The Age of HyperNormalisation: Revisiting Adam Curtis’s world today

Exploring the work of Adam Curtis through the lens of current events.

Past and Present

“Increasingly, we live in a world where nothing makes any sense,” says documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis. Events rush past “like waves of a fever,” leaving us confused and uncertain. Those in power respond by telling stories, simplified narratives meant to help us make sense of chaos, but “those stories are increasingly unconvincing and hollow”.

For decades, Curtis has been mapping the very illusion of order that defines our age. In 2025, his long-view historical collages feel eerily prophetic. We have increasing geopolitical instability, eroding institutional trust, and a digital culture where meaning itself feels dislocated. The rise of generative AI only amplifies the sense that we are, to quote Curtis’s film HyperNormalisation, living in “a fake and hollow world” sustained by collective delusions.

Curtis’s most resonant works (HyperNormalisation, The Century of the Self, Bitter Lake, Can’t Get You Out of My Head, All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace) are grand tapestries of historical fragments. Through archival footage and calm, insistent narration, he exposes the hidden wiring of power, the myth-making of institutions, the illusion of control they project, the emotional forces that bind public perception. Those themes echo and evolve today. The political stagnation Curtis often highlights, a paralysis behind the façade of progress, seems more palpable than ever. The media, once a trusted mediator of reality, has morphed into a hall of mirrors, especially with algorithmic feeds and AI-generated content. And the emotional architecture of power, built on fear, desire, and nostalgia, continues to shape our responses to an increasingly surreal present.

The Illusion of Control in a Chaotic World

One of Curtis’s central contentions is that those in power maintain a grand illusion of control even as the world grows more complex and ungovernable. In HyperNormalisation, he argues that since the 1970s economic crises, politicians and technocrats “gave up on trying to shape the complex ‘real world’” and instead built “a simpler ‘fake world’” to keep society stable. This fake world is comforting and familiar, but entirely inauthentic. Curtis recounts, for example, how Western elites in the 1980s and 90s turned Libya’s Colonel Gaddafi into a cartoonish villain, a pantomime enemy onto whom they could project simplistic evil. This manufactured myth “maintained their own illusion of control” even as real power slipped through their fingers. By simplifying the world into comic-book terms, these leaders hid their loss of understanding and authority. It was a desperate kind of magic show: if the public believed the fake narrative, then perhaps nobody would notice the chaos behind the curtain.

The illusion of control persists in our modern narratives, even as crises multiply. We see governments and corporations touting the next technological fix or bold plan, from financial algorithms said to tame market risks to AI systems promised to manage everything from pandemics to policing. But each promise often conceals uncertainty. During the COVID pandemic, for instance, leaders oscillated between confident assurances and evident confusion. The public was often presented with neat stories (“flatten the curve,” “silver bullet vaccines”) that, however useful, glossed over the messy reality of evolving science and policy failures. Likewise, the rise of generative AI has been accompanied by grand claims that AI will master complexity on our behalf. Tech companies project control, framing AI as an objective, superhuman analyst, but this too can be a pantomime. In truth, even AI’s creators are frequently surprised by emergent behaviors in complex models. And as Curtis might point out, the comforting façade of AI’s omniscience can “blind us to its total inauthenticity”. AI’s answers often sound authoritative while masking shallow pattern-mimicry or hidden biases. We risk inhabiting a hypernormalized bubble, where we pretend an algorithm can neatly manage the world, while ignoring the chaotic, real consequences beneath.

Curtis reminds us how power structures respond to chaos by doubling down on simplified myths of control. Consider how financial elites responded after the 2008 crash: rather than embrace deep reform, many policymakers essentially reinstated the status quo with minor tweaks, insisting the system was now under control. In All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace, Curtis chronicled earlier versions of this technocratic hubris, like the belief that computer models and markets could self-regulate society into stability. He recounted a 1991 experiment where hundreds of people, guided only by a Pong video game on a big screen, self-organized their paddle movements and succeeded collectively. Techno-utopians hailed it as proof of “order without central control,” but Curtis saw a darker angle: were those people free, or “disempowered slaves locked to a giant machine screen”? To him, it looked like human beings happily conforming to an algorithm’s prompts, thinking they were in charge while actually being corralled by an invisible system. That image resonates in our AI age. Algorithms constantly nudge our behavior – what we read, buy, believe – giving us just enough sense of agency to keep us invested, even as we become more predictable, programmable nodes in a digital matrix. The illusion of personal control is strong (Who hasn’t felt empowered by a personalized feed or a smart assistant?), but behind it is a “very complex, predictive system” training us to simplify ourselves into machine-readable clicks.

