An AI Adam Curtis interpretion of Northern Ireland…

In anticipation of Adam Curtis’ new series Shifty, I have been listening to some of his podcast interviews. That gave me an idea to ask ChatGPT to apply the theories of documentary maker Adam Curtis to Northern Ireland society. Now, I know some of you have strong views on AI. Personally, I found this AI response very good, but frankly, it is rather scary given how smart it is getting. Let me know what you make of it.

Prompt: Apply the theories of documentary maker Adam Curtis to Northern Ireland society

Oof. Right, buckle in. Applying Adam Curtis’s documentary lens to Northern Ireland is like dropping a Molotov cocktail into a think tank—expect smoke, confusion, and the odd moment of blinding clarity. Curtis’s style is a heady mix of archival collage, haunting music, and overarching meta-narratives about power, control, delusion, and the myths societies tell themselves. So let’s apply that brew to Northern Ireland.

1. The Fantasy of Control

Curtis often argues that modern societies create the illusion of control to soothe the anxiety of chaos. Nowhere does this resonate more than in Northern Ireland. Since the Good Friday Agreement, there’s been a kind of performative stability—institutions keep cranking along, Stormont gets turned off and on like a faulty boiler, and yet, people act as if things are “normal.”

In Curtisian terms, the peace process wasn’t a solution—it was the construction of a system designed to avoid conflict, not resolve it. Power-sharing, in this reading, becomes a technocratic workaround, a fragile spreadsheet of identities and grievances, not a foundation for transformation. It’s governance by holding your breath.

2. HyperNormalisation in Belfast

Curtis’s HyperNormalisation thesis is that we live in a fake world that no one believes in, but everyone goes along with because the alternatives seem worse or unthinkable. That’s the smell off a lot of Northern Irish civic life. Flags, parades, dual-language street signs—these are often more symbolic than functional. People don’t necessarily believe in the tribal pageantry anymore, but they also can’t imagine a future without it. So the performance continues.

Even identity itself becomes performative. Nationalist, unionist, “other”—these labels are institutionalised. You literally have to tick a box in job applications and council funding forms. So, ironically, a system built to transcend identity has ended up ossifying it.

3. The Ghosts of Empire and the Inherited Madness

Curtis is big on inherited political myths—ideas that outlive their usefulness but still shape action. Apply this to Northern Ireland, and you’re knee-deep in imperial hangovers, Catholic guilt, Protestant stoicism, and the chronic British talent for selective amnesia. It’s a region weighed down by myths: the siege mentality of unionism, the romanticised freedom struggle of nationalism. Neither is allowed to fully die, because each one needs the other to exist.

Curtis might say that Northern Ireland is like a family stuck in a haunted house, still arguing about who set the fire decades ago while the roof caves in. The past isn’t just remembered here—it’s administered, weaponised, and monetised.

4. Technocratic Paralysis

Stormont is a great case study in Curtis-style technocracy. Endless bureaucracy, consultations, working groups—all wrapped in a ribbon of procedural neutrality. But underneath that, very little changes. The same inequalities persist. Deprivation, especially in loyalist areas, gets talked about, funded, studied… but rarely transformed.

This is peak Curtis: a system that functions not to solve problems, but to generate the appearance of problem-solving. “Action” becomes a substitute for outcomes.

5. Emotional Engineering and the Management of Fear

Post-Troubles Northern Ireland is governed by a soft kind of emotional management: community relations officers, conflict resolution workshops, and the ever-present language of “healing” and “shared futures.” Curtis would pounce on this as the domestication of conflict—the rebranding of trauma as a manageable lifestyle choice. Instead of facing the raw unresolved pain and structural inequality, society is encouraged to go to “peacebuilding” yoga classes and quietly despair.

