Black Mirror and Critical Media Theory 1498573541, 9781498573542

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Black Mirror and Critical Media Theory

Black Mirror and Critical Media Theory Edited by Angela M. Cirucci and Barry Vacker

LEXINGTON BOOKS Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26-34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB Copyright © 2018 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available ISBN 978-1-4985-7353-5 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-4985-7354-2 (electronic) TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

Contents

Introduction

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Section 1: Human Identity 1

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Race, Cyborgs, and the Pitfalls of Biopolitical Discourse In Black Mirror’s “Men Against Fire” Diana Leon-Boys and Morten Stinus Kristensen

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Digitally Natural: Gender Norms in Black Mirror Angela M. Cirucci

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A Virtual Ever-After: Utopia, Race, and Gender in Black Mirror’s “San Junipero” Eleanor Drage

Section 2: Surveillance Culture 4

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Black Mirror’s “Nosedive” as a New Panopticon: Interveillance and Digital Parrhesia in Alternative Realities Francois Allard-Huver and Julie Escurignan

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All Eyes on Me: Surveillance and the Digital Archive in “The Entire History of You” Derek R. Blackwell

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Seeing the “Surveillant Face” of Technology in Black Mirror: Using Futuristic Scenarios for an Interdisciplinary Discussion on the Feasibility and Implications of Technology Pinelopi Troullinou and Mathieu d’Aquin

Section 3: The Spectacle and Hyperreality 7

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Waldo Wins IRL: Donald Trump, Black Mirror, and the Politics of Jean Baudrillard’s Hyperreal Michael Mario Albrecht Why Black Mirror Was Really Written by Jean Baudrillard: A Philosophical Interpretation of Charlie Brooker’s Series Manel Jiménez-Morales and Marta Lopera-Mármol Spectacular Tech-Nightmare: Broadcasting Guy Debord Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns v

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87 89

103 115

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Contents

Section Four: Aesthetics

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10 Rhetorical Ethics in Black Mirror: The Aesthetics of Existence in Hyperreality and Posthumanity Hillary A. Jones

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11 The Hysterical Sublime: Black Mirror, “Playtest,” and the Crises of the Present Matthew Flisfeder

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12 Black Mirrors, Hot Media, and Spectral Existence Barry Vacker and Erin Espelie Section Five: Technology and Existence

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13 Overextended Media: Hashtag Hatred and Domestic Drones Julia M. Hildebrand

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14 Unbearable Burden: Discipline, Punishment, and Moral Dystopia in Black Mirror’s “White Bear” Osei Alleyne

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15 The Entire Evolution of Media: A Media Ecological Approach to Black Mirror Carlos A. Scolari

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Section Six: Dystopian Futures

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16 Heterotopias and Utopias in Black Mirror: Michel Foucault on “San Junipero” Sarah J. Constant

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17 Trapped in Dystopian Techno Realities: Nosediving into Simulation through Consumptive Viewing Erika M. Thomas and Romin Rajan

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18 The Dystopia of the Spectator: Past Revival and Acceleration of Time in Black Mirror (“The Entire History of You” and “Be Right Back”) Macarena Urzúa Opaza and Antoine Faure Conclusion: Connecting Our Themes to Season Four and the Future Index About the Editors About the Contributors

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247 251 255 257

Introduction

It is 2011 and two million viewers are watching Channel 4, a British television network. A pulsing, spinning, circular icon appears on the void of a black screen. The circular icon flies apart, generating white circles, squares, and triangles, that flash and flicker onscreen, quickly forming the words “Black Mirror” and accompanied by accelerating electronic pulses and tones. As the tone hits and holds a high-pitch frequency, the words “Black Mirror” fracture like a broken mirror. So begins the television anthology Black Mirror (2011–). *** It is 1959 and millions of viewers are tuned to CBS, an American television network. Eerie music and strange visuals appear—hazy gray images spread apart, an empty horizon becomes a barren desert landscape, and then a starry sky appears, twinkling against the black void. The images are accompanied by Rod Serling’s narration and followed by white, flickering graphics that form the words “The Twilight Zone.” So begins the television anthology, The Twilight Zone (1959–1964). *** Black Mirror is The Twilight Zone of the twenty-first century. Like The Twilight Zone, Black Mirror is a philosophical classic that echoes the angst of an era. Just as the Black Mirror opening ends with a fractured mirror, many of The Twilight Zone openings ended with the words “Twilight Zone” flying apart amid the abyss of a starry sky. The similarities are striking because both series confront the existential conditions of modern technological civilization and the truly radical philosophical challenges we face in the never-ending quests for love, meaning, purpose, and identity—in our sprawling metropolises and expanding universe. THE TWILIGHT ZONE AND BLACK MIRROR: CRITICAL MEDIA TELEVISION To fully understand Black Mirror, we must first grasp its intellectual and television roots. According to Charlie Brooker, creator of Black Mirror, the vii

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series draws inspiration from shows like Tales of the Unexpected (1979–1988) and Night Gallery (1969–1973), but its greatest influence is The Twilight Zone, with its philosophical questions, paradoxical situations, and devastatingly twisted endings. In discussing The Twilight Zone’s endings, Brooker bluntly says “that’s the sort of thing that should be happening more on television.” 1 But Brooker was inspired by more than the bizarre endings. Writing in The Guardian, Brooker explains The Twilight Zone was Rod Serling’s hugely entertaining TV series of the late 50s and early 60s, sometimes incorrectly dismissed as a camp exercise in twist-in-thetale sci-fi. It was far more than that. Serling, a brilliant writer, created The Twilight Zone because he was tired of having his provocative teleplays about contemporary issues routinely censored in order to appease corporate sponsors. If he wrote about racism in a southern town, he had to fight the network over every line. But if he wrote about racism in a metaphorical, quasi-fictional world—suddenly he could say everything he wanted. The Twilight Zone was sometimes shockingly cruel, far crueler than most television drama today would dare to be. 2

Brooker observed in “Serling’s day, the atom bomb, civil rights, McCarthyism, psychiatry and the space race were of primary concern. Today he’d be writing about terrorism, the economy, the media, privacy and our relationship with technology.” 3 Created by Rod Serling, The Twilight Zone was the first true philosophical and existential television series and remains one of the most intellectually engaging concepts ever developed for any visual mass medium. In a sense, The Twilight Zone was the first critical media TV, clearly laying the foundations for Black Mirror. Airing at the height of the Cold War, the first season (1959–1960) of The Twilight Zone coincided with the peak period of atomic bomb production by the Pentagon—an astonishing 14,000 nuclear warheads were produced for the US arsenal during that two-year period. The Twilight Zone also aired just as the “space age” was exploding into popular consciousness, going from a few satellites circling the Earth to rockets that send astronauts to the moon (or drop nuclear bombs on cities). Side-by-side were the dystopian and utopian trajectories facing modern civilization—the specter of a nuclear apocalypse and shimmer of space-age apotheosis. Not surprisingly, The Twilight Zone featured episodes showing the horrors of nuclear war and bizarre journeys into outer space. Throughout its five-year run, The Twilight Zone depicted numerous scenarios related to existence in the then modern world and the vast universe. In many ways, Serling and The Twilight Zone were philosophically grounded in the mid-twentieth-century existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre, yet the series repeatedly pointed toward issues that would soon be addressed by theorists and philosophers emerging in the 1960s: Marshall

Introduction

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McLuhan, Guy Debord, Michel Foucault, and Jean Baudrillard, among others. By the end of the 1960s, there had been no nuclear war, but NASA had landed humans on the moon in a triumphal moment viewed on global television and celebrated worldwide as a great human achievement. “We did it” cheered the humans on planet Earth. But once NASA pulled the plug on the Apollo missions and everyone realized they would not be drinking martinis at a hotel on the moon, a new utopian destination appeared on the horizon. Outer space was replaced by cyberspace as the next human destination. Personal computers and laptops thrived and began linking up via the internet and World Wide Web. Chat rooms evolved into social media echo chambers. Google, YouTube, and Facebook became the archivists of our information, imagery, and selves. Television eventually migrated online with digital users, their hands tightly gripped around their mobile phones, poised for a selfie moment or status update. Five decades after The Twilight Zone, Brooker and Black Mirror are steeped in the technological and cultural worlds described above and critiqued by McLuhan, Debord, Foucault, and Baudrillard. Rather than facing the proliferation of atomic bombs, Black Mirror confronts the proliferation of information bombs, the billions of screens and mobile media that have colonized human consciousness where they have been introduced. If The Twilight Zone reflected the existential angst and Cold War fears for the baby boomer generation, then Black Mirror expresses the philosophical angst and technological fears for millennials in the twentyfirst century. Though produced more than fifty years apart, The Twilight Zone and Black Mirror represent critical media TV at its best, explicitly exploring similar philosophical themes and dystopian futures around which this anthology is organized. The chapters in this book provide the critical media theory for a deeper and richer understanding of the critical media TV that is Black Mirror. TECHNOLOGY IS NEVER NEUTRAL The similarities in the opening titles are revealing. Both “Black Mirror” and “The Twilight Zone” emerge from flickering white images against a black background, with “Black Mirror” fragmenting like a broken mirror and “The Twilight Zone” often flying apart at the very end of the opening title. Both series project a fractured and fragmented future, a soon-toarrive tomorrow with no coherent meaning or purpose, other than the challenge of existing within our contemporary civilization full of people armed with the latest in technologies, yet seemingly unable to build a better and more humane world. The opening of Black Mirror is very subtle in the profound meaning of the pulsing, spinning, circular icon. We have all seen them on our elec-

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tronic screens. Colloquially known as “throbbers” and often represented in circular forms, these animated graphics are meant to suggest that a computer program is performing an unseen action in the background of a laptop, tablet, or mobile phone. These unseen actions might include rebooting, processing data, downloading content, or connecting and communicating with an external device. Similarly, our media technologies are operating in the background of our consciousness, performing unseen actions among our neurons, invisibly downloading beliefs and behaviors from the circuitry and networks. Of course, all these beliefs and behaviors are made clearly visible on the pages of Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram and on the streets of our towns, cities, and metropolises. Black Mirror dramatizes these behaviors, showing today through the lens of tomorrow, a moment soon to arrive. Technology is never neutral in its effects—subtle, profound, and usually unexpected. Fire gave us heat and kept us warm, but it also made us into carnivores, leading us to kill off the mammoths, endanger other species, and eat billions of hamburgers every day. Wheels and cars made us highly mobile, leading to malls and suburban sprawl, fast food and traffic jams, air pollution and fossil fuel dependency. Mass production began with the noble aims of eliminating poverty and scarcity, but has since crossed over into the excess of an epic consumer society—busy pillaging the planet, polluting the lands, and plasticizing the oceans. Microscopes have peered into our cells and genes to reveal that we humans share 99.9 percent of the same DNA and are made of the most common elements of the cosmos. Telescopes removed us from the center of a universe, now known to have two trillion galaxies and stretch across 100 billion light years. Meanwhile, electricity and electric light have erased the night sky from our consciousness while creating a 24/7 civilization that spans the planet and gives off a glow visible from space. And our satellites and media technologies have connected our peoples and nations around the world, ensuring that our world remains aglow on our screens, too. The consequence is more than mere global warming and climate change, because we humans have effected the Anthropocene, the new epoch of planetary evolution caused by the “great acceleration” of technological civilization since the middle of the twentieth century. 4 The Twilight Zone appeared as television, consumer society, and the great acceleration began to change the planet. Black Mirror is smack in the middle of the Anthropocene and the proliferation of technologies. Implicit in both series is the idea that our technology and civilization have evolved far faster than our species, leaving our brains the challenge of making sense of the world in which we can peer to the edge of the universe, drop nukes on the other side of Earth, and trash talk on Twitter and Facebook. We are primates in search of a philosophy, knowing we

Introduction

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are trapped in old worldviews and superstitions, yet fantasizing that futuristic superheroes can save us. The Twilight Zone and Black Mirror show the need for new philosophies, new worldviews, and new modes of being, yet Serling and Brooker alike leave us trapped with no one to save us but ourselves. KEY THEMES IN THE TWILIGHT ZONE AND BLACK MIRROR What does it mean to be human? Can we save ourselves? These are questions that have challenged humanity since the first petroglyphs and cave paintings. These are also two of the questions posed in episodes of The Twilight Zone and Black Mirror. Across the millennia, the question of human identity has grown ever more complex, precisely the effects of Galileo, Darwin, and the rise of modern technological civilization. Galileo yanked us off the center stage of the cosmos, showing we were not the center of the universe, while Darwin showed we are one species that has evolved along with all the other species on Earth. Modern technological civilization has increased our life spans, enabled material comfort and consumer abundance, and extended our technologies around the planet and deep into our bodies and the universe. Billions of people live their lives in sprawling electrified metropolises, going to and from work, raising families, cheering on their favorite teams, gazing upon stars and celebrities, and enjoying art and entertainment—all with most of each and every day spent staring at electronic rectangles. We now live in a society of ever-evolving views of human identity, constant planetary surveillance via satellites and social media, and the endless events of the spectacle and hyperreal playing on our screens and streets. We can make copies of copies of copies of our lives, organize and archive it all in digital databases ready to be mined as needed—and in so doing, perform the very behaviors that raise questions of privacy, authenticity, and autonomy. We live in a world where technology is our total mode of existence, and aesthetic experience is deeply woven into the fabric of everyday life. The beautiful and the sublime are daily experiences in the spectacle and our metropolises, yet we cannot seem to imagine a future that is not naively nostalgic or hopelessly dystopian. The following six themes outline the structure of Black Mirror and Critical Media Theory. Because the contributors drafted their chapters before the fourth season was released, these chapters are not included in the body of the book. However, we provide analyses of season four episodes, through the lenses of this book’s six themes, in the conclusion. • As consumer society and television spread in the 1950s and 1960s, several episodes of The Twilight Zone addressed issues of human identity and authenticity. 5 Similarly, Black Mirror deals with human

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•

•

•

•

•

identity in “Fifteen Million Merits,” “The Entire History of You,” “Be Right Back,” “White Christmas,” and “San Junipero.” The surveillance culture of The Twilight Zone era is nowhere near as pervasive as it is now, yet Rod Serling and the series did address surveillance-related issues of paranoia, totalitarianism, and enforced conformity. 6 Of course, Black Mirror offers masterful takes on surveillance in several other episodes: “The Entire History of You,” “White Bear,” and “Hated in the Nation,” among others. The Twilight Zone explored the early effects of the spectacle and hyperreality in episodes that dealt with robots, cloning, simulation, and the realms of movies and theme parks. 7 Black Mirror tackles the ramped up twenty-first-century spectacle and hyperreality in numerous episodes, most notably “National Anthem,” “Fifteen Million Merits,” “The Waldo Moment,” “Be Right Back,” and “Nosedive.” Often overlooked in The Twilight Zone is the role of its overall aesthetic worldview. Appearing during the peak of Sartre’s fame and influence, The Twilight Zone’s aesthetic is deeply existential—it repeatedly suggests we inhabit vast impersonal metropolises and perhaps a meaningless universe in which there is no exit. These sensibilities are embedded in the ambience and atmosphere of most episodes. We must face the consequences of the choices we make and world we inhabit. Unable to face reality or handle the society in which they are trapped, the characters experience alienation, loneliness, and even abject terror. We see the same experiences in numerous episodes of Black Mirror, especially in “White Christmas.” The Twilight Zone and Black Mirror deal with issues involving technology and existence, especially how it shapes daily life in our civilization and the evolution of warfare. For example, The Twilight Zone featured episodes that related to cultural acceleration and deceleration as well as the destruction of nuclear warfare. 8 Similarly, Black Mirror features numerous episodes dealing with technological existence and current warfare, such as “Men Against Fire” and “Most Hated in Nation.” That we can make better copies of humans, but not necessarily better humans, and still cannot imagine an end to warfare among our tribes and nations is central to why we seem trapped in the dystopian futures presented in The Twilight Zone and Black Mirror. In fact, both seem to suggest there is no way out of our dilemma. For those seeking refuge against a dystopian future, The Twilight Zone warned viewers about the illusory nature of nostalgia for retreats into the past, such as small towns, quaint villages, or idyllic Edens. 9 Black Mirror is also skeptical of a non-dystopian future in most of its episodes, yet in “San Junipero” it offers hope for eternal love in a

Introduction

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romanticized vision of the 1980s—stored and simulated in a computer of the future. Via these six themes—human identity, surveillance culture, spectacle and hyperreality, aesthetics, technology and existence, and dystopian futures—this anthology explores the multiple meanings and turbulent tomorrows in Black Mirror. Warning: Spoilers Ahead! NOTES 1. “Charlie Brooker Explains Black Mirror . . . ,” Channel 4, YouTube, uploaded December 16, 2014; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U2YPxSDIoPE. 2. Charlie Brooker, “The Dark Side of Our Gadget Addiction,” The Guardian, December 1, 2011. 3. Ibid. 4. Jeremy Davies, The Birth of the Anthropocene (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016); J. R. McNeill and Peter Engelke, The Great Acceleration: An Environmental History of the Anthropocene Since 1945 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014). 5. All episodes are listed by season and number, Internet Movie Database. Episodes dealing with themes of identity and authenticity included “Sixteen Millimeter Shrine” (1.4), “The Lonely” (1.7), “Mirror Image” (1.21), and “The After Hours” (1.34). Episodes about the power and magic radio and television included “Static” (2.20) and “What’s in the Box” (5.24). 6. Suburban paranoia: “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street” (1.22) and “The Shelter” (3.3). Totalitarianism: “Eye of the Beholder” (2.6) and “The Obsolete Man” (2.29). Conformity: “Eye of the Beholder” (2.6) and “Number 12 Looks Just Like You” (5.17). 7. Episodes dealing with robots, cloning, and simulated humans included “The Lonely” (1.7), “The Lateness of the Hour” (2.8), “The Trade-Ins” (3.31), “I Sing the Body Electric” (3.35), “In His Image” (4.1), and “Number 12 Looks Just Like You” (5.17). Episodes dealing with simulated realities included “Elegy” (1.20), “A World of Difference” (1.23), and “Stopover in a Quiet Town” (5.30). 8. Cultural acceleration and deceleration: “The Odyssey of Flight 33” (2.18) and “A Kind of Stopwatch” (5.4). Nuclear apocalypse: “Time Enough at Last” (1.8), “Third from the Sun” (1.14), “Two” (3.1), “The Midnight Sun” (3.10), and “The Old Man in the Cave” (5.7). 9. Episodes dealing with Edens, villages, and small towns included “Walking Distance” (1.5), “A Stop at Willoughby” (1.30), “It’s a Good Life” (3.8), and “Probe 7, Over and Out” (5.9).

