This first aired in 2009. It's an Adam Curtis, BBC mini-doc. Short film about how mainstream media simplify complex events and present them as “scattered terrible things happening everywhere, Oh Dear”, leaving the public feeling powerless to do anything about them. It's absolutely revelation of the method, because it explains how all visible international figures take every side of every issue, so that the public is always arguing, but no one actually knows where any of the leader truly stands. By taking all sides at separate times, the figure has no actual side, and it creates endless arguments and cognitive chaos. Pick your leader... regardless of whether they declare to be on all sides, and you don't actually know what they actually believe. Adam Curtis's recent film HyperNormalisation has plenty of precedents for people who've been following his career closely. He has dealt with the idea of the internet as a force for stasis on his blog, as well as in No Protection, his live show with Massive Attack. The political implications of the "strange Boolean world" he believes we're living in were first explored in this, perhaps the best of his shorts for Charlie Brooker's TV shows. He begins by investigating a minor character from HyperNormalisation, Vladislav Surkov, a high-ranking Russian politician who seems to have taken ideas from postmodern social criticism and deployed them as methods of government. #OhDear T.me/ArtWithAim