Adam Curtis on The Rest is Entertainment podcast:
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…for this series, I spent a lot of time going through documentary news footage in the BBC, going through the 90s. At about 1998, people have stopped being real.
…And somewhere about 1998 is before the internet, they begin to recede.
…I just got the sense that…what I was watching, as I looked through all this stuff, was you saw the genuine self just receding. It was almost like it was going down a tunnel into the distance and being replaced by something else, which felt quite two dimensional.
…If you have a society where you are encouraged–as Mrs. Thatcher did, but it was there before–to feel that what you desire and what you feel is the center of your world, when things are going well, that’s great. And I would argue–and I tried to show this in the films–that it was quite a while, and quite [a] frightening time, but it was also exciting, up until the end of the nineties. And it is very interesting that actually that very moment that I see the self beginning to recede down that tunnel.
…And I think it’s to do with the fact that if you’re internalized and you believe that everything you feel is the center of the world, when things start to go wrong, it’s frightening. And if the people outside the politicians, the journalists, people like us, haven’t got an explanation for why you are feeling as you do, you retreat.
And I think, whatever, this is just hypothesis. I thought that what I might be seeing was the retreat of people into themselves because they were anxious and alone. And I would argue that is a genuine big feeling now.
…Everything looks normal now, but in a strange heightened almost pantomime way and it makes you suspect that the some other maelstrom going on inside millions and millions of people’s heads that no one’s got the answer for out there.
No one, including us journalists, we have got no language to describe it.
And if there is a revolution happening, it’s beginning to brew inside people’s heads.
So if you really want to get rid of what you’ve been talking about, you’ve got to change society. And that’s going to happen when someone comes up with a language to actually make sense of why people feel this strange relationship with the phone.
…a new form of collectivism will happen if it actually explains to you why you’re feeling as you do.
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…what we need now is an act of imagination to remix or reconstruct how you actually perceive and look and feel about power. That’s what’s waiting to to be done, and it’s an act of imagination…