Technology is a malevolent tool for dehumanization in 'Black Mirror' - Daily Kos

From Michael Hodges at the Radio Times:

When Black Mirror writer Charlie Brooker was little, he expected to die horribly. “I was convinced I’d be incinerated in a nuclear war,” the presenter and screenwriter says. “I remember when I realised, as a child, ‘That stuff on the TV about nuclear bombs is real! Why isn’t everyone running around shouting “aaarrgghh”? Why are people still buying bicycle clips?’ I really believed I was going to be killed.” … “It’s a reflection of my worrying side,” Brooker reveals in a hotel room that could be a Black Mirror set – a large, unnervingly bare space with two chairs and nothing else but him and me in it. “I’m extremely neurotic, it’s the way my brain is built,” he says. “My favourite Twilight Zone is the one where a nuclear bomb goes off.”

“Foreigners, who don’t know me, think it’s written by the Unabomber or some massive Luddite who’s furious about technology,” says Brooker, but Black Mirror was never really about gadgets ganging up on us.

“I do love technology, but it’s in the background of the show. We use it in the same way that Tales of the Unexpected or Hammer House of Horror would use the supernatural – it’s a way of making magic things happen.”

The best episodes of Black Mirror make the viewer uncomfortable in how possible they seem, and the nervous feeling people might actually behave the way depicted if given new technological tools. But Brooker is right in the blockquote above, in that the technology is just a means to an end. In most of the stories, the horror is predicated on human tendencies that exist in the here and now in the absence of advanced technology.

The technology itself is not really the problem. It doesn’t come to life and take over lives, or start killing people because it’s suddenly self-aware. It’s what humans do with the technology that makes things go to shit in these stories. A smartphone is a device which, in theory, should connect people and make human connections easier. But what happens when people are really more connected to their phone than the people on the other end of a call or text? 

15 Million Merits takes Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and E. M. Forster's The Machine Stops merges them with Facebook and American Idol to make a very cynical commentary on materialism and a celebrity obsessed society. White Christmas is probably one of the most unsettling explorations of high-tech forms of slavery and the potentials of being deemed a “blocked” non-person by your friends, loved ones and society. Be Right Back uses the very real emotions of grief, loss and loneliness to make a point about how the persona we project online doesn’t encompass who we really are. The National Anthem posits a borderline ridiculous situation —or maybe not so ridiculous situation— to portray social media mob mentality. White Bear gives a lot of people what they claim to want with the issue at the heart of the story, and you see how awful it would be, even if the person arguably deserved it. The Waldo Moment’s points about media and the tendency to turn serious issues over to rants from absurd figures for ratings seems somewhat prophetic in light of the current presidential campaign. But The Entire History of You is to me the most disturbing episode, because those characters are so believable, as well as the situation, where insecurities and jealousy builds to an awful conclusion.

Season 3 continues and revisits many of the show’s previous themes, and there are some really intriguing ideas offered in the six episodes. However, things are not quite as tight as the previous two seasons. If anything, the move from Britain’s Channel 4 to Netflix has caused a little bit of fat to show, with some of the episodes going on a little too long and telegraphing a bit too much. They spend a lot of time in many of the stories establishing these different worlds, and trying to make it believable, and in some of them they explain too much to the point that I could see the seams and knew where the story was heading before the climax. 

Now this is not to say season 3 is bad. It’s actually six solid episodes of television. But the season overall doesn’t hit the highs of the first 7 episodes of the series. So here’s a spoiler-free review of Black Mirror season 3.

• Nosedive: Written by Mike Schur and Rashida Jones, and somewhat similar to what happened with the MeowMeowBeanz app in Community’s App Development and Condiments, the story wonders what if the world ran on the equivalent of status from Facebook likes and attention from Twitter followers? Every social interaction, whether it be posting pictures to the internet or ordering coffee from a barista, is judged on a 5-star scale, with a person’s rating dictating the kind of house they can afford, their wait in line, their ability to get a seat on a plane, and their employment. Lacie (Bryce Dallas Howard) is a 4.2, but wants to up her game to 4.5 to live in a new luxurious apartment. But upping her game involves cutesy fakeness, and attending a wedding with an old not-so-friendly friend who’s a 4.8. The story touches on a bit of truth in television, since people with lots of followers on Twitter and Instagram do have the ability to monetize their popularity in ways others don’t. And there are people who can do that for no other reason than because they post pictures of themselves in tight clothes, or eating plates of exotic food at a nice restaurant. Also, China is currently developing a social credit system by 2020, which will “rate the trustworthiness of citizens in all facets of life,” with there already being some fears something similar might be mated with our current credit rating system right here in the U.S. of A.

• Playtest: Probably my least favorite episode of the new season, since I think David Cronenberg pulled off the same idea much better with Existenz. Playtest involves a young man named Cooper (Wyatt Russell) deciding to travel the world after encountering trouble at home. Due to a series of fortunate and unfortunate events that strands him in London, Cooper decides to take part in a gaming company’s experiment in order to earn some money. As one might guess, the experiment involves playing around with someone’s brain and a game that becomes a little too real. The ultimate twist of the episode didn’t really work for me, since it comes off as cruel joke more than a gut punch based on some profound statement about the nature of reality.
• Shut Up and Dance: Alex Lawther plays a young man whose computer is hacked, with some sort of 4Chan/Anonymous hacker(s) recording him masturbating and then blackmailing the boy to do various tasks or risk the material being sent to all of his contacts. This eventually leads to him crossing paths with a businessman played by Jerome Flynn (better known as Bronn from Game of Thrones). Similar to season 2’s White Bear, the resolution of the episode puts the audience in the position of considering whether they say: “Fuck those people. They deserve it.”
• San Junipero: My favorite episode of the season. It involves two women (Gugu Mbatha-Raw and Mackenzie Davis) who meet during the 1980s on the California coast. The two women become drawn to each other, and their relationship becomes more and more complex. The ending can arguably be seen as either the most uplifting resolution to a Black Mirror episode ever, or a deeply disturbing idea in which people are literally dehumanized.

“It’s kind of an ‘80s coming-of-age drama with a Black Mirror undertow,” Brooker says.

“Also, when Netflix picked us up, people were going, ‘Oh that means [the show is] going to be Americanised.’ I thought it would be a funny to f**k with those people by literally writing an episode set in California.” 

• Men Against Fire: Malachi Kirby stars as a young fresh recruit in a highly advanced army at some point in the near-future. By this time, military personnel have implants which allow mission data and communication to be broadcast directly into their heads. These men and women are fighting beings known as “roaches,” who raid communities for food, live in abandoned shelters, and are considered threats to the well-being of humanity. The story makes many solid and terrifying points about what it takes for men and women to kill, as well as what a future government might do to make things more ... efficient.
• Hated in the Nation: In many ways, the episode is sort of the inverse of The National Anthem and again rails against online mobs. Two public figures involved in online shitstorms die due to mysterious causes. The investigation ultimately leads to a near-future solution for colony collapse disorder and Twitter hashtags. In many ways, the episode felt like it could have been a story on The X-Files, since it hits many of the same crime procedural beats.

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