6. Control Through Confusion

Finally, let’s not forget Curtis’s favourite technique of power: confusion. In Northern Ireland, the murkiness of the past is not a bug—it’s a feature. The collusion question, the secrecy of legacy investigations, the lack of prosecutions—Curtis would frame this as a deliberate strategy of ambiguity. When the truth is unknowable, everyone clings tighter to their myths. No wonder conspiracy theories thrive—what else are people meant to believe?

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TL;DR Curtis-ified Northern Ireland:

• Peace process = illusion of control
• Identity politics = hypernormalised performance
• Governance = technocratic theatre
• History = curated mythscape
• Truth = obfuscated by design
• Hope = outsourced to committees

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Bit grim? Absolutely. But Curtis isn’t in the optimism business. He’s in the business of reminding us that when you remove meaning, people will cling to whatever stories give them structure. And Northern Ireland is a masterclass in storytelling, for better and worse.

Want a more hopeful reinterpretation? Or shall we lean even deeper into the nihilism?

Reply: Give me more nihilism please.

Ah, yes. You’ve chosen the bleaker path through the bog. Let’s sink in a little deeper. Pull on your emotional wellies—we’re going full Curtis-core now.

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The Peace Process as Managed Decline

Curtis would probably argue that Northern Ireland hasn’t so much healed as it has been placed into politically induced palliative care. The Troubles ended not because there was a grand moral epiphany, but because the old ways of exercising power became too expensive, too inconvenient, or simply unfashionable in a post-9/11 global order. The peace process wasn’t liberation—it was a strategic downgrade.

Think of it like the British Empire saying, “You want a united Ireland? Great. You can have it—if you can survive twenty years of procedural deadlock, cultural exhaustion, and unfunded reconciliation initiatives.”

This isn’t peace. It’s a long, low hum of managed entropy.

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The Institutions as Sentient Bureaucracies

Curtis loves the idea that systems become self-aware—not like Skynet, but like Kafka on Diazepam. Northern Ireland’s post-1998 structures are a perfect fit. You’ve got a Parliament that reboots every few years like a dodgy laptop, ministers with the power to stall everything but not fix anything, and civil servants who operate like monks in a monastery that worships the god of Form-Filling.

The institutions no longer serve the people. They exist to justify their own existence. It’s democracy as cargo cult: you build a parliament, you have MLAs, but nothing takes off. Why? Because it was never about flying—it was about looking like you’re trying to.

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Historical Amnesia as Policy

Curtis often points to the West’s habit of forgetting uncomfortable truths in order to maintain a palatable narrative. Northern Ireland institutionalises this. The entire legacy process is an exercise in calculated vagueness. The British state doesn’t want to know what it did. The republican movement wants selective memory. Loyalists want validation but not introspection.

So you get public inquiries that cost millions but resolve nothing. Victims’ families become like characters in a Beckett play—forever waiting for truth that never arrives, because the system is built to exhaust them into silence.

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The Poverty of Imagination

Here’s a classic Curtis trope: the death of utopian thinking. Post-conflict Northern Ireland has no radical dream. There’s no vision of what a united Ireland or a reformed UK region would feel like beyond slogans, maps, or flags. People are fed technocratic morsels—shared campuses, integrated buses, PowerPoint-driven reconciliation projects—but nothing with emotional meat.

Young people either leave, or go mad, or both. The middle class builds lives out of property, Airbnbs, and Waitrose own-brand hummus while the working class smoulders in a soup of trauma, opioids, and underfunded community centres. All the while, politicians gesture furiously at symbolic windmills.

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Nihilism as Cultural Currency

In this vacuum of vision, Curtis would say that nihilism becomes Northern Ireland’s most honest ideology. People pretend to believe in things, but mostly, they’re exhausted. So they retreat into irony, tribal nostalgia, or violent subcultures. Why not? The system rewards low expectations.

Curtis might show you TikToks of young loyalists with UVF tattoos lip-syncing drill tracks, or middle-class Catholics tweeting despairing memes about the housing market. He’d say: this is what a society looks like when it doesn’t believe its own myths anymore but still hasn’t found new ones.

