Thoughts on Black Mirror
It was only recently I'd started watching Black Mirror on Netflix, from the first season, and thought I'd share my thoughts on what I think the writer (Charlie Brooker) was trying to convey.
The series is a bit like Tales of The Unexpected, but most of the episodes are remarkably clever vehicles for philosophical questions about humanity's relationship with technology, and the entities - state and corporate - that have ultimate control of it. What are the consequences of our human tendencies when married with technologies that create an imbalance of power? When there is no longer a demarcation between technology and the human person, would dehumanisation be the punishment for non-comformity?
Everything that could go wrong with transhumanism does go wrong in Black Mirror.
Entire History of You
I can't say this is among my favourite episodes, as it's a little boring, and, on the surface, it's centred around a dinner party and the breakup of a relationship.
Imagine a world in which everyone - or middle class professionals at any rate - has an implant that enables them to record and review every interaction they have with others.
Early on, as the characters review their recordings, they become hypercritical of each other, and second guess things that were said for the most trivial of reasons, and that leads to accusations of dishonesty and a small amount of friction. The implant in this story could be a metaphor for the 'social' media that enables us to scrutinise the behaviours of others, and influence how we might see them because of whatever perceived defects of behaviour that might otherwise have been overlooked in the past. True relationships develop when we accept the differences - good and bad - between us.
For the main character, this hypercriticism develops into a paranoia that costs him his relationships with his best friends and his partner. The episode ends with him wandering the house alone, replaying the happy times he shared with his wife.
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Arkangel
Even if it's done with the best of intentions, the outcome of denying a person his/her autonomy and violating privacy can be ruinous.
The story: After a little girl briefly goes missing, the mother has her implanted with what's essentially a surveillance and censorhip chip. Using a tablet device, the mother can see exactly where the daughter is, can see through the daughter's eyes, and also prevent the daughter seeing distressing and violent things. The problem with this is very obvious from the beginning: The daughter grows up with the implant, and the mother still has the means to arbitrarily invade her privacy and control what she sees.
In an astonishing lack of maturity and wisdom, the mother excercises that power one day. She retrieves the tablet from storage, and watches the daughter having sex and taking drugs - the things normal teenagers do. If events were allowed to run their natural course, the daughter would no dount be married with children a decade later. Instead, the mother takes it upon herself to terminate the daughter's relationship and pregancy.
In the ensuing bust-up, the relationship between the two is irreparably destroyed, as is the tablet device, and the daughter is essentially left with an incurable mental disability because there's no way to disable the censorship feature in the implant. The irony here is that neither end up better off than if the daughter was abducted as a child.
The story isn't about the brain implant per se. Who in their right mind would have elective brain surgery that involved the fixture of some foreign object? Yet the question here isn't an hypothetical one in this context, though, because surveillance technologies and methods are becoming increasingly invasive. Hell, even the operating systems in most our devices have APIs for targetted advertising, which was unthinkable a decade ago. It poses the question for those with the power to invade a person's privacy: Are we arrogant enough to believe we wouldn't be acting destructively in exercising that power?
National Anthem
Ostensibly a story about a Prime Minister being forced to give into a kidnapper's demands by shagging a pig on live TV is crass and silly. A Tory politician would never, ever, do something like that in real life, would he? What was Charlie Brooker thinking?
This episode is as intellectually and morally difficult to watch as some of the others, as it becomes apparent it's not going to be a comedy or the kind of satire Amando Ianucci would write.
We are compelled to watch the episode, as it unfolds, and as it becomes less likely the authorities would catch the bad guy in time, yet we wait for a plot twist in which the Prime Minister is saved at the last minute. That never comes, and the Prime Minister must either sacrifice his dignity in the most extreme way imagineable in order to save a life, or live with the shame of sacrificing a hostage's life to preserve some dignity. At first, the hundreds of people in the pub are cheering as they wait for the broadcast, seeing it as a big joke. Of course, we're engrossed in this also, at that point, and and it's possible their emotions mirrored ours, the viewers, and maybe with the same intensity.
When he actually does meet the kidnapper's demands, on live TV, the public's reaction turns to shock, disbelief, pity, and shame. And empathy also. The Prime Minister is no longer the butt of an outrageous joke, but instead a human being, forced to perform a degrading act.
Fifteen Million Merits
By the end of this story, it was apparent that the dystopian world presented here was a confluence of things that are already present day reality, which is quite scary, because the episode was made in 2011. The main characters are a boy and a girl, working in some facility with thousands of cycling machines - I assume they're being used as a source of renewable energy. While on the cycling machines, the young people are fed a near-constant diet of advertising, earning credits for watching them, and having credits deducted for not watching them. Even within their sparse dormitory rooms, every wall is a screen playing intrusive advertising at the most inopportune moments, and ready to scream 'RESUME VIEWING', should one avert his/her eyes.
As an aside, the episode's title shouldn't be ignored: The characters own nothing, yet their lives are exclusively about, and determined by a virtual currency balance that might earn them virtual things. The boy develops a deep connection with the girl, and he blows almost all his credits on a virtual ticket to an X-Factor-inspired show, which he thought would give the girl a fighting chance at a life worth living.
Despite being a wonderful and talented singer, the panellists, some coked-up and others desensitised to everything, decide her only way forward is to become a porn star. That's what she does, and it destroys her as a person.
Angry and upset, the boy hatches a plan: Earning enough credits to get himself onto the show, he threatens to cut his own throat on live stream unless he's allowed to speak out against the system in front of the (virtual) audience - a virtual audience very much like the ones we saw during the pandemic. Unfortunately the panellists, coked up as they were, proved more persuasive than the boy, who struggled to articulate what was wrong with The System, and offered him his own live stream segment as the 'crazy' character.
As I've mentioned, much of this dystopian future has indeed come to pass. Some Web browsers have features that enable one to earn meagre amounts of virtual 'currency' for watching adverts, or for playing some game that does Ethereum mining in the background, or other suchlike thing that earns someone else money. There are instances of psychological coercion to make us watch adverts: I'm sure a few of you reading this have seen 'ad breaks' that commence with the scrawny, unkempt gambling addict pulling out his smartphone, which I'm certain is intended to subliminally disuade the viewer from doing the same.
The cycing machines are also analogous, I believe: I see people running and using cycling machines like they are hamsters on some corporate wheel, and sometimes running to acquire money for multi-million charities with overpaid executives. Whether that's a good or bad thing, that's my perception of it. Many young people see the prospect of celebrity as their only chance of a future, to the exclusion of whatever latent talents and intelligence they might possess.