censorship are the new censorship – ‘cancelling’ people for holding different opinions, ‘deplatforming’, boycotting, and so on.
This article blames Big Tech for the logarithmic rise in noise online. But to my mind, journalism has only itself to blame for the endless acceleration of the noise-to-signal ratio. In the democratised field of modern tech-enabled communication, journalism could and should have thrived as the pure signal offering. Instead, it allowed itself to become (even more) partisan, skewed, and untrustworthy than it already was.
The general public are not as stupid as journalists (who aren’t as smart as they think) think they are. They have learned how to ‘read between the lines’ of stories which often make little coherent sense, and glean what the missing data points are.
This has eroded trust in their former gatekeeping role.We’re now in a ‘boy who cried wolf’ scenario. The public remember every instance when the media got it wrong, or deliberately misrepresented factuality, or presented partisan viewpoint as objective reportage. So when the media, as it does, presents legitimate and reliable work for public consumption, many people simply no longer trust it.
And so they turn to the charlatans’ parade of liars, cynics, clickbait peddlars, conspiracy theorists and ideologues online instead, thereby amplifying those noises and drowning out what little truth there is.
It’s a shitshow, no bones about it. But it’s disingenuous to put the entire blame at the door of Big Tech, much as I loathe them. Journalism needs to take a long look in the mirror to find the cause of its own woes. And I don’t mean the British redtop.
Nice image from ‘Our World in Data’ here:
The last two thousand years or so (CE) make up only c. 1% of human history, but around half of all people ever have lived during that period, and one in 12 or 13 of all people ever are currently alive today.
For the record, just before humans began to farm and settle in urban environments, around 9,000 years ago, there were only around 20 million people on the entire planet. That’s the population of Cairo today.
At the time of Christ, 2,000 years ago, there was between 90 and 200 million humans on Earth. In other words, between the population of today’s Congo and today’s Nigeria.
China’s population today is around 1.48 billion. That was the population of the entire planet around 1875 CE.
When I was born, there were fewer than half the number of people alive today. Welcome to infinite growth on a finite planet. We’re getting to the point where the consequences are becoming inescapable.
When I was a journalist, I used to embody the maxim from James Joyce’s Ulysses that ‘sufficient unto the day is the newspaper thereof’. Or, to use an almost equally antiquated saying, today’s news wraps tomorrow’s chips.
In other words, it’s kind of a foolish enterprise to pontificate (as I am about to do) on matters which are kinetic. Tomorrow, next month, in one hour, the situation will change, radically. One’s assumptions, presumptions and conclusions are at best provisional and likely to become hostages to fortune very quickly.
An additional relevant point is that I’m not any expert on Ukraine. I’ve never been there. I’m not Ukrainian. Of course those attributes haven’t stopped others from spouting their tupennyworth of verbiage, so why should I be shy? At least my lack of knowledge doesn’t feed into the principals in this scenario. I’m not advising world leaders or directing the opinion of nations.
Ordinarily, I’d be silent, on the basis that when one is silent people may only presume you are an idiot, without you providing the incontrovertible proof thereof. But the current crisis in the Ukraine shows a risk of spreading, virus-like, to affect the rest of the planet, and I live here too, so on this occasion I’m prepared to take the risk. I will attempt to be brief, hence the bullet point format.
Post-Script: It’s always beneficial to recall Field Marshall Montgomery’s rules of military strategy, iterated here in the NYT during the Vietnam War: “The United States has broken the second rule of war. That is: don’t go fighting with your land army on the mainland in Asia. Rule One is, don’t march on Moscow. I developed those two rules myself.” (New York Times, July 3, 1968.)
It’s always nice to see something new from Adam Curtis. He’s a genuine original, not just in terms of his vision but also in terms of his cultural position. There is literally no one else who holds his kind of position, salaried at the BBC to rummage in the entirety of their archives for his own purposes. Therefore, we have to value him, especially as he now is reaching pensionable age.
Can’t Get You Out Of My Head is a kind of capstone to the work Curtis has been doing for the past two decades or more. It has the thematic obsessions of Hypernormalisation or Bitter Lake, presented in the longer, episodic form he used for earlier work like Century of the Self.