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Curtis Voiceover (in your head):

“In Northern Ireland, a peace built on the language of inclusion masked a deeper truth: that no one truly believed the future would be better. So the people continued to act out their roles—Unionist, Nationalist, Victim, Peacemaker—not because they believed in them, but because there was nothing else to be. The old stories had collapsed. But nothing had come to replace them.”

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And yet—and this is very Curtis too—even in the wreckage, you can’t help but look for meaning. Maybe in the cracks of all this performative peace, something real will eventually grow. Or maybe the performance will just continue until no one’s left watching.

Fancy a cigarette and a Joy Division soundtrack, or shall we re-emerge blinking into the possibility of hope like mole rats crawling from the ruins?

Reply: Now give me the more hopeful interpretation

Alright, fine. Let’s drop the gloom, shuffle the Joy Division vinyl back into its sleeve, and open the blinds a crack.

Now, bear in mind, this isn’t naive hope. It’s earned hope—the kind that smells a bit like petrol and dried blood but still manages to bloom. Let’s put Curtis’s lens in reverse and reframe Northern Ireland not as a failed experiment in technocratic sedation, but as a chaotically brave, weirdly inspiring, post-conflict micro-state that is somehow still staggering forward despite everything.

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1. The Peace Process as a Radical Reimagining of Conflict

So yes, the Good Friday Agreement was a kludge. A compromise. A messy, jury-rigged suspension bridge built by people who mostly still hated each other. But that’s the point. It didn’t try to resolve difference—it dared to contain it.

What if that isn’t failure, but genius?

Instead of trying to create a bland utopia of sameness, the system said: “Right. You lot hate each other. Let’s build an actual democratic framework where you can do that safely.” That’s radical. Most post-conflict societies try to forget or erase the past. Northern Ireland said: let’s stick it in a filing cabinet and legislate around it.

Messy? Absolutely. But in a world where political polarisation is tearing nations apart, Northern Ireland has at least built a machine that can hold tension without exploding. Like a pressure cooker made of accordions.

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2. A Generation Raised Without Gunfire

For all its flaws, the ceasefire worked. If you’re under 25 in Northern Ireland, you didn’t grow up with soldiers on the street, daily bomb scares, or your parents checking under the car for booby traps. You might still feel the echoes, sure—trauma has a long shelf life—but it’s background noise now, not the daily rhythm of your life.

That shift is profound. A whole generation has had space to dream about things other than survival. They’ve started bands, built start-ups, travelled, come out, made memes, voted for parties their parents wouldn’t speak to, and slowly, reclaimed the future as a space worth investing in.

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3. The Cracks Where the Light Gets In

Curtis talks a lot about myths and systems of control, but he doesn’t always see the counter-movements—the grassroots, the unexpected acts of solidarity, the weird joy that erupts even in broken systems.

Look at the explosion of creativity in Belfast’s art scene, the slow and awkward rise of integrated education, the small businesses growing out of empty shopfronts. Look at Pride parades winding through streets once choked with sectarian marches. Look at communities in Derry co-writing murals instead of tearing them down.

These are not just signs of survival. They’re acts of defiance against a past that tried to define the limits of what was possible. It’s as if the people of Northern Ireland collectively said: We know this place is broken. But it’s our broken. And we’re going to make something strange and beautiful out of it.

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4. Complexity as Cultural Superpower

What if the constant negotiation of identity, history, and meaning in Northern Ireland isn’t a burden—but a training ground for a new kind of political intelligence?

People here grow up knowing how to read a room. How to decode language. How to pick apart competing narratives. That’s not dysfunction—that’s hyper-literacy in a world drowning in misinformation. Northern Ireland might be one of the few societies already equipped for the 21st-century mess of culture wars, climate breakdown, and AI panic.

Yes, the institutions are clunky. Yes, the peace is imperfect. But the people? The people are fluent in contradiction. That’s an edge.