BIBLIOGRAPHY Brooker, Charlie. “The Dark Side of Our Gadget Addiction.” The Guardian, December 1, 2011. Davies, Jeremy. The Birth of the Anthropocene. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016. McNeill, J. R. and Peter Engelke. The Great Acceleration: An Environmental History of the Anthropocene Since 1945. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014. No author. “Charlie Brooker Explains Black Mirror . . . ,” Channel 4, YouTube, uploaded December 16, 2014.

Section 1

Human Identity

Human identity is comprised of all the pieces that make each person unique or noticeable in a crowd. The notion may conjure up ideas of individuality, authenticity, and autonomy. We perhaps consider the family and friends who have helped shape who we are. We probably also think about race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and other human markers that act, in one moment, as liberating platforms and, in another, as debilitating stereotypes that limit what others can notice in us. As Matt explains in “White Christmas,” “People want to be noticed. They don’t like to be shut out. It makes them feel invisible.” Of course, media technologies complicate the issues immensely, as does living in complex and diverse cities populated by millions of people with many identities. One topic that Black Mirror incorporates in each episode is human identity, mostly connected to our use of technologies. The series taps into the ways in which folding emerging technologies so freely into our everyday lives can have a profound impact on how we view others, as well as ourselves. In particular, Black Mirror employs aspects of human identity as channels to make specific critiques of, and predictions for, our lives. With the above in mind, the first three chapters of Black Mirror and Critical Media Studies explores how pieces of human identity are tied up in Black Mirror’s technologically driven plots. The authors in this section analyze what Black Mirror narratives are conveying to viewers about races, genders, and sexualities, as well as the forecasts the show inescapably makes about our futures—what we should expect from ourselves and from others. Diana Leon-Boys and Morten Stinus Kristensen problematize the depiction of race in “Men Against Fire,” arguing that the absence of race conversations implies a post-racial society that both values biopolitical genocide and does not realize “the liberatory potential of the cyborg as theorized by Donna Haraway.” Angela M. Cirucci asks if a new facet of “women’s work” is exhibited in numerous episodes as they rely on performative acts of femininity to display how technologies can “go wrong.” Eleanor Drage discusses the rare happy ending of “San Junipero”

2

Human Identity

through the heterochronic Foucauldian cemetery and Muñoz’s “queer time,” arguing that Kelly and Yorkie do not coincidentally drive off into the sunset, but that “their queerness is the horizon for their second chance at life.”

ONE Race, Cyborgs, and the Pitfalls of Biopolitical Discourse In Black Mirror’s “Men Against Fire” Diana Leon-Boys and Morten Stinus Kristensen

“Men Against Fire,” the penultimate episode of season three, debuted on October 21, 2016. The episode imagines a world in which the Foucauldian concept of biopolitics is taken to its literal and logical extreme as soldiers, in a war-torn area, must protect citizens against an infestation of “roaches.” Foucault defines biopolitics as subtle and generally indirect techniques of population control based on the state’s right to “make live and let die.” 1 “Men Against Fire” imagines a world in which technology, at the individual level, models Foucault’s description, albeit in a much more direct and explicitly violent manner. However, the episode, perhaps unintentionally by not acknowledging the raced sociocultural processes of biopolitics taken up by other scholars, manifests a fictional biopolitics that has little to say, and possibly even obscures, the actual workings of race in the modern, Western world. In “Men Against Fire,” technology enables the State to more efficiently eliminate members of the “enemy race” thus accomplishing, through the eradication of the unwelcome populations, the biopolitical aim of “mak[ing] life in general healthier and purer.” 2 Perhaps because of the apparent reliance on Foucault’s ideas of biopolitics, the de-raced fiction of “Men Against Fire” comes up short in providing a thorough analysis of the racialized regime that is Western modernity. Reading “Men Against Fire” through Alexander G. Weheliye’s intervention into Foucault’s biopolitics concept allows for a nuanced understanding of the racialized regimes in this episode. 3 Seeking to reconcile Foucault’s view 3

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Race, Cyborgs, and the Pitfalls of Biopolitical Discourse

of biopolitics with a profound engagement with the work of Black feminist scholars such as Hortense Spillers and Sylvia Wynters, Weheliye produces an analysis of Western modernity and the way in which its biopolitical logics and techniques are inextricably linked to racialization, or what Weheliye calls “racializing assemblages.” 4 Weheliye’s work helps illuminate the notion that although “Men Against Fire” provides a lucid and engaging imagining of how a future technology may make biopower, as theorized by Foucault, more efficient, the episode also reproduces the French thinker’s omission of the racialization at the core of biopolitics. The reductive conceptualization of race in “Men Against Fire” also generates an incomplete realization of the liberatory potential of the cyborg as theorized by Donna Haraway through the human-machine hybrids at the center of the episode’s plot. 5 Haraway’s vision of the potential of a human-machine hybrid provides the disenfranchised a space for liberation, but the cyborg in this episode fulfills the opposite function by aiding the powerful in demonizing and oppressing the (near) powerless. Thus, Black Mirror’s technologized and fictionalized representations of biopolitics inadvertently illustrate how a Foucauldian approach to biopolitics may be lacking in its conceptualization of race and gender—by relying too heavily on the biological elements of racialization, it insufficiently encapsulates the complex and ambivalent sociocultural operations of race, and in turn produces a view of the cyborg that evades its potential as a device of liberation. These shortcomings are further, and more overtly, demonstrated by the color-blind casting in the episode. While some roles, including the protagonist, are played by actors of color, the race of these characters, however, is never addressed, reinforcing the idea of a post-racial reality, testifying to this episode’s shortcomings in addressing how our modern era is still defined by racialized difference and hierarchies of worth. 6 In the episode, audiences follow a young military recruit named Stripe (Malachi Kirby) on a search-and-destroy mission that targets a population of “roaches.” At the beginning of the episode, the squad leader Medina (Sarah Snook) explains that these roaches must be eradicated because they have a sickness inside them that will spread unless it is stopped. In several scenes, the soldiers battle and kill “roaches” whose bloodcurdling, wordless screeches and monstrous appearance seem to corroborate the claim of their threat to humanity. However, along with Stripe, the audience later learns that these “roaches” are people who, on the surface at least, are perfectly normal. The soldiers experience them as “roaches” because their senses are manipulated by an implanted mindcontrol device referred to as “Mass,” which makes them experience the enemy as literal monsters. Once Stripe realizes the reality of the situation, he becomes distraught and wants to abandon his post. His commanding officer sends him to a military therapist who is tasked with alleviating his

Diana Leon-Boys and Morten Stinus Kristensen

5

resistance. Here, Stripe is told that the roaches have “shit” in their DNA, making them more prone to cancer, MS, and other diseases. Arquette, the therapist (Michael Kelly), explains that the soldiers are protecting society and future generations by wiping out these roaches with the help of “Mass.” Despite his moral opposition, Stripe ultimately acquiesces and returns to his role as a “Mass”-altered soldier. A BIOPOLITICAL DYSTOPIA Throughout the episode, Arquette personifies the calculating State power central to Foucault’s theories of biopower. Channeling the bureaucratic, clinical logics of the State, Arquette explains in a haughty, dispassionate manner why Stripe should not balk at murdering the people concealed by “Mass” as “roaches”: “You’re protecting the bloodline. And that, my friend, is an honor.” 7 Arquette’s rationale for killing the inferiors to ensure not only a better present, but a better future mirrors how Foucault describes the biopolitical logics of the State and its citizens: “The fact that the other dies does not mean simply that I live in the sense that his death guarantees my safety; the death of the other, the death of the bad race, of the inferior race (or the degenerate, or the abnormal) is something that will make life in general healthier: healthier and purer.” 8 When Stripe says he no longer wants the “Mass” implant, Arquette explains that their task is to save the next generation from the polluted DNA and goes on to note that “the Mass is what allows you to protect the rest of the world.” 9 In “Men Against Fire,” Black Mirror constructs a fictional future in which biopolitics reverts to its primitive state in order to provide a hopeful future for the dominant groups in society. (D)evolving away from the subtle techniques of population control, biopolitics here manifest in the violent, militarized methods from which biopower and its logics emerged according to Foucault. In a scheming, yet rather forthright, reminder that Stripe agreed to have the implant called “Mass” installed, Arquette points out that, “You knew all of this. All along.” 10 Arquette proves this by showing Stripe a recording from the day Stripe signed a consent form and agreed to be a part of this plan—which includes his memory being wiped of that initial transaction. As the audiences, especially those living in the Global North, observe Stripe literally sign away his knowledge of becoming the physical manifestation of the State’s deadly biopower, they are reminded of their own complicity to the contemporary state violence of the West. These audiences know all too well that their privileged position in the world depends on the less privileged position of others, but perhaps like Stripe, choose to forgo the awareness of that knowledge. Black Mirror analogizes how the modern West is founded on biopolitical logics: to protect the well-being of certain populations, other populations must suffer, even

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Race, Cyborgs, and the Pitfalls of Biopolitical Discourse

die. We may attempt to ignore or forget that knowledge. But deep down, we all know it, all along. Literalizing this cognitive reality of modern Western life, Black Mirror installs the biopolitical code, “If you want to live, you must take lives, you must be able to kill,” in the minds of Stripe and his cohort of militarized State proxies. 11 The biopolitics in “Men Against Fire” is certainly derived from Foucault, yet it is much less subtle than the one he describes. Foucault explicitly argues that modern biopolitics is “not . . . a military, warlike, or political relationship,” but operates by “increasing the risk of death” for a certain group of people who are the targets of racism. 12 In “Men Against Fire,” biopower is much more direct and explicitly violent, but it is still the biopolitical logics of protecting the bloodline that undergird it. The military operations of “Men Against Fire,” may center on annihilating the “enemy race,” but they entail the State’s apathetic relation to its own citizens’ humanity as they turn them into cyborgs, forsaking their humanity. This disregard for human worth as it faces the needs of the State at the core, resembles the Nazis’ bureaucratic management of life. Foucault highlights the Nazis’ management of life as the most extreme version of a regime dependent on biopower in which the State “makes the field of life it manages, protects, guarantees, and cultivates in biological terms absolutely coextensive with the sovereign right to kill anyone, meaning not only other people, but also its own people.” 13 Black Mirror provides a captivating fictionalized account of how Foucauldian theories of biopolitics work to produce and uphold hierarchies of worth and systems of oppression and creates a truly breathtaking allegory of how such a system might look in a highly technologized dystopian future. “Men Against Fire,” however, falls short in its analogy as it sidesteps the core of biopolitics: racialization and its violent differentiation of peoples and populations. Racialization, according to Omi and Winant’s theorizing, is “the extension of racial meaning to a previously racially unclassified social relationship, social practice or group.” 14 Key to this is the way in which Black Mirror reproduces Foucault’s undertheorized place of race as described by Weheliye, and as will be discussed in depth later. Other, yet connected, inadequacies of Black Mirror’s mobilization of biopolitics are illustrated by how “Men Against Fire” does not attempt to envision the cyborg as a liberatory entity as theorized by Donna Haraway. CYBORGS WITHOUT MANIFESTOS “Men Against Fire” depicts how state violence is carried out with the help of a futuristic implant that allows the soldiers to become a sort of cyborg, at first glance similar to that which Haraway imagines and proposes in “A Cyborg Manifesto.” Haraway posits that “the cyborg has no

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origin story in the Western sense; a ‘final’ irony since the cyborg is also the awful apocalyptic telos of the West’s escalating dominations of abstract individuation, an ultimate self untied at last from all dependency, a man in space.” 15 Haraway’s hopeful vision is that of a utopian existence where human-like “monsters” can break boundaries such as gender binaries by providing fluid embodiments in lieu of former human entities. Haraway urges feminists to undo Western ideologies by relying more on technoscientific knowledge and posthumanism as sources of radical liberation. For Haraway, the cyborg represents a metaphor for how feminists can steer away from binary-like reasoning, which she argues has been imposed by the modern, Western world. Haraway criticizes the dualisms and binaries imposed by society, one of them being the binary between human and machine. The irony of the cyborg, according to Haraway, however is that despite its “embodying” the telos of the West, the hybridity of the cyborg also can serve to challenge the State’s reproduction and enforcement of binaries. Haraway explains that binaries create “antagonistic dualisms,” which allow for the master populations to dominate the most vulnerable. 16 The distinction between man and “roach” in the fictional world of “Men Against Fire” is a prime example of such an oppressive binary. Haraway’s cyborg theory envisions technology as a powerful force that can rid society of those dualisms. She proposes a fusion of technology and nature in order to generate creative solutions for political problems that take advantage of subaltern populations. In engaging the latent potential of liberation within modern technology, Haraway thusly produces a more contemporarily concrete theorization of biopower than Foucault’s. The way that Haraway envisions her cyborg at the intersections of science, technology, and feminism as a challenge to systems of oppression is quite the opposite of the “Mass”-produced cyborg of “Men Against Fire,” and it can be argued that this is the case due to the fact that the cyborg in this episode originates in the modern, Western world to further and better serve her interests. Indeed, in Black Mirror, the cyborg works to shore up the power of the modern State rather than challenge it. Haraway’s utopia can only be achieved when the origins of the cyborg come from without the Western world, not from within. In line with Haraway’s proposed description of the cyborg as a cross between human and machine, “Mass” does allow the soldiers to no longer be fully human. But rather than challenging the binaries of Western society, the cyborg of “Men Against Fire” actually furthers the “telos” of the West, as it operates on behalf of and through the interests of Western society, specifically the interests that seek to maintain divisions between human populations. In this fictionalized world, the cyborg fulfills the opposite of Haraway’s liberatory hopes for humanity because it still operates along the binary logics of Western modernity. Thus, Black Mirror suggests that when the cyborg emerges out of a need to protect the

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Race, Cyborgs, and the Pitfalls of Biopolitical Discourse

(Western) State and its majority population, it cannot provide the liberation that Haraway envisioned. The climax of the episode shows Stripe struggling with the implant and his role straddling the boundaries of human and machine, a role which has allowed him to kill groups of people who are, on the surface, just like him. As he realizes that he has been made a cyborg in order to enhance, rather than challenge, the oppression of vulnerable populations, his human side rebels as he throws himself against the padded walls of the cell in which he is detained. “Mass” does not lead Stripe to be the catalyst of the kind of liberation that Haraway imagines is possible through a human/machine fusion because “Mass” operates through and for Western interests. The fusion of human and technology is what so fundamentally disturbs Stripe, and perhaps the viewer, as the implant instead functions as a tool for disempowering and oppressing vulnerable populations. After much hesitation, in the concluding scenes of the episode, Stripe agrees to have the implant reinstalled and continue with the mission, which also includes, as the perverse wages for the performance of his gruesome task, occupying his hours of sleep with vivid dreams of a quaint, idyllic life with a beautiful wife. Black Mirror seems to express what happens when a cyborg is created by and for the interests of the modern, Western world. Stripe’s violent recalcitrance to the realization of what “Mass” has made him expresses the tension between Haraway’s (post-)humanist ideal of what the fusion of man and machine could produce and the murderous and oppressive figure that emerges in Black Mirror’s dystopic vision of the cyborg. The humans, personified by Stripe, are transformed into weak vessels, unable to refuse the State’s making them into cyborgs and the grim consequences that fusing entails. RACIALIZING FOUCAULT’S BIOPOLITICS Engaging Haraway’s theory shows how “Men Against Fire” forgoes the liberatory potential of the cyborg. Not only does the “Mass” cyborg refuse the emancipatory potential theorized by Haraway, in Black Mirror’s prognosis, it serves the opposite function as it catalyzes even more powerful techniques for violently maintaining oppressive binaries to benefit the State and its privileged population. The cyborg-pessimism on show in “Men Against Fire,” however, may not be based on a cynical, cleareyed realism, but rather a flawed analysis of society. While the fusion of man and machine is gloomy in its imagining of Western society’s transformational potential, the way in which the episode imagines the central category of biopolitics—race—is also subject to critique. Like Foucault, “Men Against Fire” presupposes a biopolitics that belies the immanence of race and racialization in the social reality of the modern Western

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world, making the episode a highly unstable analogy of modern biopolitics. Indeed, when reading “Men Against Fire” through Weheliye’s work, the way race is conceptualized in the episode is not merely inaccurate, but risks obfuscating the oppressive social functions of race. During their conversation when Stripe wants the implant removed, Arquette tells Stripe, that one of the reasons the roaches are so dangerous is because they look like “us.” Arquette lauds “Mass” by contending that it is “the ultimate military weapon. It helps you with your intel, your targeting, your comms, your conditioning. It is a lot easier to pull the trigger when you’re aiming at the bogeyman, huh?” 17 Indeed, racism works by mapping threat and difference onto putative biological difference, and “Mass,” so to speak, performs the ideological work of racism as it “racializes” the targeted humans into roaches. But, as Weheliye argues, biopolitics is simply an “alternative [term] for racism” and so while “Men Against Fire” does a laudable job in literalizing biopolitics as theorized by Foucault, it like Foucault neglects a thorough account of how race works in the modern Western world by operating with an inadequate conceptualization. 18 In “Men Against Fire,” the “roaches” are targeted only due to their shitty DNA. But racialization operates along more vectors than simply biology and genetics. If racialization is, as Weheliye claims, “the manifold techniques by which sociopolitical hierarchies are camouflaged by the natural features of the human body,” Black Mirror only engages the camouflage, but not the operations that produce the needs for that camouflage. 19 This befogs the sociopolitical core of racialization that makes the biological surface salient in the first place. Modern Western society relies on “political relations that require . . . the barring of nonwhite subjects from the category of the human as it is performed in the modern west” and Weheliye argues that in the modern operations of racializing assemblages, Black bodies are especially set apart as different from the majority. 20 In “Men Against Fire” it is a general and opaque genetic difference that makes one population, masked by “Mass” as roaches, the target of state violence. At the core of modern racism and thus biopolitics, however, is the oppression and dehumanization of not some arbitrary genetic mode, but Blackness and the very real Black bodies that (are made to) embody it. As such, when Foucault illustrates how racism enables biopolitics in that “[r]acism alone can justify the murderous function of the State,” 21 he is too general in his conceptualization of racism: biopolitics is simply one (albeit widespread) manifestation of the anti-Black logics that have been at the core of the Western nation-state since, and even before, its emergence. To Weheliye, modern Western racialization of course does operate along visual markers: “Blackness has functioned as one of the key signifiers for the sociopolitical articulation of visual distinctions among human groups in modernity.” 22 But Black Mirror entirely neglects to tell any

