( 1 ) In Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation, Yurchak explains how this linguistic peculiarity reflected the way Soviet citizens perpetuated official ideology and continued to act as if the state was functioning while privately acknowledging that their lived reality was diverging increasingly from official narratives.
Word: HypernormalizationA term for these troubling times.
Word: HypernormalizationA term for these troubling times.
Etymology: The term “hypernormalization” was coined by the anthropologist Alexei Yurchak in 2005 to describe a linguistic peculiarity in late-Soviet society: Following years of ideologically driven usage, words had been hollowed out of their meanings and, as a result, could no longer be interpreted outside of the definitions given to them by the state.1
The term was later popularized, and anglicized, by the British filmmaker Adam Curtis in his 2016 documentary, HyperNormalisation. Curtis employed it more broadly to describe the propensity of governments and corporations to promote simplified narratives as an anesthetic to the more complex, and more frightening, reality.
The compound term “hypernormalization” can thus be divided in two ways to give connected but slightly different interpretations: “Hyper-normalization” is the intensified process of normalization, while “hypernormal-ization” is the takeover of a new normal. Yurchak is using it in the latter sense; Curtis in the former.
Meaning: What are the chances, do you think, that this article was written by AI? Two years ago, you’d have laughed at the idea. Now, you might well be scanning the prose for a telltale sign—an em dash, perhaps. And if you experience a sense of disquiet about the pace at which AI is learning to mimic human creativity, but would rather not think about it too much and instead continue to use ChatGPT to make your life easier, you might be a (willing) victim of hypernormalization, as Yurchak understands it.
