From Brexit to Donald Trump: welcome to the age of hypernormalisation in London

Surreality has became our new reality. Ellen E Jones explains why...
Surreal: Trump and Clinton during the town hall debate at Washington University
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Ellen E. Jones13 October 2016

Brexit. The rise of Trump. The rise of IS. The financial crisis. The housing crisis. The refugee crisis. In the past few years we’ve had to assimilate a string of ever more extraordinary events into our understanding of the world. How this surreality became our new reality is the subject of Hypernormalisation, a film by cult documentary-maker Adam Curtis.

In his 25 years as the BBC’s in-house iconoclast, Curtis has won six Baftas, blown countless minds and enraged those on both the Left and the Right with a journalistic stance he describes as “post-political”. His films are not merely historical documentaries or beautiful arrangements of archive footage and music, they offer up alternative paradigms of power.

In Hypernormalisation, Curtis locates global power not in our governments but in finance, computing and management. It is this system, he says, that creates and maintains our sense of “transparent disenchantment”. The sense we have that things aren’t quite right, yet we’re unable to do anything about it.

He describes how this all plays out in the world’s most global city:

The Cityscape

“If you’re in London, what you see around you is all these new buildings being built and they all look exactly alike. But what you also know about these buildings is that none of us are ever going to be able to afford to live in them. After the financial crash of 2008 there was a wave of money coming into the city that couldn’t go into the stock market, so it went into property instead. These blocks you’re actually looking at are not buildings, they’re blocks of money.”

Work

“You go into an office. Are you sure that’s your real job? The economy used to be based on making things. Now the only thing that keeps it going is shopping. Maybe that’s your real job — and your days in the office, in the “service industries”, are just invented jobs to give you the money to go shopping.”

Social media

“You are in an office doing your fake job but you’re spending your time being angry on social media. You’re writing posts saying, ‘This is outrageous!’, but because of the filters, that anger only goes to people who already agree with you, so nothing changes. What does happen is that those angry messages get sent round the system more than sweet little messages. The fact is that angry people click more and clicks are gold dust, clicks are the measure of success for all corporations and media platforms. So the more angry you get, the more you actually keep everything stable. Your anger fuels those systems.”

Brexit

“Then came Brexit. In this city we are surrounded by journalists, think-tank people who appear on Newsnight, television presenters, politicians, researchers and academics. Their job was supposed to be to tell us about the world. What Brexit showed is that absolutely none of them had any idea. Brexit gave people outside of London this big button that just said “F*ck off” and, naturally, they pressed it.

“The day after Brexit, internet activist Tom Steinberg, a Remainer, wanted to know what Brexit people felt but he couldn’t. He couldn’t because the filters that were set up, in this supposedly democratic knowledge-gathering machine, were so strong.”

The rise of Trump

“Maybe even politicians aren’t really politicians any longer. Increasingly they have become pantomime figures whose real job is to make us angry. Trump is another example, a bit like Gaddafi — we invent these simplified pantomime villains. His function is actually to make liberals very angry and that anger, far from changing anything, just fuels this modern system of managerial power through social media and all the clicks that go nowhere. Click, share, go nowhere; that’s the motto of our time. But maybe the pantomime figures are now running the world.”

Hillary Clinton v Donald Trump: US Presidential Election

1/70

Hyper-normcore

“The key thing about cool is instead of getting engaged politically with groups of other people to whom you have to surrender your identity, we wanted to be self-expressive individuals. Look at the Seventies and Eighties, you had the rise of radical art, music and culture. Somewhere in the Nineties, the politics dropped away altogether and you were left with the ironic, cool distance, the ‘whateva’. Cool irony originally had a political analysis that said, ‘We’re detaching from this and looking at it’. Then it just became ‘We’re detached’.

The whole point about the ‘normcore’ trend, for instance, is that you’re pretending to be normal, but you have to send out signals that you’re not really normal. Pretending not to be normal has also become normal. Or rather hypernormal.”

Protest groups

“People know there is this inequality that’s bad, people know there is corruption, but when they try to protest against it, that always seems to fail. Look at Occupy London. They had emotional impetus and support way beyond the normal radical movements and they blew it because they didn’t have an idea of an alternative world. They thought they were outsiders attacking the system but actually they were adopting its very ideas. The only way to get a change is to pull back and see the system for what it is. And what that system is trying to do is desperately keep things stable, keep things as they are. But in a dynamic world you can’t do that — and what we feel today as odd, unreal and sometimes fake are really the cracks beginning to show though.

Change is terrifying but it’s also thrilling. The first person who comes along and grabs that is going to take us somewhere else.”

Follow Ellen E Jones on Twitter: @MsEllenEJones

Hypernormalisation will premiere on BBC iPlayer at 9pm on Sunday

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