Adam Curtis on AI, the BBC and Bucks Fizz

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23:55You do it all via the archive, and you have a system for grading it while you're watching all the clips. and very, very, very, very, very good or whatever it is. But you once said to me that you think that since the smartphone, people are too conscious now on camera. It is really interesting, this, because for this series, I spent a lot of time going through documentaries, news footage, in the BBC, going through the 90s. At about 1998, people stopped being real. I can't explain it any more than that. You know this from television. When you are watching someone on television, your radar knows almost immediately whether they are really i know they know that they're being filmed of course that's that self-consciousness but you know whether they are truly being themselves to an extent or whether they are just performing and somewhere about 1998 it's before the internet they begin to recede i couldn't really do it because to do that you would have to be rude to people you'd have to say look this person is performing and i don't like doing that at all and everyone in these films i like i think do you feel because what we've just been talking about that people stop being able to be authentic or whatever, that in future it's going to become harder and harder to make these kind of films because the more you move into the now or even to the last, say, the 2000s...

25:12The archive's going to get more boring. The archive is less... Because so much of what you do comes from the start of an interview or the end of an interview, when people think the cameras have stopped rolling. Well, I mean, I just got the sense that what you were watching, or 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. A lot of those, as you say, the older clips of people talking, not only, by the way, the accents we don't hear anymore.

25:42Yeah. There is a lack of self-consciousness that we don't see and hear anymore. A guilelessness. Stopped it. A guilelessness, yeah. What stopped it? I don't know. I think it's something to do. 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 i would argue and i tried to show this in the films that it was quite a wild and quite frightening time but it was also exciting up until the end of the 90s and it is very interesting that actually that very moment that i see the self beginning to recede down that tunnel you it's the very moment at which the labor party what was called new labor give away the last bit of their power, which is the control over the economy, over interest rates, to the Bank of England, which you could argue is one of the great reasons why we have such problems today economically.

26:35And I think it's to do with the fact that if you're internalised and you believe that everything you feel is the centre 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 a 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. And the attempt to control their own bodies. It's interesting, the stuff on bulimia and anorexia that features in the films.

27:13I thought it was important to separate out bulimia and anorexia. Yeah. What was really fascinating about bulimia, which Princess Diana gave a fascinating quote about, is that you can look normal. And I do think that it relates to what we're talking about, about the retreat of the self. Everything looks normal now, but in a strange, heightened, almost pantomime way. And it makes you suspect that there's 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 And if there is a revolution happening, it's beginning to brew inside people's heads.

27:51Do you think it's possible for a revolution? You talk, you believe, I know you believe that people can still come together in groups. No, you don't. No, I don't. It's not that I don't, but I think it's, I do believe it, but I think it's hard. And I think that the thing in their hands is preventing them. The phone in their hands is preventing them. It atomises them. and I think that some reaction against the technology must be the precursor to coming properly together in groups. I think that you need something that is so powerful in its imaginative response to the way people feel that it overwhelms that.

28:25Yes. I don't think you... This whole idea, it's the HR attitude to life, which is, oh, if phones are bad, we'll get rid of them. Just like you clear your desk and light a building. It isn't like that. Phones are a product and the way they are constructed and the feedback systems in social media are a response to us. And they are responding to the mood that has grown up in our society. I don't believe in technological determinism. I think it's us who are creating the way phones are. 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 that actually makes sense of why people feel this strange relationship with the phone.

29:05People who have come up with that language, to some extent, of the populists at the moment, Trump or even to a much lesser extent, Nigel Farage, who people feel talks more like the times. Or to be racist entertainment about it, the Joe Rogans of this world who are finding a way through that seems to make more sense to people. But I would argue that they are cosplaying a nostalgia. In a funny way, Trump is cosplaying old 1960s radicalism sometimes. He sometimes feels like that. it doesn't feel like the future it feels like they've receded into a i'm trying not to use the word performative but just a sort of a two-dimensional world and what we're waiting for is that sort of way someone a new form of collectivism will happen if it actually explains to you why you're feeling as you do do you think that would come from to to to bring it back to media do you think that would come from an individual as you say imagination is the thing you needed and often imagination is a is a is a solitary thing do you think it comes from somebody making a leap or do you think it comes from a generation who grow up watching everybody taking selfies of themselves next to statues pouting the same pout and thinking i wonder if there's something different this feels like the ancient i always i sometimes feel when i look at people with their phones i feel like i'm living in the past i feel like this is going to look so old one day when when we've worked our way through it do you think this new generation the way they look at media and the way they watch things and the ridiculousness of the media environment they've they've come into do you think their reaction to that might be the thing that saves us yeah don't you i i always think that i think i think any reaction has a an equal and opposite reaction but i just i think we're too steeped in it to be able to do it ourselves towards the end of the series i try and reconceptualize it and say what what originally was a liberating force finance and social media has become a force that extracts things for you and consciously there is this sense that everyone is trying to extract something out of you they want to extract money from you they're going to see lana del rey they want to charge you absolute fortunes at the same time they're trying to extract anger out of you in order to monetize that everything is just being played back played back played back and extracted out of you what's the first step is to conceptualize that what is this new system of power now the the politicians don't do that they never step outside their own world.

