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by myrloc 764 days ago
Great read. Thanks for sharing. I am not familiar with Adam Curtis' work but will be looking for more!
5 comments

I'd go as far as saying that he's the only genuinely serious person in his domain (on TV at least) at this point .

Others have recommended "the century of self" for example which is great but I highly recommend his earlier stuff like "Pandora's box" and "The Mayfair set"

+1 for Pandora's Box. The conclusion sums it up nicely https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-FDrA7yUdFc&t=2466s
Got started with the series "All watched over my machines of loving grace".

I think more engineers and technologists who build systems that affects people's lives at a large scale need to watch those.

If there wa required viewing for entering big tech. This would be it.
>I am not familiar with Adam Curtis' work but will be looking for more!

You're in for a treat, then. He has hours of wonderful documentaries.

https://watchdocumentaries.com/tag/adam-curtis/

As noted below, Century Of The Self would probably be the best starting point:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DnPmg0R1M04

His 4-part Century of the Self series is on Youtube, IIRC. Interesting watch. Hypernormalisation didn't grab me as much.
I think “Can’t Get You Out Of My Head” may be of more interest, topically, to hacker news readers, because it converges on the use of computing as a means of controlling social unrest.
Hypernormalisation is kind of a miss.

It might be true, but it doesn't work because Curtis himself is hypernormalising — he isn't a journalist, he tells stories and emotions rather than a left-brained truth.