HyperNormalisation is a 2016 BBC documentary by British filmmaker Adam Curtis. It argues that following the global economic crises of the 1970s, governments, financiers and technological utopians gave up on trying to shape the complex “real world” and instead established a simpler “fake world” for the benefit of multi-national corporations that is kept stable by neoliberal governments.
I think I’ve watched most of Curtis’ work. He’s very good at doom porn. In retrospect, my problems with his work are that he offers no solutions, but more damningly, and he mistells narratives about the imperial core’s chosen enemies.
For example, he demonizes Hafez & Bashar al-Assad and Slobodan Milošević to cartoonish degrees, which to be fair is the standard narrative about them in the imperial core.
Curtis couldn’t tell those stories any other way, though, because his work is founded on having access to the BBC’s archival library. If he told the truth about the fall of Yugoslavia, the BBC would surely shut him out.