The world is not under control, not by our leaders, and certainly not by machines. HyperNormalisation takes its title from a term describing late Soviet life, where everyone knew the system was failing but no one could imagine an alternative, so they all kept pretending everything was fine. Are we living a similar pretense? Maybe our public reality, of endlessly managed pandemics, perpetual low-level wars, “safe” financial bubbles, and algorithmic governance, is hypernormal. We collectively sense the fragility and unreality, but we carry on as if the narratives were true. Our society is like a sleepwalker locked in a dream of control, coming up with simple stories to ignore the storm gathering outside. Curtis’s films prod us to wake up, even if it means confronting confusion and complexity head on.

Political Stagnation and the Cycle of History

Curtis often portrays modern politics as stuck on repeat. Grand historical projects collapse, but nothing truly new rises to replace them. The result is a kind of political stagnation, a paralysis in the face of change. In Can’t Get You Out of My Head, Curtis explored how the revolutions and radical dreams of the mid-20th century fizzled out by century’s end, leaving behind a world where individualism reigns but collective vision is absent. We express our personal feelings loudly (on social media, in street protests), but systemic change feels impossible. This evokes Mark Fisher’s notion of “capitalist realism,” the widespread sense that no alternative to the current system is imaginable. Curtis’s term hypernormalisation captures a similar view: the old order decays, but we remain stuck acting out its rituals, unable to conceive a new script.

Recent history gives us a pattern of stalled visions. The sweeping ideologies of the 20th century, from Soviet communism to Western liberal democracy’s post-war heyday, crested and broke. By the 1980s, Western leaders (whether Reagan-Thatcher conservatives or technocratic liberals) largely abandoned big social dreams in favor of market-driven pragmatism. In The Century of the Self, Curtis showed how post–World War II democracies turned away from collective ideals toward managing the population through consumer desire and psychological manipulation. Politicians became marketers of individual happiness rather than visionaries of society. This ushered in an era of diminished politics, choices narrowed to minor variations of the same neoliberal model, even as they were sold to voters as the peak of freedom.

“The triumph of the self [was] the ultimate expression of democracy,” Curtis notes wryly, “where power has finally moved to the people. Certainly, the people may feel they are in charge, but are they really?”

By the turn of the millennium, this stagnation set the stage for crises. Curtis’s HyperNormalisation links a chain of events: the cynicism after the Iraq War and financial crisis, the rise of “managed” democracies (like Putin’s Russia, where scripted pseudo-opposition creates an illusion of choice), and eventually the angry insurgencies of 2016 (Trump, Brexit, etc). These insurgencies were less a revolution than a symptom of drift: the liberal project to manage the world rationally was collapsing under its own contradictions. But even the populist waves have not yielded a coherent new order. Instead, we see a weird mix of resentment and paralysis. Millions voted for dramatic change – “Take back control!” as the Brexit slogan went – but the outcomes feel anticlimactic or chaotic. After the sound and fury, the same fundamental problems persist. The global economy still largely serves the “economic overlords” and leaves deep inequality in its wake. Geopolitics remains locked in old patterns of rivalry and war (e.g. the grim throwback of a land war in Europe with the Ukraine conflict). Environmental threats loom, but meaningful action is often stymied by short-term politics. It’s as if history’s pendulum is stuck, swaying between failed extremes without breaking through to something truly new.

This stagnation is not mere complacency, but structural exhaustion.

“We are living through the collapse of the liberal project to manage the world in a rational way… The great sweep of history we are living through is the collapse of that.”

The above-mentioned collapse creates a vacuum of meaning. People sense that the old promises of progress were empty. Trust in governments is near historic lows (only about 22% of Americans say they trust their government to do what’s right most of the time, and similar skepticism abounds globally). But no grand narrative has yet galvanized the world with a positive vision of the future. Into this void, strange phenomena creep. Conspiracy theories and irrational movements act as a kind of “re-enchantment” of a disenchanted world. When official politics feels empty and repetitive, people seek meaning in the shadows, from QAnon fantasies to apocalyptic cults of various stripes. Even nihilistic memes and internet subcultures can be seen as a reaction to a reality that seems both stuck and senseless. They generate noise if not change.

