It goes even further back to the days of late 19th/early 20th century and artistic communes. The first time someone monetised it on a large scale was Bernays who repackaged Freud's psychoanalysis and sold it to US government and companies. His "torches of freedom" campaign tapped into the women's right movement and desire for self-expression. The tobacco industry was very pleased with the outcomes, because until then women did not smoke cigarettes. Bernays also wrote "Engineering Consent" and "Propaganda", which he renamed as Public Relations after WWII. Curtis has an interesting documentary on the subject.

Exactly. In the US culture specifically, in the XX century before the hippies, there were limited pockets of "self-expression" (discarding previous culture, really) as depicted by Henry Miller, and later the whole Beat Generation. Only after that, this tendency picked up enough steam so that the masses picked it up, in the form the Hippies movement.

That wasn't true in 2017, either. Though the author makes some interesting points, he conflates catalysts, causes, and cultural movements and just calls it all self-expression, and casually makes some rather eyebrow-raising assertions in the process. This reads more like an idea he was trying to hash it for himself rather than a well-considered piece.

That pretty much sums up Adam Curtis to me and I would say I am quite a fan.

He is an amazing propaganda film maker but have to take him with a huge grain of salt.

Yeah I hadn't actually read anything from him before, and maybe this was just the wrong piece to start on, but this doesn't inspire me to find out. The points were interesting, but not nearly enough to justify being that glib when there are people making more interesting points who know what they're talking about. I'm an art school guy, so I'm well-versed in the idea of imprecise conceptual thinking and conveying how things feel rather than how they actually are-- that's art. But presenting how things feel as how they are isn't called art, it's called bullshit.

> He is an amazing propaganda film maker

What would you say he is advocating for that you call propagandizing? Not that I disagree, per se, just curious how you’d articulate it.

I would say he massages his facts until they fit the narrative. Not saying he misrepresents things but he often comes to conclusions that are not based on the data IMO

> I would say he massages his facts until they fit the narrative. Not saying he misrepresents things but he often comes to conclusions that are not based on the data IMO

This is a great answer, and is a very good definition of propaganda, especially in this context - his propaganda, if defined as such, is good/effective, because his motivated reasoning just so stories are broken clocks that are coincidentally right because he is a master of set and setting, cleverly telling stories at precisely the time and place of his choosing and in such a situated context/Situationist (International) way that they are not even wrong, and may even be correct, but not for the reasons he claims, or even for any reason at all.

I was hoping to draw out an explanation of what his narrative(s) seek to be an explication of, and in light of what I’ve written above, maybe he’s an author of selective revisionist history? Aspects of his oeuvre remind me of Fukuyama’s end of history, possibly the way that Curtis’ archival crate digging pastiche, his overarching yet hopscotching mode of storytelling, seeks to overwhelm the viewer with Gish galloping shaggy dog stories that are almost immune to shallow dismissal.

Curtis, like Daedalus and his son Icarus, constructs a garden path (sentence) through a Minotaur’s Labyrinth of meaning; like the maze’s solver Theseus, Curtis’ ball of thread weaves a tangled web of meaning through a hedgerow inherently devoid of meaning, and like Theseus, he accidentally/purposefully neglects to raise a black flag of ambiguity announcing his return to Athens/to meaning, instead hoisting the traditional white flag of discursive arrival at certainty, resulting in Theseus/Curtis securing the throne of power/discourse for himself, indirectly crowning himself king of the hill in terms of (a)historical victors.

I always was a sucker for mixed metaphors, though, and I might be wrong or perhaps biased. I always found Fukuyama’s end of history narrative subconsciously off-putting for some reason, while being drawn all the same to Curtis’ clarion call, but perhaps Curtis’ is a siren song sung by a wolf in sheep’s clothing?

Is this your first day on planet Adam Curtis?

;)

I love his stuff but you really need to treat it as "thought provoking but utterly lacking in rigour". Treat it as a jumping off point for topics that might be new to you and as a nudge to view things from a different angle.

In the post-LLM era, that just isn't good enough. Now that we have well-written automated probabilistic meandering text generation, "thought provoking but utterly lacking in rigour" copy is everywhere. Usually followed by a clickbait link.

It's the end of a whole second-tier literary genre.

I disagree. AI will be able to do "rigour" before it can do "thought provoking".

Part of Adam's appeal is the fact that behind it is a human being struggling to understand the world and struggling to explain it.

LLMs are incredible but nobody cares what a hyper-evolved Markov chain pretends to say about culture.

> AI will be able to do "rigour" before it can do "thought provoking".

I wish. Right now, thought provoking LLMs exist, but rigorously correct ones do not. Which is a big problem if you want to use them beyond blithering.

Llm output is not thought provoking.

Yeah new to me, and I think I've had my fill. There are people saying things just as interesting that aren't shamelessly glib about it. As I said in my reply to your sibling comment: I'm an art school guy, so I'm well-versed in the idea of imprecise conceptual thinking and conveying how things feel rather than how they actually are-- that's art. But presenting how things feel as how they are isn't called art, it's called bullshit.

To be honest, his forte isn't the written word. Watch a documentary or two. He has a fascinating style and is eminently (maybe too eminently) watchable.

"New Adam Curtis documentary just dropped" was really a thing for a fair while in the UK.

Cab Calloway was a pretty radical dude, in his day.

The Beats were proto-hippies. Many Hippies arose from the Beat movement.

The Hell's Angels were a bunch of pissed-off military veterans. They were into their own brand of self-expression.