Rowan Thorpe

Very well said. I will make a concerted effort to inject “hypernormalization” into my speech more often going forward. For decades I’ve been saying to friends that the reductionist obsession with “normal” (whatever the hell that means) is a cancer to modern society.

In particular it already sounds creepy when you replace usage with its verb-form, e.g. changing “all my friends are normal” to “all my friends have been normalized”. It’s common practise to use a re-encoder to normalize a “background” playlist of songs to the same dB threshold so no single song sticks out and distracts us from what we are trying to focus on while listening. Similarly, authorities of an authoritarian ilk try to normalize populations so none of them stick out and distract from the primary focus (centralization of power and money). Hypernormalization involves taking that to its logical conclusion, telling the vast majority of people “stay in your lane” - meaning “shut up and consume, and when we tell you what to buy you buy it”, AKA be “normal(ized)”).

The URL includes “-lets-learn-everything-” so I guess that is it.