Stagnation can precede breakdown. Curtis explicitly compares our current drift to the Soviet Union’s final years, “a sort of strange, knowing corruption and confusion” that eventually gave way to collapse. Our hypernormal times might likewise be heading toward a tipping point. But there’s a kernel of hope: Curtis notes that when people realize en masse that “you can make the world any way you want it to be,” that the stories are malleable, they may find ways to come together and create something new. In other words, the very unreality of our situation could spur a collective awakening. The “acceleration” of absurdity might force a break and “a moment of transcendence” or a “wake up call,” as discussed in the idea of accelerationism. One hears this sentiment in movements for systemic change (however nascent) that imagine alternatives to endless corporate capitalism. For now, though, we are still in the drift, the interregnum where, as Gramsci said, the old world is dying and the new cannot yet be born. Curtis’s work urges us not to avert our eyes from this limbo, but to study it, even feel its absurdity deeply, so that we might conjure a real way out.

Media and the Dislocation of Meaning

If power in Curtis’s films often works through stories, then media is the stage on which those stories play out. From the propaganda of the Cold War to reality TV politics, media narratives both reflect and distort reality, sometimes to the point that reality itself seems up for grabs. This dynamic has intensified wildly in recent years. The media landscape has fragmented into echo chambers, algorithms, and AI-generated mirages, and the result is a profound dislocation of meaning. We are drowning in information but thirsting for understanding. Curtis helps frame why our era often feels like living in a cosmic news feed with no clear plot.

In The Century of the Self, Curtis demonstrated how 20th-century PR and advertising manufactured desire by attaching emotional narratives to products and politicians. The public was subtly taught to see consumption as self-expression, and politics as another consumer choice. This was a trend that only grew with time. By the 21st century, the rise of social media promised to democratize storytelling. We were told that everyone’s voice could be heard, that we had more control than ever over the narratives in our lives. For a brief moment, it felt empowering. We had the optimism of the Arab Spring (amplified by Twitter and Facebook) and the early 2010s belief that connecting online would naturally spread truth and liberty.

“Social media did it for a bit – it gave you this illusion that you’re in control, but actually it was managing you.”

That optimistic narrative curdled into something more sinister. Algorithms learned that outrage and fear drive engagement, so our feeds began to serve up a steady diet of anger. We became actors in a clickbait melodrama, each outrage-of-the-day fading into the next, until the line between genuine concern and performative reaction was blurred.

Curtis’s HyperNormalisation contains a sequence about Vladislav Surkov, the Russian strategist who flooded his country’s media with contradictory fake narratives, a kind of strategy of confusion. Surkov would sponsor avant-garde art one moment and far-right militias the next, play all sides and then brazenly advertise that it was all theater. The result was that citizens never knew what was real, or whether even their opposition was secretly orchestrated. This “illusionary politics” was a preview of a coming global trend. Today’s digital media environment feels Surkovian. Conspiracy theories proliferate alongside state propaganda and viral disinformation, and even when you catch a lie, the damage is done. The next lie is already trending. The consequence is a public increasingly “dazed and confused… [unsure] what the fuck is going on”. We doubt everything, even obvious truths, because for every fact there’s an alternative narrative a click away. Reality feels not just contested but fragmented. Curtis captured this in Can’t Get You Out of My Head when he highlighted how people assemble meaning from “fragments… with no meaning,” much like conspiracist Jim Garrison connecting random dots in a swamp of data. It’s exactly how one navigates the internet. You see bits of stories, coincidences, unrelated images, and it’s up to you to form a pattern. In the absence of trusted common reference points, meaning becomes a do-it-yourself puzzle, prone to fantastical completion.

Now add generative AI to the mix. We are bracing for an era of endless deepfakes and AI-generated news that is indistinguishable from real. If we already struggled with “fake news,” the challenge ahead is fake everything, a total simulation. It is telling (and a bit unsettling) that Curtis’s filmmaking style, with its montage of archival footage repurposed to new narrative, mirrors what our algorithms now do on a massive scale: remix reality. But Curtis’s collages have an authorial intent. He wants to reveal hidden truths. Our algorithms have no such guiding intent beyond maximizing engagement. As AI churns out infinite narratives, the concept of a shared reality could further erode. We might each retreat into our personalized hyperreality, fed by AI that “shapes our information” and in turn simplifies us into predictable patterns. The dislocation of meaning would then be complete, meaning not just contested, but rendered almost irrelevant, replaced by sensation and spectacle. In a sense, the medium truly becomes the message (to invoke Marshall McLuhan). The chaos of the medium is the story now.

