アダム・カーティス：「芸術が世界を変えられるという考えには懐疑的」

June 14, 2025: a barrage of Iranian missiles soars through the night sky en route to Israel, passing over a wedding party in Lebanon. In the background, a soundsystem blasts out “Gimme! Gimme! Gimme!” by ABBA. Guests gather around a turquoise pool to film the surreal scene on their iPhones. Just a couple of hours later, one of these videos will be reshared by an X account called Future Adam Curtis B-Roll. In the past, the British filmmaker’s work has been described as “dazzling”, “terrifying” and “incoherent” – today, his vision of the world has come to life before our eyes.

Or maybe that’s not entirely accurate. Adam Curtis is well aware of the memes that parody and pay tribute to his work on social media; he “loves it”, in fact, as he tells me when we speak over the phone. But he resists the idea that the vision of the world they represent – a world full of strange contradictions, jarring transitions, and images that are equal parts haunting and comical – is his, and his alone. “I don’t think it’s my way of seeing the world. I think it’s our way of seeing the world,” he explains. “I noticed very early on, in the late 90s, that people talked to each other in a much more jumpy way. They jumped between politics, culture, psychology, art, and they were talking about what it all meant, and jumbling it up. I don’t think I invented that, I just expressed it.”

Very few filmmakers have such a keen ear for the ways people are speaking, thinking and processing the world around them, though. That’s what makes Curtis’s films so distinctive, from 2002’s The Century of the Self, to HyperNormalisation (2016), and the more recent TraumaZone (2022). That’s what makes it possible to share a clip on the internet, call it future Adam Curtis B-roll, and have everyone know exactly what you’re talking about. 

There’s another meme that’s spread from political message boards to the mainstream internet in recent years, which consists of a single phrase: “Nothing ever happens.” This is false, of course. Things are “happening” all the time, even if their direct consequences don’t reach the shores of America, Britain or any of the other places where the meme typically circulates. Tens of thousands of people have been killed in Gaza since October 2023. Casualties in Russia and Ukraine reportedly number around 1.4 million since February 2022. For people living in these areas, and elsewhere around the globe, things “happen” at a scale and pace the human mind can barely comprehend. But there’s a kernel of truth in the meme as well. It speaks to a general feeling across the 21st-century West: that nothing we do – from protesting, to exposing information about political corruption and elite sex trafficking, to electing a whole new government – actually makes a difference. 

Curtis tuned in to this feeling around 18 months ago. “There was all that anger after 2008 [because of the financial crash], and then after Brexit and Trump,” he says. But that anger failed to produce any meaningful change. Instead, it gave way to a “strange sense of both uncertainty and dread about the future, a sense of stasis. It was almost like a circuit had been broken”. This provided the spark for Curtis’s latest documentary, Shifty, a five-part series aired by the BBC. “I wanted to know how we got here.”

Shifty tells the story of Britain’s transformation under Margaret Thatcher, who served as prime minister from 1979 to 1990. (Mis)guided by the belief that money could be used to usher in a better, more ‘rational’ kind of society, the Iron Lady oversaw a transition of power from politics to finance. Then, things began to spiral out of control. Instead of booming, British industry collapsed. Workers set adrift, especially in the industrial north, became increasingly atomised. Riots broke out across the nation as new social and cultural boundary lines were drawn. But Thatcher kept on doubling down. By the time Labour’s Tony Blair and Gordon Brown won the general election in 1997, there was very little power left to give away.

Below, we speak to Adam Curtis about how Thatcher’s choices influenced how it feels to live today, finding his “hero” in Alexander McQueen, and much more.

In Shifty, you describe the creation of a deeply pessimistic incentive structure for society, based on the idea that everyone’s acting out of pure self-interest. Do you think it’s fair to say we still live in this system today?

Adam Curtis: Yes. In the late 80s and really early 90s, there was this idea [known as ‘new public management’] that simply said: ‘People, when they say they’re public servants, are lying. Everyone is self-interested.’ It was terrible… I think I say in the film it’s the Achilles heel of Thatcher’s idea. She comes in, and says: ‘Let’s get rid of telling people what to do. We’ll use the marketplace. Out of that will come a society where everyone balances each other out via their self-interest.’ The trouble with that is that once you’ve started saying people are self-interested in the marketplace, the radar comes around to everyone else. 

Ultimately, it came around to politicians, who were told that they were self-interested. And out of that, an underlying feeling emerges in British society, that those in power don’t really trust you. Have you ever worked in a large bureaucracy?

I haven’t.

Adam Curtis: I work in a large bureaucracy. It’s called the BBC. I know full well that HR departments in the BBC are based on this fundamental, underlying idea that you have to incentivise people. The idea that people can be motivated to do things out of something grander than their own self-interest doesn’t occur to them. The idea of public duty is seen as a joke. Did you ever see The Thick Of It? The picture you have of politicians in that is of totally self-interested creatures, driven by dark forces, a maelstrom of self-obsessed emotions within them. The idea of public duty is never mentioned. I think we do live in that world.