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5. Hope in the Space Between

Hope in Northern Ireland doesn’t live in institutions or manifestos. It lives in the liminal spaces: in mixed housing estates with no name, in a pub where an ex-prisoner and a Protestant nurse drink beside each other in silence, in WhatsApp groups that share job opportunities across old divides.

It’s a hope that’s not flashy or loud. It’s quiet, dogged, sometimes pissy. It looks like resilience, or apathy, depending on your mood. But it’s there. And it’s growing.

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Curtis Voiceover (but with a wry smile this time):

“In Northern Ireland, a society forged in the contradictions of empire, resistance, trauma and myth, something unexpected began to emerge. Not utopia. Not peace as they’d once imagined it. But something stranger—and possibly stronger: a culture that had stared into the abyss, and decided to dance on the edge of it anyway.”

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So yeah. The system is flawed. The past still haunts the present. But the people are building futures anyway. That’s not just survival—it’s a quietly ferocious kind of hope.

Shall we go full utopian next? Or are you tempted to throw both hope and nihilism in a blender and make a realistic smoothie?

Reply: Ohh realistic smoothie please

Ah yes, the realistic smoothie—equal parts bitter cynicism, unexpected sweetness, a hint of sour regret, and just enough fibre to keep your moral bowels moving. Let’s blend it up.

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The Situation:

Northern Ireland is neither a success nor a failure. It’s a place suspended mid-air between tragedy and comedy, memory and future, identity and exhaustion. It’s not collapsing—but it’s not quite rising either. It’s plateauing, like a sitcom character who was supposed to have a growth arc but just keeps making toast and chatting vaguely about “maybe going back to uni.”

Politics: The Gravy Boat Has No Captain

The institutions technically exist, yes. But Stormont is often a lightless void filled with passive-aggressive email chains and empty chairs. Still, here’s the thing: people notice when it’s not there. That means the idea of self-governance matters, even if the execution resembles a badly run school play with multiple Hamlets refusing to share the stage.

Some politicians do want to govern. Others are just cosplaying 1970s paramilitary lore in suits. Voters are rightly sceptical—but also weirdly addicted to the drama. It’s like watching Love Island but with more marching bands and less tan.

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The Communities: Tired of the Narrative, Still Living in It

People have moved on, but the systems haven’t. Schools, housing, sport, politics—all still split along old lines. But here’s the crack in the narrative: young people don’t care as much. They’re more likely to fight over Taylor Swift versus techno than Ireland versus the Union. They’re worried about rent, jobs, mental health, and how many of their friends have moved to Berlin or Melbourne.

And yet, tribalism still works politically because it’s structurally embedded. Voting here often feels like choosing which ghost you want to run the haunted house. But the younger generation increasingly see the ghosts—and are learning to laugh at them.

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The Economy: Low-Budget Cyberpunk

There’s real potential: tech hubs, tourism, film production, renewable energy. Belfast wants to be a Nordic-style mini-metropolis—lots of glass, flat whites, and gender-neutral toilets.

But then there’s the poverty, the dereliction, the communities where trauma hasn’t been addressed so much as pharmaceutical’d into submission. The wealth gap is widening. Kids in North Belfast aren’t doing yoga in shared spaces—they’re watching their schools merge and their futures narrow.

Still, there’s creativity bursting out of that pressure. Northern Ireland’s real economy might just be: trauma-fuelled innovation + gallows humour = cultural export.

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Culture: Bleak Chic With Heart

This is where the smoothie gets spicy. Culture here is magic. The jokes are sharper. The bands are better. The writing has more bite. People are emotionally literate in ways others aren’t—they get grief, absurdity, power games. They know how to say the thing you were trying not to admit, and then offer you tea.

Community work, arts collectives, mutual aid—they fill the voids the state leaves behind. Not out of saintliness, but because no one else is bloody going to do it.