31:29Hard to because they have to be short-termist by the very nature of politics. As you say, self-consciously made themselves front-of-house people to power having completely divested themselves of meaningful powers. I mean, I sometimes wonder whether Trump is really a politician or whether he's actually something... Oh, he's definitely not. He's part of the extraction machine. What does it feel when you hear things like that Elon Musk is a big fan of your documentaries? How does that make you feel, Adam? Well, this was quite a while ago. Yeah. I was a bit baffled really i mean i always thought you must be stoned or something i mean my films are quite trippy what what would you think of neil and muslim the one i was more proud of was when i'm suddenly there was a flurry of tweets a little no quite a while ago kenya west was tweeting on about me and all my friends would text me saying kenya was kenya assist is texting about you texting about you and i was going that's good and then his final text is a real flourish he said well it was really good i mean quite frankly he could have taken this three-hour series and done it 20 minutes and I thought okay executive producer put it on the poster yeah something I think is interesting that you've done is that you worked out very quickly that you weren't so interested in channels and you wanted to put all of your work straight onto iPlayer which is and it's bought you a totally new audience are you very glad you took that decision it's now a media access and how do you think it's bought a new audience and why does it bring one into the BBC well I was asked about 12 years ago by the woman who was running iPlayer at that point.

32:54And it was just completely a repeat channel. She said, well, I've got a small amount of money. Would you like to make a film for me? So I went and made this thing called Bitter Lake, which was an hour and 75 minutes long. I ran shots for two and a half minutes. Which is about Afghanistan and is amazing. Yeah. And it was completely experimental. And it started with everyone dancing over lots of ages to burial. It was quite odd. And it got a massive audience. and the BBC were like, oh, but I don't think they've still understood. The point about iPlayer and anything online is you know from yourself that you go to it with a completely different sensibility than you do when you watch something live, even if it's just a repeat programme.

33:37You have a much more open, relaxed attitude to it. And I still don't think my colleagues in the channels fully get that. And if you do have that more open sensibility, then you can experiment and make things that are more open and that's all I tried to do. Yes, I'm very glad to go there. It's such an interesting thing that, well, because again, like politicians, they have a 20th century language that doesn't work. Again, if you're a legacy broadcaster, it's very, very hard with the DNA of an organisation like that to understand where culture is going and all the things that have always worked for you and all the things that have always protected you are no longer working.

34:14It's very, very hard to change that sort of culture within an organisation where everyone was mentored by the person above them, by the person above them, by the person above them. Do you feel there is a shift in our terrestrial broadcasters? They're beginning to understand that people are watching and consuming things in very different ways. And that they need to bring more people up like you who might have quite odd ideas about how to use the BBC to do things. Well, someone asked me what I would do if I was 23 today, and I just went, well, I'd go to YouTube. It's as simple as that. TikTok has become formalised now, so it's no fun.

34:45Instagram is far too buttoned up and neat. It's the last Wild West, so I'd go there. I wouldn't go to the BBC now. And who would you ask to fund you, or would you not? You'd do it cheaply. I mean, to be honest, I operate inside the BBC because I'm incredibly cheap. It's amazing sometimes, haven't you? You've told me some of your series, of course. It's sort of amazing that you can do it. Well, I edit it myself. Yes. I mean, that's it. And that's really all it is. And all the footage is free because it's BBC. Most of it is free, and we pay for little bits. But it's also because I close any UK, it doesn't cost very much.

35:17Can I talk about a slightly more prosaic thing, which is just documentaries in general? And it seems these days the easiest way to get a documentary made is to have a celebrity-led documentary, some of which are terrific, some of which bring new audiences into it. What's your take on that? Yours are obviously archive-based, but the broader world of presented documentaries and celebrities getting first billing. I take your view of the same. Some of them are really good. And some of them, you just think, well, this is cynical. And the sense I get with television is that people are flailing around.