It doesn’t mean that the people in power are thinking we’re bad all the time. It’s just that you have a structure in which the underlying assumption is that you have to incentivise people, otherwise how are you going to get them to do anything? The idea that people will actually do things out of a sense of duty to something greater and bigger than themselves is gone.

I think that human beings can be anything. I’m optimistic in that sense

Do you think that’s a real loss, that old world? Are you more optimistic about human impulses?

Adam Curtis: I think that human beings can be anything. I’m optimistic in that sense. You probably think of most of your friends, as I think of my friends, as complete twats. You’ll be sitting in a bar, they’ll be talking absolute rubbish, they’re obsessed by themselves and they’re really boring. If, then, outside that bar a terrible accident happens, you and your friends would transform yourselves into completely different kinds of human beings. You’d be courageous, helping people, and above all you’d care for them, wouldn’t you? And I’m sure most of your friends would. I have this idea that human beings are strangely fluid beings, they can be anything.

I think it was inevitable that [the old world of public duty] was going to go, because it had become corrupted to an extent, and it didn’t work in a world of individualism. It sort of lost its bearings, and therefore went a bit mad. What it was replaced by is this idea that the only way you can manage individuals is through incentives.

I hope that there is going to be a new kind of idea, which says, ‘No, you can have a world in which people still feel themselves as individuals and are free, but also can come together collectively.’ I don’t quite know where it’s going to come from. What it needs is for a new kind of politician or social analyst to create a language and a terminology that explains the world to people in ways that [make them] go, ‘Oh yes, I get that. I get why I’m uncertain. I get why I dread the future.’ Because before you can come together collectively, you have to have a shared language that means you can recognise in each other why you are all feeling this. 

The thing that I find saddest about our society at the moment is that so many people are convinced that the way they feel at the moment, the sadness, the sense of aloneness, the uncertainty and the sense of dread about the future, is their fault. That it somehow comes from them, so they’ll do anything to try and change themselves. Actually, in fact, it might be to do with the fact they’re living in a society that isn’t working very well at the moment, and needs changing. But no one’s articulating that to them.

When I look at a cathedral, I’m often kind of in awe at the level of storytelling it would require to get someone to dedicate their life to building something that they know won’t be finished before they die. And it feels like we don’t have any stories that are compelling enough to make that happen today.

Adam Curtis: We don’t. That’s completely true. That’s where mass democracy came from. It was people who gathered together in industrial towns, [in] terrible circumstances, that realised they were powerful together. What gave us this power was not just collectivism, it was the idea that what we’re doing will go on way beyond our death. It’s a story that goes into the future, which you will be part of. And I miss that terribly. I think most people do.

But I would argue that I’m not being nostalgic. What I’m saying is that, if you look back – you went into the cathedral, or I look back at archival footage of giant factories in Britain – you can see that they lived a completely different kind of experience, a collective experience. And out of that came the language of modern politics, which was about social class and ideology. We don’t have a similar set of terms to describe the world we have today.

One of the things that make democracy a good thing is the feeling it creates for millions of people of being a part of a community. What I tried to show in the series is how that aspect of democracy was effectively dismantled, both by politicians and by us ourselves, over the past 45 years. It was replaced by a very different consumerist idea of democracy, which defines you the individual as being at the centre of your world. I think that removed the central point of democracy, and if you want to make it work properly again you need to reinvent the feeling of being part of something. It’s not nostalgic. It’s necessary.

How do you think we reinvent that feeling?

Adam Curtis: I always believe that imagination is terribly powerful. All it requires is someone to come along with a leap of imagination that reconfigures society in a simple, clear way. It’s almost like a heightened dramatising of the world you’re living through. I’m sure that’s what happened in the 19th century, in industrial towns. It doesn’t happen on TikTok.

TikTok is really good for footage coming out of places like Ukraine and Gaza. But as a revolutionary tool, as another way of seeing the world? No

Why do you think that kind of storytelling doesn’t happen on Tiktok?

Adam Curtis: I used to love Tiktok. It was sort of wild west and crazy for a bit… but then it became incredibly formalised. Now, there are six different types of TikTok. You go, ‘Oh, yeah, I know what that one’s going to be like.’ So I got bored with it. And I know it’s really good for footage coming out of places like Ukraine and Gaza. But as a revolutionary tool, as another way of seeing the world? No. It’s been captured by genre. 

I think the idea of genre is the most destructive thing of our time. Anytime anyone does anything new, immediately everyone goes: ‘Oh, it’s like that. Oh, it’s that genre.’ And instead of being new, it’s suddenly swept back into the cupboard of the past.

