Adam Curtis

The Mayfair Set
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Part 1
Empires cannot be saved by mercenaries who replace conventional forces. The Northern Yemenis learned the art of modern guerrilla warfare from ex-SAS mercenaries. When you spread corruption abroad it follows you back home. The practice precedes the principle. Foreign policy by export has hard limits and soft control.

Part 2
Business cannot be saved by hostile takeovers from indolent owners. Gaming stats can work in the short run, but only then. Money taken from assets goes elsewhere. Money from the streamlined industries entered the stock market. Corporate raiders enrich themselves at the expense of the corporation. Growth by acquisition is phony. Growth by investment in real. When a company growths through operations that growth is real. When a company grows in the stock market that causes bubbles. A company can simultaneously destroy its real operational capacity destroying its real value and boost its share price inflating its market value.

Power can be lost, but it can’t be destroyed. Power moves. Power can move from controller to controller, but also from controllers to quasi-organic masses. The crowdsourcing of management goes inevitably toward crowds. Crowds can be herded, but they can’t be reliably directed. Thus independence is never fully present, but unaccountability is.

Tax evasion is illegal, but tax avoidance is legal. Fraud is illegal, but financial wizardry is legal. The differences between the illegal and legal is not substantive, but stylistic. The effect is the same, but the consequence is quite different. Corruption suffers in the open, but thrives in the dark. It also thrives in disguise.

Part 3
The failures of the past are easily described, but the failures of the future are hard to predict. Just because they are hard to predict in cause, their nature is quite predictable.

The big corporations grew to prominence as a control on the free market and monied power. Managers weren’t supposed to be shareholders because the shareholders were flaky and irresponsible. Shareholders aren’t knowledgable or active enough to exert real control. Shareholders can be manipulated by activist investors. Turning wealth into income destroys wealth. Turning corporate wealth into personal income destroys the corporation and creates personal wealth.

Pension funds resemble wealth, but seek income. They are natural allies to corporate raiders. Their fiduciary interests were too narrowly defined. The deep irony is that the security of workers out of work, put more workers out of work.

Leveraged buyouts can transfer control to a debtor. The debtor hollows out the corporation to pay off, or merely to pay bills, on the debt. Leveraged buyouts can be done by insiders or outsiders. The purchaser becomes an insider with a conflict of interests.

Part 4
Deregulation causes a short term boom or bust as an immediate reaction to the chaos in that market. It then settles into a new pattern.

Powerful entities like controllable partners. If they think they can control you they will partner with you.

Beneficiaries of schemes soon shift from accomplices to active plotters.

Corruption is easier when the bribe target views itself as weaker. Bribery then transforms from a method of personal enrichment to personal empowerment. Corrupted pawns are assets and liabilities to corrupters.

The Trap
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Game Theory shaped libertarian thinking with John Nash’s theory of selfish and suspicious equilibrium. The Nash Equilibrium assumes that everyone is paranoid and implacable, but furthermore it require they all behave that way. John Nash was a paranoid schizophrenic which shaped his idea.

Artie Lang believed that Game Theory explained family life. He saw everything as calculated methods of social control rather than love or trust.

Research predicated upon assumptions sometimes finds results, but far more often reinforces assumptions.

The anti-psychiatric movement proved that psychiatrists couldn’t really discern the sane from insane. The subjective expertise of psychiatrists were replaced by objective checklists that verified the existence of disorders. This reinforced concepts of normality that the checklist implicitly assumed. The checklists didn’t have causation ergo they conflate disordered people with normal reactions to disorderly life.

Models of human interaction based upon Game Theory expect people to behave in a selfish manner and try to get people to do so.

Systems analysis creates a market where none naturally exists. Particularly in public institutions. In theory this should bring about the rigors of the free market. In truth it destroys cooperative environments by incentivizing selfishness.

Biologists see animals as machines that serve to reproduce genes. This is based off of bogus research. Amazon tribes fought over gifts the researcher gave them, but he thought that they were only fighting based on consanguinity.

Gaming stats leads to perverse effects in systems analysis run organizations. It increases educational inequality by leading to more residential segregation and poorer education. There are multiple ways to achieve prescribed numbers.

Fake profits create real bonuses.

Technocratic systems are not more effective, but they are more elitist.

Only economists and psychopaths behave “rationally” in game theoretic models.

Negative Liberty is anti-idealistic because it views ideals as inherently fraught with temptation toward excess. Positive Liberty is always coercive in effect. Negative Liberty itself proved to be coercive. The Neoconservative “worldwide revolution” was brought about to spread Negative Liberty to foreign lands.

Negative Liberty serves itself as a purpose. It is inherently a nihilistic value system. Positive Liberty serves a higher goal. Whether that goal is correct or not it has a value.

