What's Holla Forums's opinion on Adam Curtis the journalist/documentation of how society operates. He's a liberal cuck but he's docs have some good info on how shit American and British politicians operate on bullshit ideas of people.
Adam Curtis
Jose Rogers
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Evan Phillips
Dude has explicitly called for some sort of revolution on multiple occasions. IDK how the BBC lets him get away with so many redpills. He's always somewhat amiguous about his real beliefs.
Anyways his blog is cool, check out his entry on the original Nazbols:
bbc.co.uk
on the Oprah-ish media driven sentimental manipulation that has come to reign all over our society:
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Jayden Hill
He doesn't consider himself a lefty, and is in favour of a welfare state.
Joseph Johnson
pseudointellectual hack
Sebastian Murphy
But what about the info/interviews are they valuable?
Cooper Allen
I like him, although he really sent me down the depressive train I'm on now where I don't believe any kind of change is possible.
I particularly like his attitude to journalism and narratives, and the way he handles that sort of thing. (Also his style meshes well with my own ADD-infused-wikipedia-binge style of information gathering.)
I'd say a lot of people don't "get" it, but not in a pretentious way. At least my understanding is that the way he creates a narrative is basically intentionally a little intellectually dishonest - which is ultimately the only way you'll ever get a narrative in politics. You've basically always got to decide where you put the borders on the picture-frame. And so he takes the picture frame and puts it at a funny angle, or sticks another photo in, or whatever, in a way that makes you look at it in a different way to the original photo. (I think he did a wonderful blog-post where he basically literally did this - same footage, one song it's dancing in communal harmony, other song they're all lonely in one another's arms.), so you ultimately get a "story" running through it that isn't strictly intellectually linked, but has some other form of narrative thread.
And I've lost my own narrative thread now. But basically, it's not just random collage, and it's not dull factual documentation. It's interesting trivia strung together into a story, and if you dig into that trivia you'll learn a lot - and even the story itself helps to set the present narrative at a different angle. Which is very important, much more important than strict factual accuracy - because you're "fighting" a story yourself. You have to argue against the present story of how things came to be.
I mean Labour, for example. To get any sort of proper labour government you need to overturn the whole narrative. No more "The unions got too big for their boots, brought down Heath and ramped up inflation - Callaghan couldn't handle it, so Thatcher stepped in and fixed things but she was a bit harsh with it, and then to win again Blair had to move the party right, and he was rewarded with being the only Labour leader to get a third consecutive term" - which is the basic political narrative of Britain today. You need something else, maybe built around John Smith or whatever, to say - well actually, Blair was unnecessary. Or even better, if you can, Thatcher was unnecessary - you can point out that the inflation only got really bad with the OPEC Oil Embargo, for example, or blame the Nixon shock. That's your narrative get-out-of-jail-free card for the unions, and with that you can rehabilitate Wilson and Callaghan. (Theoretically Heath too, but what kind of idiot takes on the miners in an energy crisis?)
As another data point, in an argument over who was the better Labour leader - Wilson won more elections than Blair. Now, Blair won his consecutively and with big majorities and Wilson won 3 by the narrowest of margins, but - as Curtis memetically says - That did not matter , narratively it can be used to trip the current story up a bit, and that's what really matters. Because you don't fight with facts, you fight with stories. Facts are just the materials used to build stories. They're just data points floating in the air.
That's how I tend to understand Curtis anyway, though obviously I've simplified to that one specific area. It's not quite as simple as "narrative trumps honesty" or anything like that, it's just the sheer importance of having a narrative instead of worthless free-floating-data, and it's inevitable you'll do this because your picture always has to have borders. The camera lens will always cut something off - but have you tried cutting it like this?
He earned his salary with webm related alone.
Blake Cook
kys edgelord
Jayden Ward
Never watched anything of his, but…
Looking the synopsis for All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace, he seems to make the crass mistake of blaming the means of production for the misery caused by the relations of production.
Julian Miller
It's way more complicated than a simple antitechnology rant. It's more about the failed promise of technoutopianism, that technology by itself was going to solve all the world's problems. It also deals with Ayn Rand and the political implications of ecology and biology and how they relate to neoliberal economics.
Nathaniel Green
I dunno, he says he changes his mind a lot. He kinda feels like an anarchist to me.
Jaxon Rodriguez
Well yeah, that's what I mean. He seems to conclude that technology failed to liberate mankind, without noticing that what he judged is actually technology in capitalism.
Dominic Martin
Maybe an anarcho-neocon.