You often speak about the forces that are shaping and driving human experience as if they’re almost autonomous. How much responsibility would you place at the feet of individuals, like Thatcher?

Adam Curtis: What I think are really powerful are ideas. I don’t buy the left-wing idea that it’s just economics, I just never have. I think ideas shape everything. Mrs Thatcher was a great conduit of one idea. Some of the specific economic ideas she brought in had a really big and sometimes very disastrous effect. Sometimes, they also liberated people. She liberated the bank so they could lend money to everyone, which for 20 years worked extremely well, until the crash in 2008. So there’s good and there’s bad. But at a deeper level, I’ve always thought that the politicians tend to be on the coattails of something that’s already happening. And in her case, it was individualism. It was already on the rise.

How have you seen that individualist streak manifest in ordinary people?

Adam Curtis: Over the last 18 months or so, there has been a change from the anger that you saw beginning with Iraq, then after the crash of 2008, and then with Trump and Brexit. Maybe it’s post-Covid… you just get this sense of disillusionment but also powerlessness, that whatever you do is not going to have any effect at all, however corrupt the companies are shown to be, however much governments lie to you about why they go to war, nothing will happen. So why do anything? That’s why I made Shifty. I wanted to show how that happened.

In the face of that uncertainty, in the face of those fears, people realised there was nothing out there that was going to look after them, so they retreated into themselves. It’s almost like that heroic figure of the individual self, which was the model for the society that Mrs Thatcher ushered in, began to hide. I get the sense now that we live in a society where lots of people have retreated into their own heads. You know, from the glimpses and the fragments you see online, that people are frightened and alone and scared, but what you see is this sort of two dimensional happy exterior. Underneath, there’s a lot churning away, there is a much richer and more substantial and big, complex life, but there’s no way of connecting to it. 

People have become sort of invisible. People are beginning to cosplay themselves, in a way, and I don’t mean just for fun. It’s almost like that’s the defense. Now you have a cosplay version of yourself, and you have the other self, which thinks: ‘I’m on my own. This is a scary world. Dive, dive, dive.’ And I’m waiting for a good artist to come along, a novelist or filmmaker, who can capture that sense.

You speak about doom, melancholy and dread as the dominant feelings of our age, but when you describe your own feelings, you talk about being interested and hopeful for the future. Do you feel any of that doom and dread yourself?

Adam Curtis: I feel something much more mixed. It may be because I am, by nature, optimistic, but I think it’s also because I do a lot of research into the past, and I know that societies get themselves into really strange states, especially when one system of power is declining and the other is waiting to come. It’s almost like the eye of the storm. It’s all quiet, but actually you know there’s something else coming, and people get frightened. 

In the series, I jump back right at the end to the revolutions of the 1830s and 1840s in Europe, because out of that came the modern world, some of it bad, some of it great. And I think that’s where we are. I’m not saying I’m optimistic, because I can’t bear those people who say it’s all going to be nice. What I really mean is that you know that what’s going to come out of it is going to be really complex, and also very mixed. To be aware of that makes you much more powerful than if you just hunker down and act frightened, in which case you’re powerless. 

I’m always interested in how ordinary people can have a countervailing power against those who are acting against their interests, which you could argue is very strong at this moment. There seem to be groups in our society extracting a lot for their own purposes and not giving much back. And the feeling of many people [is] that no one knows how to stop that. Well, I’m interested in how an idea can, and I’m sure will, emerge, to find a way to stop that.

People have become sort of invisible. They are beginning to cosplay themselves, in a way, and I don’t mean just for fun. It’s almost like that’s the defense

Do you feel that most politicians, technologists, and other powerful people who have shaped the modern world had basically good intentions, even if they went about them the wrong way?

Adam Curtis: I sense that from about the end of the 90s, as I show in the films, New Labour had given away most of its actual power to the financial world. They became very aware of that happening, especially Gordon Brown, and in that sense they became powerless. Then what happened, I think possibly after 2001 [and the September 11 attacks], was that politicians like Blair stumbled on something else. They realised that instead of saying to the people, ‘Look, we’re going to take you to a new world,’ they could say: ‘Look, out there, as the attacks have just shown, is a really dark, frightening world that can come and attack you at any time. My job as a politician is to use my skill and intelligence to see those dark forces before they come, and I will protect you against them.’ 

It wasn’t a conspiracy. It was a group of politicians who realised that their power was now diminished, and stumbled upon something because of an accident of history, which happened 3,000 miles away in New York and Washington. They stumbled upon it, and Blair and many others have run with it ever since. ‘No, our job is to protect you from the darkness of the future.’ And in that sense, you have a political class who have become used to saying the future is dark, the future is frightening, when, in fact, the future can be all kinds of things.

