Adam Curtis Cancels the Future
Curtis’s new BBC series,
Can’t Get You Out of My Head, depicts the repetitive bleakness of individualism, but how can we collectively envision an alternative?
The primary thesis in Adam Curtis’s latest six-part BBC series,
Can’t Get You Out of My Head (2021), seems to be that individualism has become an undemocratic force. Across eight hours, Curtis focuses on different revolutionary figures and those proximate to power, including Mao Zedong’s fourth wife, Jiang Qing, and Black Panther Party activist, Afeni Shakur. He explores psychology theory and the psyche of isolation that festers in the suburbs to create a dizzying picture of how we have arrived at such a narcissistic moment in time.
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”.