Leaving the 21st Century: Adam Curtis Talks to Dean Kissick
· Vice
“Maybe the self or the idea of the self has become this terrible prison that we’re trapped in”
—Adam CurtisVisit h-doctor.club for more information.
This conversation is from the spring 2026 issue of VICE magazine, THE NOT THE PHOTO ISSUE. Buy it now—or get 4 issues each year sent straight to your door, by subscribing.
For my whole career as a writer, I have been watching Adam Curtis films on the BBC and seeing them grow more abstract and unconventional, less about making an argument or recounting a history, and more about conjuring a feeling for a particular time and a place, and the excitements that it had to offer and the changes that were happening then. In 2015, his documentary Bitter Lake ended with the wish, “What is needed is a new story, and one that we can believe in.” In 2021, Can’t Get You Out of My Head concluded, more desperately, “We have to imagine a new future.” More recently, he has been looking for a new “language,” because, he says, we have not come up with a new story for society—of what we should want, or how we should live—but might still find new modes of expression to describe the present. (I asked if there’s anyone he’s seen that’s come close, and he replied, “No.”) Over the past couple decades, Curtis has influenced how I have come to think about the world, but also how I think about image-making and cultural production, and the failure of artists, filmmakers, musicians, novelists, journalists, et al to come up with new ways of expressing the overwhelming and often thrilling feeling of being alive today, and the expanding complexity of selfhood, both of which have changed dramatically during this period.
Curtis’s most recent series, Shifty, evokes the feeling of the last 50 years in the UK through a jumpy, gleefully mischievous collage of archive footage and pop music, broadcast without any narrative voiceover, with only the odd burst of context and interpretation delivered as bold text overlay. It is, like much of life today, a bombardment of short video clips, flashing images, sans-serif captions and familiar songs from the past, combining—at least for me, having grown up in England during the time—into a devastating nostalgic ambience; again, like much of life today. His next project, possibly, might be a stage show that goes back to the New York City of the 1980s to search out the origins of the contemporary construction of the self and the performance of the real.
Over two conversations in old wood-paneled rooms, we spoke of the problem of creativity, transcendent romantic love, the desire to escape the self, and how the latter might be done.
Dean Kissick: Let’s begin with Ozzy Osbourne. He says in Shifty that something is wrong with a society in which everyone wants to get fucked up. What struck me is that now it seems like less and less people want to get fucked up. There has been a great decline in drinking and hedonism. What do you think about that?
Adam Curtis: Well, you’ve got to be careful about what Ozzy Osbourne actually said. The first half of the quote was, “I get fucked up. What the hell’s wrong with getting fucked up?” Then there was a pause—I put that in for effect—and he said, “But there must be something wrong with the system if so many people have to get fucked up.” And in that statement you’ve got, in a way, the sense of our time. I think he was quite a self-reflective bloke. He was saying, look, I really like it, but I know that means I’m flawed. That is the sort of awareness that rose up during our time. The utopian idea of the self was that you would be strong and confident and able to live, and to take on things on your own terms. The idea that you were part of a class or a religion would belong to the past. What Osbourne was pointing to, through his own experience—but I think it is also the experience of our time—is that we’re all flawed, but we still want to be individuals. He was saying that drugs allow you to do that. Drugs fill the gap, but there must be something very wrong in a society where everyone wants to do that. Whether that’s still true now or not, I don’t know. But I’m always very dubious when newspapers have a wave of stories saying, “Oh, this thing is happening.” What you’re referring to is this idea that people are drinking less.
Kissick: That young people don’t drink, that they don’t go out.
Curtis: Maybe it’s linked to their being lonely, and it’s also linked to an older generation’s angst about a younger generation who don’t seem to be behaving quite the way they did before. It’s very similar to teenage panics from the past. I’m dubious about all that. Maybe they’re not drinking because they can’t afford to. It’s pretty brutal. In London now, it costs eight pounds a pint. And pubs are closing because of debt extraction, which has got to such a high level with all the finance companies that have moved in and own the leases on the pubs and own the breweries. However, I do think the relationship between our modern individualized society and drugs is really interesting. It’s historically interesting because it comes out of bohemian Beat culture in the late 50s with heroin. Then in the 60s, the drug of choice was LSD, which is about opening yourself up and experiencing more as an individual. There’s always weed. And then came the big one, cocaine, which is about being confident in yourself, and which I think is what Osbourne was referring to mainly. Then you have MDMA, which suggests that, well, you’re beginning to feel uncertain about this confident self, but this makes you feel happy and part of something—there is that sense of it in rave culture. Then you get this strange interregnum with all these variations, and now you get ketamine, which suggests that you’re wondering, can I escape the self? And in that you’ve got the arc of the rise of confidence in the self and then the uncertainty of it, the bolstering of it, which is what I think Osbourne was talking about. And the idea of, let’s escape it.
