Ominous Noise

In Charlie Brooker's 2014 Wipe — a grim but fun recap of the year's big events with snarky commentary about how they were covered in the media — there is a short segment by Adam Curtis, which attempts to explain why people can't seem to make sense out of the world around them anymore.

I thought it was quite beautiful and enlightening, so I wrote a few notes to comment and basically explicate it to myself.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3EoNsGHZD0
(It starts at 28:32.)

Curtis talks about a man called Vladislav Surkov, who was a "grey eminence" to Putin in Russia, and one of the main architects of the "managed democracy" that has characterised Putin's regime. Surkov's big idea was to create a stupefying political reality for the Russian people thanks to a kind of elaborate political theatre. It consisted in conjuring up artificial "grassroots" pro-Putin nationalist movements like Nashi on the one hand, while on the other hand also funding all sorts of groups — a constantly changing mixed bag, which included neo-nazis as well as progressives, many opposed to the government. The point of this limited support for opposition groups by an authoritarian regime wasn't at all to foster pluralism and political choice, but rather to muddy the waters and to make it very difficult for the public to actually understand the situation. Who is on what side? Who's interests does this or that organisation really stand for? What is real and what is a front? It's like the Bob Dylan song: you know something is happening, but you don't know what it is.

The weird twist is that this was not done in secret, quite the contrary: Surkov publicly explained and acknowledged his manipulations. According to Curtis, this strategy is really the application of practices inspired from contemporary conceptual art to politics: mainly the post-modern notion that no single discourse plausibly describes (or comments on, or reflects) the world, but rather that such plausible descriptions are myriad; that they are often contradictory, and may even be internally incoherent; that, unlike in the age of innocence that preceeded our muddled, anxious times, there is no longer any way of meaninfully designating one as "the truth" to the exclusion of the others. Things are happening — bad things surely, a crisis... But we are all hypnotized, mired in the fractured midset the authorities strive to keep us in with their bewildering contardictory stories. We remain impotent, consternated and befuddled witnesses, who say "oh dear!" while the people pulling the strings have their way.

Yes, because Curtis then argues that such manipulations are also at work in advanced democracies, like the UK. The public is told by people in authority that the economy is picking up... But wages are down and unemployment is up. They are told austerity budgets are a necessity to cut the deficit... But the deficit keeps growing, and in fact, through "quantitative easing", huge amounts are being transfered from the public coffers to the pockets of the very richest individuals. British soldiers are back from Afghanistan... But who won that war? And what was it all for? The public is offered no linear explanations, only a profusion of soundbites. Things don't seem to add up. Governments are doubling down on absurd and unpopular neo-liberal economic policies, which ought to have been utterly discredited by the present ongoing crisis — but, on the contrary, we are told in patronizing tones by the grown-ups, the right honorable people in charge, that there is no other choice. Even the most dim-witted of citizens can't help but suspect that we are being steered into the rocks, and yet there are no stirrings of revolution, only quiet desperation, or alternatively a frantic search for the vulnerable scapegoats provided by racism and xenophobia.

Of course, here or in the UK, it’s not like there’s actually a self-conscious conspiracy of sinister men called Dr. Evil perhaps or Cobra Commander, or even Vladislav Surkov, meeting in darkened rooms to weave their webs of deceit. There are no Illuminati. But there are governments and ruling classes completely divorced from the people they are meant to represent. There is a capture and subversion of democratic systems by obscenely avid, ruthless oligarchies, with the complicity of their henchmen in the media and the professional elites. But although the public might have intimations of this, might be vaguely outraged in fact, might certainly be angry... No mainstream discourse exists to coherently articulate the road to an alternative reality; no groove can yet channel the collective discontent; for now, it is still unclear what to do and where to go.