Can't Get You Out of My Head - New Adam Curtis Miniseries

[childhood]

"Can’t Get You Out of My Head: An Emotional History of the Modern World is a six-part series that explores how modern society has arrived to the strange place it is today. The series traverses themes of love, power, money, the ghosts of empire, the history of China, opium and opioids, the strange roots of modern conspiracy theories, and the history of Artificial Intelligence. Inspired by the 2016 apex of populism—the political ideology which presents The People as morally good, and The Elite as morally bad—the underlying aim of the series is to show why the critics of Donald Trump and Brexit were unable to offer an alternative vision for the future."

https://thoughtmaybe.com/cant-get-you-out-of-my-head/

[TheLurper]

Thanks for posting this. I'm hyped to watch this tonight. I love nearly everything Adam Curtis has done (the only thing I didn't like was Hyper-Normalization... it felt rushed).

[cky enthusiast]

i don’t think i’m mentally prepared for this but i’m excited nonetheless

[childhood]

Somebody put it on youtube too, the link I posted yesterday was playing kinda choppy for me


https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCTCk1V6Ts3Vgdou_OObRAEw/videos

[stratosphere]

Thank you for posting this! Adam is wonderful.
I re-watched Power of Nightmares last year, and about halfway through my girl starts watching with me. Within 15 minutes she has a minor panic attack and had to walk away. She was okay, but that's powerful.

[TheLurper]

I feel like parts 1 and 2 could probably be skipped over and the doc could start at part 3.

[manysnakes]

I feel like parts 1 and 2 could probably be skipped over and the doc could start at part 3.

Setting aside that there would be no context without episodes one and two, I very much enjoyed them. I had no idea about the relation between George Boole and Ethel Voynich, for example. I work in AI, and that alone was worth the two-plus hours

[Grind King Rims]

I've started watching this.
I really like the style, the audio/visual collage. It's a bit like a BBC documentary stylized as an Alien Workshop video, haha.
Sometimes I find it hard to really connect the different anecdotes to establish what point Curtis is trying to make.
It's interesting.

[numagik]

adam curtis is always good but this series is excellent

[childhood]

Bitter Lake is probably my favorite of his work that I've seen



And yeah, he definitely doesn't always make the parallels between everything he discusses in the new series explicitly clear.
It's part of what makes it intriguing, but can feel frustrating at times.

[professional]

Bitter Lake is probably my favorite of his work that I've seen



And yeah, he definitely doesn't always make the parallels between everything he discusses in the new series explicitly clear.
It's part of what makes it intriguing, but can feel frustrating at times.

What a heavy film. A really incredible piece of work all around, but by the end of it I just felt...heavy. War, colonization and capitalism is just hell. That said, I really appreciate how extensive Adam Curtis connected the dots on this topic.

It was also pretty astonishing to me that, as he got into the history of the 1980s heading into the 2000s, the same mistakes perpetuated by outside influences(Americans, British, etc.) were being repeated at a more and more rapid rate.

[IUTSM]

Bitter Lake is probably my favorite of his work that I've seen



And yeah, he definitely doesn't always make the parallels between everything he discusses in the new series explicitly clear.
It's part of what makes it intriguing, but can feel frustrating at times.

I'm curious where you found parallels lacking? I found it all to be fairly synched up on the Macro level despite refraining from the use of spoken, first-then causality.

[S.]

I liked it too. I didn‘t know anything about about Chinese history. I found that part fascinating. Some parts of the history of the black Panthers I was not familiar with either.

His point about paranoia and fear keeping people from any meaningful action was very well made!

Finally he affirms the belief in reason as the only way out. Even though I mostly agree, it felt a bit disappointing and uninspired  as an ending. I mean Jeez, The enlightenment happened in continental philosophy centuries ago, but that did not really prevent any of those atrocities he himself described in the series. Imperialism was in part justified by the philosophies of reason.
I also felt it was a bit too much about ideas and not enough about the material relations that produced them.

I don‘t want to be too critical. It was very thought provoking and well done!