Adam Curtis

Dancing and cibernetics

Well, I think dancing is where people are the most open and honest in a funny way. Are you not noticed this?… When you watch your friends dancing if you are in a club, and you watch your friends dancing they become more really what they are. They lose their self-consciousness. I think one of the great, one of the great dance sides of individualism is that everyone is very self-conscious, have you seen it on Facebook? Everyone is grooming themselves and aware that everyone else is looking at them.

And that is the mood in our time. Everyone is very aware at being look at. And I think that when people dance they lose, they can lose that and they become more free and open, and I just think that it is a good moment and I just liked and I decided to put on my film because it gives you a moment such an openness and honesty. Emotionally…That’s all. And I just like dancing and I like music so I decided to put in. I mean the lot of the things I do on my films are just because I just feel I want to. You know I’m a radical individual too, I felt I wanted to put as it is and put it in and sometimes there is no reasons. And I’m just trying to create a mood that allows me to put over a more intellectual argument. So, I’m just trying to create a mood.

I think individualism is the great phenomenon of our time, is what happens in a mass democracy. When people become more confident and they don’t feel they have to gain their identity through being part of the Church, or being part of the European Union or being part of a political party. They gain their identity by their own feelings, their own desires and what they want. And that is the ideology of our time: what you want, what you feel is the most important thing. In many ways it is wonderful. It is really good because it liberates millions of people from being appressed by families, by bad families, by oppressive organizations, by Churches, by also political parties who use people. And it was really good and it gives people confident. The problem with it is… There are two problems. One is that… it is very difficult to have a political party when you are dealing with millions of radical individuals because they all want different things. The solution of the Right is just to have the market, because it gives the individuals what they want. The Left, who wants to change the world and makes it a better one, the progressive ideal, have found it very difficult. The other problem with it is that what isn’t good and what isn’t wonderful of being a free individual, when things go wrong, when things go badly, you can find yourself very frightening and very weak. And the picture I will give is that if you go into the woods at night, by yourself, it’s very frightening. You’re alone. Every snap of the branch, every noise behind you is scary. But if you go into the same woods at night with your friends it’s wonderful, you feel alive and you feel confident. And in a way that’s the weakness of individualism is that when things go bad, and they have gone bad for the last five or six years, it can be very frightening and you feel very alone. And you don’t feel that anyone who can take you into the woods with you. So, you’re in your own in the dark. And that is weakness. So in many ways it is wonderful, but it is difficult change the world with the group of millions of individuals.

One politician said to me: “It’s like hunting little piglets; they all want to go different ways”. Whereas in the past they will follow you like in the party. And secondly, if things are bad, it’s frightening to be in your own.

Well, I think that we live in an age where we have become in trance by the machines we build. Well, any age the builds are any kind of machine, it feels it is like a magical thing. These machines we build are like magic in many ways, do we feel that. What we then do is trying to construct ideas about how the world is and how the world could be based on these machines. And in my films, last few films, I tried to show in different ways the engineering ideas, the life behind, so many the machine we have, are bubbled by their feedback as become a sort of..., and ideology, almost like a political belief. Somehow, through feedback we can create a kind of stable system. So, for example, people pointed nature and says: “nature and ecosystems maintain the sustainability”, and they point to social media and they say: “look, through the feedback of information between millions of individuals, you can get the stability”.

And what I’ve tried to point out is that, firstly, how all this happens, and secondly, to raise some questions about it because underneath I think that what happens is that they are confusing an engineering process with the vision of a future world. So, for example, in the most recent film I made, Hypernormalisation, I showed that both in the occupy movements which took off in, after 2008, in America and in Europe and in another parts of the world, many of those who gather that, gather through social media, it worked very well. But when they got there they thought somehow the same process, the process of feedback could be used to create a new kind of society. So, occupy movement for example, they set random meetings, without a leader, and they hope out of these meetings it comes up with a new kind of society. It didn’t. What came out of it was confusion because what they had misunderstood was that an engineering process does not give you an idea of how to create a new kind of world. What they can give you is a mechanism to ensemble a million of people together… It’s beautiful, it’s brilliant of that, but it doesn’t give you a picture of what kind of future they can build. And when they were sitting there, well I know it’s a bit cruel… But in the film, I said when they were sitting around there, having those meetings, in the way they were behaving like managers. They were trying to manage the situation. And they were confusing management with a picture of the future. So really what I was saying was it’s more than cybernetics, it’s a sort of, it’s an idea of machine networks can be used to build a new kind of world, is somewhat an illusion. To actually build a new kind of world, you have to have an idea of what you want. Machines can’t give you what you want, what machines can give you is what they know you had yesterday. What the machines are brilliant at is reading what you did yesterday, and then saying themselves: “Well, that’s like what millions of another people did as well, so we will give him more of that tomorrow”. So you live with the machines, they make you live with the ghost of your own past, what they can’t do is imagine a future for you.

The roots of the idea that you can create a new kind of order through networks without a hierarchy, it has many different roots… But the most recent root comes out of technological utopia among Silicon Valley in the mid 1990. because they looked to the emerging networks and they looked to the ideas of somehow running through those people could feed information back and forward to each other. And they thought, well, out of that, you can create a new world with a new kind of democracy, without leaders, somehow through the information dancing back and forward you could create a new kind of stability. They pointed to nature, and they said: “This is what nature does, so we can do the same thing”.

And it has its roots also in the counterculture of the hippies, because they started the thing called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was an early version of the Internet, where people were sending their recommendations of a product or a piece of machinery, and out of that there were sending back what was the best idea. So, in a way, it worked very well for that kind of consumerism and it worked very well to assemble many people on social media, like Facebook, where they could find people like each other’s. What they can’t tell you is what you do without network. To have a system, whether or not leaders, where people exchange information is aim management structure, is a way of managing millions of people. The idea of what you do with that comes out with the vision of the future, and what they have found in the occupy movement was, when they got that, when they got to send London or in Wall Street, when they got there, they looked around and they thought “what we do now?” and they said “why we just have meetings?” and they had these meetings, and I’m afraid, I was there in some of them, to an outsider there is a little bit of, because you had well educated middle class white liberals, predominantly white liberals, sitting around waving their hands in the act of agree and dipping their hands in they disagree, and out of that, they believed that a new kind of order would come. What they hadn’t understood was if you want to change the world, you have to tackle power. And power in this world, in all our countries, is deeply –deeply- rooted and is very powerful, and to tackle power you have to have an idea to inspire millions of people who have not necessarily be like you, they may be people you don’t like, some of them may be racist, some of them may have horrible sexist views, but you have to inspire them, to get them on your side by saying “If you follow me and give me your vote, or give me the power that millions of people can have when they’re together, then we would together create this kind of world”. It’s not a top down authoritarian idea, it’s an idea of inspire idea, to get people to work to do something, and in that sense you have to have a hierarchy. It doesn’t mean, well this is the big question, the techno-utopians will say “a hierarchy always leads to some kind of dictatorship”, which is also what the free market right says, they’re very similar. And if many of the Silicon Valley people are libertarians right with us. I’m not sure that it’s true, because the evidence of the failure of the occupy movement, and the failure of all others attempts to challenge powers shows that when you just literally ensemble people and say “right, now we are going to get a new kind of democracy”, you don’t have the ability to challenge power. And, to be honest, the occupy movement fell so badly, it is astonishing that they haven’t been criticized more. They had a fantastic slogan, wonderful slogan, and also because of the moment they had millions of people who were sympathetic to them, who not normally be sympathetic to that kind of operating and they blew it and I think they blew it, well, partly because they were negligent, but also because they confused a technical process with a vision of the future.