HyperNormalisation

When you make the complicated simple, you make it better. But when you make the complex simple, you make it wrong

The details of who and where *exactly* is hazy, but I have a distinct memory of a communications planner standing on a conference stage with a powerpoint slide that said something to the effect of “trend reports are like astrology for strategists”.

And one which I was reminded of yesterday when I re-watched Adam Curtis’ 2016 film HyperNormalisation.

Having watched the recently released Shifty, I’ve gone on a bit of an Adam Curtis back-catalogue binge. Curtis opens the film by saying that it is about “how, over the past 40 years, politicians, financiers and technological utopians, rather than face up to the real complexities of the world, retreated. Instead, they constructed a simpler version of the world in order to hang on to power. And as this fake world grew, all of us went along with it, because the simplicity was reassuring”.

The intersection of Curtis’ film and the glib astrology joke is something I’ve been thinking about a lot recently in one way or another.

In part because I’ve spent alot of time over the last few weeks thinking about how I do my job as a communications strategist. I have just concluded a pitch - a process that forces you to confront, quite viscerally, the way you work and where you’re strong and where you’re frail. I read Richard Huntington’s Feral Strategy which is all about how he works. And then there was this brilliant slap-round-the-chops from Zoe Scaman, which makes the case that strategists might actually be in danger of becoming astrologers themselves.

But also because it really applies to so much of the knowledge we absorb now in the algorithmic, social-media first context we now findourselves. Content explains so much about how a topic works but in such a superficial way. You can watch videos on any topic you can think of, summoning them on demand. You can bathe in information and spare yourself the trouble of having to submerge yourself deeply as you once might have. All of which encourages people in social settings, but also strategy roles in advertising (including myself) to make some big claims about the world and the way it works, often in a way which flattens reality to the neat and tidy and logical.

Now, for the Curtis hawks out there, I realise that there might be some apparent irony in his observation. But it does highlight an interesting truth about the world, which is to say- “When you make the complicated simple, you make it better. But when you make the complex simple, you make it wrong”