I just think he's a politically ignorant liberal who makes interesting documentaries.
Adam Evans
He's a Weberian, not a Marxist.
Everyone has to decide at some point if they'll go down one of these two routes.
(p.s. he picked the wrong one)
Hudson Gutierrez
if this is the hypernormalization guy i have to say he's a very bright man. has an eye for espionage, propaganda and memetics. excellent editing and aesthetics in that doc as well. disappointed he's a literally soc dem faggot
Jonathan Long
What's wrong with Weber?
Juan Ramirez
Marx a shit
Evan Gutierrez
...
Jose Rivera
In the interview with Chapo Trap House he quite openly calls for revolution and a left ressurgence. I think he does not see himself as a political actor, which helps him in his work.
Camden Ortiz
he's not really a liberal or a soc dem, his films aren't really from an established political viewpoint
it annoys me when people claim his films are depressing though, they are incredibly optimistic. people who do bad things are usually just mistaken and reacting to real problems in the wrong way, thing are never as bad as they seem, and change is always possible as long as you look past selfish individualism and embrace collective action
Christian White
the BBC can mostly do what it wants since the things it makes don't have to rely on ads
it's why it can make so many dry nature documantaries
Parker Miller
But as he often touches on: We don't actually have a rallying idea for collective action. It's all well and good for it to be possible, even trivial in theory - it's getting things into practice that kills all ideas.
But this is in many ways worse than malice. If fixing the world was as simple as taking a baseball bat to the bad guys, life would be much easier. Indeed, this misguided belief (and it's exploitation by porky and the like) is perhaps the root reason I can be sure that 20 years from now we're going to be in broadly the same place, the continued slow decline of the western middle/working class since the late 70s. Because ultimately you're just going to get /r/neoliberalism jizzing on everything.
Unless you want to take a baseball bat to the misguided, but then you've got a society where you could have your skull smashed in at any time.
(Perhaps that's a more optimistic future tbh. At least people would recognize the dangers instead of sleepwalking to ecological collapse.)
Grayson Cox
Which people fucking love. I wish the Tories would be purged from BBC News though.
Kayden Hill
That was a while ago, it's possible his views have changed. Curtis does seem rather sympathetic towards communalism in here.
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Jeremiah Myers
I know this is bait but there are probably redditors who believe it.
Wasn't a Weber a luddite sympathiser too?
Conservatism is so self-defeating it's sad really.
Fuck, i need to see that.
Sounds larpy and dumb, but then again, he's aware he's talking to a larpy audience.
Artists should be left the fuck alone, fuck politics.
Andrew Morales
I think it's unfair to reduce Weber's ideas to mere luddism, after all he created lots of really useful concepts and was a key influence on Adorno and the Frankfurt School. 'rationalization' extends way beyond just technology.
Easton Hernandez
He's great. I've seen Machines of Living Grace, Bitter Lake, Way of all flesh, and hypernormalisation and I enjoyed and git something out of them all.
Ayden Morris
He doesn't seem to be denying leftist sympathies in that quote, just pointing out that he criticizes neoliberal ideology from both the leftist perspective that it fucks over the lower classes & third world and the rightist perspective that it erodes traditional cultures & communities.
Benjamin Hill
His reason for not being a leftist seems kind of arbitrary to me, I don't think it means that he's a liberal exactly.
Luke Roberts
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Adrian Cooper
100% pretentious, you're pretentious too if you think he's good
Oliver Russell
He is critiquing an ideology that is massively influential. He is proving that ideology wrong, not adding evidence for his own.
Leo Robinson
he makes very aesthetically appealing videos that string interesting information together, but I feel like that's something to watch out for because it leads people to suspend their disbelief and skepticism. He seems to be vaguely reactionary especially with that traditional cultures and communities shit
Jackson Jones
Those get destroyed by the natural workings of Capitalism, we don't actually need to oppose them.
Logan Bailey
eceleb thread, his documentaries are brilliant though.
mods.
Luke White
...
Ryan Brown
his opinions on capitalism are kind of strange
Joseph Morales
The guy realized that the catastrophe has already happened, and instead of being a depressed faggot like us he makes these cool vapid documentaries.
Christopher Clark
also he sometimes makes short clips for Charlie Brooker's Wipes and writes stories about how the intelligence agencies aren't intelligent at all:
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Cameron Brooks
I kinda knew that, but the problem is, I can't do shit. If I had a talent or skill I would be much less depressed, but them's the breaks.