Adam Curtis: The Map No Longer Matches the Terrain
Since the late 1980s, British documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis has been delving into the unexpected ways in which politics, economics, religion, technology and philosophy intersect to create the world we live in. His television journalism has earned him a cult following across disciplines: his visuals are part of Massive Attack’s current touring live show, which explores geopolitics, climate action and disinformation. In this extended Q&A, author Nathalie Olah speaks with Curtis about climate change, and how nostalgia and doomerism are affecting our ability to organise for, and imagine, a better tomorrow.
Nathalie Olah: What are your feelings on the current climate change discussion?
Adam Curtis: I’m bored of the way climate change is discussed because it seems to completely ignore the central question of power. The discussion is dominated by… not technocrats, but people of a technical mindset; people who think that if you can somehow dial the temperature down then everything will be solved, and I don’t think that’s going to happen. The climate change movement has gone nowhere since the Rio [Earth Summit] conference in 1992. At that point, scientists who conceived of the problem as a system that simply needed to be stabilised took over, and because that’s a powerful model, it bled out into our idea of society as a whole.
NO: Do you think there’s a similar phenomenon happening in electoral politics; a nostalgic yearning for a moment when liberalism appeared to be working more effectively?
AC: Yes, there’s a great deal of nostalgia, of resetting what you had – but if you look underneath the votes that this new government got, it’s delicate. It’s interesting that Labour ignored the green movement, or the climate change movement, to a great degree, in the interests of getting other votes from provincial towns. That seems to have been their strategy. Nostalgia might be at play, although it might be too early to tell how widespread it is. There’s a great yearning among ‘good thinking people’ for everything to just shut up and go back to ‘being nice’ again.
NO: Do you think it’s reasonable for people to draw comparisons between the cultural climate of today and 1930s Europe?
AC: No. I think it’s nostalgic, to be brutal. What’s happening here, over Gaza, is completely new. The kind of societies people were yearning for then were highly centralised and controlled technocracies in which you, the individual, would disappear. This is what fascism in its original incarnation was about. We now live in a world of hyper-individualism. That’s not what people want now.
“We’ve retreated into a sense that there’s always a new apocalypse on the horizon; it’s a terrible teddy bear that the bourgeois greens hug to themselves and say, ‘We’re all going to die, it’s terrible.’ That’s not the way you change the world” – Adam Curtis
NO: What do you make of the American election and the new Democratic vanguard?
AC: It’s inevitable that some journalists, sooner or later, will start saying Kamala Harris has no policies. Others will say that she replaced an old person, but that she and Walz want to bring back an old time, before Donald Trump, so it’s a case of going backwards dressed up as going forward. Then there will be journalists who say she is just as vacuous as Donald Trump. It’s waves of hysteria caused by a total vacuum of ideas.
People who voted Trump were angry and wanted change, but when he got in he didn’t actually carry out many of his pledges. He was lazy, and he reduced taxes for rich people – which is what Republicans do – but apart from that, he didn’t build a wall and he didn’t start fixing the terrible infrastructure in America.
Now, what Kamala Harris represents, and what Keir Starmer represents, is a large portion of the middle class that says, “We’re fed up with all this anger, we just want it to shut up.” They might get their way. The other possibility is that these politicians really do represent the end of a decaying system of power that rose up during the Cold War, and because they are bereft of ideas they are talking in memes and with emotional spasms.
NO: Well, on nostalgia, it’s perhaps that these presidential candidates embody two dying ideologies that Americans can’t let go of.
AC: I think the major, current feeling is of disenchantment with politics because those in charge don’t know. They don’t have a picture of what they want to do and are just trying to manage things. People are waiting for someone to say, “This is the society we’re going to create.” Trump hasn’t done that. Trump has nostalgia, but I’m not sure it’s completely nostalgic; what he’s channelling is anger from people who feel marginalised. That’s true of Reform in the UK, too.
This is a strange year, in which election upon election is overturning the expectations of those who ran the old systems. Everyone thought Modi was going to storm in and turn India into a super-nationalist state, but he was undermined. The ANC is falling apart in South Africa – there’s a mood check. In Mexico, you’ve got a green technocrat. The old smug certainties are being undermined. You get the feeling we’re at the end of something and we have absolutely no idea what’s coming.