That’s something that really pisses me off. I’m a progressive. I believe that human beings have the capacity to progress and make the world a better place. Often they mess it up and get it wrong, but they can. And what we now have is a political class who, having given away their power, have stumbled upon this other way of maintaining their power and prestige by promising to protect you from the dark future that means they’re never going to change anything. And I think that’s terribly sad, and a failure of their real role.

You confront the artist’s role in British culture in the late 20th century, mainly as a pawn for property developers. What function do you think artists should play in society, and do you think they’ve failed us to some extent?

Adam Curtis: To be fair to artists, I wasn’t criticising any of their work. Some of their work is great and some of it is not great. But what I think they failed to recognise is that, from the late 1980s onwards, they also became scouts for the property developing world… and I think they know this in their hearts. In fact, I remember meeting some big property developer in New York who had redeveloped a giant area, and he was just very blank with me. He said: ‘We get the artists in, we give them cheap studios, then the coffee shops come, and then the apartments start to be built, and we chuck them out, we find them somewhere else.’ And he would say, I’m sure, that some of them produce amazingly good work, but they were performing another function in society as well. 

The thing that I always get in trouble with is that I do think artists retreated in the face of the rise of the right like Mrs Thatcher and Ronald Reagan in the 80s, into the idea that culture would be the opposition, as they called it, to this right wing takeover. I’ve always been very dubious about this idea that art can actually change the world. If you look at it historically, art tends to come along after.

What art is absolutely brilliant at doing is describing what is happening and showing you how power works. That’s what artists are really brilliant at. They’ve got this skill to intuit the mood of a new kind of society emerging. They give you a heightened version of what people were living through at the time. What they don’t do is create these revolutions. That’s done by hard money and power.

Artists get very angry when you say this, but this idea that somehow they are the opposition… I’m dubious about it. I feel, actually, that they’re missing a trick, that they should be dramatising where the power is. I want to know. And I think everyone wants to know. But they’re not telling us. And people like me, journalists, can’t get into that world. They don’t let us in. There’s a lot in our present world that’s invisible because it hides behind money and anonymity and the law.

Do you look at anyone in contemporary culture who’s doing it like, say, McQueen did at the turn of the millennium?

Adam Curtis: The hero in Shifty is McQueen. Someone who knew him watched the films and wrote to me saying: ‘Yeah, Lee. He knew.’

Prior to McQueen in the series you have the Millennium Dome. You have all the great and the good who have no idea what to put in that Dome. Then, 18 months later or something like that, McQueen does SS01’s Voss. He dramatises what our society has become, and I thought it was just beautiful, absolutely amazing.

Who else… Sometimes I think trash pop gets closer to it than the ‘posh’ art, and some hip-hop videos get closer to it. Possibly computer games.

There’s a self-reflective, even self-critical moment at the end of this series, where you acknowledge a kind of complicity in the nostalgic culture you’re critiquing. ‘Will people come together as they did in the past and fight back,’ you write. ‘Or is this just another feedback loop of nostalgia, repeating back sounds, dreams, and images of the past? Which is the way the system controls you. And is the way this series was made.’ Where did that come from?

Adam Curtis: We live in a world where so much of the past is played back to us all the time. I mean, there are, how many now, four new films coming out about the Beatles? And it’s not just older people listening to them. It’s 23-year-olds. The whole of the internet, and the way AI works, is constantly taking stuff from the past and playing it back in all kinds of different ways to us, all the time. It’s like a haunting. 

It did occur to me, all the way through, that if there’s another thing that is blocking us out from the future, it’s that world of two-dimensional images. As the past disappears in any age, what happens is that most fragments of memory just disappear, and the few that are left settle down into a pattern which becomes history. And out of that understanding of history, whether it’s right or wrong, comes an idea [about] how you can move into the future. That’s your data. In our past, which has really been accelerating over the last 20 years, the fragments never die away, because every day, millions and millions and millions of images and photographs and songs from the past are played back to us. Taken collectively, they make no sense. But unlike previous eras, where those fragments of personal experience will mostly disappear, these will not go away. They thicken up the fog of experience. The fragments that do remain can never settle down into a pattern that is understandable.

Maybe one of the things that is holding us back from the future is those endless fragments of the past, repeated back to us, which can never be assembled into a proper meaning. And if you look at what I do… that’s pretty much what I’m up to as well. So I thought I would gently point that out. I had a discussion with Robert [Del Naja] who runs Massive Attack, about how both of us found our voice in the 1990s, when we both started doing sampling, and we discussed how liberating it was at that point. But we’ve both become a little bit trapped by it. We are maybe, possibly, some of the agents who are holding us back from moving into the future. Maybe one of the ways to move into the future is to do the most radical thing you could think of doing at this present moment, which is: forget the past, move on. Maybe we’re pushing it to such a limit that we’re going to have to leave it.