Kissick: As a way to be free?
Curtis: I do think that what might emerge is a feeling that possibly the whole idea of freedom that we have at the moment—the image of the autonomous individual—is one of the most limited ideas of freedom. There are alternative ideas of freedom that have been largely forgotten—like giving yourself up to something beyond yourself. Like to God, for example— “in whose service is perfect freedom.” If you’re going back to religious ideas of freedom, they’re the complete opposite. What Christianity in its purest form offered people was an escape from those voices in your head that constantly keep you trapped, going round and round and round, by allowing you to give yourself up to something. The old idea of love was that it was like jumping off a cliff. You gave yourself up to someone without any idea of what it was going to be like, but you just knew that you wanted to do it. It was the old, romantic idea of love, that you transcend the voices in your head. You transcend that little universe you are in, and you reach out towards something else, but you have to do it with others. Maybe that’ll come back.
Kissick: That would be good, yeah. I don’t like what’s become of love or how we think about love and relationships today. In my own personal life, it causes problems.
Curtis: It’s called transactional love. Everything is a transactional love now.
Kissick: It’s not about giving up your own—
Curtis: Giving yourself up.
Kissick: Yeah.
Curtis: Release.
Kissick: But I would like that too!
Curtis: It’s a completely different kind of freedom. We look back at the Victorians and say that their conformism was going to church and being moral and hypocritical at the same time. Others will look back at us in a hundred years’ time and say that our conformity was self-expression, that everyone believed that the most important part of life was self-expression, which is ridiculous because if everyone is self-expressive, what’s the point?
Kissick: There is this prevalent idea of everyone being completely atomized today, but often I feel that we also have this huge monoculture—which is what you are describing—and that the monoculture is so big that we can’t see it, or don’t want to see it, but everyone’s living in it. We’re all on our phones, having lattes, taking pictures in cafés, expressing ourselves.
Curtis: I’ve got this theory that the tech industry peaked in 2012. They haven’t invented anything substantially new since then. Their feedback loop system, which is expressed perfectly in social media, peaked, and it hasn’t developed any further. And AI is just more of that. There’s nothing new. It doesn’t offer a picture of another kind of world. Which, to be fair to social media, it did in the early utopian days, remember?
Kissick: Yeah. Although I am more interested in AI than you are. I understand your point that it takes the past and the familiar and regurgitates it back to us, but it does feel like a significant technological advance. It reminds me of things you’ve said about the advent of sampling, and how that changed music and filmmaking. Perhaps it’s just a more advanced and powerful form of sampling. But the first time I used a text-to-image program, it really gave me a thrilling sense of vertigo. I thought, this is a new experience. It is a radically new way of making images and videos.
Curtis: Won’t it ultimately devalue that kind of creativity?
Kissick: But I don’t know if that’s the worst thing.
Curtis: Maybe that’s really good for art.
Kissick: Yeah.
Curtis: The one thing that might go could be the whole idea of creativity and self-expression that is central to our idea of ourselves as “free individuals.” Maybe that’s the conformity of our time, and maybe that’s the belief that’s holding us back from breaking through to new kinds of ways of organizing human society. Something else may come out of the AI boom as well, and that is a gigantic financial crash of the bubble that has been fueled by AI mania. If that happens, a lot of the magical feeling about AI that you are describing will suddenly disappear, and be replaced by anger.
“Embracing the chaos is a good way forward. That’s how to fall in love with the present”
—Dean Kissick (above, right)
Kissick: Well, I still think video is in an exciting place as a form. Some of the ways that video is being scrambled and mutated by AI creates this new aesthetic that’s compelling, to me. Beyond all that, though, the fact that video is suddenly becoming so easy to make is transformative because it becomes more like painting now; anyone can make a video in a day, or in a few hours or less, in all sorts of different styles—even multiple styles blended together—and I’m very curious to see what comes of that.
Curtis: AI may also help bring on an even deeper crash—in the very idea of “realism.” We may be at a similar point to that moment in the 19th century when photography came along and completely undermined the notion that painting was a description of what was real. What you describe would suggest that video won’t be about reality any longer. It’ll be about something else. What, then, describes the real? Or maybe we’ll give up the idea of the real… The idea of realism—and that realism is the function of art—is quite recent. It took off in the middle of the 19th century with the rise of cities and mass democracy—and writers like Émile Zola and painters like Courbet created realism. It was about expressing the way most people experienced the world day by day in the new mass conurbations. They captured that. It may be that what we call “art” no longer has the ability to describe how most people experience the world today as they move through it. And we’re waiting for something else to capture and describe the now. While what we call “art” will just give up on that idea of “realness” and go into a world of total imagination.
