Adam Curtis: “Big Tech and Big Data have been completely useless in this crisis”
The film-maker’s new series
Can’t Get You Out of My Head explores why the age of individualism has left us uncertain, anxious and distrustful.
How should we understand the silencing of the modern mind? No ideology or tradition of thought has emerged to contest the social and political arrangements that define the democracies of the north Atlantic. Having abandoned statist commitments and witnessed the collapse of communist regimes in 1989, progressives look in vain for a politics beyond the defence of a mummified social democracy. Surrendering to the inevitability of neoliberalism, they stand on the stage of history as the executors of their conservative rivals, content to master their irrelevance rather than overcome it. As the Brazilian philosopher Roberto Unger puts it, “the world suffers under a dictatorship of no alternatives”.