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Race, Cyborgs, and the Pitfalls of Biopolitical Discourse

story of what sociopolitical events articulated the “roach” body as dangerous in the first place or rather what made it socially necessary to racialize, through “Mass,” the targeted human population as roaches. The violent exploitation and its attendant social processes of hierarchy at the core of Western history is what produced Black bodies as Black, but we are never told what social processes necessitated the production of “roaches” as inferior in “Men Against Fire.” Key to Weheliye’s work is that by neglecting race and racialization in his theorization of biopower, Foucault also ignores or obscures “the politics emanating from different traditions of the oppressed” and the ways in which racializing assemblages such as biopower “can never annihilate the lines of flight, freedom dreams, practices of liberation, and possibilities of other worlds.” 23 This is an immensely important point in Weheliye’s work. In “Men Against Fire,” there are some moments that could be considered analogue to the “miniscule movements, glimmers of hope, scraps of food, the interrupted dreams of freedom found in those spaces deemed devoid of human life” that Weheliye conceptualizes as the flipside of racializing assemblages. 24 We see such resistance to racialization’s violent erasure of humanity, for instance, when Stripe encounters a “roach” mother and her child, but experiences them not as roaches but as humans who further manifest their humanity through their expression of familial bonds of love. Although it is from the rather unreliable Arquette that the audience is made aware of this, the ways in which Stripe’s “Mass” is reconfigured by “roaches” and their human allies to spur Stripe’s sympathy for them conforms to Weheliye’s notions of a new kind of subjectivity arising from racializing assemblages. Indeed, it is precisely as the population targeted for eradication and their allies are able to hack into and gain control of “Mass” that Stripe is able to see the “roaches” as humans. “Men Against Fire” thusly conforms well to Weheliye’s point on how radical transformation can be harnessed from racializing assemblages that otherwise work to oppress—mobilizing those very mechanisms that oppress to struggle against the oppressive. Yet it falls short in its broader conceptualization and thus critique of the modern workings of race. MORE TO RACIALIZATION THAN THE “MASS” CAN SEE The “roaches” as a population are designated as what Weheliye calls “non-humans,” an inferior category in his racialization schema below humans and not-quite-humans. However, the social formation that placed them there is never developed—all the audience, and Stripe, are told is that they are targeted because of their biology. This inability, or disinterest, to address how racialization actually works in the modern Western world is highlighted by the episode’s color-blind casting prac-

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tices, which provide a different, yet connected, illustration of Black Mirror’s meager grasp of how race works in modern Western society. While most other actors in the episode are white, the actor playing Stripe is Black—but his Blackness never presents any significance to the plot. Warner suggests that the practices of color-blind casting—casting roles with no consideration of how the racial identity of the actor will impact the narrative—function to “maintain an idealistic but myopic view of the world based on normative (white) assumptions.” 25 In other words, colorblind casting and its inherent inattentiveness to race results in cultural products that cannot properly address Western society’s continued racialized hierarchies and their consequences, but instead reinforce “our current societal post-racial belief that we are all the same, irrespective of race.” 26 Black Mirror’s choice to engage in color-blind casting raises the stakes of the de-raced nature of the universe in “Men Against Fire” even further as it, too, works to not only simplify how modern patterns of racialization work, but ultimately obscures them by ignoring racial difference in its storytelling in what, we must assume, is meant to be a parable of our modern era. As discussed above, although biopolitics is key to the plot, the actual processes of racialization inherent to biopolitics are never described in “Men Against Fire,” thus obscuring the racialization and dehumanization, particularly of Black bodies, key to the development and maintenance of modern biopolitics. The color-blind casting practices resulting in Stripe’s Blackness never being addressed or acknowledged at any point in the episode are similarly reflective of the reductive notion of racialization and color-blind ideology that defines the episode’s politics. In “Men Against Fire,” color-blind casting practices and inadequate representation of the racialization at the core of biopolitics work in tandem to reinforce the post-racial idea that race no longer matters. Weheliye’s astute observation that “biopolitics discourse . . . misconstrues how profoundly race and racism shape the modern idea of the human” is then reproduced by Black Mirror’s violent analogy of biopolitical population control. 27 Weheliye argues that racialization operates by attaching human bodies with statuses of “full humans, not-quite-humans, and nonhumans,” which are attached to flesh. 28 This episode certainly fits with this notion of the effects of racialization. Here, the least valued race’s humanity is literally erased in order to facilitate their eradication—they are, to the implanted soldiers, made into non-humans as their threatening position in relation to the State is given the visual expression of “roaches” through Mass. However, as Weheliye also points out, who is made to be full human, not-quite-humans, or non-humans is not the result of a simple biological calculation, as this episode posits, but of complex historical and social processes. “Men Against Fire” does not seek to provide any social explanation for why the “roaches” had to be made into non-humans and so

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Race, Cyborgs, and the Pitfalls of Biopolitical Discourse

works poorly as an analogy of the workings of Western modernity’s patterns of racialization. Black Mirror illustrates, instead, how biopower might operate in the future of a race-less world, but since we currently do not live in a race-less dystopian society, “Men Against Fire” does not illustrate the full picture of how biopower actually works within the Western modernity in which we presently find ourselves. On the contrary, in its production of an alternative de-raced world, “Men Against Fire” ultimately works to obscure the workings of race by furthering post-racial ideology and the notion that race, in our modern world, no longer matters. There is only biological difference between the “roaches” and those who kill them. Outside of Black Mirror, however, race relations do not operate in this way. In the modern, Western nationstate that Black Mirror purports to critique, racialization is a social process that sometimes does depend on biology, but is never fully determined by it, and continues to have grave consequences for those groups racialized as different and dangerous. CONCLUSION By reducing racialization to its biological and phenotypical elements, Black Mirror, like Foucault, risks reifying a “naturalization of racial categories and the existence of a biological sphere that is not always already subject to ethnic racism.” 29 Because there is no such thing in the history of our present world like the purely biological racism that enables the biopolitical violence of “Men Against Fire”; the world of this episode and its conception of race is entirely fictional. In our reality, race is “a set of sociopolitical processes of differentiation and hierarchization, which are projected onto the putatively biological human body,” but in Black Mirror’s representation of the workings of racialized violence, only the latter part of this equation is included as the only reason provided for why the roaches are targeted is their “shitty” DNA. 30 This is not to say that “Men Against Fire” lacks worthwhile lessons on our social reality. Black Mirror here produces a powerful criticism of the dehumanization at the core of violent oppression of human populations. The way in which “Mass” makes the targeted group appear as hideous creatures is a convincing metaphor for the ocular elements of racialization and the militarized State power and its logics as represented by Arquette is an engaging analogy of Foucault’s biopolitics. Similarly, the way in which Stripe’s empathy allows the viewer to see the “roaches” exemplifies Weheliye’s important insight into how racializing assemblages can also be an engine of hope and radical social transformation as Stripe’s “conversion” emerges, in part, from the “roach” population’s appropriation of the racializing technology of “Mass.”

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Yet “Men Against Fire” eschews the opportunity to engage the complex role of race in the biopolitical realm. Part of this could be due to the fact that they seem to rely heavily on Foucault’s analysis—and thus repeat his inattention to race. The similarly de-raced approach to systems of oppression illustrated by the color-blind casting produces a future devoid of modern patterns of racialization—and thus an incomplete analogy for the modern workings of race. This fantasy ultimately, as Warner points out, works to obscure the continued existence of racialized hierarchies and differentiation across the Western world. Rather than critique modern processes of racialization where phenotype is the canvas onto which sociopolitical marginalization maps, in “Men Against Fire” phenotype becomes simply a marker of innate biological difference, reinforcing the hopeful, but erroneous post-racial ideology that race simply does not matter. As Haraway shows, the figure of the cyborg is uniquely situated to fundamentally trouble these modern processes such as racialization, if the cyborg does not emanate from Western logics. “Men Against Fire’s” Western cyborg does not seem interested in critiquing, or even acknowledging, those critical elements of modernity. The cyborg of “Men Against Fire” instead reflects and protects State power rather than challenging it. While the fictional universe provided in “Men Against Fire” neatly encapsulates how the State operates via biopolitical differentiation, it falls short of providing an accurate analogy of the modern workings of race, racism, and racialization as experienced beyond the screen. NOTES 1. Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–1976. Translated by David Macey. (New York: Picador, 2003), 241. 2. Ibid., 255. 3. Alexander G. Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014). 4. Weheliye, as one of the seminal theorists of the term, uses “racializing assemblages” rather than racialization. The two terms are not synonymous, but the space constraints of this chapter does not allow for an explication of racializing assemblages that would do this complex and sophisticated concept justice. 5. Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto.” In Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, 149–181 (New York: Routledge, 1991). 6. Kristen J. Warner, The Cultural Politics of Colorblind TV Casting (New York: Routledge, 2015). 7. Charlie Brooker, Black Mirror, “Men Against Fire.” Digital streaming. Directed by Jakob Verbruggen (United Kingdom: Netflix, 2016). 8. Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended,” 255. 9. Charlie Brooker, “Men Against Fire.” 10. Ibid. 11. Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended,” 255. 12. Ibid., 255. 13. Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended,” 260.

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14. Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States. Third edition (New York: Routledge/Taylor & Francis Group, 2015), 111. 15. Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto,” 192. 16. Ibid., 180. 17. Charlie Brooker, “Men Against Fire.” 18. Alexander G. Weheliye, Habeas Viscus, 72. 19. Ibid., 69–71. 20. Ibid., 3. 21. Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended,” 256. 22. Alexander G. Weheliye, Habeas Viscus, 4. 23. Ibid., 2. 24. Alexander G. Weheliye, Habeas Viscus, 12. 25. Kristen J. Warner, The Cultural Politics of Colorblind TV Casting, 12. 26. Ibid., 153. 27. Alexander G. Weheliye, Habeas Viscus, 4. 28. Ibid., 3. 29. Ibid., 59–60. 30. Ibid., 5.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Brooker, Charlie. Black Mirror, “Men Against Fire.” Digital streaming. Directed by Jakob Verbruggen. United Kingdom: Netflix, 2016. Foucault, Michel. “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–1976. Translated by David Macey. New York: Picador, 2003. Haraway, Donna. “A Cyborg Manifesto.” In Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, 149–181. New York: Routledge, 1991. Omi, Michael, and Howard Winant. Racial Formation in the United States. Third edition. New York: Routledge/Taylor & Francis Group, 2015. Warner, Kristen, J. The Cultural Politics of Colorblind TV Casting. New York: Routledge, 2015. Weheliye, Alexander G. Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014.

TWO Digitally Natural Gender Norms in Black Mirror Angela M. Cirucci

One consequence of our growing reliance on digital technology is the ethos ascribed to these tools, branding them as the great truth bearers. Technologies that can track, predict, and even resemble humans are linked with objectivity and truth. Indeed, much of Black Mirror’s success is derived from exploring exaggerated versions of our reliance on, and devotion to, digital media as unbiased lenses through which to view the world. Although never a main storyline or moral within a Black Mirror episode, gendered norms are an important area of study in the current era of “Big Data.” Presenting stereotypical gender roles through powerful technologies is detrimental because they are further reified and “proven” even more “natural” due to the repetitive digital acts that constantly link them to some objective truth. In addition, traditional womanhood has historically been used to warn of technologies’ dark sides. As such, the purpose of this chapter is to investigate gendered performances included in Black Mirror and to analyze how stereotypical gender norms are potentially naturalized, even within the fictitious worlds created for each episode. Drawing from Michel Foucault and Judith Butler, I argue that the current view of technological advancements as vehicles for objective realities, paired with gender performances through these spaces, problematizes gender politics. To do so, I consider seven episodes of Black Mirror that contain varying notions of stereotypical femininity. In particular, I note the ways in which stereotypical femininity is used as a 15

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Digitally Natural

plot device to illustrate the damaging consequences of “misusing” everadvancing digital tools. DIGITAL AS TRUTH In boyd and Crawford’s piece, Critical Questions for Big Data, 1 they question what “Big Data” truly means in the scope of current scientific inquiry. On the surface, it may seem to mean simply “a lot of data.” But in actuality it represents the new capacity to search, aggregate, and crossreference billions of data points for millions of people. Big Data represents the maximization of computer power and affords us the ability to identify patterns that often lead to economic, social, and legal change. But, most importantly, Big Data offers a new mythology—digital tools and large “data sets offer a higher form of intelligence and knowledge that can generate insights that were previously impossible, with the aura of truth, objectivity, and accuracy.” 2 This new culture, one that positions digital technologies as paving clearer paths to truth and objectivity, is precisely the philosophy that Black Mirror exploits. Brooker, along with the episodes’ writers and producers, present worlds wherein technologies, very similar to the ones we rely on each day, are taken a step too far, often highlighting the characters’ blind trust or admiration for emerging digital tools. Technology is often thought to be the instrument that extends and enhances what we can do as humans. 3 Yet with increasing impulses to fold more and more digital technologies into daily life, the body and technology have become entangled into one augmented reality, where the technology as instrument is difficult to distinguish from the body. Thus, the body itself has become an instrument for those in power, a theme Black Mirror regularly employs. Indeed, the push toward a culture of a digital, “quantified self” promises to optimize our lives. But these technologies are not only used at the personal level; they are heavily incorporated into social and institutional life. Digital innovations assure us a future less prone to human error, to help us fight against instincts and traditions with reliable evidence, and to grant us more control. 4 But these tools are actually valorized because it behooves those in power to promote the guarantee that technologies will bring us closer to the truth. These promises are misleading because the “control” users may gain is akin to a constant self-surveillance or what Foucault termed “governing the self.” 5 In a system of “permanent registration,” 6 the more that users decide to fold new media technologies into their lives, the more they necessarily live their lives through the realities presented by these technologies. Users are led to believe they are acting in their own interests, but these interests are couched in the interests of the State. Just as

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with Bentham’s Panopticon, technologies ask users to keep track of themselves while also making these valuable data available to those in power. And, as with the Panopticon, digital spaces are used as a means of conducting experiments and controlling the social order. 7 Unlike the Panopticon, the process of control through regulating social norms has become expected. Technologies of control are not forced upon users, but graciously accepted. Although the process may not be, the products of digital control are incredibly visible—targeted ads, infographics, and wearables’ statistics flood users’ timelines and news feeds, creating the illusion that quantifications of reality, presented by and through new media technologies, represent “the truth” more than any instinct, feeling, or qualitative methodology. Indeed, this visibility is what makes the push toward full technological immersion and faith successful. Users, too, participate in the naturalization of “digital as truth.” Sayings like “Facebook official” and “pics or it didn’t happen” underscore the need for human experiences to be represented through digital spaces if they are to be taken as fact. Visual evidence has always made for better “proof”; traditionally photographs and video clips played this role in newspapers and nightly news programs. Contemporarily, however, all pieces of human existence can be “visible” because so much of who we are is tracked by, and presented through, digital media technologies. Thus, when information is linked to digital technologies it is perceived as “more real.” It is important to remember that those who have the power to create digital structures are the ones who control what becomes naturalized as social norms. As Foucault argued, the seemingly innocent discourses that take place on and through digital media are not “essential” but rather intertwined with institutions like religion and politics. In particular, Foucault wrote about the created categories of sexual identity that, while not natural, have become widely accepted as true. GENDERED EXPECTATIONS Butler, 8 drawing from Foucault, argues that gender is not natural. Instead, through “the repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame . . . congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of being.” 9 In other words, gender is not a noun, but a verb. We “do” gender, and binary gender categories only feel natural because gender is performative. Institutional structures support these repetitive acts and punish those, in a multitude of ways, who step outside of the expectations for “female” and “male.” Butler argues that these stylized acts happen through the structures of power that already exist. Thus, for gender, political and religious struc-

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Digitally Natural

tures, among others, are all around us, constantly impelling us to act in a manner that “correctly” corresponds to the sex noted on our birth certificates. These unnatural norms then remain “true” because the majority of people reify their importance. One important consequence of human bodies becoming indistinguishable from technological instruments is the increased “truth” that normalized stylizations carry. Because these acts are now more visible than ever, they are readily seen as the “correct” way of being. Thus, when users perform the self on and through digital spaces, they are making these performances even more visible, and the repetitive acts that further naturalize binary gender are seemingly further validated, even though the structures exhibiting these acts are the very structures that support, and benefit from, stereotypical gender expectations in the first place. This is to say that, with increasing turns to the valorization of digital instruments, it becomes increasingly easier to “prove” that “female” and “male” are specific, and in fact the only two, gender identities. Women already have experienced a complicated history with technological advancements. As one example, when bicycles were a fairly new technology, women were warned to be careful how they were seen in public riding a bike. New York World published a piece in 1895 10 warning women about cultivating a “bicycle face” and to not “overdo things.” Similarly, in the early twentieth century, women were selected to be telephone switchboard operators, acting as the connecting medium between caller and recipient. Women were chosen both because the job was a low paying one and because women were considered to be more capable of being kind and social. However, when men would need to speak with the operator, the telephone acted as one of the first media that broke down traditional social etiquette filters. Many women operators were considered immoral; until 1913 Italian women operators were required to quit their jobs if they married. 11 Fast forward to today, and it is clear that these issues of women, publicness, and technology are still thriving. Popular press, news pieces, and even scholarly articles link the selfie, for instance, with narcissistic behavior. A University of Toronto study found that people who take selfies regularly overestimate their attractiveness. 12 Women’s World reported that taking selfies can damage your skin 13 and, if you take selfies with friends, you are at risk for lice. 14 Each of these pieces featured only images of women taking selfies. On the other hand, when men take selfies they are celebrated and depicted as savvy and working toward greater goals like winning elections. 15 While perhaps drawing from images of action heroes in their stiff, awkward stance, men taking selfies are expected to be active, while women are anticipated to passively pose for an assumed, heterosexual, male gaze. These few examples share an important and similar thread—moral panics ensue when women are paired with new technologies. In a sense,