By stepping back and showing how media narratives were constructed in the past, how, for instance, the BBC and CNN once lent credibility to government myths or how radical ideas were co-opted and domesticated by pop culture, Curtis gives us a mental vantage point outside the swirl. In Bitter Lake, Curtis explains that Western leaders, unable to cope with Middle Eastern complexities, “oversimplified the world into a fairytale of good vs. evil”. The media eagerly propagated this black-and-white story during the War on Terror. But that oversimplification produced a fragmented reality, “a chaotic media flow” of violence and confusion that leaders then also struggled to control. The image is of a feedback loop of misunderstanding, media spreading simplistic narratives that create blowback, which in turn produces more chaos to be narrated. This rings true today with, say, coverage of terrorism or conflicts. Initial simplistic narratives (good guys vs. bad guys) give way to messy truths (unintended consequences, civilian blowback), leaving everyone bewildered.

Curtis’s message to media consumers is: beware the easy story. Approach the information deluge with both skepticism and imagination. Realize that when “nothing makes any sense”, it may be because those simplifying stories no longer fit the facts. Maybe we need new, more honest narratives, ones that acknowledge complexity and uncertainty rather than deny it. Maybe we need to support journalism that digs deeper and contextualizes, instead of chasing virality. Maybe we need to use AI as a tool for synthesis and pattern-finding in service of truth, rather than just propaganda. Maybe we need to cultivate personal media literacy, stepping outside our bubble, cross-checking sources, resisting the emotional bait that platforms dangle. Curtis’s own approach, blending disparate sources to find a hidden coherence, is instructive. When meaning is dislocated, each of us must do a bit of what he does: actively make sense of the fragments rather than passively consume them. The danger, of course, is falling for false patterns (conspiracy webs), but the alternative is to drown in noise. Curtis inspires a kind of critical vigilance. The truth may be out there, but we have to piece it together, much like one of his films.

Myth-Making of Institutions and the Erosion of Trust

Curtis’s documentaries relentlessly expose how institutions like governments, corporations, banks, even intellectual elites, create myths to preserve their authority. These myths are the stories that justify the status quo, that rally public consent or at least complacency. But when the myths diverge too far from reality, trust shatters. The myth-making of institutions is often a double-edged sword, powerful in the short run, but sowing cynicism in the long run. We currently have both an overabundance of institutional myth-making and a collapse of trust that suggests the spell is wearing off.

One striking Curtisian example is from Bitter Lake: Western politicians, grappling with economic and military crises, ceded actual power to financial institutions yet “simultaneously present[ed] the public with oversimplified narratives of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ to gloss over naïve and incongruous decision-making.”

These politicians might have lost control of the underlying forces (money flows, geopolitical complexities), but they offered stirring legends to maintain legitimacy. Freedom vs. tyranny, heroism abroad, prosperity at home...Similarly, HyperNormalisation details how, in the 1980s, American and British leaders embraced the myth that markets would benevolently regulate themselves, allowing them to deregulate aggressively while assuring citizens it would bring universal wealth. For a while, such myths worked (or at least masked problems). But over time their hollowness became apparent with widening inequality, financial crashes, and quagmire wars. Reality bit back, and the old narratives lost their shine.

In response, instead of admitting failure, institutions often double down on myth-making or seek new scapegoats. When Reagan-era America and others needed a clear villain to simplify a messy world, they exaggerated Gaddafi’s menace into almost cartoonish proportions. He became a “two-dimensional… global villain” in the popular imagination, a mythic figure convenient for Western institutions to rally against. Never mind that this mask concealed shifting alliances and the West’s own policy confusions. The myth was the point. Fast forward, and think of how post-9/11 institutions seized on “the terrorist” as an almost mythic entity, everywhere and nowhere, requiring endless war to slay hydra-like heads. For years, it shored up government powers (from surveillance to military interventions). But as those wars dragged on inconclusively, public belief in the facile “good vs evil” framing waned. By the time of ISIS’s grotesque theatrical evil, many in the West had also grown skeptical of their own institutions’ narratives (like the U.S. government’s ever-morphing rationale for Middle Eastern entanglements). So, when new threats arise, say a pandemic, a significant portion of the public immediately distrusts official narratives (dismissing public health guidelines as conspiracies, for example). It’s a sad irony: decades of manipulative myth-making have eroded the very credibility needed in a real crisis.