NO: On climate change, is there a failure of language? We talk about melting ice caps, rising sea levels and immense floods, but these images don’t seem to precipitate a widespread shift in thinking.
AC: We’ve retreated into a sense that there’s always a new apocalypse on the horizon; it’s a terrible teddy bear that the bourgeois greens hug to themselves and say, “We’re all going to die, it’s terrible.” That’s not the way you change the world. In fact, it frightens people, and when people are frightened they don’t want change. It’s one of the stupidest things I’ve ever seen. Of course, there are serious issues. And of course, they’re incredibly dangerous. But fear is the last resort of those who’ve failed to mobilise people to transform the world for the better. I get grumpy about this because it’s almost cowardly.
An aspect of the climate movement ignores the fact that there are people who are having a horrible time right now; for whom poverty today is more important than worrying about the climate tomorrow, and you can’t blame them. The solution is to create a movement that says, “We are going to transform the world so that we avoid the disaster in the mid-future, and we’re going to transform it in such a way that it becomes better now for you.” No one has done that and I wonder why.
I wonder whether the middle classes are feeling their own power waning; that, unconsciously, they’re projecting their doom for their own class status onto the world. What’s also hampering the climate change movement is the narcissism of the boomers. They know they’re about to die, and because they were the first, big individualists of our modern era, they’ve discovered that there’s nothing beyond them and it terrifies them; “It’s not me that’s going to die, it’s the whole world that’s going to die.” They’re driven by solipsism.
What the movement should be saying is, “No, you will die, but in the time you’ve got left, you should be working hard to ensure we create a different kind of society, which helps people now and transforms the world in the future.”
NO: That’s a great diagnosis.
AC: In the old days – and this is not nostalgia, I’m just noting – when you were part of a church, a trade union, a political party or revolutionary movement, you felt that what you did would go on beyond you. Today, people are self-contained units and can’t bear the idea that they won’t exist. That’s not to say there aren’t lots of people doing good things, but what we need more than that is a picture of how this could transform the world now.
“[AI] is a strange haunting; a vast collage of our dreams and fantasies that we’ve put online. AI can’t imagine anything that hasn’t happened yet, and good, optimistic, progressive politics imagines something that doesn’t yet exist” – Adam Curtis
NO: I was thinking about some of the work you’ve made around AI. One of my frustrations with the emphasis on AI is a belief that the world’s problems are down to a failure of comprehension, rather than a failure of will and imagination. AI companies say they can help us understand and optimise certain systems, but without the will to change those systems these improvements will be marginal at best.
AC: Yes, and AI can have no imagination because AI has to be trained on stuff that’s already happened. If I was going to do a clever drama about AI, I’d do a ghost story because, in a way, what’s coming out of AI is stuff that is made of all that. It’s a strange haunting; a vast collage of our dreams and fantasies that we’ve put online. AI can’t imagine anything that hasn’t happened yet, and good, optimistic, progressive politics imagines something that doesn’t yet exist.
NO: Yes, and they have to input ethical heuristics to avoid human rights violations, for example, but naturally, the instinct of AI is to move towards a kind of Malthusian diagnosis of the world, and of ‘efficiency’ at all costs.
AC: Yes, and it also sees the world as a static system, which is another problem with the climate change movement. Feedback is the most terrible ideological problem with the tech world. They believe that if you can get the feedback right, the world can stabilise. Well, history isn’t stable. No, it’s a dynamic world; the forces of history roar on, they change. We surf on them. It’s great.
AI is going to be a very good administrative system. Someone was telling me that the SwiftKey system now in the NHS is brilliant. It’s solving the problem of [access to and backlogs of] appointments. Going back to the earlier point, the real problem with individualism is that it undermines democracy, because democracy depends on accumulating people together.
People have collective power because they all agree on something, and from that point they can change the world. If you have individuals acting like screaming piglets who just want to be themselves, it completely screws democracy. So the other argument is that what you’re going to have – and I don’t know how far I believe this – is a benign AI that manages lots of people’s lives. The problem is: who writes the code?
NO: A system in which we are all conceived of as individual nodes?
