Documentary – HyperNormalisation by Adam Curtis

Adam Curtis’s film ”HyperNormalisation” is about how, since the 1970s, governments, the financial market, and technological utopists have given up on the complex ”real world” and constructed a simplified ”fake world” driven by corporations and stabilized by politicians.

The term ”hypernormalisation” is borrowed from Alexei Yurchak’s book ”Everything was Forever, Until it was No More: The Last Soviet Generation” [2006]. The book explores the paradoxes of life in the Soviet Union during the 20 years before its collapse. A professor of anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, argues that everyone knew the system would fail, but because no one could envision an alternative to the status quo, politicians and citizens were accepting in maintaining the illusion of a functioning society. Over time, this delusion became a self-fulfilling prophecy, and the ”fakeness” was embraced by everyone as the real, an effect Yurchak calls ”hypernormalisation.”

thoughtmaybe.com, Documentary – HyperNormalisation by Adam Curtis