Trust in major institutions like government, media, and scientific authorities is deeply frayed. Polls and surveys show this across many countries. We’re immersed in institutional skepticism, where people fact-check the fact-checkers and assume spin or bad faith as default. Some of this skepticism is healthy, even necessary (institutions should be questioned). But much of it is indiscriminate and debilitating, a reflexive nihilism toward any collective endeavor. When leaders cried wolf one too many times, or painted the world in false colors once too often, the public psyche internalized a corrosive doubt. In Can’t Get You Out of My Head, Curtis explored how emotional narratives from the 60s onward (the promises of personal liberation, the paranoid style of politics, etc.) left a legacy of disillusionment. It’s like society has been through repeated romantic betrayals by its leaders. Now, jaded and hurt, many simply refuse to believe anything coming from “on high.”

Generative AI threatens to turbocharge this erosion of trust. If institutions were already seen as manipulative, imagine when governments or corporations can deploy AI to mass-produce polished propaganda or counterfeit grassroots support. Imagine when any embarrassing or incriminating evidence can be dismissed as “AI-generated fake.” Without some restoration of authentic storytelling and transparency, institutional trust could hit rock bottom. Curtis often emphasizes how emotional truth is critical. People need to feel that something is real and speaks to their condition. The Century of the Self shows how FDR’s administration used Bernays-style PR to sell New Deal policies emotionally to the public, but crucially FDR also delivered tangible results, building trust. Later politicians tried to borrow the emotional manipulation techniques without the substantive follow-through, eventually breeding cynicism.

So how might institutions reclaim trust now? Perhaps by breaking the cycle of myth-making. Honesty can be powerful: admitting uncertainty, admitting past errors, treating the public as adults capable of hearing complex realities. We saw glimmers of this during the pandemic when some scientists and officials leveled with people about uncertainties. But others fell back on patronizing myths (“just 15 days to slow the spread” – well-intended but ultimately seen as a lie when things dragged on). Institutions must relinquish the “illusion of control” they project and involve people in grappling with complexity instead. New forms of participatory narrative might emerge, where institutions facilitate spaces for collective sense-making rather than just broadcasting one-way stories. The rise of citizen assemblies, participatory budgeting, or open-data initiatives hints at how governments can act less like myth-makers and more like conveners of reality-based collaboration.

The collapse of trust is itself a kind of hypernormal situation. Everyone knows the official reality is shaky, but no one has a fully credible alternative vision yet, so we muddle along in a fog of semi-belief. Maybe things have to break further before they can be rebuilt. Look at Surkov’s game in Russia: by openly telling people the system was rigged and myths were manufactured, Surkov induced a kind of nihilistic acceptance. Nobody believed anything, which suited the power structure just fine. In the West, we are perilously close to a similar state. But there is also pushback. Investigative journalists, whistleblowers, citizen watchdogs…these are the unsung heroes trying to ground our discourse in truth. They carry the flame of true storytelling that cuts through myths. They remind us that while institutions can manufacture narratives, reality still exists and can bite back. They say: Look, here is what really happened behind the scenes. By seeing how myth-making led to fiasco we can demand better from today’s institutions.

The Emotional Architecture of Power

Beneath all these narratives and illusions lies a foundation of human emotion. Power isn’t maintained only by force or law, but by orchestrating feelings. Fear and hope, anger and love, pride and shame. In The Power of Nightmares, Curtis argued that modern politicians no longer promise utopias, but rather sell themselves as protectors from nightmares, using fear of enemies (terrorists, rogue states) to justify their power.

“Fear and insecurity are often used as tools of control.”

The emotional architecture of power is essentially the scaffolding of these manipulated feelings that hold up the status quo.

Consider how Century of the Self dissected the work of Freud’s nephew, Edward Bernays, who pioneered propaganda and public relations. Bernays understood that people could be guided by appealing to unconscious desires and anxieties. Want to sell cigarettes to women? Convince them a smoke is a “torch of freedom” that makes them independent (Bernays literally did this in the 1920s). Want to rally a nation for war or consumerism? Tie it to pride, to fear of missing out, to patriotic duty, to anything but dry rationality. This insight birthed a consumer culture where identity and emotion intertwine with products and politics. By the late 20th century, politicians like Ronald Reagan and Tony Blair were effectively “brand managers” of national feelings, more than ideologues. Curtis shows Blair’s team using focus groups to tap into voters’ private hopes and fears, then crafting policies as emotional offerings (tough-on-crime for fear, NHS investment for hope, etc., all marketed with soothing or stirring rhetoric). The cynicism of it is that genuine popular emotions were often co-opted or simulated for agendas that ultimately served elite interests.

