2019-11-15 The Century of the Self
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I’ve started watching The Century of the Self, Part 1. There are four
parts.
I found a copy on YouTube at the time and downloaded it in 2018 after
reading a discussion online. ¹ It’s also available from the Internet
Archive. ² ³ ⁴ ⁵
A few minutes in: Using propaganda for peace! Renaming propaganda to
council on public relations… I’m liking this documentary already!
A bit later, the first experiment: convincing women to smoke in
public. WTF this callousness is what creates evil in the world. 🤮
The idea that somebody had to discover a way to turn objects like
cigarettes into a way to make a statement (”torches of freedom” and
all the cigarette ads ever that followed), and that many other people
were willing to come along, and benefit from the manipulation of their
fellow humans… The disgust still lingers when people talk about
marketing, when they work in marketing.
Did I think my stance against consumerism was a kind of hidden
knowledge and nobody else had studied it? Or had the noise drained out
all the truth from advertising? When I look at this documentary and
hear bankers say we need to change society from a needs culture to a
culture of desires, that people must be trained to desire new things
before having used up the old, it’s as if somebody had removed my
earplugs and said: yo, you’re not alone. We all know this! We’ve been
doing it for years.
@technomancy asked me whether it was for a mature audience. Hah, I
wouldn’t dare tell an American what to show or what not to show to
their kids. The Atlantic is a cultural gulf we all try to ignore. I’m
24 minutes in and I’ve seen pictures of the first world war, but no
corpses; I’ve seen women smoke but nobody was naked; there was no
cruelty or torture. After all, it was shown on British television. If
you’re watching it with kids ten or twelve years old and talk to them
about advertising, you’re going to be fine. Also, I have no kids. 😃
This four part series looks like a must-see.
#Movies #Capitalism #Capitalism
Comments
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Thanks for recommending these! I watched them the other night and
thought they were great.
I’ve seen another documentary by Adam Curtis called HyperNormalisation
that I liked too, will have to go through his whole filmography.
@krozruch said: “I’ve been going through all of Adam Curtis’
documentaries recently. The Mayfair Set most recently - which is more
relevant to Brexit than I may have realised. All of them have
something to say. I first watched a handful of them (The Power of
Nightmares, The Century of the Self, and All Watched Over by Machines
of Loving Grace) as they came out and talked about them a lot. I’m
working on reviews of a few of them now. Great stuff!”
