| HN Mirror

HyperNormalisation (2016) is a documentary film by Adam Curtis; the word/concept is from a book, so maybe that's what you're referring to? I have only seen the film myself.

As to your question about Soviet collapse, I don't think I could coalesce the views of the 166 minute documentary to this comment field while doing it justice. I'm not sure that there is a direct casual relationship or arrow of causality between the collapse and use/misuse of language, as much as there is a feedback loop between the two.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperNormalisation

> 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.

> The word hypernormalisation was coined by Alexei Yurchak, a professor of anthropology who was born in Leningrad and later went to teach at the University of California, Berkeley. He introduced the word in his book Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (2006), which describes paradoxes of Soviet life during the 1970s and 1980s. He says everyone in the Soviet Union knew the system was failing, but no one could imagine any alternative to the status quo, and politicians and citizens alike were resigned to maintaining the pretense of a functioning society. Over time, the mass delusion became a self-fulfilling prophecy, with everyone accepting it as the new norm rather than pretend, an effect Yurchak termed hypernormalisation. It has since gained further resonance in the social media era in 2025 in the U.S.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yS_c2qqA-6Y

I think you might also like to check out another Adam Curtis documentary series, Russia 1985–1999: TraumaZone. I'm not an expert, but it seems to me that, ironically (or not), after the fall of the USSR, the government no longer controlled the media directly. Oligarchs appear to have taken over nearly everything under privatization, including the media and the nominally democratic government, so it's hard to say that it was better or worse than before the fall, rather than differently bad. Certainly many lost their lives, and that's lamentable to say the least.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russia_1985%E2%80%931999:_Trau...

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLSjQL8MYniTTLA3wnZ25U-s6R...

In researching this response, I learned of a new Adam Curtis doc series that came out last year, which I just started watching. The "talking computer" at the crisps factory with a phone based ordering system was interesting to see.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shifty_(TV_series)

> Shifty is, according to the Guardian columnist Lucy Mangan, a "purely UK-focused dissection of recent history, built around the idea that the growing atomisation of society has ushered in an age in which the concept of a shared reality on which we can all depend has dissolved – and with it any hope of a functioning democracy." The overarching theme is that Britain is haunted by its past, constantly replayed through the media, which prevents it from going forward with a vision for the future.

> Shifty depicts the changing landscape of Britain under Margaret Thatcher, including a shift of focus from politics to finance that saw the collapse of industry in the UK.[8] Curtis argues that this shift towards individualism and consumerism has incurred a dismantling of democracy over the last 45 years.

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPSo2fAdxXUW-y5xCATilyzBO...