Presently, the emotional strings of power are still being pulled, but also fraying. We live in what some call an “age of anxiety,” a time of ambient dread (climate threats, economic precarity, pandemics) that can be exploited by demagogues or corporations. Social media, again, has supercharged this. It’s an emotional echo chamber where rage, envy, and fear can be provoked with a viral post and amplified globally within minutes. Curtis’s observation that social platforms intentionally amplify anger to keep us engaged is a perfect example of emotion being weaponized for profit. The emotional architecture now extends into our very feeds and notifications, an always-on system tweaking our dopamine and cortisol levels. It’s not a conspiracy; it’s simply the logic of an attention economy aligned with surveillance capitalism. But its effect on society’s psyche is profound. We see heightened polarization (anger directed at out-groups is politically useful), widespread stress (the world’s problems intrude on our phones 24/7), and often emotional fatigue or numbness as a result.

Curtis’s Can’t Get You Out of My Head was subtitled “An Emotional History of the Modern World.” In it, he traces personal stories of revolutionaries, extremists, and dreamers, showing how private emotions like paranoia, love, desire for significance coursed through public events. One takeaway is that when people’s emotional needs are unfulfilled or manipulated, it can lead to collective madness or inertia. For instance, the series examines how the decline of the 1960s idealism led to both apathy in some and conspiratorial thinking in others, an attempt to find meaning in the disappointments of reality. Curtis even touches on mental health, hinting that a society without coherent narrative or genuine emotional fulfillment breeds inner turmoil (e.g., the rise of individual anxiety and depression might be linked to this larger collapse of shared meaning). The “emotional architecture of power” thus has a flip side: the emotional lives of the powerless, ordinary people, which can either buttress the system (if kept in a certain range of complacency or fear) or threaten it (if swung toward collective anger or hope for change).

Where do we stand now? It seems power still largely uses fear as its go-to emotion. Geopolitical rhetoric often appeals to fear of the Other (immigrants, foreign adversaries, “misinformation” – ironically sometimes a bogeyman myth itself). In domestic politics, fear of crime, fear of economic loss, fear of cultural change are staples of campaigns. But there is also a notable use of indignation and outrage as mobilizers. Politics has become very performative in moral emotional terms (think of viral videos of politicians “destroying” opponents rhetorically to delight their base). At the same time, positive emotions are in short supply in our public sphere. The hopeful grand narratives (like Kennedy’s moonshot or early Obama-era “hope and change”) have fizzled. This leaves a kind of emotional vacuum, which often gets filled by nostalgia. Many current movements trade in nostalgic emotion: Make America Great Again, or Brexit’s harkening back to a bygone Britain, or even the left’s yearning for a revival of New Deal-esque solidarity. Nostalgia is a potent but backward-looking emotion. It can rally people, but it doesn’t truly challenge the existing order. If anything, it seeks comfort in an imagined past.

The emotional architecture of power needs remodeling. Maybe a politics of genuine empathy and vision could emerge, one that addresses fear with honest reassurance (grounded in action), counters cynicism with authenticity, and sparks hope not based on fantasy but on collective possibility. Curtis often ends his documentaries on a note that implies, if we understand the machinery of our feelings, we might free ourselves from its automatic grip. One memorable line from Bitter Lake comes when he notes that the old stories have stopped making sense, implicitly urging us to feel differently, to break the spell. Part of the solution is reorienting our emotional energies, finding meaning in community and shared purpose rather than in endless self-focused consumption or tribal internet combat.

Generative AI, once again, complicates the emotional landscape. AI can mimic emotional tone (chatbots that sound caring or enraged), but it has no actual feelings. Interaction with AI might further distort human empathy. People might anthropomorphize AI companions and feel attachments, or conversely, become more callous thinking everything could be fake. The emotional distance in digital life was already an issue (outraging at strangers on Twitter whom we never meet, etc.). AI adds another remove. Curtis often underscores the importance of authentic human connection – for example, contrasting the artificial high of consumer culture with the genuine collective joy of the civil rights movement’s victories. In that spirit, safeguarding our human emotional core in the AI era will be crucial. That could mean emphasizing arts, face-to-face interactions, local projects…anything that fosters real feeling grounded in reality, not in the hyperreal simulations.