Shifty is now available to watch on BBC iPlayer.

June 14, 2025: a barrage of Iranian missiles soars through the night sky en route to Israel, passing over a wedding party in Lebanon. In the background, a soundsystem blasts out “Gimme! Gimme! Gimme!” by ABBA. Guests gather around a turquoise pool to film the surreal scene on their iPhones. Just a couple of hours later, one of these videos will be reshared by an X account called Future Adam Curtis B-Roll. In the past, the British filmmaker’s work has been described as “dazzling”, “terrifying” and “incoherent” – today, his vision of the world has come to life before our eyes.

Or maybe that’s not entirely accurate. Adam Curtis is well aware of the memes that parody and pay tribute to his work on social media; he “loves it”, in fact, as he tells me when we speak over the phone. But he resists the idea that the vision of the world they represent – a world full of strange contradictions, jarring transitions, and images that are equal parts haunting and comical – is his, and his alone. “I don’t think it’s my way of seeing the world. I think it’s our way of seeing the world,” he explains. “I noticed very early on, in the late 90s, that people talked to each other in a much more jumpy way. They jumped between politics, culture, psychology, art, and they were talking about what it all meant, and jumbling it up. I don’t think I invented that, I just expressed it.”

Very few filmmakers have such a keen ear for the ways people are speaking, thinking and processing the world around them, though. That’s what makes Curtis’s films so distinctive, from 2002’s The Century of the Self, to HyperNormalisation (2016), and the more recent TraumaZone (2022). That’s what makes it possible to share a clip on the internet, call it future Adam Curtis B-roll, and have everyone know exactly what you’re talking about. 

There’s another meme that’s spread from political message boards to the mainstream internet in recent years, which consists of a single phrase: “Nothing ever happens.” This is false, of course. Things are “happening” all the time, even if their direct consequences don’t reach the shores of America, Britain or any of the other places where the meme typically circulates. Tens of thousands of people have been killed in Gaza since October 2023. Casualties in Russia and Ukraine reportedly number around 1.4 million since February 2022. For people living in these areas, and elsewhere around the globe, things “happen” at a scale and pace the human mind can barely comprehend. But there’s a kernel of truth in the meme as well. It speaks to a general feeling across the 21st-century West: that nothing we do – from protesting, to exposing information about political corruption and elite sex trafficking, to electing a whole new government – actually makes a difference. 

Curtis tuned in to this feeling around 18 months ago. “There was all that anger after 2008 [because of the financial crash], and then after Brexit and Trump,” he says. But that anger failed to produce any meaningful change. Instead, it gave way to a “strange sense of both uncertainty and dread about the future, a sense of stasis. It was almost like a circuit had been broken”. This provided the spark for Curtis’s latest documentary, Shifty, a five-part series aired by the BBC. “I wanted to know how we got here.”

Shifty tells the story of Britain’s transformation under Margaret Thatcher, who served as prime minister from 1979 to 1990. (Mis)guided by the belief that money could be used to usher in a better, more ‘rational’ kind of society, the Iron Lady oversaw a transition of power from politics to finance. Then, things began to spiral out of control. Instead of booming, British industry collapsed. Workers set adrift, especially in the industrial north, became increasingly atomised. Riots broke out across the nation as new social and cultural boundary lines were drawn. But Thatcher kept on doubling down. By the time Labour’s Tony Blair and Gordon Brown won the general election in 1997, there was very little power left to give away.

Below, we speak to Adam Curtis about how Thatcher’s choices influenced how it feels to live today, finding his “hero” in Alexander McQueen, and much more.

In Shifty, you describe the creation of a deeply pessimistic incentive structure for society, based on the idea that everyone’s acting out of pure self-interest. Do you think it’s fair to say we still live in this system today?

Adam Curtis: Yes. In the late 80s and really early 90s, there was this idea [known as ‘new public management’] that simply said: ‘People, when they say they’re public servants, are lying. Everyone is self-interested.’ It was terrible… I think I say in the film it’s the Achilles heel of Thatcher’s idea. She comes in, and says: ‘Let’s get rid of telling people what to do. We’ll use the marketplace. Out of that will come a society where everyone balances each other out via their self-interest.’ The trouble with that is that once you’ve started saying people are self-interested in the marketplace, the radar comes around to everyone else. 

Ultimately, it came around to politicians, who were told that they were self-interested. And out of that, an underlying feeling emerges in British society, that those in power don’t really trust you. Have you ever worked in a large bureaucracy?

I haven’t.

Adam Curtis: I work in a large bureaucracy. It’s called the BBC. I know full well that HR departments in the BBC are based on this fundamental, underlying idea that you have to incentivise people. The idea that people can be motivated to do things out of something grander than their own self-interest doesn’t occur to them. The idea of public duty is seen as a joke. Did you ever see The Thick Of It? The picture you have of politicians in that is of totally self-interested creatures, driven by dark forces, a maelstrom of self-obsessed emotions within them. The idea of public duty is never mentioned. I think we do live in that world.

