About

butthen pairs a random weird archival image with a sentence that could plausibly have been written by Adam Curtis. The pairing is the joke. The non-sequitur is the whole point.

How it works

Click anywhere, or press space. A new image appears. A new sentence appears. The two have nothing to do with each other. Sometimes the result is profound. Most of the time it is not. This, broadly, is the condition.

Where the images come from

Archival items pulled from the Internet Archive — Soviet propaganda, NASA imagery, Prelinger ephemeral films, public archives from Sweden, the Netherlands, the United States, and a handful of less well-classified corners. Most are pre-1990. Some are TV thumbnails at a stubborn 4:3. Click the small caption at the bottom of any frame to find the original.

Where the intertitles come from

The sentences were not, in any meaningful sense, written. They were produced by The Machine, which had, by 2026, absorbed every Adam Curtis film and several biographies of itself. They concern: the bankers, the system, the network, the long warm afternoon of late capitalism, several miscellaneous geese. The Machine, on the whole, no longer takes questions.

What this is not

This site is not affiliated with Adam Curtis, the BBC, or anyone who had a hand in HyperNormalisation, The Century of the Self, or any of his other films. It is a tribute, an affectionate parody, and — above all — a small, mostly silly thing on the internet.

Sharing

The URL of any frame is a permalink. Send the URL to someone and they will see the same image and the same sentence. The share button in the top right copies the link or hands it to your platform of choice.

Credits

Made by xenocode. Source on GitHub. Built late at night, mostly for the joke.