Afeni Shakur, featured in Can’t Get You Out of My Head, was a Black Panther who struggled between radical hope and despair, and ultimately her emotional journey influenced her son Tupac and a cultural movement. Curtis used her story to illustrate how personal pain and resilience can ripple into political significance. The architecture of power is not monolithic; it’s constructed through countless individual hearts and minds. Change can come when enough of those hearts and minds feel something different, perhaps outrage transmuted into solidarity, or fear overcome by courage, or apathy shaken off by a sense of meaning. If our current system runs on fear and distraction, then acts of empathy, understanding, and shared passion are quietly subversive. They lay emotional groundwork for new stories we might tell ourselves, stories of a future that is not an illusion, but real and worth striving for.

Bridging the Long View and the Now

History is not a linear progress march, but a looping, twisting saga of dreams and delusions, power plays and unintended consequences, all interwoven into the narratives that guide us. The “disorienting immediacy of the now,” AI breakthroughs, political upheavals, climate anxieties, culture wars, and more, can feel overwhelming. It is easy to get lost in the noise. But patterns exist. We have been through echoes of this before, and by naming the illusions we live under, we can see beyond them.

A major paradox of today is that we have unprecedented technology to master our environment, yet we feel events slipping from our grasp. Curtis would point out that control was always partly an illusion, that complex systems like societies cannot be run like machines, and attempts to do so often backfire. Accepting this means we can stop clinging to false certainties and start engaging with reality’s complexity. The role of a future leader should be less “I have a master plan” and more “I’ll help navigate the uncertainty with you.” The stagnation in politics might break when someone finds a story honest enough to resonate, one that admits problems are complicated but still inspires collective action. Old grand narratives have died; the task now is to craft new ones that aren’t just myths masking elite power, but genuinely of the people. Emerging technology could help in this, if used as a tool to aggregate ideas and wisdom from many voices. Or it could hinder, if it just deepens the fog of unreality.

Curtis’s focus on media and meaning underscores a pivotal point: a society is held together by the stories it believes. Right now, our shared stories are few and fraying. But humans are storytelling creatures. We crave meaning. In the absence of coherent shared narratives, we see a proliferation of mini-narratives, from conspiracy theories to identity-based worldviews. This babel can be dangerous, but it also indicates that people haven’t given up on finding meaning. The challenge is to bridge these fractures, to find common ground in reality-based narratives that can unify diverse experiences. Maybe a cultural renaissance, a new art or philosophy movement (the kind of thing Curtis would later weave into a documentary) will emerge to cut across the silos and speak to our common humanity. Small changes can cascade in complex systems. A few courageous institutions practicing radical transparency, a social network redesigned to promote deliberation over division, a grassroots movement that rekindles collective purpose, any of these could start tipping the scales toward a healthier public sphere.

Curtis’s work has often been described as disillusioning. But disillusionment, in the literal sense, is the loss of illusions, and that is a necessary step to any real progress. Curtis at his best helps people see through the hype of consumerism, the propaganda of war, the false promises of technocrats. Discarding comforting myths is painful, but it clears the ground for new truths.

The final bridge between Curtis’s historical collage and the present moment might be possibility. History is full of contingency. Things didn’t have to go the way they did. There were always alternatives, paths not taken, visionary ideas crushed or co-opted but not gone forever. There are forgotten radicals, experiments in living, moments when people dared to imagine different systems. Even in our current dislocation of meaning, we have an opportunity to re-thread some of those strands, using the knowledge of past failures to guide us.

In one scene from HyperNormalisation, Curtis describes how, after a period of chaos, people in the Soviet Union began to imagine new futures once the old certainties dissolved. We may be in a similar interregnum globally. The old certainties, that liberal democracy will inevitably spread, that endless growth is possible, that the internet will naturally make us free, have all taken a beating. But new certainties have not solidified, and that’s OK. It means we are still in the act of choosing what comes next.

Curious, critical engagement with our history and media is not a chore. It can be exhilarating, even freeing. It’s how we reclaim agency from systems that would happily script us. The emotional courage of individuals (to love, to rebel, to think differently) can, in time, reshape the collective fate, and get us out of our heads.

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This idea started in my brain, was hashed out with AI, and then heavily edited by yours truly.