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women are used to showcase the personally, socially, and institutionally negative sides of new technologies. However, these detrimental implications work both ways. While one consequence is learning the “right” way to use a technology, another is expressing the “correct” way to “be” male or female. Indeed, as the era of Big Data places more emphasis on the digital as truth, it also, I argue, makes it easier to stereotype and categorize “correct” modes of performing femininity. Even with its futuristic and creative storylines, Black Mirror routinely exploits gendered acts of stereotypical femininity for its plots, particularly when it comes to showcasing how new technologies can go wrong or be taken too far. GENDER IN BLACK MIRROR Throughout the first three seasons of Black Mirror, the viewers are taken on journeys, navigating what life would be like if technologies that we now know and love were slightly enhanced, used more readily, or further integrated into institutional life. Specifically, many of the plots use characters who identify as female as vehicles to showcase extreme digital situations. In what follows, I explore seven episodes to highlight the varying ways in which gender identity is employed as a tool to convey specific stories about technology and digital worlds. Drawing from Foucault and Butler, I explore how the myth that digital technologies more accurately project truth is particularly detrimental to attempts toward progressive gender identities. “White Christmas” In a special Christmas episode that aired after season 2, “White Christmas,” we learn that Matt’s job is to insert “cookies” into his patients and copy their consciousness. In particular, the episode tells the story of Greta who has her consciousness copied and inserted into an egg-shaped device to serve as her personal assistant. Unfortunately, her copied consciousness still thinks she is herself—fully human with feelings and emotions. Matt must torture her, digitally speeding up time, until Greta’s Copy is so bored that she is literally on her knees begging Matt for something to do. Greta’s Copy’s purpose is to serve as Greta’s housekeeper, cook, and secretary. Indeed, Greta’s Copy is a perfect model for performative femininity, particularly that of women’s work—the tasks that are reserved for women in the home. 16 Women’s work is often called “invisible labor” because it is rarely even deemed work. Instead, it is seen as the duties that women naturally should, and ought to want to, perform. The tasks performed in the home, like cooking, cleaning, and raising children, support capitalistic goals, but in an indirect and invisible manner. They also

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are designed to keep women in the home instead of taking on more traditional, 9–5 jobs for which men are “better qualified.” Greta’s Copy is not just shown as stuck in the home, but also trapped in her egg within Greta’s house. Her only choices are to perform women’s work or be tortured once again. Greta’s Copy’s experiences would not be possible without the futuristic technologies presented in “White Christmas.” Yet, beyond their practicalities, the portrayal of specific stylized acts through these technologies further highlights the naturalization of these gendered acts—of course Greta’s Copy, as a woman, would be made to conduct these specific modes of work. Even more egregious, Greta herself, as a female, has chosen to subject her own consciousness to this work. “Fifteen Million Merits” In “Fifteen Million Merits” (S1E2), Bing convinces Abi to use his merits to try out for Hot Shot, a talent show not unlike American Idol or Britain’s Got Talent. As a shock to Bing, Abi is denied a chance at singing fame and instead told, while her voice is “good,” that she is better suited for porn. Bing is tortured by her sex scenes on WraithBabes and earns enough merits to go on Hot Shot himself. However his plan is different; he uses the stage to threaten suicide, eager to subvert the entire system. Instead, the judges and audience love his “performance” and suggest he star in his own reality show. The episode depicts how immersive technologies can go wrong through a sharp contrast in gender roles—we see Abi in uncomfortable sex scenes with a man’s thumb shoved down her throat while Bing ambles about a large apartment, staring out onto a seemingly infinite, verdant forest. Much of the support for both Abi’s and Bing’s destinies come from the viewing audience. Not just the live, in-studio audience at Hot Shot, but also the massive number of people who live to ride bikes, collect merits, and watch television programs. Thus, “correct” roles for men and women are displayed when they immerse themselves deeper into mediated reality. Before entering Hot Shot, Abi and Bing led fairly similar lives. Once on the futuristic version of television, much like a modern Panopticon, Abi and Bing become more visible, and their real purposes are ratified— the woman should be further shackled as a sex slave, and the man should be presented as liberated, with his own program. “White Bear” In “White Bear” (S2E2), it at first seems that Victoria Skillane is being chased by some unknown foe while onlookers record her plight on their mobile devices. We later learn that Victoria’s boyfriend Iain abducted, tortured, and killed a young girl named Jenima while Victoria recorded

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the events on her phone. The event of Victoria running for her life is repeated over and over again and broadcast as a reality television show. Before each iteration, Victoria’s memory is painfully wiped to ensure that she experiences the same level of fear. The process is Victoria’s punishment for recording Iain’s acts and is meant to torture her in perpetuity. This decision was not served at random; the logic behind the recurring event is that Victoria must experience the same pain and terror that Jenima experienced. Beyond traditional notions of women’s work lies a “second shift”— the expected emotional labor that also comes with traditional femininity. 17 Not only are women expected to conduct physical tasks around the house, they also have some “assumed expertise in emotional management” 18 and are subsequently expected to regulate their emotions in accordance with what others may need. Victoria is literally sentenced to conduct performative emotional labor; her body is not punished, but instead her psyche. This punishment is validated through multiple technological tools including video recording, live-streaming, and erasing her memory. Again, Black Mirror viewers are shown a reality-like television program that relies on notions of the Panopticon as well as audience involvement and advanced digital tools. Victoria’s terror is only a cover for her expected, albeit exaggerated, performance of emotional labor. Interestingly, Iain committed suicide in his cell before his trial, escaping his punishment. Victoria, on the other hand, must not only be perpetually tortured, like Sisyphus, but she must also act as an archetype for performative notions of gendered labor. “Nosedive” In “Nosedive” (S3E1), Lacie Pound is obsessed with increasing her social score. Rightly so, as the clean, seemingly utopian world in which she lives depends on a human-human rating system, like that of Uber or Yelp, that presses people to rate one another. While the process may seem social, these ratings are incredibly important to institutional life, acting as deciding factors for plane tickets, car rentals, home purchases, and jobs. Lacie is obsessed with her image and how others view her. In stark contrast, her brother is not. Much of the plot relies on displaying Lacie as caring about her social image, while her brother is worried about playing video games with his friends. Lacie carries out performative acts in an attempt to earn a higher social score and move into an expensive neighborhood. Lacie’s original 4.3 score is maintained through a series of acts stereotypically viewed as feminine—taking pictures of cappuccini and cookies, dipping back into a childhood memory with a doll, cooking, and generally remaining socially visible and friendly to all those around her.

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Throughout the episode, the ways in which men use the platform is rarely explored. Instead, it is a woman who is obsessed with her social score and who also is the character used to show its dark side. Dreams of a “high 4” lifestyle begin to diminish when a series of events relentlessly decrease Lacie’s social score. She is late meeting a taxi, she is upset and curses at an airport clerk, and she arrives at her friend’s wedding dirty, angry, and outspoken. Although the social rating platform relies on people being liked, it is Lacie’s very obsession with acceptance that is also her downfall. She has tried too hard, wanted social acceptance too much, and her acts eventually put her in jail. Even Susan’s story, the low-rated truck driver from whom Lacie reluctantly accepts a ride, is meant to link a low social rating—1.4—with a failure to perform the women’s work of taking care of her dying husband. Throughout “Nosedive,” viewers are presented with common acts of stereotypical femininity paired with obsessive, and ultimately failed, uses of digital technology. Clearly, the social rating system portrayed in “Nosedive” is again inspired by the Panopticon. Because of the constant social and institutional gaze, users must surveil themselves, being sure to both post socially validated content to the platform as well as perform “correctly” in the physical world. Lacie’s performances within, and for, the Panopticon reify traditional notions of female-ness. Yet the display of these stylized acts is only truly relevant when they are verified by and through the social rating platform. The technology makes her acts more visible, both as performances and as socially accepted displays of femininity. In addition, when Lacie begins to not act “ladylike”—cursing, hitchhiking, looking disheveled—the technology confirms her failures, even further validating what female-ness should be by denying anything that is considered to be its opposite. “Men Against Fire” In “Men Against Fire” (S3E5), it seems that gender roles are flipped as Stripe, a male soldier, is distraught when he learns that the “roaches” his unit is exterminating are really just people who only look scary because of MASS, a neural implant that has altered how he perceives certain groups of “genetically inferior” people. In actuality, these “roaches” are victims of a mass genocide propelled by propaganda and prejudice. Hunter, the female soldier, is instead characterized as a Rambo-like character, not afraid to use her gun and unabatedly ready to eradicate as many roaches as possible. As Goffman 19 argues, one large exception to the rule of naturalized, stylized acts of men and women can be found within race relations. When a woman is displayed, he argues, with a Black man, she is then “allowed” to take on more dominant, less “feminine,” qualities. Stripe is

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a Black male; Hunter is a white female. Thus, it is as if race has allowed Hunter is perform less “womanly” than socially expected. Stripe attempts to get out of his position, but he is shown a video of himself aloofly agreeing to the MASS and his duties. He is threatened with imprisonment if he does not comply, so he agrees to have his memory wiped for a second time, complete his roach-killing mission, and is later discharged with full military honors. The final scenes show him retiring to a beautiful house and wife, yet in reality he walks into a shack with no wife in sight, the MASS still altering his reality. Although race is used as a mediating factor, Hunter is still a woman used to display how technologies can be deadly if taken too far. She blindly accepts her assignments, never questioning what digital instruments may be altering her experience. While not performing traditional notions of women’s work or emotional labor, she still plays some new role of “women’s work”—displaying all that can be negative about digital technologies. “Playtest” In “Playtest” (S3E2) Cooper is invited to SaitoGemu to test a new virtual reality experience. The episode winds through increasingly immersive and confusing worlds concluding with Cooper’s death. However, the end of the episode reveals that Cooper really only survived for three seconds. His death came so quickly because, although warned, he brought his cell phone with him. While the initial mistake is his, the real killer was his mother, who had been trying to reach him by phone for some time. Because she called him three seconds into his test run, she kills him. Thus, it is really her use, although indirect, of technology for performative acts of emotional labor, that highlights a simple, yet deadly, dark side of technology. “San Junipero” In “San Junipero” (S3E4), viewers learn that people can visit a 1987 beach resort as a way of escaping their current reality. More precisely, the elderly can visit for five hours a week and can choose to live there permanently instead of dying. Yorkie and Kelly meet in San Junipero and fall in love. Kelly learns that Yorkie is actually on life support, visits her, and convinces her to upload her consciousness along with Kelly so they can spend eternity together in the colorful world of 1987. They end up together, and the episode ends on an atypically positive note. Intriguingly, because the choice was made for the episode to take place in 1987, no contemporary technologies are present. Thus, for most of the episode, and beyond the overarching theme of uploading oneself to San Junipero, the women are never shown actually using new, digital

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tools. Instead, the episode relies heavily on the assumed appeal of gazing upon lesbian lovers—residents are shown as constantly partying and having sex. The residents are also portrayed as being obsessed with living in the past, perhaps a fitting setting for two women and limited technologies compared to other Black Mirror episodes. CONCLUSION Black Mirror’s success can be largely attributed to its uncanny storylines. The episodes can, at the same time, feel both completely alien and all too real. This eccentricity was exactly Brooker’s intention; he noted that he hopes to always represent the “area between delight and discomfort.” 20 Each episode is “just close enough” to our lived experiences, and this is what keeps people watching. The above episode excerpts indicate a continued dependence on women to act as the exemplars of new technologies’ dark sides—perhaps another facet of “women’s work.” Even more worrying, these stylized acts are performed on and through digital tools, bringing the coupling of women and detrimental uses of digital tools closer to some “objective” truth. Constantly portrayed as concerned with a panopticon-like gaze, women are depicted as naturally having dangerous relationships with digital media because of their performative acts of femininity. When women are not portrayed in this light, they are either paired with a “lesser” character (who can do this “dark side” work for them) or simply not interacting with new media. With the rich and forward-thinking storylines, one obvious question remains—why produce such a thought-provoking show yet still rely on outdated gender stereotypes? If it is possible to imagine copying consciousnesses, installing digital eye lenses, and institutionalizing reality television, then why are the show’s plots still reliant on using stereotypical female roles to convey the dark side of new media? Perhaps the best answer to these questions is the uncanny. Much of the episodes, while close to home, are still unbelievable. Thus, something has to ground the stories; something has to link the Black Mirror world to our world so that viewers can become immersed and see themselves in the characters. Binary gender norms are so engrained in our society, and have become such naturalized expectations, that is seems it is easy for the episodes’ writers and producers to rely on gender as a constant. Even in the Black Mirror reality, stereotypical gender norms are used to ground viewers, making them believe what they are viewing is closer to their destinies than they had originally imagined.

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NOTES 1. Boyd, Danah, and Kate Crawford. “Critical Questions for Big Data: Provocations for a Cultural, Technological, and Scholarly Phenomenon.” Information, Communication & Society 15, no. 5 (2012): 662–679. 2. Ibid., 663. 3. McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994). 4. Lupton, Deborah. “Self-Tracking Cultures: Towards a Sociology of personal Informatics.” In Proceedings of the 26th Australian Computer-Human Interaction Conference on Designing Futures: the Future of Design (2014), ACM. 5. 5 . Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish. Translated by Alan Sheridan. (New York: Vintage, 1979 [1997]). 6. Ibid., 196 7. For example, see Confessore, Nicholas and Matthew Rosenberg, “Spy Contractor’s Idea Helped Cambridge Analytica Harvest Facebook Data.” The New York Times. March 2018. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/27/us/cambridge-analytica-palantir.html. 8. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble (London: Routledge, 1990). 9. Ibid., 45 10. Cited in Popova Popova, Maria. “A List of Don’ts for Women on Bicycles Circa 1895.” Brainpickings. https://www.brainpickings.org/2012/01/03/donts-for-womenon-bicycles-1895/. 11. Balbi, Gabriele. “‘I Will Answer You, My Friend, But I Am Afraid’. Telephones and the Fear of a New Medium in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth-Century Italy.” Moral panics, social fears, and the media. Historical perspectives (London: Routledge, 2013). 12. Boult, Adam. “People Who Take Selfies Regularly ‘Overestimate How Attractive They Are’—Study.” The Telegraph. May 2016. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2016/05/20/people-who-take-selfies-regularly-overestimate-how-attractive-th/. 13. Chia, Jessica. “Taking Selfies Could Actually be Aging your Skin.” Women’s Health. March 2016. https://www.womenshealthmag.com/beauty/selfies-aging-skin. 14. Miller, Korin. “People Are Getting Lice from Taking Selfies with Their Friends.” Women’s Health. July 2016. https://www.womenshealthmag.com/health/head-licefrom-taking-selfies. 15. Byrne, Bridie. “Social Media Campaign #MyMaribyrnong Invites People to Take a Selfie at their Favourite Maribyrnong Spot.” Herald Sun. November 2015. http:// www.heraldsun.com.au/leader/news/social-media-campaign-mymaribyrnong-invites-people-to-take-a-selfie-at-their-favourite-maribyrnong-spot/news-story/ a5169a9d6079d2a25c3743802939e076. 16. Hochschild, Arlie Russell. “Emotion Work, Feeling Rules, and Social Structure.” American Journal of Sociology 85, no. 3 (1979). 17. Arcy, Jacquelyn. “Emotion Work: Considering Gender in Digital Labor.” Feminist Media Studies 16, no. 2 (2016). 18. Ibid., 1. 19. Goffman, Erving. Gender Advertisements (1979). 20. Brooker, Charlie. “Charlie Brooker: The Dark Side of Our Gadget Addiction.” The Guardian. December 2011. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/dec/01/ charlie-brooker-dark-side-gadget-addiction-black-mirror.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Arcy, Jacquelyn. “Emotion Work: Considering Gender in Digital Labor.” Feminist Media Studies 16, no. 2 (2016): 365–368.

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Balbi, Gabriele. “‘I Will Answer You, My Friend, But I am Afraid.’ Telephones and the Fear of a New Medium in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth-Century Italy.” Moral Panics, Social Fear, and The Media: Historical Perspectives. London: Routledge (2013): 59–75. Boult, Adam. “People Who Take Selfies Regularly ‘Overestimate How Attractive They Are’—Study.” The Telegraph. May 2016. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/ 2016/05/20/people-who-take-selfies-regularly-overestimate-how-attractive-th/. boyd, danah, and Kate Crawford. “Critical Questions for Big Data: Provocations for a Cultural, Technological, and Scholarly Phenomenon.” Information, Communication & Society 15, no. 5 (2012): 662–679. Brooker, Charlie. “Charlie Brooker: The Dark Side of Our Gadget Addiction.” The Guardian. December 2011. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/dec/01/ charlie-brooker-dark-side-gadget-addiction-black-mirror. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble. London: Routledge, 1990. Byrne, Bridie. “Social Media Campaign #MyMaribyrnong Invites People to Take a Selfie at Their Favourite Maribyrnong Spot.” Herald Sun. November 2015. http:// www.heraldsun.com.au/leader/news/social-media-campaign-mymaribyrnong-invites-people-to-take-a-selfie-at-their-favourite-maribyrnong-spot/news-story/ a5169a9d6079d2a25c3743802939e076. Chia, Jessica. “Taking Selfies Could Actually be Aging your Skin.” Women’s Health. March 2016. https://www.womenshealthmag.com/beauty/selfies-aging-skin. Confessore, Nicholas and Matthew Rosenberg “Spy Contractor’s Idea Helped Cambridge Analytica Harvest Facebook Data.” The New York Times. March 2018. https:// www.nytimes.com/2018/03/27/us/cambridge-analytica-palantir.html. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage, 1979 (1977). Goffman, Erving. Gender Advertisements. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1979. Hochschild, Arlie Russell. “Emotion Work, Feeling Rules, and Social Structure.” American Journal of Sociology 85, no. 3 (1979): 551–575. Lupton, Deborah. “Self-Tracking Cultures: Towards a Sociology of personal Informatics.” In Proceedings of the 26th Australian Computer-Human Interaction Conference on Designing Futures: the Future of Design (2014): 77–86. ACM. McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994. Miller, Korin. “People are Getting Lice from Taking Selfies with their Friends.” Women’s Health. July 2016. https://www.womenshealthmag.com/health/head-lice-fromtaking-selfies. Popova, Maria. “A List of Don’ts for Women on Bicycles Circa 1895.” Brainpickings. https://www.brainpickings.org/2012/01/03/donts-for-women-on-bicycles-1895/.

THREE A Virtual Ever-After Utopia, Race, and Gender in Black Mirror’s “San Junipero” Eleanor Drage

Lauded as “2016’s most life-affirming piece of television,” 1 “San Junipero,” the fourth episode of Black Mirror’s third season, has captured the hearts of the LGBTQIA community and beyond. The show radically upends the “Bury Your Gays” trope, offering an eternal “paradise” to a “mixed-race,” queer romance. To the dismay of Black Mirror fans, Charlie Brooker, writer and creator of the dystopian anthology series, finally offered viewers a happy ending. The episode not only constitutes an exception to Black Mirror’s unapologetic message of doom and gloom but made queer happiness the condition for that exception. This chapter explores how the episode is at a remove from Black Mirror’s usual portrayal of virtual reality (VR) as Virilian “deception” or “substitution,” to promise and deliver life after death for a “mixed-race,” same-sex romance. I argue that the VR space of San Junipero does this by “queering” death, so that San Junipero becomes a heterochronic Foucauldian cemetery, a place between reality and virtuality. Through a study of José Esteban Muñoz’s conception of queer futurity, and De Witt Douglas Kilgore’s exploration of the utopian potential of astrofuturism, I demonstrate how San Junipero’s heterochronic cemetery supersedes heteronormative “death” to allow Yorkie and Kelly’s romance a second chance at success in virtual “heaven.”

