Toward the end of Adam Curtis’s new documentary, Shifty, we’re given front-row seats to one of New Labour’s more bizarre spectacles. More than two decades ago, as Y2K’s world-historical deadline loomed, Tony Blair’s government planned to mark the occasion by constructing the Millennium Dome, a vast structure that is today parked across the Thames from Whitehall. It was supposed to commemorate the end of one era and the advent of another, Cool Britannia–style. Inside visitors would wander through themed “zones” that promised an immersive encounter with their shared “Island Story:” science, faith, work, play, culture. It was to be an official UK mythology for a posthistorical age. At the center of it all was a stage where the nation might, in theory, gather as one when the clock struck midnight on the final day of the twentieth century.

But as Adam Curtis would say, there was just one problem. No one knew what any of it was for. Committees were formed, disbanded, and reformed. Consultants were hired to provide a story. No one involved could articulate a coherent vision of national identity or shared purpose. Instead they resorted to vague gestures and banalities. “HOW SHALL I LIVE?” appeared in all-caps across the bare wall of the so-called Spirit Zone, with the absence of any real meaning inadvertently creating an immanent critique. A virtual reality experience meant to dazzle with futurism settled instead for pixelated simulations of woodland groves because those in charge simply had no idea what should be shown on the headsets. The Dome became a theater of nonmeaning, the architectural corollary to a politics that had mistaken managerialism for ideology, neoliberalism for inevitability, and private pleasure for collective purpose.

For those unfamiliar, Shifty’s director Adam Curtis is the BBC’s resident montage philosopher, a documentarian of the uncanny who builds sprawling historical narratives out of archival footage, synth scores, and voice-over essays delivered in a register somewhere between bedtime story and Oxford don. Some of his greatest hits include The Century of the Self (2002), where he mapped the psychological architecture of liberalism, tracing how Sigmund Freud’s heirs helped rewire desire into consumption; The Trap (2007), in which he turned to the cold logic of game theory to show how freedom was gradually recoded as self-interest; and HyperNormalisation (2016), which argued that both elites and citizens had retreated into a managed unreality sustained by hollow myths of the past, ambient fear, and the comforting lie that nothing else was possible.