The primary western reaction to Negative Liberty is economic and civic nationalism.

In order to spread democracy abroad lies were used to gain support at home. The majority of Russians favored the rolling back of economic and political democratization.

Revolutionary violence is based off of Sartrian philosophical theory. Its purpose was to create a blank slate from which to try society again.

Revolution changes the oligarchs who run a society, but it doesn’t abolish oligarchy.

All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace
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Utopian ideologies propose to abolish politics, enforce equality, and bring stability. These ideologies change politics, inequalities, and patterns of instability although never achieve their goals. A frequent rhetorical tactic these ideologies use is to say that political management is counterproductive and the system can only be managed by technocratic experts. A system that seems free is constrained by the assumptions and biases of the designers. It makes things mechanistic, but change quite difficult. A system that doesn’t accept political divisions in principle doesn’t allow political opposition in practice. An abolition of power reinforces power by making it epistemologically invisible.

The Friedmanite boom of the mid 2000s was the result of a PRC politburo plot to boost the Chinese economy by exporting to the US and using the money to buy US debt. Just like the “Asian miracle” investments 10 years before this caused an economic boom that ended with a property bubble.

Alan Greenspan noticed the fraud in the markets. He saw that profits were rising despite flatlining productivity. When he suggested that this was bogus the backlash was fierce. He shifted to say that it was good in ways he din’t understand.

Ayn Rand was influential in entrepreneurial culture much moreso than economics. Her selfish objectivism was the result of her selfish isolation. The only group she ever formed she destroyed by her own sexual immorality.

Color Revolutions seemed to prove that spontaneous leaderless revolutions could work. (This ignores CIA involvement.) The results are less freedom and more corruption. Power

Cybernetics and Ecology arose from the Freudian idea that the mind was a machine that tended toward equilibrium. This was expanded to apply to nature and human societies. Spaceship Earth was this idea in an extreme.

Balance doesn’t exist. Constant dynamic fluctuations do. After a major disturbance the system resets according to a new and different pattern. Simple models of nature work. Accurate models of nature don’t work.

Apartheid and Club of Rome style population growth were both outgrowths from ecology.

Just because you can’t imagine something doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. Conclusions based on untested premises are bunk.

When you challenge conclusions people are annoyed. When you challenge assumptions people get offended.

In Rwanda the Belgians put the Tutsi in charge. Just before they left they riled up the Hutus against them in the name of equality and freedom. The refugee camps in the Eastern Congo spread the violence. A genocide that killed 1 million set off a war that killed 4 million.

Ironically George Price the inventor of the “Selfish Gene” idea believed it was so profound God gave it too him. His ideas were that altruism and hatred were both mathematically logical propositions from the genetic point of view. He eventually destroyed himself in an attempt to disprove his theory. First with radically generous Christian charity, then with suicide. Richard Dawkins, a computer programer turned biologist, popularized his ideas. Ironically this is created an amoral immortal soul. Hamilton, Price, and Dawkins all grappled with the inherent temptations toward fatalism and eugenics in their theories.

If you've seen one of his works you've seen them all.

fucking love oneohtrix point never

He's pretty okay tbh

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He's a politically confused liberal who has an interesting style of narrative weaving.

All of his documentaries are here.
thoughtmaybe.com/by/adam-curtis/

thoughtmaybe is a pretty good resource for other docs, too.

Yes, because of that.

Thank you.

I don't understand this part of HyperNormalisation where he quotes a British journalist (to me it kinda feels like Curtis agrees with the journalist, the way he's quoting him) about how Assad was ok but then he got betrayed by the Big Bad Am*rican and turned evil.

Here's the doc the part i'm talking about goes from 15:40 to ±18:45
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...

Every now and then, his docs have salient points, like vid related.

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It's useful as an intro to the history/meaning of neoliberalism and "neoliberal subjectivity" as theorists call it. Curtis' documentaries are not as accessible as they could be. There's a lot of repetitive music, the same kind of cuts, and each "documentary" feels like I'm reading an essay written by a grad student.

Still, he does work that could be considered "useful" for the "anti-neoliberal left" if that is actually a thing. It's broad, and as many people have said, doesn't really involve class/labor analysis. At times the narrative seems to get pretty "out there" conceptually and stops being as materially grounded as it could be.

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his work has a great aesthetic

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Very good at describing the way things are but no attempt at describing a way out, to the point it makes it look like change is impossible.

I'm Sorry to Bother You did a good job of mocking the liberal absorption of any attempt at change (coke ad about the strike). But still had the good guys win in the end.

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Adam Curtis thread. Noone talking about The Century of the Self, his most important work.