It doesn’t mean that the people in power are thinking we’re bad all the time. It’s just that you have a structure in which the underlying assumption is that you have to incentivise people, otherwise how are you going to get them to do anything? The idea that people will actually do things out of a sense of duty to something greater and bigger than themselves is gone.

I think that human beings can be anything. I’m optimistic in that sense

Do you think that’s a real loss, that old world? Are you more optimistic about human impulses?

Adam Curtis: I think that human beings can be anything. I’m optimistic in that sense. You probably think of most of your friends, as I think of my friends, as complete twats. You’ll be sitting in a bar, they’ll be talking absolute rubbish, they’re obsessed by themselves and they’re really boring. If, then, outside that bar a terrible accident happens, you and your friends would transform yourselves into completely different kinds of human beings. You’d be courageous, helping people, and above all you’d care for them, wouldn’t you? And I’m sure most of your friends would. I have this idea that human beings are strangely fluid beings, they can be anything.

I think it was inevitable that [the old world of public duty] was going to go, because it had become corrupted to an extent, and it didn’t work in a world of individualism. It sort of lost its bearings, and therefore went a bit mad. What it was replaced by is this idea that the only way you can manage individuals is through incentives.

I hope that there is going to be a new kind of idea, which says, ‘No, you can have a world in which people still feel themselves as individuals and are free, but also can come together collectively.’ I don’t quite know where it’s going to come from. What it needs is for a new kind of politician or social analyst to create a language and a terminology that explains the world to people in ways that [make them] go, ‘Oh yes, I get that. I get why I’m uncertain. I get why I dread the future.’ Because before you can come together collectively, you have to have a shared language that means you can recognise in each other why you are all feeling this. 

The thing that I find saddest about our society at the moment is that so many people are convinced that the way they feel at the moment, the sadness, the sense of aloneness, the uncertainty and the sense of dread about the future, is their fault. That it somehow comes from them, so they’ll do anything to try and change themselves. Actually, in fact, it might be to do with the fact they’re living in a society that isn’t working very well at the moment, and needs changing. But no one’s articulating that to them.

When I look at a cathedral, I’m often kind of in awe at the level of storytelling it would require to get someone to dedicate their life to building something that they know won’t be finished before they die. And it feels like we don’t have any stories that are compelling enough to make that happen today.

Adam Curtis: We don’t. That’s completely true. That’s where mass democracy came from. It was people who gathered together in industrial towns, [in] terrible circumstances, that realised they were powerful together. What gave us this power was not just collectivism, it was the idea that what we’re doing will go on way beyond our death. It’s a story that goes into the future, which you will be part of. And I miss that terribly. I think most people do.

But I would argue that I’m not being nostalgic. What I’m saying is that, if you look back – you went into the cathedral, or I look back at archival footage of giant factories in Britain – you can see that they lived a completely different kind of experience, a collective experience. And out of that came the language of modern politics, which was about social class and ideology. We don’t have a similar set of terms to describe the world we have today.

One of the things that make democracy a good thing is the feeling it creates for millions of people of being a part of a community. What I tried to show in the series is how that aspect of democracy was effectively dismantled, both by politicians and by us ourselves, over the past 45 years. It was replaced by a very different consumerist idea of democracy, which defines you the individual as being at the centre of your world. I think that removed the central point of democracy, and if you want to make it work properly again you need to reinvent the feeling of being part of something. It’s not nostalgic. It’s necessary.

How do you think we reinvent that feeling?

Adam Curtis: I always believe that imagination is terribly powerful. All it requires is someone to come along with a leap of imagination that reconfigures society in a simple, clear way. It’s almost like a heightened dramatising of the world you’re living through. I’m sure that’s what happened in the 19th century, in industrial towns. It doesn’t happen on TikTok.

TikTok is really good for footage coming out of places like Ukraine and Gaza. But as a revolutionary tool, as another way of seeing the world? No

Why do you think that kind of storytelling doesn’t happen on Tiktok?

Adam Curtis: I used to love Tiktok. It was sort of wild west and crazy for a bit… but then it became incredibly formalised. Now, there are six different types of TikTok. You go, ‘Oh, yeah, I know what that one’s going to be like.’ So I got bored with it. And I know it’s really good for footage coming out of places like Ukraine and Gaza. But as a revolutionary tool, as another way of seeing the world? No. It’s been captured by genre. 

I think the idea of genre is the most destructive thing of our time. Anytime anyone does anything new, immediately everyone goes: ‘Oh, it’s like that. Oh, it’s that genre.’ And instead of being new, it’s suddenly swept back into the cupboard of the past.

