Conversation

I’m increasingly using “hypernormalization” to tag behaviors/people. Pity Adam Curtis claimed a really good term with that incoherent documentary that largely missed the point of the phenomenon, though he almost hit it. I had high hopes after Century of Self. Wasted opportunity.
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I use the term to mean: ignoring weirdness in environment and doubling down aggressively on most recent behaviors and postures that had a credible claim to sanity, injecting escalating amounts of energy into preserving a shrinking zone where an illusion of status quo ante holds.
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Curtis otoh told some rambling story about Qadaffi and hedge funds and stuff that went nowhere and had no point to it. Though arguably Libya story was a good example of a hypernormalized western/NATO military machine in action within its own manufactured hypernormalcy field.
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Century of the Self otoh was great. He found a conspiratorial plot throughline (Ed Bernays and the PR-Freud nexus) that hit just the right nerve in terms of trading out a major dynamic. I went “AaaHA!” Wish we could get him to do-over hypernormalization with a better throughline
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Things that fit hypernormalization the way I’ve defined it: - Recycling behaviors among consumers - Neourbanism/premium mediocre lifestyles - Mainstream media post 2016 - Metastasized financialization post subprime - Silicon Valley startup scene since about 2017 - China
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I screened the film for my conservative parents in 2016 but they weren't that into it. I thought the soundtrack was really effective. Is not the acceptance of the films failures because of effective spectacle not itself a lived-in example of hypernormalization?
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I'm not that meta yet... I'd like an actual account of hypernormalization rather than a performance art piece embodying the phenomenon without illuminating it... I mean if we're down to "good soundtrack" as a saving grace, it's a failure, period.
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