HyperNormalisation is a 2016 BBCdocumentary by British filmmaker Adam Curtis. In the film, Curtis argues that since the 1970s, governments, financiers, and technological utopians have given up on the complex “real world” and built a simple “fake world” that is run by corporations and kept stable by politicians.
The term “hypernormalisation” is taken from Alexei Yurchak’s 2006 book Everything was Forever, Until it was No More: The Last Soviet Generation, about the paradoxes of life in the Soviet Union during the 20 years before it collapsed. A professor of anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, he argues that everyone knew the system was failing, but as no one could imagine any alternative to the status quo, politicians and citizens were resigned to maintaining a pretence of a functioning society. Over time, this delusion became a self-fulfilling prophecy and the “fakeness” was accepted by everyone as real, an effect that Yurchak termed “hypernormalisation”.
Submitted by Peter Reid on Wed, 10/07/2013 - 00:37
The Roast Oven
Guinness Storehouse
Dublin
Roasting
About 15,000 tonnes of barley are roasted every year at St. James’s Gate. Some of the barley is put in large cylindrical ovens and roasted at 230° C for a period of about two and a half hours. Only in the final five to ten minutes does the colour change from pale gold to a rich dark brown.