You often speak about the forces that are shaping and driving human experience as if they’re almost autonomous. How much responsibility would you place at the feet of individuals, like Thatcher?

Adam Curtis: What I think are really powerful are ideas. I don’t buy the left-wing idea that it’s just economics, I just never have. I think ideas shape everything. Mrs Thatcher was a great conduit of one idea. Some of the specific economic ideas she brought in had a really big and sometimes very disastrous effect. Sometimes, they also liberated people. She liberated the bank so they could lend money to everyone, which for 20 years worked extremely well, until the crash in 2008. So there’s good and there’s bad. But at a deeper level, I’ve always thought that the politicians tend to be on the coattails of something that’s already happening. And in her case, it was individualism. It was already on the rise.

How have you seen that individualist streak manifest in ordinary people?

Adam Curtis: Over the last 18 months or so, there has been a change from the anger that you saw beginning with Iraq, then after the crash of 2008, and then with Trump and Brexit. Maybe it’s post-Covid… you just get this sense of disillusionment but also powerlessness, that whatever you do is not going to have any effect at all, however corrupt the companies are shown to be, however much governments lie to you about why they go to war, nothing will happen. So why do anything? That’s why I made Shifty. I wanted to show how that happened.

In the face of that uncertainty, in the face of those fears, people realised there was nothing out there that was going to look after them, so they retreated into themselves. It’s almost like that heroic figure of the individual self, which was the model for the society that Mrs Thatcher ushered in, began to hide. I get the sense now that we live in a society where lots of people have retreated into their own heads. You know, from the glimpses and the fragments you see online, that people are frightened and alone and scared, but what you see is this sort of two dimensional happy exterior. Underneath, there’s a lot churning away, there is a much richer and more substantial and big, complex life, but there’s no way of connecting to it. 

People have become sort of invisible. People are beginning to cosplay themselves, in a way, and I don’t mean just for fun. It’s almost like that’s the defense. Now you have a cosplay version of yourself, and you have the other self, which thinks: ‘I’m on my own. This is a scary world. Dive, dive, dive.’ And I’m waiting for a good artist to come along, a novelist or filmmaker, who can capture that sense.

You speak about doom, melancholy and dread as the dominant feelings of our age, but when you describe your own feelings, you talk about being interested and hopeful for the future. Do you feel any of that doom and dread yourself?

Adam Curtis: I feel something much more mixed. It may be because I am, by nature, optimistic, but I think it’s also because I do a lot of research into the past, and I know that societies get themselves into really strange states, especially when one system of power is declining and the other is waiting to come. It’s almost like the eye of the storm. It’s all quiet, but actually you know there’s something else coming, and people get frightened. 

In the series, I jump back right at the end to the revolutions of the 1830s and 1840s in Europe, because out of that came the modern world, some of it bad, some of it great. And I think that’s where we are. I’m not saying I’m optimistic, because I can’t bear those people who say it’s all going to be nice. What I really mean is that you know that what’s going to come out of it is going to be really complex, and also very mixed. To be aware of that makes you much more powerful than if you just hunker down and act frightened, in which case you’re powerless. 

I’m always interested in how ordinary people can have a countervailing power against those who are acting against their interests, which you could argue is very strong at this moment. There seem to be groups in our society extracting a lot for their own purposes and not giving much back. And the feeling of many people [is] that no one knows how to stop that. Well, I’m interested in how an idea can, and I’m sure will, emerge, to find a way to stop that.

People have become sort of invisible. They are beginning to cosplay themselves, in a way, and I don’t mean just for fun. It’s almost like that’s the defense

Do you feel that most politicians, technologists, and other powerful people who have shaped the modern world had basically good intentions, even if they went about them the wrong way?

Adam Curtis: I sense that from about the end of the 90s, as I show in the films, New Labour had given away most of its actual power to the financial world. They became very aware of that happening, especially Gordon Brown, and in that sense they became powerless. Then what happened, I think possibly after 2001 [and the September 11 attacks], was that politicians like Blair stumbled on something else. They realised that instead of saying to the people, ‘Look, we’re going to take you to a new world,’ they could say: ‘Look, out there, as the attacks have just shown, is a really dark, frightening world that can come and attack you at any time. My job as a politician is to use my skill and intelligence to see those dark forces before they come, and I will protect you against them.’ 

It wasn’t a conspiracy. It was a group of politicians who realised that their power was now diminished, and stumbled upon something because of an accident of history, which happened 3,000 miles away in New York and Washington. They stumbled upon it, and Blair and many others have run with it ever since. ‘No, our job is to protect you from the darkness of the future.’ And in that sense, you have a political class who have become used to saying the future is dark, the future is frightening, when, in fact, the future can be all kinds of things.