Kissick: Yeah, we should. That’s a good path—
Curtis: Yes, I quite agree.
Kissick: …to destroy reality. That’s one of the things I think that you do in your films. I feel like you’re contributing to the dissembling of reality, or at least of its illusions.
Curtis: A number of people have said that.
Kissick: And embracing the chaos is a good way forward. That’s how to fall in love with the present.
Curtis: It is true that I have a personality that likes chaos. And I’m not frightened of throwing in all sorts of material and stitching it together in different ways. Quite early on in my career I noticed that people were jumping around in the way that they talked. When I would go to a bar with my friends, they would be jumping from politics, to culture, to modern psychological theories about why people feel as they do, and then back to pop culture. There was a jumpiness that was new and they were quite at ease with that. Then I simply decided to make films that were based on that kind of realism, which was a way of describing and talking about the world that jumped around. And that’s all I have ever done.
Now, you’re suggesting that just pulling everything apart, and reassembling it in more imaginative ways, would create the new present? That the realism of our age is one of total scrambledness? You would be what’s called an “accelerationist,” who wants to push everything so much that it breaks—rather than trying to invent something coherent and alternate, which of course I haven’t been able to do. Is that what you’re saying?
Kissick: I don’t feel like you’re trying to explain anything anymore. Quite the opposite.
Curtis: Well, I think that you have to be honest that it’s very difficult to know what it is that is coming. No one knows what’s going on in our society at the moment. My lot, journalists, they don’t really know what’s going on. They make a stab at it every now and then. The politicians don’t seem to know what’s going on. But what’s worse is that those who want to be informed also know that those whose job is to inform them don’t really know what’s going on.
Kissick: You have suggested before that people are not quite real anymore. How everyone is performing. Politicians are playing a pantomime, and that has become the point. Stephen Hawking was saying, in Shifty, that black holes are eating reality and time does not exist. There is an ongoing hypernormalization of absurdity. So it feels—Curtis: So it feels what?
Kissick: It feels like reality is gone. And, as I said, I think your recent films contribute to that process of dismantling what we think of as reality. And I think that’s good.
Curtis: It’s inevitable. But I would argue that it’s not that reality is dissolving, it’s that the parts of society that we thought would describe what was real to you don’t work any longer. In my defense, I don’t think I’m just trying to pull everything apart. I’m trying to create a way of portraying the world that expresses, in a heightened way, what people are feeling in their own minds at this present moment. Now, that may be a fragmented reality that’s falling apart, but I don’t think I’m trying to push that further. Because I’m a journalist. And good journalism is not just about facts, it’s about expressing people’s moods. I’m trying to express the way people feel today.
Kissick: My editor, Kevin, says that we spend half of our lives now living in this other realm, but act like it doesn’t even exist, as though we don’t spend half of our lives in our screens. We don’t really talk about it. We pretend it’s not there. That is a strange way of being.
Curtis: This is why I get really pissed off with artists. I’ve always thought their job is to jump ahead of us and find a language, and an emotion and a mood, and a way of suddenly bringing into focus what you’ve just described. But no one’s doing that. I haven’t found anyone. We know implicitly what we’re talking about. You and I both agree, there is this place that takes up more than half of one’s life, but no one’s dramatized it for us—and I don’t mean dramas where you have texts on the screen and you’re still within the machine. It’s like the software doesn’t understand the hardware, isn’t it? The software doesn’t know it’s living inside a computer. That’s where we are, at the moment. We can’t imagine it. So we retreat. I go back to what I said before. That art’s job in the age of the mass [editor’s note: see footnotes below]—that period which begins in the middle of the 19th century—was to articulate and express how people experienced the world: to give them a language and a frame to express what they felt was “real” to them. It doesn’t do that any longer. And it’s exciting to imagine what might be the thing that will do that in the future. That will capture the realness. The obvious answer is to say religion. But I doubt it will be a religion like anything else we’ve seen before.
Kissick: But I don’t think much of the art world is even trying or wants to imagine it. And not just the art world, but a lot of the cultural establishment, a lot of the media has pivoted to upholding the illusion of normalcy.
Curtis: Yes, I was about to say that.
Kissick: Which is essentially what you are tearing apart. There was a long time in the 20th century when artists were trying to destroy reality, but now their role is to tell you, “No. Reality is still intact and we have to defend it, and you have to think and feel like this, and we’ll have a better world.” There is so much chaos in mass culture, which has usurped the role that artists would have once had, to create these insane thoughts and visuals.
