Jon Ronson in Conversation With Adam Curtis

Metadata

Author: Jon Ronson
Full Title: Jon Ronson in Conversation With Adam Curtis
Category: #articles
URL: https://www.vice.com/en/article/exmw3j/jon-ronson-interviews-adam-curtis-393

Highlights

The problem is how that material is then used, when it’s processed through broadcast central. It is taken and fitted into increasingly rigid formats in TV that tend to remove the very thing that has been captured so well in the original rushes: the emotional truth of the situation. What it felt like to be there. And what you would think if you yourself were there. It’s part of a much bigger problem. I’m not just talking about news, but about all factual reporting on television. The way they tell stories about the world feels increasingly thin—and more and more detached from the way all of us think and feel. Journalism used to open up reality to tell us new stuff. But now it is helping to keep us all inside the bubble by playing back stuff we already know in slightly altered forms.
Journalism’s job should always be to explain things to you. But in our age it should do that with real emotional power. But it doesn’t. It has become rigid and full of cliches, and in response people turn away and immerse themselves in the stories of themselves and their friends’ lives. Which is exciting—and a new kind of world—but it leaves large parts of the public world completely unexamined, which means that people in power can do more and more what they like.
So information becomes a currency through which you buy friends and become accepted into the system. That makes it very difficult for bits of information that challenge the accepted views to get into the system. They tend to get squeezed out. I think the thing that proves my point dramatically are the waves of shaming that wash through social media—the thing you have spotted and describe so well in your book. It’s what happens when someone says something, or does something, that disturbs the agreed protocols of the system. The other parts react furiously and try to eject that destabilizing fragment and regain stability.
I don’t think these waves are “political” in the liberal way the shamers proudly think. They are political in a completely different way, because they work to create a static, conservative world where nothing really changes.
I have this perverse theory that, in about ten years, sections of the internet will have become like the American inner cities of the 1980s. Like a John Carpenter film—where, among the ruins, there are fierce warrior gangs, all with their own complex codes and rules—and all shouting at each other. And everyone else will have fled to the suburbs of the internet, where you can move on and change the world. I think those suburbs are going to be the exciting, dynamic future of the internet. But to build them I think it will be necessary to leave the warrior trolls behind. And to move beyond the tech-utopianism that simply says that passing information around a network is a new form of democracy. That is naive, because it ignores the realities of power.