That’s something that really pisses me off. I’m a progressive. I believe that human beings have the capacity to progress and make the world a better place. Often they mess it up and get it wrong, but they can. And what we now have is a political class who, having given away their power, have stumbled upon this other way of maintaining their power and prestige by promising to protect you from the dark future that means they’re never going to change anything. And I think that’s terribly sad, and a failure of their real role.

You confront the artist’s role in British culture in the late 20th century, mainly as a pawn for property developers. What function do you think artists should play in society, and do you think they’ve failed us to some extent?

Adam Curtis: To be fair to artists, I wasn’t criticising any of their work. Some of their work is great and some of it is not great. But what I think they failed to recognise is that, from the late 1980s onwards, they also became scouts for the property developing world… and I think they know this in their hearts. In fact, I remember meeting some big property developer in New York who had redeveloped a giant area, and he was just very blank with me. He said: ‘We get the artists in, we give them cheap studios, then the coffee shops come, and then the apartments start to be built, and we chuck them out, we find them somewhere else.’ And he would say, I’m sure, that some of them produce amazingly good work, but they were performing another function in society as well. 

The thing that I always get in trouble with is that I do think artists retreated in the face of the rise of the right like Mrs Thatcher and Ronald Reagan in the 80s, into the idea that culture would be the opposition, as they called it, to this right wing takeover. I’ve always been very dubious about this idea that art can actually change the world. If you look at it historically, art tends to come along after.

What art is absolutely brilliant at doing is describing what is happening and showing you how power works. That’s what artists are really brilliant at. They’ve got this skill to intuit the mood of a new kind of society emerging. They give you a heightened version of what people were living through at the time. What they don’t do is create these revolutions. That’s done by hard money and power.

Artists get very angry when you say this, but this idea that somehow they are the opposition… I’m dubious about it. I feel, actually, that they’re missing a trick, that they should be dramatising where the power is. I want to know. And I think everyone wants to know. But they’re not telling us. And people like me, journalists, can’t get into that world. They don’t let us in. There’s a lot in our present world that’s invisible because it hides behind money and anonymity and the law.

Do you look at anyone in contemporary culture who’s doing it like, say, McQueen did at the turn of the millennium?

Adam Curtis: The hero in Shifty is McQueen. Someone who knew him watched the films and wrote to me saying: ‘Yeah, Lee. He knew.’

Prior to McQueen in the series you have the Millennium Dome. You have all the great and the good who have no idea what to put in that Dome. Then, 18 months later or something like that, McQueen does SS01’s Voss. He dramatises what our society has become, and I thought it was just beautiful, absolutely amazing.

Who else… Sometimes I think trash pop gets closer to it than the ‘posh’ art, and some hip-hop videos get closer to it. Possibly computer games.

There’s a self-reflective, even self-critical moment at the end of this series, where you acknowledge a kind of complicity in the nostalgic culture you’re critiquing. ‘Will people come together as they did in the past and fight back,’ you write. ‘Or is this just another feedback loop of nostalgia, repeating back sounds, dreams, and images of the past? Which is the way the system controls you. And is the way this series was made.’ Where did that come from?

Adam Curtis: We live in a world where so much of the past is played back to us all the time. I mean, there are, how many now, four new films coming out about the Beatles? And it’s not just older people listening to them. It’s 23-year-olds. The whole of the internet, and the way AI works, is constantly taking stuff from the past and playing it back in all kinds of different ways to us, all the time. It’s like a haunting. 

It did occur to me, all the way through, that if there’s another thing that is blocking us out from the future, it’s that world of two-dimensional images. As the past disappears in any age, what happens is that most fragments of memory just disappear, and the few that are left settle down into a pattern which becomes history. And out of that understanding of history, whether it’s right or wrong, comes an idea [about] how you can move into the future. That’s your data. In our past, which has really been accelerating over the last 20 years, the fragments never die away, because every day, millions and millions and millions of images and photographs and songs from the past are played back to us. Taken collectively, they make no sense. But unlike previous eras, where those fragments of personal experience will mostly disappear, these will not go away. They thicken up the fog of experience. The fragments that do remain can never settle down into a pattern that is understandable.

Maybe one of the things that is holding us back from the future is those endless fragments of the past, repeated back to us, which can never be assembled into a proper meaning. And if you look at what I do… that’s pretty much what I’m up to as well. So I thought I would gently point that out. I had a discussion with Robert [Del Naja] who runs Massive Attack, about how both of us found our voice in the 1990s, when we both started doing sampling, and we discussed how liberating it was at that point. But we’ve both become a little bit trapped by it. We are maybe, possibly, some of the agents who are holding us back from moving into the future. Maybe one of the ways to move into the future is to do the most radical thing you could think of doing at this present moment, which is: forget the past, move on. Maybe we’re pushing it to such a limit that we’re going to have to leave it.

Shifty is now available to watch on BBC iPlayer.