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OVERVIEW OF THEORY In his 1994 The Vision Machine, Paul Virilio explores the “blindness” experienced by users of “real-time video computer graphics,” arguing that “the production of sightless vision is itself merely the reproduction of an intense blindness that will become the latest and last form of industrialization: the industrialization of the non-gaze.” 2 This is Virilio’s grim prediction for the virtual image, a computer-mediated mode of experiencing the world, which results in human vision becoming less adept at interpreting and responding to the surrounding environment. Users subsequently experience a “steady decline in retention rates,” “the rapid collapse of mnemonic consolidation” (memory formation), and a reduction of their capacity to organize and exercise their “cognitive functions.” 3 The virtual image processed by human eyes is thus one of “deception” in its “substitution” of reality, making the user a “slave to the faith in the technical sightline.” 4 For Virilio, this is a phenomenon that owes its pervasiveness in part to wider issues of twenty-first-century surveillance and warfare, which employ the tools of VR to practice a modern form of dominance and destruction, a war of “images and sounds.” 5 Where Virilio rejects as “disturbing” 6 the potentialities of VR as a meeting place between users, also criticizing the proponents of cybernetic sexuality as “the servants of a new type of sexual control,” 7 feminist theorist Elizabeth Grosz focuses somewhat asymmetrically on “how conceptions of virtuality, simulation, computer reproduction and rendering transform our understanding of the real, matter, space, the body, and the world.” 8 Grosz interrogates how our understanding of the “real” can be transformed by a deeper understanding of the codependence of what she terms the “interior” and the “exterior” worlds, claiming that the architecture of the interior—the consciousness—can always also be thought of in terms of the exteriority of corporeal surfaces: the “complexities, specificities, and materialities of bodies.” 9 In other words, “the virtual is immanent in the real” 10 : the virtual exists in and through the “real” just as the “real” is often the referent of the virtual. I approach this analysis of how San Junipero is also able to transform lives and hearts in the “real” world by way of this conceptualization of virtuality as a bi-directional movement between VR and “real” spaces. San Junipero is a heterotopic space, which has been defined by Michel Foucault as a “mixed, intermediate experience” between reality and virtuality, which can produce a positive return effect on the “real.” 11 Like the utopia, the heterotopia possesses “the curious property of being in relation with all the other sites, but in such a way as to suspect, neutralize, or invent the set of relations that they happen to designate, mirror, or reflect,” 12 thus presupposing “a system of opening and closing that isolates them and makes them penetrable at the same time.” 13 Some hetero-

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topias, such as the graveyard, hospital, and nursing home, operate as spaces of “temporal discontinuities” [decoupages du temps]: c’est-à-dire qu’elles ouvrent sur ce qu’on pourrait appeler, par pure symétrie, des hétérochronies; l’hétérotopie se met à fonctionner à plein lorsque les hommes se trouvent dans une sorte de rupture avec leurs temps traditionnel. 14 [that is, they open onto what might be called, for the sake of symmetry, heterochronias. The heterotopia begins to function fully when people find themselves in a kind of absolute break with their traditional time.] 15

The heterochronic space of “temporal discontinuity” exists at a remove from productive time. 16 In this sense, these spaces can also be productively seen as queer: they deviate from the heteronormative linearity of “traditional time” to allow for new realities to emerge. In his elaboration of Judith Halberstam’s important work on time and normativity, In a Queer Time and Place, 17 José Esteban Muñoz posits that queer time is “a thing that is not the linearity that many of us have been calling straight time,” 18 and must “resist the stultifying temporality and time that is not ours, that is saturated with violence both visceral and emotional.” 19 Nominally non-reproductive, queers, like the elderly and the hospitalized of Foucault’s heterotopic/chronic nursing homes, hospitals, and cemeteries, inhabit spaces that deviate from reproductive futurity. Muñoz’s utopian conceptualization of a future that does not extend out of the ideological impasses of the present, allows for the emergence of a “not yet” wherein queer desires and aspirations can take shape. But Muñoz’s Blochian “not yet” is also drawn from the “no-longer-conscious,” 20 the traces of the past whose unrealized potential can be released into a queer future. This utopian hermeneutic, wherein the past generates other presents and futures, is Muñoz’s way of historicizing without turning to “normative historical analysis.” 21 By tracing the tradition of African American speculative thinking, astro- and afrofuturism also provide useful models of historicized futurethinking, which welcome the formation of other, reinvigorated futures based in revisions of the past. 22 De Witt Douglas Kilgore, in particular, explores heterotopic conceptions of the future that form heterogenous spaces of resistance to the colonization of space by racist and capitalist ideologies. Crucially, these are spaces that, while transcending normative spatio-temporalities, are also embedded in the situated “identities and agendas” of people who exist “somewhere and at sometime”: “Although utopia may never shake the charge of being nowhere at any time, heterotopia is distinguished by always being somewhere and at some time. It is achievable through available means, and is inhabited by identities and agendas that mirror the complexity of our ordinary world.” 23 Where science fiction utopias often assume that racist societies will disappear in the future with the eradication of either diversity or differ-

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ence, Kilgore’s conception of the astrofuturist heterotopia brings to the fore the historical and cultural specificity of its people and its spaces. Indeed, Kilgore follows Foucault to define heterotopia as “a space that is always material and bounded, partial and transitional, hybrid and momentarily, if ever, homogenous.” 24 As I explore below, for the heterotopia to impart benefits onto its occupiers, it must maintain a transitional position between “real” and virtual space. “SAN JUNIPERO” “San Junipero” is the story of Kelly and Yorkie, played by Gugu MbathaRaw and Mackenzie Davis, who meet and fall in love in the VR Californian beachside party town of San Junipero. Kelly and Yorkie’s romance is an unlikely one. As we discover near the end of the episode, they are not entirely the young, attractive, and sprightly party-town residents that they first appear to be. In the “real” world, Kelly is a widowed old woman dying of terminal cancer who has never acted on her “crushes” for other women, while Yorkie is a hospitalized quadriplegic virgin, who, after an unwelcome coming out to her homophobic parents forty years earlier, got in her car and drove off the road in a near-fatal car crash. Thanks to “immersive nostalgia therapy,” Kelly and Yorkie’s consciousnesses, for a limit of five hours a week, are granted a second chance at life when re-embodied as healthy twenty-somethings in the virtual town of San Junipero. Once there, visitors can move from decade to decade as they please, passing from the 1980s to the 1990s and back again. 25 As they slip through San Junipero’s multi-layered virtual pasts, sites of utopian potentiality where the queer desires of their youth resurface, Kelly and Yorkie also transcend the unstoppable tick of mortality that is all too present in the hospital ward and the retirement home. At the end of the episode, they decide to “go permanent,” and, once they are granted permission to undergo the state-controlled euthanasia and “pass over” to San Junipero forever, Kelly and Yorkie achieve eternal romance in the cloud. This result prompted an explosion of commentary from Black Mirror digital fandom, with headlines including “Queer Women Are Losing Their Shit Over the Perfection of ‘San Junipero’” 26 shared and reshared across social media. “SAN JUNIPERO,” VR, AND HETEROTOPIA I begin by exploring how “San Junipero” subverts Black Mirror’s usual representation of the problematics of VR, in particular its potential to deceive its users by blurring the boundaries of reality and virtuality, as has been theorized at length by Paul Virilio. 27 This thesis then argues that the virtual paradise of San Junipero is able to improve the quality of Kelly

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and Yorkie’s reality on Earth by behaving as a Foucauldian heterotopia. I then draw on José Esteban Muñoz’s study of queer futurity and De Witt Douglas Kilgore’s work on utopia and astrofuturism to demonstrate how San Junipero’s heterochronic cemetery allows Yorkie and Kelly’s queer, “mixed race” romance to overcome the obstacles posed by race and gender in the domain of the “real.” For some LGBTQIA fans, Kelly and Yorkie’s happy ending meant that, for once, the community was not treated poorly. Yet the episode easily could have done so: regular Black Mirror viewers, accustomed to Charlie Brooker’s worst-case-scenario endings of near-future tech horror stories, might have expected this gay romance to go the same way as any other romance on the show: bottom up. Any one of an infinite selection of the drawbacks of VR could have, instead, been the episode’s lesson of the day. Kelly’s ocean view nursing home, Yorkie’s state-of-the-art hospital, and the modern TCKR systems’ building that houses the (presumably expensive) technology with which San Junipero is built, position the viewer to wonder, as we do in several other episodes of Black Mirror, if slick technology is again the exclusive plaything of the rich. These unfortunate victims of technology point to what the viewers, glued to our screens, have perhaps have already become, products of what Paul Virilio has termed the “industrialization of the non-gaze.” 28 This is explored to frightening effect in the episodes “The Entire History or You” (S1E3) and “Men Against Fire” (S3E5): in the former, implants allow characters to watch their memories on playback, while their eyes, sightless to the present, are glazed over like the waking dead; in the latter, technologically mediated vision is used as a military-political tool that allows soldiers to perceive an invisible enemy. The passive optics of the video lens, so easily transformed into a commercially viable product and sold en masse to generations of tech-hungry consumers, will, for Virilio, forever push human consciousness out of reality and into another dimension. Indeed, Black Mirror fans have taken to online forums to discuss the economic points of enquiry left unpacked by “San Junipero”: would individuals trust a corporate giant with their ever-after? What kind of guarantee could TCKR systems offer that they would keep a person’s soul for eternity? Could this ever be profitable for any enterprise, or has their society changed so completely that payment and profit are no longer a priority? Perhaps the most pressing of the concerns put forward and then swiftly batted aside by the episode are voiced by Greg, Yorkie’s hospital nurse, in a conversation with Kelly: Kelly: “They ration [VR time] out. Huh! They don’t trust us with more.” Greg: “They say you go crazy if you have too much. Don’t leave your seat, you disassociate body from mind . . .”

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A Virtual Ever-After Kelly: “Like that doesn’t happen in every senior home already.” [Chuckles]

We hear in Greg the Virilian fear of VR as “deception,” a simulacrum of reality that makes the user a “slave to the faith in the technical sightline,” as they “no longer believe their eyes.” 29 To choose the realm of fantasy at the expense of reality, would be, as Virilio puts it, to transfer consciousness “from the actual to the virtual,” resulting in “a general loss of a sense of reality that permeates all aspects of normal life.” 30 Not only does Kelly shrug off this grim prediction, but she also suggests a different kind of deception experienced by the elderly in senior homes: the deception of mortality, of unfulfilled desires, and for Yorkie, the codes of social morality that foreclose on the possibility of exercising freedom of sexuality. Paralyzed, permanently hospitalized, and robbed of a chance at love, Yorkie is already dependent on technology to support her vital organs and allow her to communicate. Unable to choose to die without permission from her family, who refuse to give it, she must weave her own web of deception, marrying Greg (though ultimately Kelly steps in to be her wife) in a sham bedside service that makes Kelly “family” and thus eligible to sign off on her transfer into the eternal VR ever-after of San Junipero. Where Virilio rejects cybernetic sexuality as the “waning of reality,” 31 the domination of humanity by technology, “San Junipero” explores how humanity’s repressive social systems have already limited the expression of human life, refusing Yorkie and Kelly a chance at queer love, a promise that technology paradoxically fulfills. The beach town of San Junipero thus behaves not as a Virilian “substitution” for reality, 32 but instead like a Foucauldian heterotopia—a “mixed, intermediate experience” between reality and virtuality that produces a positive return effect on the “real.” 33 As such, it is fruitful to explore the Foucauldian interpretation of Black Mirror’s duo of cemeteries—one a traditional burial ground on Earth, the other a futuristic virtual server farm—which the viewer encounters at the end of the episode. They offer Yorkie and Kelly the possibility to transcend the limits of heteronormative immortality and pursue a non-reproductive and queer immortality. The first burial ground is a familiar vision of a North American cemetery in a neatly kept field lined with identical graves. In one of the closing scenes, Kelly’s body, encased in her coffin, is being gently lowered by an invisible force into the rectangular pit. This is the kind of silver screen cemetery that queer viewers are all too familiar with: gay, bisexual, and trans characters in films and on television usually end up here before the end of the film. But the brevity of the scene, coupled with the fact that there are no visible mourners, makes the segment as upbeat as is possible for a burial scene, directing the viewer’s attention toward the imminence of Kelly’s future. The camera then swiftly pans to TCKR systems, where a

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robotic arm is inserting a data drive of Kelly’s permanently transferred consciousness into a data socket on a wall of hundreds of other encrypted souls. In this dark, synthetically illuminated data-cemetery, saturated with state-of-the-art technology which “plays” the consciousnesses of those who have had their bodily death on Earth, Kelly’s eternal life is about to begin. If this is the engine behind the virtual “heaven” of San Junipero, then perhaps, as the episode’s theme tune, Belinda Carlisle’s 1987 hit song proclaims, heaven really is a place on Earth. This duo of graveyards can be interpreted as the ultimate realization of a Cartesian mind-body dialectic, the achievement of the masculinist fantasy of control over the self, the separation of extended, imperfect body from the infinite, disembodied and unextended the mind. But for the queer happy ever after to come into effect, the utopian consciousness offered by San Junipero must be an embodied one, existing in relation to the lived experience of sexed and racialized bodies in the “real” world. Without its interactions with the Earthly imperfections of mortality, homophobia, and racial prejudice, San Junipero cannot afford consolation to its visitors by making up for the failures of the homeland, Earth, nor begin to actually intervene and improve the “reality” from which they, however temporarily, escape. Foucault describes the relational utopia of the heterotopia as possessing “the curious property of being in relation with all the other sites, but in such a way as to suspect, neutralize, or invent the set of relations that they happen to designate, mirror, or reflect.” 34 San Junipero, powered by the TCKR systems building’s paradoxical graveyard-of-life, is both deeply imbricated in the Earthly dimension, and yet at a variance with it, existing in another space with a different temporal structure. As a Foucauldian heterotopia, which always presupposes “a system of opening and closing that isolates them and makes them penetrable at the same time,” 35 San Junipero is both accessible from the outside and cut off from reality through state mediation. Indeed, the virtual city must be, as the Foucauldian heterotopia requires, both geographically unmappable and located in relation to those bodies and social spaces that it occupies in the “real.” Kelly and Yorkie’s interactions move between the virtual and the real, San Junipero and the hospital. It is because of this dual emplacement afforded by VR, which demands that the user be in a “real” place and also an imagined one, that San Junipero calls the limitations of ordinary reality into question, actively affording Kelly and Yorkie the possibility to “suspend, neutralize, or reverse” the set of relations that connect them to the “real” world. Using VR to interrupt the consciousness of their bodies in real-time allows for transformation and resistance in San Junipero that then translates back to reality as real-world interventions. There are three instances where these meaningful realities are made visible; firstly, committed to see the woman she loves in real-world flesh,

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Kelly travels across America to visit Yorkie in hospital. Thus, the “contact at a distance” offered by VR, as propounded by Grosz, also produces proximity in “real” space. 36 When Kelly sees her youthful, lithe San Junipero lover as a bed-ridden quadriplegic, she begins to love the “real” Yorkie, a love that is subsequently, and somewhat problematically, proved by Kelly’s wish both to step in for Greg and marry Yorkie at the hospital, and to make the “real,” and difficult, decision to permanently unite her consciousnesses with Yorkie’s in the ever-after. Secondly, Kelly and Yorkie’s time in San Junipero manifests itself in the present as the experience of real-world satisfaction at being able to embody the past differently. Their time spent in the nursing home and the hospital is thus enriched by the opportunity offered by San Junipero to do all that they would have liked to do on Earth but never had the chance. These other pasts, where everything was “up for grabs,” as Kelly reminds Yorkie, is the basis for their ever-after in San Junipero. Thirdly, utopia invades reality across the dimensions of time, space, and television, as viewers around the world experience hope and joy from the humorous upending of the Bury Your Gays trope, in the quite literal resurrection of two buried gays. Reading San Junipero as a Foucualdian heterotopia—that which suspends and subverts linear time—illuminates the way in which Yorkie and Kelly’s use of its VR landscape opens up the possibility of pursuing queer futurity in the present, described by Muñoz as “an opening or horizon,” 37 a counter to the prescriptive end gestured at by the hospital, cemetery and nursing home. Queer futurity therefore becomes the condition for the appearance of a future beyond San Junipero’s technologically mediated death. We return again to the cemetery, but this time, as a Foucauldian heterochronia—the “timezone” within which the heterotopia exists. Heterochronias are spaces of “temporal discontinuities” [decoupages du temps], which like the hospital and the nursing home, two of the episode’s other heterochronias, are characterized by an absolute break from productive time. 38 In his elaboration of Jack Halberstam’s important analysis of time and normativity, In a Queer Time and Place, José Esteban Muñoz posits that queer time is “a thing that is not the linearity that many of us have been calling straight time” 39 and must “resist the stultifying temporality and time that is not ours, that is saturated with violence both visceral and emotional.” 40 Nominally non-reproductive queers, like the elderly and the hospitalized, inhabit spaces that deviate from reproductive futurity. Queer time, as experienced by Yorkie and Kelly, not only rejects the finality of the cemetery, but its association with the systematic annihilation of gay people during the AIDS crisis, of homosexual modes of life, as well as the premature death of gay characters in film and television. The graveyard, as that non-space where for too long queer potentiality has been discarded, deemed inexpressible, and covered over with soil, be-

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comes now only a memory of a time when queers were not welcome. By living beyond the graveyard, Yorkie and Kelly escape what Muñoz terms “the stultifying temporality” 41 of heteronormative time, and achieve an ever-after devoid of the tropes of heterosexual futures: a white wedding and babies. Kelly and Yorkie’s queer romance was not the coincidental winner of Black Mirror’s happy ending, but the condition for the appearance of that hopeful future: their queerness is the horizon for their second chance at life. Following Muñoz, who borrows from Bloch and Jameson, we can understand that the queer utopian hermeneutic by which San Junipero operates identifies Kelly and Yorkie’s unfulfilled potential—that which on the one hand is no-longer-conscious, and on the other is not-yet—and projects it into a possible future. In doing so, this temporal maneuver becomes a powerful weapon against racial divisions and homophobia experienced in the present. There are two ways in which the episode performs this queer utopian hermeneutic to interrupt the linear heteronormative temporality of past, present, and future. Firstly, as has been discussed above, the queer utopian potentialities unexplored in Kelly and Yorkie’s pasts are projected onto San Junipero—their desires and ambitions—and secondly, as I now explore in more detail, because time travel within San Junipero offers the imminent exploration of endless, unexplored utopian potentialities. Temporal fluidity within the heterotopic town, where inhabitants move from the 1980s to the 2000s at will, is not exercised at the expense of geographical, historical, and cultural situatedness. Through a brief study of De Witt Douglas Kilgore’s work on utopia and astrofuturism, I demonstrate how San Junipero, behaving as a Foucualdian heterotopia, offers localized and situated alternate pasts in which racial and gender identities can be renegotiated through available means in Yorkie and Kelly’s present. De Witt Douglas Kilgore, in his study of astrofuturism, which is a form of “speculation about the progress and final aims of technological and political power” that is “deeply implicated in debates on race, class and gender,” 42 explores the movement’s utopian and heterotopian possibilities. Kilgore notes that heterotopic conceptions of the future, in particular, constitute hybrid and multiple spaces of resistance that are “distinguished by always being somewhere at sometime,” while utopia is often critiqued for “being nowhere at any time.” 43 For Kilgore, the distinction between utopian and heterotopian conceptions of the future is particularly critical when confronted with the desire to reimagine race in the future, while also not forgetting the past. Where science fiction utopias often assume that racist societies will disappear in the future with the eradication of either diversity or difference, Kilgore’s conception of the astrofuturist heterotopia brings to the fore the historical and cultural specificity of its people and its spaces.