Curtis: But they’ve been kicked out of that. Haven’t they?
Kissick: Yeah.
Curtis: Well, I think they may have exited quite early on, because what you’re talking about is a fusion of technology and the new kind of politics that emerged in the 90s, and that created this mass culture, which I have always liked.
“A lot of the media has pivoted to upholding the illusion of normalcy”
—Dean Kissick
Kissick: You’ve spoken before about how in 1997 or ‘98, people started to carry themselves differently on television—they began to perform for the camera and were no longer themselves. Now, if we went down to the streets of Soho today and shared this hypothesis that the self has somehow disappeared, that ordinary people are no longer authentic, I don’t think we’d encounter much disagreement from anyone. But what surprised me is that you had a date for it, and that the date was in the late 90s. I wondered, what on earth was going on in the 90s?
Curtis: It baffled me. I only came to it through the right way, through empirical research. I was watching lots and lots and lots of factual programming, and it just became clear to me, because I’ve got an eye and I’m a journalist and I know when people are being … Look, everyone when they’re filmed is self-conscious, but I’ve also filmed people when they’re sort of lost, and they become unaware of the situation and what you’re seeing is really pretty much what they’re like. That has disappeared. I don’t know why. It just isn’t there anymore. Everyone started to act, and I am fascinated by that. I’ve been asked to do a live show, and I’m thinking of doing a show about the self: there’s “I,” which is your inner private version of yourself, and there’s “me,” which is the version you present to others and the version of you that you know is in their heads, and “I” retreated and “me” became the dominant thing. As I watched all the footage I started to date this change and it becomes obvious by the late 90s. But it has earlier roots.
Kissick: Which were?
Curtis: If you look back at America in the 80s, you see it beginning to emerge in gay culture quite a lot. There’s that film called Paris Is Burning [chronicling New York City’s mid-to-late 80s Ballroom scene], where the whole idea was this performance of “realness,” which this black and Latino gay subculture adopted as a way of defending themselves against the homophobia and the racism that they were facing, and of celebrating themselves through imitations of the “real.” You act out, in this theatrical world, the people that you aspire to be, that you know you never can be because of the homophobia and the racism, and it also acts as a collective sense of preservation.
There’s also a fascinating woman called Arlie Russell Hochschild who wrote a book called The Managed Heart, published around the same time, in 1983, which is all about the beginning of “emotional labor,” she calls it, as you de-industrialize in a country. As you de-industrialize and the service industries rise up and the self begins to become the dominant thing, what a lot of companies—she especially focused on the airline industry—realized was that the public demanded more than what she called the “painted smile,” the inauthentic smile. They wanted to feel that their air steward or stewardess was authentically being nice. And she said that they almost started training people in method acting, because method acting is all about accessing your authentic self in order to play a role.
These are clues that I’m looking at at the moment. I’m only giving you these fragments, but I think all kinds of things were emerging under the surface, some of it coming out of gay culture, and black culture, some of it coming out of the service industries, and also politicians were beginning to play roles too. If I could pull it together, it would be fascinating. Maybe it’s the baroque end of that story that I was tracing in The Century of the Self, which was the rise of hyper-individualism. Maybe that understanding of the self has become disenchanted and it’s retreated and in the process we have gone back to an old model from the 19th century: you have your public and your private self, and only do very few people ever see the private self. The really interesting question of our time is, does anyone see the private self now?
And this touches on another topic that people write about a lot these days, which is loneliness. I wonder if you’ve had an age when you were encouraged to be this self-contained, self-sufficient individual and it wasn’t enough, and then things started to get a bit scary and you retreated and now you feel very much on your own. I just wonder. If the self really has receded, if it has gone down the corridor, and is on its own now, that is extraordinary in this age which is supposed to be one of total openness, in which everyone is open in a way that they hadn’t been in the past. Have we now reached a stage when the very opposite has happened? Is it rather that in an age of theoretical total openness, the true self has just receded and it’s on its own, somewhere in some meta space behind your head?
“It may be that what we call ‘art’ no longer has the ability to describe how most people experience the world today as they move through it. And we’re waiting for something else”
—Adam Curtis
Kissick: We may have retreated into ourselves, or we may have just completely lost ourselves. We might not know who we are. You spoke earlier about fragmentation, shiftiness, and the jumbling up of everything. The self has been fragmented, certainly, and people are exploded and scattered all over the shop in various material and immaterial places and formats and it may be that people don’t know who they are anymore.