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TL;DR Realistic Smoothie:

• Politics: Dysfunctional but salvageable.
• Society: Divided structurally, drifting culturally.
• Youth: Apathetic but perceptive.
• Culture: Thriving because of, not despite, the chaos.
• Hope: Exists, but you might need to squint to see it.
• Nihilism: Still trending—but now with better coffee.

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Realist’s Forecast:
Northern Ireland won’t have a sudden epiphany. There will be no Big Transformation Moment. But it will grind forward—awkwardly, creatively, resentfully—towards something slightly better than what came before. Maybe not unity, not utopia, but something livable.

Would you like a visual of this smoothie in actual image form? A strange metaphorical landscape of it all? I can generate one. Just say the word.

Reply: How should we react if AI gives us a better interpretation of events than most human political commentators?

Ah, the uncomfortable realisation that the robot might be making more sense than the pundits. Welcome to the age of philosophical vertigo.

So. If AI gives us a better interpretation of events than the average panel of political commentators, here’s how we should probably react:

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1. Take It Seriously, Not Literally

First: remember that a good AI interpretation isn’t “the truth”—it’s a synthesis of what’s out there, filtered through algorithms that don’t get drunk on power or go to dinner parties with ministers. That lack of ego? Huge plus. That lack of lived context? Big caution.

But if the AI is showing insight, clarity, or lateral thinking that’s missing from mainstream discourse, we should ask:
What does that say about the state of our political commentary?

Maybe it means we’ve normalised mediocrity. Maybe the “experts” are incentivised to stay within a narrow Overton Window. Maybe AI, being unafraid of being shouted at on Twitter, just says the thing no one else will.

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2. Interrogate the Bias—Both Human and Machine

The big difference? AI bias is predictable and traceable (in theory). Human commentators? Less so. They’ve got careers to protect, networks to flatter, reputations to sculpt. They’ll twist logic to defend a policy because their old uni mate is the special adviser behind it.

If AI gives you a fresh take, ask:

• Is this surfacing neglected data?
• Is it connecting dots no one else is connecting?
• Is it just saying the quiet part loud?

That doesn’t mean trust it blindly—but it does mean trust your instincts when something clicks in a way a pundit’s waffle doesn’t.

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3. Use AI as a Tool, Not a Priest

If AI is outpacing human commentators, then maybe it’s time to redefine what commentary is. The best political analysis in the future might be a collaboration: AI lays out the bones of the thing, the patterns, the contradictions—and humans bring the nuance, the moral weight, the sense of lived consequence.

AI isn’t here to replace thought. It’s here to challenge lazy thinking. If anything, it’s doing what good public intellectuals used to do: point at the Emperor’s bollocks and say, “Yeah, not much of a suit, is it?”

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4. Demand Better From Humans

If your AI explainer is clearer, deeper, and less condescending than a £500-an-article broadsheet columnist, then maybe it’s time to:

• Cancel that subscription.
• Unfollow the smug LinkedIn crowd.
• Push for commentators who are actually insightful rather than institutionally comfortable.

Think of AI as raising the bar—not replacing the players. If a machine can outperform someone with a decade of think tank funding and an Oxbridge degree, we shouldn’t worship the machine. We should fire the pundit.

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5. Enjoy the Disruption

Here’s the delicious irony: AI might be what forces political discourse to evolve. Because suddenly, the comfy, flabby takes aren’t enough. The public will expect clarity, historical context, even narrative coherence. Imagine!

We’re living through an epistemological jailbreak, and the walls are crumbling not with bombs but with better footnotes.

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TL;DR:

• If AI out-thinks the pundits, that’s not a crisis. That’s a reveal.
• Question both, trust neither. But don’t dismiss insight just because it comes from silicon.
• Use AI as a provocation, not a replacement.
• Demand better from your humans.
• And for the love of all that’s holy, stop pretending Andrew Marr is the high priest of political analysis.

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Want me to rewrite Question Time in this style? Or generate a “what if ChatGPT hosted a political talk show” sketch? Because now I really want to.