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A Virtual Ever-After

Indeed, Kilgore follows Foucault to define heterotopia as “a space that is always material and bounded, partial and transitional, hybrid and momentarily, if ever, homogenous.” 44 San Junipero, consistent with Kilgore’s definition of the heterotopia, is not merely fixed in one utopian “no place” but is always in-between, moving from decade to decade at the will of its users, neither fully fantasy nor fully detached from the real. In this sense, San Junipero is always imbued by time and memory. While the characters do not explicitly refer to the difficulties that might have have arisen from a “mixed-race” lesbian romance in America in the 1980s, their conversations, which refer equally to both their pasts on Earth (in one typical conversation, Kelly asks Yorkie, “when did you know that you liked women?” 23:00), and their possible futures on San Junipero, is a reminder of the reality they might have faced had their romance blossomed in real-life 1980s America. While “interracial” marriage in America would have been constitutional following the June 1967 Loving vs. Virginia ruling, anti-miscegenation laws persisted in several states, with Alabama being the final state to align its laws with the Supreme Court ruling, only permitting “interracial” marriage in 2000. Supporters of “interracial” marriage in the United States were also in the minority during the 1980s: Gallup’s Minority Rights and Relations poll, a survey of 4,373 Americans including 1,010 “non-Hispanic blacks,” conducted between 1958 and 2013, revealed that “interracial” marriage only received majority approval from “Whites” in 1997, having been approved by “Non-Hispanic black” respondents since the beginning of the poll in 1956. 45 A similar poll undertaken by Gallup asking whether respondents believed that gay and lesbian relations between consenting adults should or should not be legal found that between 1982 and 1988 disapproval ratings actually rose from 39 to 57 percent. As of 1989, this figure fell to 36 percent, with an increase in respondents answering “no opinion;” however, gay and lesbian relations only received majority nationwide approval in 2001. 46 San Junipero’s heterotopic time travel allows its inhabitants to exercise their desire to experience variations on the past, to relive these decades shrugged free from social or legal difficulties and impossibilities, while retaining their attachment to place, culture, and history. When Tucker’s disco transforms 1980s funk music to the synth-pop of the 1990s, the past is projected into yet another future so that an era is born again. In the process, the original decade is substituted by one of many possible heterotopic variations, embedded in a different time and space. The freedom afforded to these new reincarnations of the nostalgia decades demonstrates that “white” heteropatriarchy’s systems of oppression function through their inhabiting of a particular space, time, and geography. By way of spatio-temporal maneuver, Kelly and Yorkie’s youths are repeatedly replaced by other, alternate worlds neither fully detached from, nor fully consistent with, its original. San Junipero’s anti-racist heterotopia

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thus enables a proliferation, rather than an eradication of, racial and gender subjectivities, creating the conditions for the expression, enactment, and validation of the innumerable ways to desire and love. CONCLUSION As Foucault ends “Of Other Spaces” with the metaphor of the ship, for him the ultimate heterotopia, so “San Junipero” ends with a 1993 Mazda Mx5 NA, Brooker’s heterotypic vehicle of choice (to the eco-conscious reader—San Junipero’s cars are presumably as fumeless, weightless, and placeless as the town itself). Inside the convertible, Kelly and Yorkie drive toward the utopian horizon, bathed in technicolor sunset, blasting Belinda Carlisle’s 1987 classic, “Heaven Is a Place on Earth.” The Mazda runs with the unstoppable energy of the utopian imagination, which functions outside of, and yet is deeply imbricated with, the heteronormative machinations of time and space. San Junipero’s promise of a better future, comprised of a remixed past, overwrites the past to actualize an improved reality, offering hope—the petrol of utopia—to those in front of, as well as behind, the television screen. “San Junipero”—not a single place but the possibility of endless and multiple culturally and historically situated spaces—comes with the viewer as we leave our screens, offering hope and refuge to those Black Mirror fans who have come to suffer, live, and love alongside Kelly and Yorkie. NOTES 1. Shepherd, Jack. “Black Mirror’s ‘San Junipero’: 2016’s Most Life-Affirming Piece of Television.” The Independent, December 23, 2016. https://www.independent.co.uk/ arts-entertainment/tv/features/black-mirror-season-3-san-junipero-tv-2016-life-affirming-a7493091.html. 2. Virilio, Paul. The Vision Machine. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994, 73. 3. Ibid., 7. 4. Ibid., 13. 5. Ibid., 70. 6. Ibid., 97. 7. Ibid., 44. 8. Ibid., 100. 9. Ibid., 31. 10. Ibid., 35. 11. Foucault, Michel. “Of Other Spaces.” Translated by Jay Miskowiec. Diacritics, no. 16 (Spring 1986): 22–27, 179. 12. Ibid., 24. 13. Ibid., 26. 14. Foucault, Michel. Dits et Ecrits IV. Paris: Gallimard, 1972, 759. 15. Foucault, Michel. “Different Spaces*.” Translated by Robert Hurley. In Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology: Essential Works of Foucault, Volume 2, edited by James Faubion, 175–185, London: Penguin, 1998, 182.

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16. Ibid., 182. 17. Halberstam, Judith. In a Queer Time and Place : Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. New York: New York University Press, 2005. 18. Muñoz, José Esteban. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York: New York University Press, 2009, 196. 19. Ibid., 187. 20. Ibid., 27. 21. Ibid., 27. 22. Kilgore, De Witt Douglas. Astrofuturism: Science, Race, and Visions of Utopia in Space. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003. 23. Ibid., 227. 24. Ibid., 226–227. 25. Brain Formo, “‘Black Mirror’: Charlie Brooker and Gugu Mbatha-Raw Talk ‘San Junipero’ in Our Spoiler Interview,” Collider, October 27, 2016. http://collider.com/ black-mirror-san-junipero-explained-netflix-interview/. In this interview with Collider magazine, Brooker imagined this form of time travel as an arrangement of temporal “rooms,” through which visitors are able to wander at will from one era to another. Brooker explained that “People gravitate towards their own era, nostalgia therapy is a real thing that’s being tinkered with.”Jonathan Jacobs, “Nostalgia Therapy,” accessed March 21, 2018. http://www.jonathanejacobs.com/. In the words of practitioner Jonathan E. Jacobs, AKA “The Vintage DJ,” nostalgia therapy is a guided meditation that can produce the effect of “a transformation of our perception of ‘the past’ from an immovable sequence of events into a malleable and immersive fantasy.” The opportunity offered by nostalgia therapy to continually reboot the past can therefore point toward the healing properties of the heterotopia in the present. 26. Lauren Strapagiel, “Queer Women Are Losing Their Shit over the Perfection of ‘San Junipero,’” Buzzfeed, October 27, 2016. https://www.buzzfeed.com/laurenstrapagiel/for-the-rest-of-it?utm_term=.tlY0P992q3#.si7EO66N8k. 27. Virilio, Paul. War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception. London: Verso, 1989. 28. Virilio, The Vision Machine, 73. 29. Virilio, The Vision Machine, 13. 30. Ibid., 67. 31. Ibid., 49. 32. Virilio, War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception, 47. 33. Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” 179. 34. Ibid., 24. 35. Ibid., 26. 36. Grosz, Elizabeth. Architecture from the Outside: Essays on Virtual and R eal Space. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001, 65. 37. Muñoz, 97. 38. Foucault, “Different Spaces*,” 182. 39. Muñoz, 186. 40. Ibid., 187. 41. Ibid., 187. 42. Kilgore, 4–5. 43. Ibid., 227. 44. Ibid., 226–227. 45. Gallup. “Gallup Poll Social Series: Minority Rights & Relations.” Last modified July 25, 2013. http://news.gallup.com/poll/163697/approve-marriage-blackswhites.aspx. 46. Gallup. “Gallup Poll Social Series: Minority Rights & Relations.” Last modified May 15, 2017. http://news.gallup.com/poll/1651/gay-lesbian-rights.aspx.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Formo, Brian. “Black Mirror: Charlie Brooker and Gugu Mbatha-Raw Talk ‘San Junipero’ in Our Spoiler Interview.” Collider. October 27, 2016. http://collider.com/blackmirror-san-junipero-explained-netflix-interview/. Foucault, Michel. “Of Other Spaces.” Translated by Jay Miskowiec. Diacritics, no. 16 (Spring 1986): 22–27. ———. Dits et Ecrits IV. Paris: Gallimard, 1972. ———. “Different Spaces*.” Translated by Robert Hurley. In Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology: Essential Works of Foucault, Volume 2, edited by James Faubion, 175–185, London: Penguin, 1998. Gallup. “Gallup Poll Social Series: Minority Rights & Relations.” Last modified July 25, 2013 http://news.gallup.com/poll/163697/approve-marriage-blacks-whites.aspx. ———. “Gallup Poll Social Series: Minority Rights & Relations.” Last modified May 15, 2017. http://news.gallup.com/poll/1651/gay-lesbian-rights.aspx. Grosz, Elizabeth. Architecture from the Outside: Essays on Virtual and Real Space. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001. Halberstam, Judith. In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. New York: New York University Press, 2005. Jacobs, Jonathan. “Nostalgia Therapy,” accessed March 21, 2018. http:// www.jonathanejacobs.com/. Kilgore, De Witt Douglas. Astrofuturism: Science, Race, and Visions of Utopia in Space. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003. Muñoz, José Esteban. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York: New York University Press, 2009. Shepherd, Jack. “Black Mirror’s ‘San Junipero’: 2016’s most life-affirming piece of television.” The Independent, December 23, 2016. https://www.independent.co.uk/ arts-entertainment/tv/features/black-mirror-season-3-san-junipero-tv-2016-life-affirming-a7493091.html. Strapagiel, Lauren. “Queer Women Are Losing Their Shit over the Perfection of ‘San Junipero.’” Buzzfeed. October 24, 2016. https://www.buzzfeed.com/laurenstrapagiel/for-the-rest-of-it?utm_term=.erZ6gj1Pk#.mfNMlEYer. Virilio, Paul. War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception. London: Verso, 1989. ———. The Vision Machine. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 1994.

Section 2

Surveillance Culture

Surveillance has long been a theme in science fiction novels and films, from Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We (1927) and George Orwell’s 1984 (1983) to recent films like The Matrix (1999) and The Circle (2017). Cultures of total surveillance vacillate between “keeping people safe” and collecting personal data driven by corporate goals positioned in social control and monetary gain. With breaking news stories about United States government agencies legally tapping phone lines under The USA PATRIOT Act and Cambridge Analytica 1 using massive amounts of scraped Facebook data to create targeted political ads, it is clear that surveillance culture includes notions of spying, watching, guarding, prying, and, most importantly, profiting. As international laws and national constitutions try to keep up with surveillance technologies, we know the issues of privacy and surveillance will not go away in the near future. Indeed the outdated notion that “surveillance” should only summon images of rusty CCTV cameras and sleeping security guards is readily rejected through Black Mirror episodes. Shaun, in “Hated in the Nation,” “tracked subjects for weeks in ways they couldn’t dream of.” The authors in this section tap into the ever-intensifying notions of surveillance and explore what Black Mirror conceives as our futures. In “Nosedive,” Lacie teaches us that institutional-, social-, and selfsurveillance culminate into one, volatile human race. As Francois AllardHuver and Julie Escurignan argue, “if the walls of the panopticon have disappeared, they have been replaced by communication devices playing the roles of wall.” Derek R. Blackwell explains the specific focus on social surveillance in “The Entire History of You” as commentary on current users who, tasked with being watchers, are distracted from how much they are watched. Pinelopi Troullinou and Mathieu d’Aquin use Black Mirror’s fictional scenarios to “generate interdisciplinary discussion and consequently to construct a new body of knowledge around technology.” Analyzing the technologies used within multiple episodes, they argue that these depictions shape who we are as a people and the eventual real surveillance technologies we build, accept, and even love. Orwell may

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Surveillance Culture

have wanted us to fear Big Brother, but the newest big brother resides in each of us. NOTE 1. See for example: Wylie, Christopher. “Why I Broke the Facebook Data Story— and what should happen now.” The Guardian. April 2018. https:// www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/apr/07/christopher-wylie-why-i-broke-the-facebook-data-story-and-what-should-happen-now.

FOUR Black Mirror’s “Nosedive” as a New Panopticon Interveillance and Digital Parrhesia in Alternative Realities Francois Allard-Huver and Julie Escurignan

Black Mirror is a British science fiction television series created by Charlie Brooker. Critically acclaimed, the series stirs much debate around its representation of dystopian futures of Western societies. Despite being all different, they share in common to be technological dystopias. Grim, pessimistic, and technologically led, these representations confront the viewers with alternative societies deriving from the current use of new technologies. The lead characters of the show evolve in “always on” societies, where screens and devices have become vital elements of everyday life. As Greg Singh writes: “Throughout all of the stories, the characters are somehow beholden to a particular technology, or are otherwise trapped in a dysfunctional relationship with it.” 1 These dystopian futures, albeit dissimilar in one way or another to twenty-first-century Western societies, are nevertheless close enough to the world we live in (similar technological devices and similar attitudes toward them) for the audience to feel both connected to the story and compelled to think about its own use of technology in a reflexive perspective. This chapter specifically focuses on “Nosedive,” the first episode of the show’s third season, written by Rashida Jones and Mike Schur and released worldwide in October 2016 on Netflix. The action follows Lacie Pound, a young woman living in a world where every interaction, 43

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Black Mirror’s “Nosedive” as a New Panopticon

whether online (posting pictures and status updates) or offline, is ranked by “online friends.” Everybody rates and is rated, each rating impacting people’s lives (their job, their housing, their friends). The society depicted in “Nosedive” calls upon our knowledge of technology and our consumer behavior of product, brand rating up to self-branding. Through a semiotic analysis of the episode, this chapter explores the shift from a professional to a personal application of current marketing theories, and at showing how the society depicted in “Nosedive” works as the representation of a new panopticon, as crafted by Bentham 2 and reclaimed by Foucault. 3 In this panopticon, mobile devices and social media serve as “disciplinary” tools to normalize people’s behavior. Citizens experience a new relationship with the media and the ensuing social order, theorized by Jansson as “interveillance.” 4 But this chapter takes a deeper look, beyond the concept of the panopticon. Indeed, “Nosedive” shows an era of digital parrhesia, 5 a model for truth-telling and its consequences in the digital public sphere. 6 “Nosedive” thus questions the balance between our right to anonymity, a growing need for more transparency, and, paradoxically, one for more visibility. This need for visibility is at the core of the series and is reflected in its own title: It might come as no surprise to know that the title of the series, Black Mirror, is a direct reference to the look of various screens that surround us: if you have ever looked into a monitor, or an iPad, or a smartphone when switched off, you won’t see nothing; tellingly, you see your reflection, darkened, untrue. Is this a black mirror reflecting what we are to become: switched “off” and self-obsessed; a constellation of fears, anxieties and desires; possessed by the urge to look and be looked at? 7

In our modern society, if the walls of the panopticon have disappeared they have been replaced by communication devices playing the role of walls—as individuals seem to be imprisoned by their phone screen—and the role of guardians—as everyone monitors and judges everybody’s actions through social media. LACIE POUND’S “NOSEDIVE”: REPUTATION, INTERVEILLANCE, AND TRUTH-TELLING “Nosedive” follows the downfall of Lacie Pound, a young woman obsessed by her online ratings. Lacie lives in a society where people rate each other on a scale of one to five stars. With an average grade of 4.2, Lacie has access to a comfortable lifestyle and lives in a social bubble colored in pink pastel. However, the viewer soon discovers that to keep living in these conditions, Lacie must spend a considerable time on the social media platform that rules over everyone’s life, taking and liking pictures: indeed, one’s average grade determines one’s social position (“prime influencer” 8 or not) and access to commodities (housing, cars,

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health, job). High reviews give access to everything and everyone, from discounts in housing to best jobs and top-notch health treatments. On the contrary, low grades restrict access: longer queues, economical offers at rental stores and no access to new medical treatments. For instance, Lacie can keep her job position as long as she stays above 2.5 or can access the last seats of an upcoming flight with a required 4.3. Lacie’s demise begins when she sets herself up to get an average grade of 4.5 in order to have access to the “Prime Influencers Program” of her dream apartment. In order to “boost” her grade she tries to benefit from the influence of a former friend Naomi, a 4.8, and manage to get invited to her wedding. Her refusal to hear out her brother’s concerns about this project and the real nature of her former relationship with Naomi, who tormented her in high school, is the starting point of her grade drop and thus, of her social “nosedive.” From that point, we only further discover how low grades worsen life conditions, both materially and socially. Despite trying everything she can to get to her friend Naomi’s wedding, for which she is the maid of honor, her newly acquired low ratings prevent Lacie from getting a seat on a plane, accessing a reliable rental car, and even entering an upscale neighborhood. When Naomi discovers Lacie’s grade fall, she forbids her to come to her wedding—having someone with such bad ratings would negatively impact her own. The audience then uncovers the social violence of this society, where “friendship” has often been replaced by an extreme form of professional networking and personal branding. FROM SELF-BRANDING . . . In “Nosedive,” the marketing concept of personal branding goes hand in hand with Goffman’s self-presentation theory, in which he draws a parallel between theater and social life. 9 In this model, one treats his or her behavior as an actor in a play where everyone plays several roles. The audience consists of all the people who observe the scene and react to it. There is just one step from there to building a personal brand using one’s theatrical persona on social media platforms. This strategy of personal branding and the apparatus that surrounds it appears essential in a system of peer ratings. Peer rating as seen in “Nosedive” is the extension of business and service rating we know today. Rating has increasingly become part of our daily lives, as it allows the differentiation between companies proposing similar products or services. It has become common to search for reviews before making an online purchase or choosing a hotel. The act of giving ratings has become so widespread that companies such as TripAdvisor now enjoin their readers to become contributors in exchange for nothing but online