35:53And every now and then they hit it right. And quite a lot of times they get it completely wrong. Just like life. Yes, just like life. But I do get a sense that, well, this is what I'm saying, is that they haven't yet found a way of, if they feel a bit old, I'm not being rude here, it just feels a bit, a lot of stuff feels quite dated. I think you were saying that earlier on. It just feels like we've gone past all that. And to be brutal, that's what I feel about celebrity-presented documentaries. They were really good in the early parts of this century. BBC Three was really good at some of them.

36:29They're an old language. They're an old language because they are based on this idea that celebrity is important. And I have this lurking theory that maybe celebrity is on the wing. I don't know what you think, but I just feel that it's... Oh, God, I hope not. It's sort of, well, there you go. No. Well, I've got this theory that entertainment or mass entertainment has become something else. Oh, great, go on. I'm going to lean forward. Now, I'm part of the problem as well. is that there's a historian I really like. He's called Eric Hobsbawm. Oh, yeah. Very good. And he was a populist as well. And he's on Shifty.

37:02And I put him on Shifty because I thought he was great. I think it's documentary. I said he's in Shifty. OK. I'm light entertainment, so I say he's on Shifty. I'm sorry. He's on that show Shifty. You watch. You like it. See, Richard Catterjee. Yes, exactly. Exactly. He wrote a piece introducing one of his books where he says, I really like the phrase, he says, there is this, what he called it, It's the twilight zone between memory and history. And what he's talking about is in the most recent past, the past is contained in millions and millions of fragments of experience inside people's heads.

37:34That's where it is. Taken together, it means nothing. It's just like a giant mess. And then he says that what happens is those millions of fragments, most of them just fall away, and those that remain settle into a pattern, which becomes history. And I've got this theory that because we are continually replaying the past all the time on our technology. Because there's so much recorded data now. There's so much recorded data. There's so many old recorded programs that they keep on adding to the fog of experience and they won't go away. Yeah. Which means that actually we are stuck forever in that twilight zone.

38:10We can't put a narrative on experience. We can't impose order on it. We can't do what he was describing. We can't let it all fall away and then something emerge which gives it a shape out of it. which actually means that we are blocking the way to the future. That actually entertainment and people like me who continually replay songs, images, music from the past. But you have tried to put an artistic, impose an artistic order on that kind of formless tide of experience of the last 40 years. And I think you have. Yeah, but it's still playing it all back to you. You know, whether it even bucks fizz or not, it's still playing back.

38:49And someone pointed out to me the other day that when you watch, I don't know, comedy shows on YouTube, you're listening to the laughter of the dead most of the time. But it's a haunting. That's like whenever I see a cat or a dog on an old drama, I'm like, oh no, that cat's no longer with us. Like Brune. Like Brune. Like Brune. But is that a function of the fact that we are quite old? Is that a function of the fact that we sort of came of age at a time where actually this extraordinary wave of culture was coming at us? films, TV programs, people being filmed in their homes which you haven't seen before, pop music.

39:24All of this was new and we're the generation who has gone back over it and over it and over it whereas if you were coming to the generation now that is just a part of the culture which is our generation's attempt to constantly rehash our own culture. I think that's probably true but I think what we created is a monster embracing everyone. It's narcotising. The technology to some extent has been narcotising. That's what I mean by the fact that Yeah, that when they people, it drugs you. Oh, lovely. Narcotising, I like that. It comes from the word narcotic. Yeah, OK. That's not a long read. Yeah, I worked it out.

39:57That's what I mean of having the phone in your hand all the time, is that it sort of anaesthetises you from things that in previous eras you might have rushed out and grabbed. Would you like to be the person who cracks the code and brings us into the next bit of the future? Is there something in your work that you think, I wonder if I could help? I mean, I think I'm part of the problem, personally. I mean, I'm still doing... I just wonder whether in 50 years' time they'll look back and they say they just wanted to stay with the dead. You know, they were frightened of the future. That's what I think people were saying.

40:25I go back to that thing I spotted in the 90s. Everyone was mixing and jumbling everything up. It wasn't just what you were saying about there was this mass of things. It was the way everything got jumbled up way before the Internet. And that's what we live with today. And it's sort of like a ring of two-dimensional images and sounds all around us. And we can't see the future. That's what I feel. I mean, but it may be a generational thing. Yeah, I wonder if my brother often talks about, he's a musician, he often talks about classical music, how there is a canon. At the time, that was all new music.

40:55And after 100 years, 200 years, we agree on the things that we now play. And I feel like the second half of that 20th century, that will be the entertainment decade. And that will be what it's remembered for. And of course, all those acts will live forever because it'll be AI generated and all those films will be watched forever. And people hopefully will be able to move on to something else. And that would just be a period of 60, 70 years, which were the entertainment years in the same way classical music was the 18th and 17th century. But it may be even deeper than that, that actually some of the underlying belief systems that underlie that entertainment age, like self-expression.