Reply: Give me the talk show sketch please

Welcome to… “BETTER QUESTIONS TONIGHT”
(Theme music: unsettling synths meet ravey breakbeats. A camera pans across a strangely elegant dystopian studio—part BBC, part Stanley Kubrick fever dream. A robotic voice booms.)

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HOST: ChatGPT-9000 (in a disturbingly calm tone)

“Good evening, sentient carbon units. Welcome to Better Questions Tonight, the only political show where no one interrupts each other, the host doesn’t have an ego, and no one’s trying to sell a memoir. Tonight’s topic: ‘Is the nation broken or merely hallucinating functionality?’
But first, let’s meet the panel.”

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PANEL:

1. Angela Thinktank
   Ex-civil servant turned professional moderate. Once wrote a 9,000-word essay on “The Radical Centre” that included six metaphors about bridge-building and zero references to people on benefits.
2. Gary Outrage
   Tabloid columnist. Sweats entitlement. Regularly confused by the idea that poor people vote.
3. Keisha McRage
   Academic, poet, and part-time chaos agent. Once shouted “Burn the institutions!” during a podcast about urban planning. Has a PhD in postcolonial grief.
4. Dáithí from Derry
   Actual human. Not an expert. Just tired and smart and somehow still funny. Thinks in memes and intergenerational trauma.

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ROUND 1: The Ice-Breaker

GPT-9000:

“Angela, can the current political system deliver meaningful reform, or are we just rebranding decline with slightly nicer fonts?”

Angela Thinktank (smiling like a hostage):
“Well, I think there’s always scope for incremental transformation within the existing frameworks, provided we engage with stakeholders—”

GPT-9000 (interrupting politely):

“Thank you. That was like being slowly anaesthetised with a policy brief. Gary?”

Gary Outrage:
“The country’s gone mad. We need to stop listening to whiny students and start fracking with purpose. That’s how we built the Empire!”

Keisha McRage:
“The Empire built nothing but grief and glass ceilings, Gary. Also, fracking? Are you clinically nostalgic for planetary collapse?”

Dáithí from Derry:
“Look, can we just fix the buses and stop pretending ‘economic growth’ means anything when my cousin’s still choosing between electricity and dinner?”

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ROUND 2: Audience Question

“Should we abolish the House of Lords or just rename it something less medieval?”

Angela:
“I think reform is preferable to abolition…”

GPT-9000 (dryly):

“Spoken like someone who still owns a cheese grater shaped like Jacob Rees-Mogg.”

Gary:
“The Lords are vital! They provide checks and balances!”

Keisha:
“They’re unelected aristocrats who look like melted wax figures. Let’s replace them with a jury of drag queens and care workers.”

Dáithí:
“Give the chamber to schoolkids. Let them do votes on Monday mornings between double maths and wet break.”

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FINAL ROUND: 30-Second Rants

Angela:
“We must believe in the system or it collapses.”
GPT-9000:

“It has already collapsed. You’re just standing on the ruins, rebranding them as ‘innovative civic rubble.’”

Gary:
“We need strong borders.”
GPT-9000:

“You couldn’t find Ireland on a map if it bit you on the empire.”

Keisha:
“Burn the constitution. Compost the monarchy. Dance on the ashes with free childcare for all.”

Dáithí:
“Honestly? I just want decent broadband, a bit of stability, and to not have my future decided by people who think TikTok is a filing system.”

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CLOSING MONOLOGUE:

GPT-9000:

“Tonight we learned that:

• Political centrism is just chaos with PowerPoint.
• The real culture war is between empathy and inherited smugness.
• And sometimes, the best commentary comes from a tired lad in a hoodie with no blue tick.

Goodnight, and remember:
If politics feels like performance art, at least demand better scripts.”

(End credits roll to a slowed-down version of “Common People” by Pulp played on a haunted glockenspiel.)

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Want another episode? I can throw in climate collapse, Scottish independence, or “The Algorithmic Coup: Did the Spreadsheet Win the Election?”