AC: Yes, and we would all get to live under the illusion of individualism, but the machine would know the truth; that we are, in fact, all very like each other. “They all like Taylor Swift, give them more.” No one likes to say it, but sometimes you appreciate the stuff recommended by the Spotify algorithm.
NO: We can’t say that, though – this is meant to be a celebration of independent music and thinking!
AC: See – and we are back to the modern rules of liberal fear!
NO: In Doppelganger, Naomi Klein speaks to something I recognised in your work – particularly in the segment on Jane Fonda in HyperNormalisation – which is how the body became the new frontier of individualism; where the focus is on becoming as fit and resilient to the outside world as possible. Have you thought about that in the context of Covid?
AC: Well, that emerged around the AIDS crisis. It’s very paradoxical. I wonder whether we haven’t fully understood the extent to which AIDS has had an effect. They made these terrifying warning adverts about AIDS in the 80s, and I wonder if that’s related to the instinct of thinking, “God, I’ve got to protect my body.” If you have the idea that you can no longer change the world, all you’ve got left is to change yourself. Your body becomes the territory that you can exercise control over because no one is going to look after you. Also, the mind: anxiety, trauma.
NO: And then there’s the book [The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk] that says trauma and the body are one and the same. That trauma is carried in the body.
AC: I know! Have you seen Inside Out 2? It’s all about anxiety. The new character is anxiety; it was trauma last year, anxiety this year. What’s fascinating about Inside Out 2 is that there’s no mention of changing society. This is the modern thing: you deal with it all inside yourself, forget society. I deal with this to an extent in [2002 documentary] The Century of the Self. It’s been around since the 1960s and radical psychotherapy, but it’s become almost physical now.
NO: What makes you the way you are – tentatively optimistic, I suppose, about the present moment – rather than sharing those feelings of anxiety, dread, stubbornness?
AC: I made a film for Charlie Brooker about a problem at the heart of the liberal middle class, which I call “Oh-dear-ism”; you come to this point where everything is bad and your only response is to say, “Oh dear.” It came to a head with Trump and Brexit. What gave that class of patrician liberals its sense of dignity and self-worth was this implicit feeling that they cared for the little people underneath them. They felt there was a feedback of gratitude and the gratitude fed a sense of dignity and self-worth.
NO: It was a paternalistic dynamic.
AC: Yes, and for a long time they were probably right. But suddenly, in 2015 and 2016, those little people turned round and said, “We don’t like you, we think you’re arrogant” – and they can’t bear it. I voted against Brexit but I was astonished by the reactions to it. It wasn’t just a case of [the patrician class] saying, “Oh, we fucked that up,” it was like, “They’re stupid.”
NO: Hillary Clinton is terrible for this, too. As soon as she lost, and arguably before, the tone became extremely patronising. Raymond Williams talks about how the ‘mass’ is just a way of reframing ‘the mob’, which is a way of stigmatising anyone who isn’t you.
AC: I know bourgeois people who still say, “They’re stupid,” and I say, “No, you’re stupid, because you can’t understand why everyone dislikes you.” It’s interesting to observe a class that’s losing power and ask yourself where that power is going. The traditional left position is to say that it’s the bankers, but bankers say, “We do arbitrage, we spot gaps and go for it, we’re just chancers.” That’s not power. It has an effect, but it’s not power. The other left position is that we’ve returned to a sort of feudalism, but I’m not convinced by that. My theory is that the map we currently have in our heads no longer matches the territory we are in. We’re waiting for someone to draw a new map, and until then, we’re just going to witter away to each other on podcasts.
NO: So is the new frontier for holding power to account through whistleblowers? And is that going to happen at the scale that is needed when we see what happened to Assange, or the strange circumstances surrounding the people who have spoken out against giant corporate monopolies?
AC: No. The old model was investigative journalism, where you would find a whistleblower, or documents, to expose the corruption to us – the readers, the viewers – and then we would get angry and pressure lawmakers. That doesn’t work now. When I read that rich people hold their money in tax havens, I think, “Yes, I know that, but I also know that nothing is going to happen about it.” In a way, investigative journalism is a cliché now because it’s [only] telling us that the world is corrupt. What I want is journalism that explains to me why nothing is ever done about it.
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