It’s subtitled as an ’emotional history’, which could mean that Curtis has eschewed his habitual monotone voiceover or attempts to emulate the communicative modes of reportage, but in fact means that he intends this to be understood as a history of human emotions, specifically how people have emotionally responded to key events and societal developments in recent times.
People familiar with his work, so iconic at this point that a number of biting satires exist, will know what to expect: grand macro-theories about global geopolitical developments undercut by psychological speculation deriving from key practitioners, and illustrated by the succinct telling of lifestories belonging to people from the slipstream. Not Malcolm X but Michael X, not Mao but his fourth wife Jiang Qing, not Lee Harvey Oswald but his buddy from the Marines Kerry Thornley, and so on.
This is, of course, all extremely interesting, and provocative, especially when little known or long forgotten facts, such as Michael X selling John Lennon’s hair to raise money, are illustrated with archival footage. And the sheer welter of information, and imagery, alongside Curtis’s calm and lugubrious voiceover script, and the soft lulling of an expertly curated soundtrack of ambient music, all adds to the effect of being almost hypnotised.
Curtis loves to tell us how we have collectively and individually succumbed to dreamscapes, be they the futility of revolution, the seduction of online existence, the pseudo-authority of the banks, the fabricated myths of lost nationhood. Ironically, the narratives which emerge from his own work, acute though they are at times in skewering key engagements of the West with the non-Western world, are no less delusional.
It would be churlish and indeed ungrateful to pick holes in a work delivered to the world for free by a man who dedicated two years of his life to constructing it, a work of nearly 8 hours in length, that is carefully constructed, and perpetually intriguing and informative. So I’m not going to do that.
His theorising, in the academic sense of the word, which means argumentation that varies in quality from actual philosophising to bar room speculation to fervent ideological signalling, is exempted from the usual somewhat limited standards of academic review, largely because of the format in which he presents his arguments. The archival collage effect is so impressive, the editing so neat, the soundtrack so excellent, that one realises the inappropriateness of desiring an evidence base, or references, or footnotes.
And because he doesn’t have to provide footnotes and references, he can wildly connect this to that, across time and space, operating with the facade of reportage so it seems to be without the constrictions of ideological argument. But of course there is an ideology in there, albeit submerged and tentative, and there is a rashness to the wild connecting which suggests causality where in fact there is at best correlation, or at most ideological desire, or perhaps nothing except the sort of false pattern recognition he simultaneously propagates and excoriates.
If there’s a meta-theory beneath all of Adam Curtis’s endless, and often spurious big-picture postulating, it’s Dasein. Curtis’s sense of optimism is rooted in Heidegger’s understanding that we must really be in the world we occupy. Which is perhaps an understandable but ironic desire coming from someone who spends decades at a time in dark rooms watching ancient film footage.
The collage aspect, along with his culminating call for us all to wake up and be in the world, as well as his predeliction for slipstream figures and their tangential relationships to his grand narratives, may be why his huge lacunae often pass unnoticed. It seems perhaps that precisely because we have spoken so much about Trump and Brexit that Curtis need not refer to them except in brief passing.
Or we have worried ourselves so much about Putin’s Russia that the story of fringe element Limonov seems refreshing and interesting. Or we have agonised over both the causes of BLM and the civil unrest unleashed by it so much that it is preferable to look to previous eras and discussions of race relations, like Tupac or his mother. Or our lives have been so upended by Covid that we prefer to consider China’s business relationship with the west rather than the origins of the virus.
In the end, though, these are not slipstream events. They are the key elements of our age, and will define the chaos we have before us, indeed are already experiencing. Curtis’s slipstream narratives do not address these matters, because they don’t fit his narrative, his theorising. Curtis would have us to keep dreaming of new futures, which is desirable, but not at the expense of sleeping through the present.
Can’t Get You Out Of My Head is highly recommended, the keywork of a master at the top of his game. But it’s just another dream. One wonders if Curtis has it in him to document what happens if, how, when, we dead awaken. I hope so, because I doubt who else could.