Shifty: Adam Curtis on Politics, Power and the Mind

In the early 1980s, the UK government, led by newly elected Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, adopted a financial policy known as monetarism – the idea that, by controlling the supply of money, a country can regulate nominal GDP and inflation. Shifty, a new five-part series for the BBC by Adam Curtis, explores the impact of this policy on the UK and how its consequences led to widespread social and economic change, ultimately paving the way for the rise of new global powers – not in politics, but in technology and finance.

Curtis’s series charts a characteristically far-reaching course through the country’s cultural, political, financial and social underbelly – its aristocracy, ruling, middle and working classes – engaging with both the direct and indirect consequences of monetarism. He develops the idea that the policy was a system that had worked well in the 19th century to serve an industrializing nation, while Thatcher deployed it to precisely the opposite effect: bringing about the devastating demise of many UK industries. 

On the eve of the show’s release, Sean Burns spoke with Curtis about the parallels between the 1980s and today, the advent of AI and the emotion at the heart of his work. 

Sean Burns I’ve always felt that your filmmaking is driven by the idea that the conditions of the past contribute to the mess of the present. Could you speak to how Shifty engages with the political landscape of 2025?

Adam Curtis I didn’t start making it just because of the political landscape, but because of the broader landscape – how people are living and feeling today. There’s a pervasive uncertainty, an overwhelming feeling that those in power lack any real vision for the future, that they’re just kind of flailing. They might try out good ideas, but they don’t seem to have a clear sense of why. And they know that we know that.

Underneath all that, I sensed a kind of melancholy. Those of us who lived through this period experienced something that was equal parts exciting, extraordinary and horrible – and, somehow, we’ve ended up here, in this uncertain place. We can’t see the future and we constantly replay the past to ourselves. That’s where I started: with a sense that something is ending.

I wanted to go back into the past and look at it with fresh eyes, to better understand the roots of this uncertainty. What I began to find was twofold: first, there were major shifts in power during the 1980s and ’90s – primarily away from politics and mostly toward finance, though also other areas. Second, there was a significant internal shift in consciousness. We are very different creatures from the human beings of 1978. The new individualism that rose up ate away at the foundations of political democracy.

SB Shifty explores this theme of rampant individualism. At times, it seems as though you’re critiquing the cultural emphasis on self-improvement and self-care. 

AC I don’t think I’m critiquing it: I’m trying to trace the waystations individualism passed through during this period. One thing I was very aware I needed to do – since I grew up in that era – was to show it was both exciting and frightening. We still don’t fully understand the dimensions of the change that occurred, both outside and within us.

Toward the end, where the series takes a darker turn, I wanted to show that being a self-contained individual – someone who believes that what drives you comes from within rather than from what pompous elites tell you – can be incredibly liberating and exhilarating when things are going well. But, since the late 1990s, when things aren’t going well, that same individualism can leave you feeling very lost and alone. 

I try to suggest in this – and it’s a difficult area, because you’re dealing with people’s real worries and anxieties – that, when there’s a sense you can no longer change the world outside or put mass pressure on lawmakers, you inevitably turn inward. 

SB It feels like we’re in a heightened moment of the condition you’re describing and, at such times, the body is one thing people feel they can control.

AD That’s often all you have left to control – which doesn’t mean it’s wrong to do so, something that lots of anti-wellness people go on about. If you can’t change anything else, you may as well try to make the thing you do have control over better. But I’m trying to point out something subtler: yes, that is power, but it’s only one kind of power. What you have lost is the countervailing power against the forces outside of your body, which may also have a negative effect on it. I’m an optimist; I think people will begin to realize that it’s not wrong to turn inward, but there are other things as well.

SB You often move between broad, expansive narrative segments – such as Stephen Hawking’s research into the galaxy – and more specific, personal stories. Could you speak to the interplay between the micro and the macro?

AC A lot of factual history, whether on television or in writing, tends to fixate on a particular genre. Political history is always about high politics, which is why it’s often boring. I wanted to show the interplay between political events and what was happening inside our own minds. We were transforming and experiencing a shift in how we saw the world while the world was being transformed by massive shifts in power. 

One of the things this age might suddenly realize – and I’d be out of a job – is that it’s time to stop looking back and replaying the past

The reason I’m interested in Hawking is that there is a parallel between him and Thatcher. They were both people who really believed that rationality – in Thatcher’s case, the logic of money – could make a better world. She didn’t like the fuzzy ideologies of socialism or a planned economy. Hawking I saw as a tragic figure who really wanted to find a unified theory of the entire universe. He sought to achieve that through the rationality of mathematics. As I gently show in the films, it often led to absurd ideas, of which his wife was the best critic.

SB Could you speak to the importance of presenting a nationwide perspective?

AC I felt that was the right thing to do because what I’m talking about is something that happened to an entire nation. It’s a truth that people in the prosperous areas – mainly, but not exclusively, London and the southeast – often don’t fully realize what happened in the rest of the country. The northeast is very important in that regard: it’s one of the great engines of rebellion. It’s where Brexit really started, I think, after the global financial crisis of 1998. In a way, Shifty is a tribute to the BBC: there’s footage in the archive from all over the country.

SB It strikes me that music is an important aspect of the series. We hear tracks from Young Fathers, Yazoo and others. Could you talk about how you use music? I’m thinking specifically about the footage of drunk private-school kids set to a soundtrack of opera.

AC Actually, Yazoo was just playing in the background of the footage from Capital Radio’s Best Disco in Town. I loved it! Most of the time, I tried to let the background music seep through naturally. With the footage you mentioned, the soundtrack comes from Giuseppe Verdi’s opera The Force of Destiny [1835]. I wanted to create a mood that, although those kids are probably the future, they already feel sad and old. 

SB A recurring spectre in Shifty is the danger of technology – particularly surveillance technology – when it falls into the wrong hands. It feels as though we’re at a critical moment with the advent of AI. 

AC I have a problem with talking about AI because absolutely no one knows what it’s going to be. It’s a blank screen onto which we project our dark fears or techno-optimistic fantasies. I think two things about AI: the person who writes the first line of code is the ideologist. There’s nothing neutral about AI. The other thing I know is that – rather like we’re still obsessed with the Beatles – it’s obsessed with the past. AI haunts us with our own dreams, fantasies and the absurd drunken things we’ve said one night. It mashes them up and plays them back to us like a weird avalanche of phantasms. From a political point of view, we’re waiting for someone to show us how to escape our obsession with the past. One of the things this age might suddenly realize – and I’d be out of a job – is that it’s time to stop looking back and replaying the past, and to build something genuinely new.

SB In Shifty, you’ve removed the authoritative voice that characterized your previous work, which in turn removes the sense of history as a definitive narrative.

AC There is a funny moment in recent history when the fragments of experience don’t quite make sense: they’re still memory and haven’t yet become history. Most of these things will fall away in the next ten to 15 years. It’s like a twilight zone of memory before the formal structure of history replaces it. I wanted to make a film set in that funny transitional moment, when everything is morphing and in flux. No one knows what it means at the time, but we later come to realise it was actually much more important than we thought. 

Adam Curtis’s Shifty is available via BBC iPlayer from June 14 

^{Main image: Adam Curtis, Shifty, 2025, film still. Courtesy: the artist and BBC}