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badges. People rate to give their opinion and be part of the community. Lacie’s world is then no more than the mere development of this model. Moreover, this new way to evaluate people and relationships introduces a dual process that is particular to social media. 10 On the one hand, we observe a logic of calculated and interested social relationships, where we search for more friends and create an idealized self-image through personal branding. On the other hand, this logic of reputation and grading exacerbate social inequalities and creates a homogenous social space, visually and symbolically illustrated by different color universes throughout the show as we will later analyze. Thus, we not only create new means of connecting others but we also create new means of surveillance and new digitally rendered walls, a new panopticon. . . . TO SELF-SURVEILLANCE This society focused on personal branding, appearance, “face,” and peer rating raising, among others, the question of the place of privacy, surveillance, transparency, and truth-telling. Indeed, the first impression created by the show is that Lacie may live in a modernized version of Bentham’s panopticon. The principle of the panopticon is one of a prison conceived so that every prisoner could be watched by a sole guardian without knowing if and when he is watched. Ultimately, Bentham envisions a system in which not only prisons but also schools and factories could be built this way and lays the foundation of a society where everyone watches everyone else that will ultimately be realized in modern Western societies: “Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?” 11 As Foucault theorized, we encounter here a modern form of the eye of power: “This reign of ‘opinion’, so often invoked at this time, represents a mode of operation through which power will be exercised by virtue of the mere fact of things being known and people seen in a sort of immediate, collective, and anonymous gaze.” 12 Michael Schur, who wrote “Nosedive,” qualified the society observed here: “I don’t think of it as the near future—I think of it as a parallel present.” 13 It thus derives from our uses of the internet by creating a virtual “house of glass” and a real “electronic panopticon” 14 where our lives are constantly put under surveillance by the means of electronic devices, symbolized by the fact that every character wears a digital contact lens connected to the phone’s rating app. Nevertheless, in “Nosedive,” the surveillance means and control apparatus differ from Bentham’s panopticon as the show creates a narrative at the crossroad of new media criticism and dystopian culture. Indeed, the logic of surveillance is substituted by a culture of interveillance: “in which people enjoy following the activities of others as well as the automatized reflections of their own ‘data doubles.’” 15 The world per-

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spective has changed: a vertical control, from top to bottom, has been replaced by a horizontal form of control where every citizen is watching the other: “As mediated social interaction and the instantaneous circulation of images and opinions collapse into reined participatory techniques for consumer monitoring, the classical Big Brother model of top-down surveillance is intertwined with a number of other, increasingly interactive forms of mediated control, some of which are marked by a high degree of social complicity even pleasurable and/or empowering engagement.” 16 As previously explained, personal branding strategies are at the center of the relations developed between protagonists in the show. They master digital tools and promote themselves through all available media. For Jansson, this could be the consequence of a more and more important focus on the mediatization of individuals started in our society: “interveillance means that social agents to a growing extent come to understand and define the relations between themselves and others via automatically generated recommendations of contacts and commodities (connectivity) and quantified simulations of social status (popularity). Interveillance practices are thus inseparable from societal surveillance processes, foremost algorithmically based commercial surveillance (datafication), but they are not systematic and hierarchical per se.” 17 However, the difference we observe in “Nosedive,” which also generates a certain sense of discomfort when we watch the show, is that interveillance has become systematic and hierarchical: individuals only exist by their grades and their place in the world is entirely linked to this grade. Rating, qualifying social interactions via app, and being rewarded with commodities are direct consequences of a society where actors are compliant with the surveillance culture which “can be seen as a playful aspect of personal relationships.” 18 This apparent playfulness in downgrading others hides the fact that the nature of relationships at play here is not playful at all, but more likely a power play for social status. NETWORKED SOCIETY AND DIGITAL PARRHESIA The complexity of telling the truth is crucial when one tries to understand the true nature of a networked society. For the social psychologist Turkle, the “network” does not really pertain to information and communication technologies or devices but to social interactions and the significance we give to mediated communications practices over non-mediated ones. 19 In the show, Lacie’s “nosedive” begins when she and her brother fight over Lacie’s perception of her relationship with Naomi as well as her increasing shallow behavior. Her brother tries to enter in a parrhesiastic relationship with her, that is, to tell her the discourse of the truth, to be frank with her because he cares about her: “parrhesia consists in telling the truth

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without concealment, reserve, empty manner of speech, or rhetorical ornament which might encode or hide it. ‘Telling all’ is then: telling the truth without hiding any part of it, without hiding it behind anything.” 20 But parrhesia and more precisely digital parrhesia does not simply mean telling the truth; 21 it implies that the person who speaks the truth sincerely believes in it, honestly represents himself by doing so, and takes a risk by telling the truth: “For there to be parrhesia, in speaking the truth one must open up, establish, and confront the risk of offending the other person, of irritating him, of making him angry and provoking him to conduct which may even be extremely violent. So it is the truth subject to risk of violence.” 22 For instance, in ancient Greece, a messenger telling bad news to a tyrant could be executed: if someone wanted to tell the truth and felt risks for himself, he had to ask permission, he had to request parrhesia, and enter what was called the parrhesiastic game. If one is refused this permission, it can lead to social freefall. PERSONAL BRANDING AS A NEW PHYSIOLOGICAL NEED The prominence of personal self-branding is clear in the society developed in “Nosedive.” People develop their image as brands do. They emphasize the features they want people to see while hiding the most trivial aspects of their lives. This is exactly what someone like Naomi, Lacie’s former friend, does as a “prime influencer”: she develops an image of herself showcasing her in the most beautiful settings, from paradise beaches to mansions. While aware of these strategies (she herself works hard on retouching her pictures to ensure maximal rating), Lacie cannot help trying to resemble Naomi. According to Lake: “personal branding used to include nothing more than a simple business card with your name on it, but with the development of social media and an increasingly individualized society, the brand you build around yourself is perhaps the single most important way to stand out in your spheres of influence.” 23 If in our society, personal branding remains a “way to stand out,” in Lacie’s world, it has become a vital necessity, a physiological need similar to the ones described by Maslow in his hierarchy of needs. 24 It is so important that people have counselors who help them manage their image and their global rating. These counselors act as marketing strategists. In Lacie’s case, her counselor advises her to get a boost from “quality people” (i.e., 4.0 point people or more) if she wants to achieve the grade of 4.5. This also directly recalls on the profound definition and uses of social network sites as they are not as much a tool to meet and connect as a tool that “enable users to articulate and make visible their social networks” and thus to benefit from these mise-en-scène. 25 The mise-en-scène of everyday life presented in “Nosedive” is the clear illustration of Goffman’s self-presentation theory. 26 Indeed, in La-

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cie’s universe, everyone acts in a calculated and predictable manner motivated by the consciousness of being both observed and judged, as it also happens in Bentham’s panopticon. This appears from the very beginning of the episode, in a scene where we discover Lacie practicing her smile in front of her bathroom mirror again and again until it satisfies her. This aspect comes back again when Lacie rehearses her maid of honor speech with her brother, highlighting the emotional memories she shares with the bride while a tear rolls down her cheek. At the end of it, she loses her moved face and asks her brother if the “tear was too much,” to which he answers by calling her a “sociopath.” Nonetheless, this strategy of personal branding is necessary, as peerrating is the foundation of the society in “Nosedive.” In this system, people rate each other on their looks, acts, and behaviors. The peer-rating system is doubled by a self-moderating one. Lacie’s world is based on the idea that the community moderates itself. In the show, we do not see anyone controlling the grades that are given. The only legal authority who appears in the episode (a security agent in the airport) actually uses rating to implement coercive measures upon Lacie (removing one point from her grade for twenty-four hours). In Goffman’s theory, this leads her to lose her face in public. 27 This self-moderating society leads to drifts: some people, such as Lacie’s coworker, become scapegoats for the rest of the group, which allows itself to judge his personal life (he has broken up with his partner) and punish him by giving him bad grades. Similarly, low ratings lead to even lower ratings: grading acts as a “customer review” about a person. If someone is badly rated, people become suspicious and rate the person low as well. This is what happens to Lacie when she hitchhikes with a grade of 2.8: despite her neat appearance, drivers do not stop and rate her low for the sake of doing so, leading her to an even deeper downfall. In the “Nosedive” universe, judgment over a person has shifted from one’s external appearance to one’s social media grade. INTERVEILLANCE IN A DIGITAL DYSTOPIC SOCIETY The problematic power plays in the discourse are at the center of the show. On the one hand, Lacie and the other characters are seeking “authentic gestures” or “meaningful encounters” when meeting others through their digitally enhanced social lives. On the other hand, they seem to be unfit to accept going beyond the surface of these “meaningful encounters” specifically when someone tries to tell the truth and play the parrhesiastic game. Within “Nosedive” exists a perfect illustration of this game played by several characters and the consequences it has on them in the digitally mediatized society. Lacie’s brother is the first character who risks telling the truth: he fights with his sister who refuses to hear it

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and will thus be “punished” by her as she sends him a bad grade. Entering the parrhesiastic game has a cost and implies consequences for both the person telling the truth and the person receiving it. Using digital parrhesia without permission consequently led to losing points and to losing the social status associated with them. The truck driver encountered by Lacie explains that she once put a lot of efforts in having a high score, she “used to live for it,” but once she decided to tell everybody what she really thought, she lost her social status. The protagonists’ mediatized self is not a digital double, a pseudonym, or an avatar, but a digitally created ethos with all the implication of an ethos. Therefore, using digital parrhesia can then lead to the same consequence as real parrhesia for the subject. When Lacie tells Naomi, without permission or invitation to do so, the truthful nature of her “friendship”—that Naomi used Lacie to cast a favorable light on her— she enters the parrhesiastic game. This unwanted truth led all wedding guests to give Lacie bad grades. Consequently, she loses all her stars and is arrested. This arrest symbolizes death, a social and digital death materialized by the forced withdrawal of her contact lens. However, this death opens a door for different relationships, less shallow, more open, cruder, and ultimately more honest. Paradoxically, it is only when Lacie reaches a “real” prison, with glass windows reminding the panopticon logic, that she is able to free herself and to practice parrhesia in its most basic form: tell everything, swear, laugh. CONCLUSION Through a semiotic analysis of the episode, this chapter illuminated the shift from the current, professional use of marketing theories such as selfbranding and peer-rating to the fictional and personal application of them in the “Nosedive.” The society depicted in the series moved from self-branding to self-surveillance and shows how easily the boundaries between the private sphere and the public one can be crossed. In addition, Lacie Pound’s world, as created by Charlie Brooker, is the representation of a new panopticon 28 in which the “disciplinary” tools normalizing people’s behavior are social media and mobile devices. More than a society of surveillance, the one displayed in this episode of Black Mirror is one of interveillance 29 where people watch, rate, and judge each other continuously. However, beyond the mise-en-scène of everyday life lies the question of parrhesia, 30 or in this case, digital parrhesia 31 and its consequences: for the characters, whether it is online or offline, parrhesia comes with relief and a (re)connection to “real” life but also with a risk of downfall within society.

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NOTES 1. Greg Singh, “Recognition and the Image of Mastery as Themes in Black Mirror (Channel 4, 2011–present): An Eco-Jungian Approach to ‘Always-on’ Culture,” International Journal of Jungian Studies, 6 (2014, 2): 121. 2. Jeremy Bentham, The Works of Jeremy Bentham, 4, 1843, http://oll.libertyfund.org/ titles/1925. 3. Michel Foucault, Surveiller et Punir (Paris: Gallimard, 1975). 4. André Jansson, “Interveillance and Identity: A Quantitative Study of Privacy Concerns Related to New Social Media,” Comunicazioni sociali, 2, (2012): 274–287. 5. François Allard-Huver and Nick Gilewicz, “Digital Parrhesia as a Counterweight to Astroturfing,” in Online Credibility and Digital Ethos: Evaluating ComputerMediated Communication, ed. Moe Folk and Shwan Apostel (Hershey, PA: IGI Global, 2013): 215–227. 6. François Allard-Huver and Nick Gilewicz, “Digital Parrhesia 2.0: Moving beyond Deceptive Communications Strategies in the Digital World,” in Handbook of Research on Digital Media and Creative Technologies, ed. Drew Harrison (Hershey, PA: IGI Global, 2015): 404–416. 7. Singh, “Recognition,” 122. 8. An influencer is a person who can have an impact on trends, purchase decisions, or behavior due to his/her status in the community. Influencers, thanks to their real or perceived knowledge and relationships, have authority in the community in determining trends. In the “Nosedive” society, “prime influencers” are high-grade citizens who benefit from advantages because they are considered influential enough for companies who want them on their side. 9. Erving Goffman, The presentation of self in everyday life (New York: Random House, 1956). 10. Dominique Cardon, “Réseaux Sociaux de l’Internet,” Communications, 88 (2011): 141–148. 11. Foucault, Surveiller et Punir, 264. 12. Michel Foucault, “L’œil du pouvoir,” in Dits et Ecrits, tome 2: 1976–1988 (Paris: Gallimard, 2001), 190–207. 13. Eliana Dockterman, “Sci-Fi Evolves into Disturbing Reality in Black Mirror and Westworld,” Time, October 13, 2016, http://time.com/4529439/sci-fi-evolves-into-disturbing-reality-in-black-mirror-and-westworld/. 14. Manuel Castells, The Internet Galaxy: Reflections on the Internet, Business, and Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). 15. André Jansson, “Perceptions of Surveillance: Reflexivity and Trust in a Mediatized World (the Case of Sweden),” European Journal of Communication, 24 (2012, 4): 415. 16. André Jansson, “Interveillance and Identity,” 274. 17. André Jansson, “Interveillance: A New Culture of Recognition and Mediatization,” Media and Communication, 3 (2015, 3): 85. 18. Miyase Christensen, “Cultures of Surveillance: Privacy and Compliant Exchange.” Nordicom Review, 37 (2016, special issue): 177. 19. Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (New York: Basic Books, 2011). 20. Michel Foucault, The Courage of Truth: The Government of Self and Others II: 1983–1984 (Lectures at the College de France), (New York: Picador, 2012): 9. 21. Allard-Huver and Gilewicz, “Digital Parrhesia, 2.0.” 22. Foucault, 11. 23. Laura Lake, “Personal Branding and What You Need to Know About It,” The Balance, February 19, 2018, https://www.thebalance.com/what-is-personal-branding4056073. 24. Abraham Maslow, “A Theory of Human Motivation,” Psychological Review, 50 (1943, 4): 370–396.

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25. dana boyd and Nicole Ellison, “Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship,” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 13 (2007): 210–230. 26. Erving Goffman, The presentation of self. 27. Goffman, The presentation of self. 28. Foucault, Surveiller et Punir. 29. Jansson, “Interveillance.” 30. Foucault, The Courage of Truth. 31. Allard-Huver and Gilewicz, “Digital Parrhesia 2.0.”

BIBLIOGRAPHY Allard-Huver, François and Gilewicz, Nick. “Digital Parrhesia as a Counterweight to Astroturfing.” In Online Credibility and Digital Ethos: Evaluating Computer-Mediated Communication, edited by Moe Folk and Shwan Apostel, 215–227. Hershey, PA: IGI Global, 2013. Allard-Huver, François and Gilewicz, Nick. “Digital Parrhesia 2.0: Moving beyond Deceptive Communications Strategies in the Digital World.” In Handbook of Research on Digital Media and Creative Technologies, edited by Drew Harrison, 404–416. Hershey, PA: IGI Global, 2015. boyd, dana and Ellison, Nicole. “Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship.” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 13 (2007): 210–230. Bentham, Jeremy. The Works of Jeremy Bentham, 4. 1843. http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/ 1925. Brand image. In Business Dictionary. Accessed March 24, 2018. http:// www.businessdictionary.com/definition/brand-image.html. Cardon, Dominique. “Réseaux sociaux de l’Internet.” Communications, 88, (2011): 141–148. Castells, Manuel. The Internet Galaxy: Reflections on the Internet, Business, and Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Christensen, Miyase. “Cultures of Surveillance. Privacy and Compliant Exchange.” Nordicom Review, 37 (2016, special issue): 177–182. Dockterman, Eliana. “Sci-Fi Evolves into Disturbing Reality in Black Mirror and Westworld.” Time. October 13, 2016. http://time.com/4529439/sci-fi-evolves-into-disturbing-reality-in-black-mirror-and-westworld/. Foucault, Michel. Surveiller et Punir. Paris: Gallimard, 1975. Foucault, Michel. L’œil du pouvoir. In Dits et Ecrits, tome 2: 1976–1988, 190–207. Paris: Gallimard, 2001. Foucault, Michel. The Courage of Truth: The Government of Self and Others II: 1983–1984 (Lectures at the College de France). New York: Picador, 2012. Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Random House, 1956. Jansson, André. “Perceptions of Surveillance: Reflexivity and Trust in a Mediatized World (the Case of Sweden).” European Journal of Communication, 24 (2012, 4): 410–427. Jansson, André. “Interveillance and Identity: A Quantitative Study of Privacy Concerns Related to New Social Media.” Comunicazioni Sociali, 2, (2012): 274–287. Jansson, André. “Interveillance: A New Culture of Recognition and Mediatization.” Media and Communication, 3 (2015, 3): 81–90. Lake, Laura. “Personal Branding and What You Need to Know About It,” The Balance. February 19, 2018. https://www.thebalance.com/what-is-personal-branding4056073. Maslow, Abraham. “A Theory of Human Motivation.” Psychological Review, 50 (1943, 4): 370–396.

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Pope, Nigel. “An Examination of the Use of Peer Rating for Formative Assessment in the Context of the Theory of Consumption Values.” Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 26 (2001, 3): 235–246. Ramsey, Paul and Wenrich, Marjorie. “Peer Ratings An Assessment Tool Whose Time Has Come.” Journal of General Internal Medicine, 14 (1999, 9): 581–582. Singh, Greg. “Recognition and the Image of Mastery as Themes in Black Mirror (Channel 4, 2011–present): An Eco-Jungian Approach to ‘Always-on’ Culture.” International Journal of Jungian Studies, 6 (2014, 2): 120–132. Turkle, Sherry. Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. New York: Basic Books, 2011.