Curtis: Or—and this is the really radical question—did the self ever really exist?
Kissick: This was going to be one of my questions for you.
Curtis: I made this film for Massive Attack that comes right at the end of the show on the present tour. There is this soaring moment, I use some Italian disco, which they play, from the late 90s, and it ends up by saying, “Well, maybe it was never there. There was no such thing as the self.” People were really interested in that after the show, they came up and wanted to talk about that. Maybe the whole thing was an invention. When did the self really begin, the late 17th century? In medieval times people didn’t talk about the self. Today, it’s like all powerful, dominant ideologies in history—when you are living through an age dominated by a powerful ideology, it’s impossible to think that it couldn’t be naturally true and forever true. But people living under communism at certain points could not believe that it wouldn’t continue forever either. Is the self an idea like that? It is just the central belief of our time. It’s the central belief of art at the present moment, but artists didn’t used to think about self-expression. Art was about the glory of God. I’ve just been in some obscure places in Croatia and I was taken to this church, a very early church, with very early mosaics, and it’s just beautiful, but the images have nothing to do with self-expression at all. Nothing. You could feel that. It was about giving, it’s what we talked about before, it’s giving yourself up to something.
Kissick: You also mentioned the utopian promise of early social media. There was a time when the internet was going to be about transcending the self, and the body, and personal identity, although it has turned into something very different. There was a time when it was this radical, ongoing explosion of pseudonyms, and mutable, transforming identities, becoming a new person each day, anonymous collectives, new forms of expression.
Curtis: The Japanese man [Hiroyuki Nishimura] who invented what was originally called 2channel, which later inspired 4chan, when he was at university had a great quote about how he knew what he was creating was inevitable in the newly fragmenting world. He said, “This is not a utopia, something had to happen. I provide a space. But I tell people—‘You decide what to do inside.’” But he did insist on just one rule: that all the users remain anonymous. His idea was that you have to be anonymous because then you can just change all the time – which of course, then Mark Zuckerberg and everyone fucked up.
Kissick: Sheryl Sandberg.
Curtis: Was she the one who insisted that you had to use your real name?
Kissick: I don’t know if it was her idea, but yeah, she came over to Facebook from Google in 2008 and she oversaw the real-names policy, and it really shifted the course of everything.
Curtis: I’ve often thought that’s the real problem because again, you’re having to use your name, but you’re also acting, right from the start of Facebook. If the self does not exist that completely screws the whole idea of self-expression, which has become a terrible burden on people. It would mean that you could live without expressing yourself all the time. What we’re talking about is freedom, which is what all good ideas give you. Maybe the self or the idea of the self has become this terrible prison that we’re trapped in. It’s what stops you from being free. And maybe you could be liberated from this fictional version of yourself that you’re always having to perform. Maybe the performance has become so exhausting.
“Did the self ever really exist?”
—Adam Curtis
Footnotes:
Adam Curtis: “By ‘the age of the mass’ I mean the period that begins in the 1840s, when hundreds of thousands of people began to come together in the new industrial cities in Europe. Out of that came the revolutions of 1848 all across Europe. Most of them failed – but from them came the new idea of ‘mass democracy.’ It was dominated by the new bourgeois class, but their power rested on the idea that they had a responsibility to organize and care for the mass of the people in this age. Central to that was the belief that the main role of art and culture was to make sense of this new mass world. I think that the very idea of ‘realism’ was invented in this time—through people like the painter Courbet and novelists and playwrights like George Eliot and Ibsen. It wasn’t to describe just what was real—that was the job of sciences—but to dramatize in heightened ways what it felt like as an ordinary person to live in this new age. What it felt like to move through these new, incredibly complex mass city-worlds. To make sense for the ordinary people—not for the old powers any longer, but for us. You could say that we are at the end of that age now because it depended on one crucial thing: that people accepted they were part of classes or groups like trades unions. That they had a common experience which the art could express and dramatize for them. Today, practically no one feels like that—they experience an increasingly fragmented world where they live in nichified villages—sometimes villages of one. And that kind of realism that emerged from the 1840s no longer works. Any idea of ‘realism’ is gone. And what is called ‘art’ today has become something else. What is interesting is what may be coming instead to express and capture that experience. But one thing is for certain: it’s not going to be the old idea of ‘culture’ that emerged in the 1840s.”
You can follow Dean Kissick on X
This conversation is from the spring 2026 issue of VICE magazine, THE NOT THE PHOTO ISSUE. Buy it now—or get 4 issues each year sent straight to your door, by subscribing.
The post Leaving the 21st Century: Adam Curtis Talks to Dean Kissick appeared first on VICE.