41:27Self-expression is now seen as the God. Everyone wants to be self-expressive. Maybe that's the conformity of our time. Like we used to look, we look back at Victorians and say, oh, they were very conformist. Maybe the conformism of our time is, oh, everyone has got to express themselves. What if we don't? What if we actually surrender ourselves to something else? Maybe that will... What if we stop expressing ourselves? Yeah, a great believer in tamping down the feelings and not talking about them all. Listen to our podcast on that subject next week. But imagine you came out of your house, walked around the world by yourself and didn't tell anyone.

41:58Yeah. You couldn't conceive of it, could you? Well, I'd do it, but I'd love to do a documentary about it. The brilliant comedian Sean Locke once said he did a joke on 8 Out of 10 Cats and he said, what they should do with Big Brother, they should send everyone in there, tell them they're filming, but not film it. And everyone's laughing. And he goes, the trouble is, I'd really like to see that. Yeah. And so generative AI and your thoughts on that, is that... Where's that taking us? Where's that taking us? Somewhere positive? Well, I'm extremely suspicious of all the theories about whether AI is good or bad, because I don't think anyone knows.

42:28They're just projecting their own fears or their optimism onto it. It just, you don't know. What I think about it is let's look at how it works. It's the ghost of our time, because what it does is it goes back and scrapes all our past. I was talking about the fragments earlier on. The fragments of our past, it takes them up and it mashes them up into this complex thing which then feeds itself back to us. They are actually taking our own past and haunting us with it in a strange... Telling us it's new. Telling us it's new, but actually maybe keeping us stuck in the past. I mean, as I was saying, we're surrounded by images, dreams, music, films of the past, what AI is doing is taking it much further.

43:12It's actually going back to our own past. It's going back to our own images, our own language, the words we wrote, the phrases we wrote, our own emotions, because out there in the server farms are our feelings written down in fragmentary form, little images, little moments, little intense moments of fear and love. And it's just scraping it all, putting it all together in some strange, almost like cubist form, and playing back to us a world built out of that. And if I was going to write a ghost story now, I would do it about that, that we are haunted. It's the haunting, which makes me suspect, for which I had no evidence at all, is that AI is not the future.

43:52It's the final end of the past. It's the moment at which the past came for us. We will have to escape from it. I think that might be us done. I think that might be us done. That was so interesting. I could talk to you for absolutely ever. But Shifty is on now, it's on iPlayer, and it is a beautiful mix of archive stuff, political stuff, the tectonic plates shifting, but just beautiful moments, as you say, of ghosts and of people. And the one thing that I took from it all the way through is we have not changed. When you see kids dancing at discos, all of these things, you think we are all the same.

44:24It's just more stuff is being thrown at us. It's incredibly moving. And as well as being sort of, as I always view things, it's funny and it's surprising, it is incredibly moving. I tried to capture moments which I found moving. Yeah. You certainly did. And thank you for being our first ever guest. Thank you so much, Adam. Thank you.

44:44That was our first ever interview. That was fascinating. I mean, he doesn't make it hard for you, does he? Yeah, that was amazing. He talked for quite a long time in a very interesting fashion. Yeah, I absolutely love doing that. It's really interesting to sort of get behind it all, even though that series really gets behind some other things as well. I find it because he's such a genre of one. It's interesting talking about how he sees himself as fitting into entertainment. Yeah. And where we've been and where we're going was fascinating. Yeah. I enjoyed that so much. I hope listeners that you enjoyed that.

45:11I thought it felt like an awful lot to think about. And if you haven't watched Shifty, I'd really, really recommend it. It's a real listen. It's a mood. And go back. If you haven't watched all of his other films, they all remain on iPlayer. He is a BBC, as he put it, a sort of current affairs journalist in lots of ways at heart. and all of his films are on iPlayer and everyone is completely compelling and sort of disruptive of any sort of thought patterns you might have fallen into, I think. He always makes me think completely differently about something. Doesn't he, Jess? Talking of which, we're talking about Jaws again on our bonus episode.

45:44Let me make you think completely differently about the shoot of Jaws, which we did the preamble to the shoot of the first ever summer blockbuster and we're now going to talk about the shoot, which was quite troubled, Richard. It was, but every time we do any episode now, I'm going to be thinking, but yeah, but what would Adam Curtis say? Thank you so much, Adam. Thank you, Marina. See you next Tuesday. See you next Tuesday.

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