"It may be that Britain – and much of Europe – is in a similar moment to that described by Clark just before 1848: on the edge of a new kind of society we don’t yet have the language to describe. It feels frightening because without that language it is impossible to have coherent dreams of the future. To build a better world, you need an idea of what should change and how.
And one of the things preventing that may be our obsession with constantly replaying the past. In the present age, the fog of experience has been thickened by the mass of recorded data that allows the recent past to be endlessly replayed, refusing to fade away. A constant loop of nostalgia – music, images, films and dreams from the past. It is another block to the future. And it is also the way this series is made. My bad."
Adam Curtis talking about his new-ish program Shifty
“You have this constant pantomime of hysteria which screws with your idea of time and yet it’s almost like you’re treading water. Nothing is actually happening. No one actually comes up with anything new. There are now four films being made about The Beatles. Four major movies about The Beatles. That’s like people in the 1960s listening to a musical from the time of Queen Victoria. It’s extraordinary! We’re trapped!”
“Taylor Swift is such a prim 1950s, almost Doris Day figure. That’s not to diss any of what she’s saying but it’s quite held together in time and I don’t think that expresses now.”
“What you’re left with now is this weird psychodrama-scape of everyone knowing that everyone is performing. The real self has completely disappeared deep within your and my minds and you’ll never find it.”
Adam Curtis also talking up and around his new-ish program Shifty
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