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
