JustAdamCurtis
13 HN recommenders · recommended in 16 months, 2017–2025
58:46 · 2.9M views · Jun 20, 2016
The first part of Adam Curtis' documentary series on Sigmund Freud and his nephew Edward Bernays, who invented public relations. It shows how Bernays used Freud's ideas to link mass-produced goods to unconscious desires and create modern consumer persuasion.
HN commenters recommend it constantly in threads about advertising, propaganda and manipulation as the origin story of the consumer society.
20 comments from Hacker News
Thanks for your part in getting this story published! If you have not seen it, the BBC series "The Century of the Self" details the pre-history of these tendencies in the creation of the public relations industry by Freud's nephew Edward Bernays [0]. It is truly fascinating and horrific -- all 4 or 5 hours of it! Social media/big data has also made the consumer a (not fully willing or conscious) _producer_ of mass addiction, through the exploitation of their social graph data. There is a fictive "work contract": give me your data and we'll give you your buzz. This relationship is based on unwaged work. What if this work, the value of it to BigTech, were recognized? It leaves open the possibility of mass refusal. And in some sense how people use social media now is already composed of many types of refusal, some more and some less effective. To state one obvious way -- Facebook is used around the world as a tool for political organizing. The fact that this makes it an even more valuable commodity for repressive governments, starting with the US government, does not stop us from using it and finding it effective, does not stop us from getting together "in real life". More needs to be said about the social basis of addiction. It's not only ad scientists pushing well-studied biological buttons. It's the trauma of living a society that locks up an insane number of people, puts its children on psychotropic drugs, poisons them with toxic environments and toxic fast food, separates p
There's a great four-part documentary by Adam Curtis about Edward Bernays, his career and the rise of marketing in the 20th century called "The Century Of The Self". It's available on YT: this video
I highly recommend the documentary, Century of the Self, which details how Bernays' theories about advertising were put to use by Nazis. this video [LINK]
The Century of the Self documentary by Adam Curtis does an incredible job of covering that and is well-worth the watch. this video [LINK]
a very good bbc documentary based on Bernays work is "The Century of the Self": The Century of the Self - Part 1: "Happiness Machines" this video TL;DR: The story of the relationship between Sigmund Freud and his American nephew, Edward Bernays. Bernays invented the public relations profession in the 1920s and was the first person to take Freud's ideas to manipulate the masses. He showed American corporations how they could make people want things they didn't need by systematically linking mass-produced goods to their unconscious desires. Bernays was one of the main architects of the modern techniques of mass-consumer persuasion, using every trick in the book, from celebrity endorsement and outrageous PR stunts, to eroticising the motorcar. His most notorious coup was breaking the taboo on women smoking by persuading them that cigarettes were a symbol of independence and freedom. But Bernays was convinced that this was more than just a way of selling consumer goods. It was a new political idea of how to control the masses. By satisfying the inner irrational desires that his uncle had identified, people could be made happy and thus docile. It was the start of the all-consuming self which has come to dominate today's world. --- The Century of the Self - Part 2: "The Engineering of Consent" [LINK] TL;DR: This episode explores how those in power in post-war America used Freud's ideas about the unconscious mind to try and control the masses. Politicians and planners came to believe F