FIVE All Eyes on Me Surveillance and the Digital Archive in “The Entire History of You” Derek R. Blackwell

“The Entire History of You” is the third and final episode of Black Mirror’s inaugural season. Its central characters are Liam and Ffion (Ffi for short), a young married couple whose relationship is dramatically upended after Liam suspects Ffi might be hiding something. Specifically, Liam believes that Ffi is secretly involved with a man named Jonas whom they encounter at a friend’s dinner party. When Liam confronts her, Ffi admits that she and Jonas did have a romantic past but assures him that their relationship was brief and took place “years ago” before she and Liam first met. Despite her repeated attempts to downplay the situation, Liam’s suspicion continues to grow until eventually he confirms that Ffi and Jonas did, in fact, have an affair. Liam’s ability to discover and expose his wife’s infidelity is largely facilitated by a fictional technology called the “grain”—a biologically implanted memory chip, installed under the skin behind the ear, that records everything its user sees and hears. Series creator and showrunner Charlie Brooker likens the grain to “a kind of Sky Plus 1 system for your head, so that you could rewind and replay memories at will.” 2 Although no explicit explanation of how the device works is provided, much can be inferred from the events of the episode. First, as a recording device, the grain captures both audio and video from the user’s point of view. Unlike contemporary audiovisual recorders, the grain seems to lack an on/off switch, which suggests that it is always on and always recording. The 55

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playback of a grain recording is referred to as a “re-do.” Users can either view a public re-do in which the recording is projected onto a screen, mimicking the TV-viewing experience, or they can engage in a private redo where the image plays on the internal surface of their own eyes. Playback on the grain also allows for various enhanced features such as zooming in on a scene and automated lip-reading (used to decipher indistinct audio). Taken together, these features create an extensive digital archive of one’s everyday interactions that is retrievable, easily searchable, and in Liam’s case, endlessly analyzable. Taking full advantage of the grain’s capabilities, Liam pieces together evidence from his own digital archive, as well as Ffi’s and Jonas’s, in an effort to prove that his aforementioned suspicion is correct. In this chapter, I argue that this episode foreshadows an impending panoptic society in which subjects are simultaneously positioned as watcher and watched. While the central storyline revolves around surveillance at an interpersonal level, the grain ultimately serves the larger purpose of constructing users as disciplinary subjects to the state, laboring as active participants in their own surveillance. THE GRAIN AS SURVEILLANCE TOOL Although the grain appears to be marketed to consumers as a memory aid, 3 the recording and playback capabilities described above make it a surveillance tool par excellence. Consequently, lateral surveillance, which Mark Andrejevic defines as “the use of surveillance tools by individuals, rather than by agents of institutions public or private, to keep track of one another,” 4 is an everyday reality for these characters. In “The Entire History of You,” the most prominent examples of lateral surveillance are performed by Liam, as he uses the grain to diligently investigate the nature of Ffi and Jonas’s relationship. He begins this process with a quick private re-do of Ffi’s subtle change in countenance after he meets her at the dinner party earlier than expected. Later that night, she admits that Jonas was “Mr. Marrakesh”—an ex-partner whom she had told him about long ago—and they begin to quibble over the details of the relationship. (Ffi says it lasted a month, while Liam claims she originally said it was only a week.) To settle the argument, Liam shows her a re-do of their earlier conversation, proving himself right and reinforcing his suspicion. From there, his surveillance behavior intensifies, as he is shown watching re-dos of the dinner party late through the night and into the next morning with increasing scrutiny. As his trust of Ffi’s testimony quickly fades, he seeks the truth elsewhere, turning instead to the grain. With the ability to replay scenes from the night before ad nauseam, Liam utilizes the grain to uncover damning evidence in what would have otherwise likely been seen as fleeting moments and mundane conversation.

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The widespread adoption of the grain within the context of this episode 5 makes surveillance a constant threat, readily evoking Foucault’s notion of panopticism. 6 Panopticism was originally derived from Jeremy Bentham’s architectural concept of the panopticon—a prison design that facilitates inmate monitoring using a circular layout with a central observation tower. From inside the tower, guards could clearly see into any and all cells in the panopticon; however, inmates could not see back into the tower. As a result, an inmate could never know for sure whether he/ she was being watched, but because it was always a possibility, he/she would presumably be more likely to conform consistently to prison rules. 7 Foucault argues that this logic—that surveillance alone could function as an instrument of disciplinary power and social control—can be applied to other kinds of institutions and social arenas far beyond the prison environment (e.g., schools, hospitals, workplaces). 8 Because the characters in “The Entire History of You” occupy a reality in which “everyone you know and interact with essentially becomes a surveillance camera,” 9 their world serves as a particularly unique example of a panopticon. Like panopticon prisoners, these characters are “observed at every point” and their “slightest movements are supervised.” 10 Yet, while the threat of being watched always looms over their heads, these characters can also “turn the tables” and utilize the grain and its archives to actively monitor others. Thus, while Foucault’s conceptualization focuses on surveillance that is unidirectional (from guard to inmate), the panopticon in “The Entire History of You” is multidirectional, allowing anyone with access to the technology to take on the “guard” role even as they are positioned as “inmates.” In this way, the events depicted in this episode mirror Zuboff’s notion of the “information panopticon.” 11 Focusing on the role of workplace computer systems as accessories to employee surveillance, Zuboff points out the duality afforded by computer-assisted surveillance. She also notes that computers create a lasting record of one’s behavior so that even if a worker is not being actively monitored in real time, his/her supervisor can still review the computerized records at any time to check up on past behavior. As a surveillance tool, this is the grain’s real strength—like the computer in Zuboff’s model, it creates a comprehensive digital record that can easily be reviewed at any time. Given these parallels, “The Entire History of You” illuminates several of the potential implications of a society in which the digital archive serves as an accessory to surveillance and surveillance technology is omnipresent. These include implications both for the watcher (a modern version of the Foucauldian guard), and for the watched (the newly evolved Foucauldian inmate).

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THE ROLE OF WATCHER In the role of “watcher,” having access to the ostensibly perfect memory of a technology like the grain can have psychologically crippling consequences. This is most evident in Liam’s behavior, starting with the opening scene of the episode. Leaving from a job interview, Liam immediately begins watching re-dos of the interview, visibly disheartened by what he sees. Later that night, he is shown playing the footage again for his wife and expressing his disappointment as he fixates on minor details that he is convinced signal impending rejection. As described earlier, he takes this same approach with the Ffi and Jonas situation, watching re-do after re-do of the dinner party and poring over the minutiae of their interactions. In both cases, it seems Liam is unable to focus on the present due to his obsession with looking back. Recent neurological studies suggest there may be some real-world truth to this depiction, as individuals with hyperthymesia—a rare brain condition characterized by an unusually detailed memory—have been shown to possess obsessive-compulsive tendencies. 12 In the first documented case of hyperthymesia, Parker, Cahill, and McGaugh note the overwhelming nature of this condition, claiming their informant “spen[t] much of her time recollecting the past instead of orienting to the present and the future.” 13 In her own words, their informant stated, “My memory has ruled my life . . . I think about the past all the time . . . It’s like a running movie that never stops.” 14 Tanne van Bree uses the metaphor of “Digital Hyperthymesia” to argue that a similar condition has emerged in the wake of the digital revolution, as new technology equips users with “perfect artificial memory.” 15 For Liam, Digital Hyperthymesia gives rise to obsessive-compulsive tendencies in the form of continuous re-dos. This seemingly addictive quality of lateral surveillance echoes Gershon’s argument about the monitoring of romantic partners on Facebook: Facebook offers potato chips of information—you get a tantalizing taste that somehow doesn’t quite satisfy, and so you keep seeking a sensation of fulfillment, of being satiated. Facebook offers the hope of certain knowledge, but rarely does one ever fully know for certain whether or not someone is actually flirting with your lover, whether or not your lover is actually being unfaithful, and so on. 16

According to Gershon, a technology like Facebook teases “watchers” with tidbits of information that are often inconclusive, which, in an infidelity investigation, can lead to a perpetual hunt for more evidence. Similarly, Muise, Christopfides, and Desmarais claim, “Facebook may expose an individual to potentially jealousy-provoking information about their partner, which creates a feedback loop whereby heightened jealousy leads to increased surveillance of a partner’s Facebook page. Persistent

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surveillance results in further exposure to jealousy-provoking information.” 17 In many ways, digital archives like Facebook and the grain facilitate critique, allowing users to bring a hypercritical eye to their everyday experiences. As Peters points out, audiovisual recordings can provide “a much amplified and nuanced record of events, a ‘super-abundance of details’ rich with evidentiary value.” 18 Yet, because these archives are so vast and their evidence so inconclusive, they can easily foster an obsessive surveillance habit. Not only can the “watcher” role promote feelings of surveillance addiction, but it also erodes trust. Like a prison guard, one’s trust of the surveilled is minimal, and skepticism becomes the operative mode. Thinking with Zizek, 19 Andrejevic describes this as “the demise of symbolic efficiency—a mistrust of what is said in favor of what can be detected.” 20 When technology makes surveillance effortless, it becomes easy to double-check someone’s words, just to be safe. In addition, when holes are exposed in a person’s words, the surveillance society turns to “covert investigation as an alternative/substitute for debunked discourse.” 21 In an interesting turn, “The Entire History of You” takes this one step further when Colleen, one of the dinner party guests, asserts, “You know half the organic memories you have are junk. Just not trustworthy.” Thus, not only is the grain seen as more trustworthy than others, some see it as more trustworthy than self. While this “trust no one” prison guard mentality may be useful in some situations, it seems particularly troublesome as a default for romantic relationships. 22 Likewise, when we trust the digital archive above everyone, including ourselves, we run the risk of falling victim to the common misconception that because it is a mechanically produced record, it must be neutral and unbiased. This belief is likely strengthened by the visual nature of the grain’s archive, as Porter and Kennedy point out, “The idea that a photograph mirrors real objects, and the resultant photograph must therefore reflect reality, is one that considers photography as purely objective in nature. This condition is based on the thinking that a camera is simply a mechanical apparatus that produces a facsimile of the real.” 23 Tom Gunning refers to this as the “truth claim” of photography. 24 Yet to trust the grain above all others on these grounds is to overlook the fact that (1) photographs (and by extension, film and video recordings) can be manipulated; (2) bias is an inevitable part of the photography process—there’s always someone behind the camera; 25 and (3) photographs are subject to a range of interpretations and meanings. 26 Thus, while the grain might seem to provide “watchers” with the perfect witness—a seemingly objective audiovisual recorder with a hyper-detailed memory—the reality is that the device is not without limitations and that the trust these characters grant it may in some ways be misplaced.

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THE ROLE OF WATCHED In the role of “watched,” Foucault argues that the threat of constant surveillance serves as a deterrent to deviant behavior. 27 Interestingly, this is not always the case in “The Entire History of You,” as Ffi still commits infidelity with Jonas, even in a panoptic society. In trying to account for Ffi’s behavior, I would argue that it demonstrates how as the scope of surveillance increases, the disciplinary function of the panopticon is reduced. What separates Ffion from Foucault is that Foucault’s theory assumes distinct contexts. Whereas for Foucault, the panopticon is a distinct physical space—the prison, the school, the hospital—for Ffi, the panopticon is decentralized and without boundaries. In “The Entire History of You,” the panopticon has evolved beyond a place where one can check in and out. In fact, for someone like Liam and Ffi’s daughter who is born into the world of the grain, being surveilled becomes a cradle-tograve experience (hence the episode’s title, “The Entire History of You”). In this way, the episode reflects a kind of surveillance that is less like Bentham’s panoptic prison and more like the eyes of an omniscient and omnipresent God. Under such all-encompassing supervision, even the seemingly faithful follower, fully cognizant of God’s attentive gaze, still sins. The Christian Bible itself acknowledges the inevitability of this fate, claiming “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” 28 In this sense, Ffi is a victim of her own human nature; however, one could also argue that the standard Ffi is pressured to conform to is above even that of God because while God is a singular entity with a set standard, Ffi is subjected to an immeasurable number of “watchers,” each with his/her own standards. In today’s world of social media, we might refer to this as the problem of “context collapse.” 29 According to Marwick and boyd, “Social media technologies collapse multiple audiences into single contexts, making it difficult for people to use the same techniques online that they do to handle multiplicity in face-to-face conversations.” 30 Whereas in the offline world, we engage in “impression management,” adapting our self-presentation based on context and audience, 31 social media pose new challenges by bringing together audiences that have traditionally remained separate. Moreover, because social media audiences are not physically present, users are forced to cater their communications to an “imagined audience”—a mental picture of who they think might be watching, reading, or listening. 32 Like the teen Facebook user with both peers and adult relatives on the same “friends list,” the tension of negotiating between oft-conflicting behavioral standards presents Ffi and others with a catch-22. In the social media sphere, users have devised a variety of workarounds to mitigate this concern, from creating multiple online accounts to using advanced privacy settings to direct specific content to specific contacts; 33 however, because the grain is a biologically embedded tech-

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nology, it allows no such flexibility. Unlike social media, the grain makes the role of “watched” an around-the-clock experience in which the “imagined audience” is essentially everyone, and as conventional wisdom would suggest, it’s impossible to please everyone. As a result, in the world of the grain, the “watched” must inevitably play the role of the unruly, nonconforming inmate at some point in time. While “The Entire History of You” focuses primarily on lateral surveillance, its characters are subjected to more traditional, top-down surveillance as well. By purchasing a grain and having it implanted into their bodies, the characters have voluntarily opted into what Whitaker refers to as a “participatory panopticon.” 34 This can best be seen near the beginning of the episode when Liam is at the airport and a security worker asks him to play a re-do of his last week’s activities before allowing him to pass through and proceed to his flight. The subtext, of course, is that reviewing the footage will reveal any suspicious activity that might flag Liam as a potential safety threat. Andrejevic refers to this kind of activity as “offloading duties of monitoring onto the populace.” 35 By requiring grain users to share their re-dos as a safety checkpoint, the state reduces its own workload, while the citizens essentially supervise themselves. Yet even in a participatory panopticon such as this, the ultimate goal is disciplinary in nature, as it serves to discourage passengers from engaging in deviant behavior. While little is said about who manufactures and controls the grain, its use as a state surveillance tool reinforces Schwartz and Cook’s argument that “archives are established by the powerful to protect or enhance their position in society.” 36 By controlling the archive, one has the power to control society, shaping everything from history to memory and identity. 37 What makes the airport scene especially interesting is that in the grand scheme of the episode, it is almost an afterthought. Liam shows no signs of concern or frustration about the guard’s request, and as reflective as he is about everything else happening around him, he never seems to give the incident a second thought. His casual acceptance of state surveillance contrasted against his intense obsession with lateral surveillance illustrates how institutions can use surveillance at the micro level to distract populations from surveillance at the macro level. Part of what helps a participatory panopticon succeed is that it offers participants something in return. 38 The grain not only lures users with the gift of memory, but it also keeps them so distracted in an endless loop of re-dos that they become unreflective about the tool’s larger purpose— to discipline subjects in service to the state. What’s more, to opt out of the grain provides little relief. For Hallam, the sole character in the episode who has made this choice, going grainless means being labeled untrustworthy (when Liam physically attacks Jonas and she tries to phone for help, the emergency operator is resistant because she has no grain to scan for verification). 39 In addition, opting out of the grain does not exempt

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one from surveillance. Given the technology’s widespread use, one becomes subject to its consequences regardless of whether or not one chooses to “buy in.” For these characters, to live is to be watched—opting out only removes the power, albeit limited, of the “watcher” role. By constructing a series of disincentives to opting out, the state makes it easier to discreetly obtain the compliance needed to continually monitor its citizens. CONCLUSION Although “The Entire History of You” is about fictional characters and fictional technology, series creator Charlie Brooker notes that Black Mirror is deeply rooted in reality, claiming that every episode is “about the way we live now—and the way we might be living in 10 minutes’ time if we’re clumsy.” 40 Thus, as social commentary, the episode sheds light on numerous aspects of contemporary life. While the technology of the grain does not yet exist, there are several devices both in development and on the market that parallel its features. As early as 2003, designer Henry Strub patented a grain-like recorder described as “an unobtrusive camera that would record continually without requiring a lot of distracting interaction.” 41 This wearable device “can be worn anywhere on the body or mounted on the head,” and according to Strub, it “doesn’t need a lot of electricity and can record everything that happens in a day without needing to be downloaded.” 42 More recently, Sony filed a patent for a smart contact lens with video recording capabilities. 43 While these inventions have yet to be released, the mobile media industry has embraced wearable recording devices and “lifelogging” in recent years with devices like the GoPro, Google Glass, and Narrative Clip. 44 Even the average smartphone, with its increasingly sophisticated digital camera, might be seen as a distant relative of the grain. Not only do smartphones allow users to archive daily interactions and capture recordings of life events in real time, but as users become more and more tethered to their phones, these devices are all but biologically implanted. Further, in the era of Big Data, the volume of the digital archive on each one of us may soon rival that of the grain. “The Entire History of You” also reflects the growing dependence on and trust in technology that characterizes today’s society. In a 2007 New York Times op-ed titled “The Outsourced Brain,” David Brooks describes this as “externalization”—relying on digital media as a way to lighten our cognitive loads. 45 From remembering phone numbers and driving directions to important facts about the world, digital devices act as “external cognitive servants,” storing and retrieving information on our behalf. According to Tanne van Bree, “Most people see human memory as an untrustworthy, forgetful, adaptive thing, because it lacks the ability to

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preserve information indefinitely like computers do . . . Our prevailing conception, living in the ‘Information Age,’ is that computers are better at this, and therefore it is best to use as many external memory aids as possible.” 46 Yet to adopt this approach is to exhibit a great deal of trust, both in the accuracy of the “outsourced brain” and in the immutability of its data. In his 2009 book Delete, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger challenges these assumptions about digital memory: “[W]hat if external memory itself (digital memory in particular) is not unalterable but can be modified after the fact, and thus does not necessarily represent an accurate rendition of a past event?” 47 We see a small glimpse of this possibility in the fight scene between Liam and Ffi when Ffi plays a re-do of Liam telling her, “You’re a bitch!” Apologetic, yet frustrated, Liam responds, “You can’t just edit off the word ‘sometimes!,’” accusing her of manipulating the recording and taking his statement out of context. Despite the seeming trustworthiness of digital records, they can be edited, and the implications of their manipulability can be significant. As stated earlier, the question of who controls the grain is never fully addressed in the episode. In fact, the characters seem largely unconcerned with protecting what Raynes-Goldie calls institutional privacy (i.e., privacy from the institution[s] behind the grain) while using this technology. 48 Similarly, many internet users today freely upload personal content to cloud services and social network sites with little regard for the potential ramifications. In a discussion of cloud computing, technology writer David Pogue states, “You’re no longer in possession of your own data. You’re making them available, at least in theory, to Apple, or Google, or Microsoft. