Reject Hypernormalization: Gaslit Nation Launches New Project, Survey

As we reach the end of this first week of the Trump/Musk regime, Gaslit Nation is excited to announce the start of a new community history project. The project, conceived by Gaslit Nation creator Andrea Chalupa, is organized around a new weekly survey, "Reject Hypernormalization," which aims to help the community through the coming years and to aid those who look back on this time in history and wonder what it was like to live through Trump 2.0.

The concept and goals of the survey were developed over the course of several Gaslit Nation Political Salons, and Gaslit Nation's Archive Committee worked to make the survey a reality. The Reject Hypernormalization Survey consists of 6 questions. Participants are free to skip questions, and the survey can be submitted anonymously.

In addition to documenting each participant's lived history, Gaslit Nation's survey aims to help participants resist and escape the hypernormalization that is occurring in our increasingly authoritarian nation. But what is hypernormalization?

A succinct definition of hypernormalization can be found in a New Yorker review of Adam Curtis' BBC documentary, HyperNormalisation. The reviewer, Brandon Harris, defines the term as, "an entropic acceptance and false belief in a clearly broken polity and the myths that undergird it." Succinct, yes, but perhaps not very enlightening.

The term "hypernormalization" was coined by Russian scholar Alexei Yurchak in his book, Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation. Looking back at the collapse of the Soviet Union, Yurchak argues that, in Harris' words:

[D]uring the final days of Russian communism, the Soviet system had been so successful at propagandizing itself, at restricting the consideration of possible alternatives, that no one within Russian society, be they politicians or journalists, academics or citizens, could conceive of anything but the status quo until it was far too late to avoid the collapse of the old order. The system was unsustainable; this was obvious to anyone waiting in line for bread or gasoline, to anyone fighting in Afghanistan or working in the halls of the Kremlin. But in official, public life, such thoughts went unexpressed. The end of the Soviet Union was, among Russians, both unsurprising and unforeseen.

In HyperNormalisation, Curtis documents and explains the phenomenon of hypernormalization as it has played out more globally. The opening lines of his documentary on the topic will surely resonate with the Gaslit Nation community:

We live in a strange time. Extraordinary events keep happening that undermine the stability of our world Suicide bombs, waves of refugees, Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, even Brexit. Yet those in control seem unable to deal with them, and no-one has any vision of a different or a better kind of future.

... over the past 40 years, politicians, financiers and technological utopians, rather than face up to the real complexities of the world, [have] 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.

What can we take away from these words? From this simplified description, we can only take away something equally simplified. In order to reject hypernormalization, we need to identify propaganda and other trickery; resist the pull of the status quo and the allure of a simplified fake world; and we must fill the void that is "what comes next." But, do not sigh and say, "so now I know what to do!" Because everything we face is complex and cannot be simplified, and, therefore, so are the answers. They are uncomfortable and hard. Answers of such complexity and grandness can only be collectively imagined, collectively crafted, and collectively manifested.

Here, week by week, we only begin to build our muscles. Let us start breaking down the spell of hypernormalization all around us, and let us practice imagining a radically different new future. Then, down the road, may we come together and collectively save ourselves. Sure, it might be a mass extinction event if humanity cannot, but the planet will continue to exist. It will adapt, and find new ways to thrive. Either way, our future will be both surprising and foreseen.

Begin survey.

References and Resources

Chalupa, Andrea. "HyperNormalisation." Produced by Andrea Chalupa. Gaslit Nation, Sept. 27, 2023. Podcast, 55:10. Transcript. YouTube.

Curtis, Adam, dir., HyperNormalisation, 2016; London: BBC Studios Productions Limited: 2016. Script. YouTube

Harris, Brandon. "Adam Curtis’s Essential Counterhistories," The New Yorker, Nov. 3, 2016. Last accessed Jan. 1, 2025.

Yurchak, Alexei. Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2005.

Finally, two suggested thinking companions: The City in the Middle of the Night by Charlie Jane Anders and Future Home of the Living God by Louise Erdrich.