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film2016

HyperNormalisation

Disciplines:
documentary
politics
media/bbc
philosophy/reality

Summary

Adam Curtis's 2016 BBC documentary arguing that governments, finance, and technology have constructed a simplified false version of the world that both they and we know is fake — but continue to inhabit because no one can imagine an alternative.

Core Contribution

Provides the most influential documentary account of contemporary political unreality — HyperNormalisation's argument (borrowing Alexei Yurchak's term for late Soviet unreality) that we live in a deliberately constructed artificial reality maintained by elites who have given up on genuinely transforming the world created the dominant framework for understanding post-2008 political disorientation.

Historical Influences

Adam Curtis Yurchak

Intellectual Lineage

Adam Curtis BBC

Allied Works

Century of the Self The Power of Nightmares

Contemporaries & Peers

Century of the Self The Power of Nightmares

Minds Influenced

Documentary political analysisHistory 102

Intellectual Posterity

HyperNormalisation HyperNormalization as conceptCurtis aesthetic

Discussing

HyperNormalisation

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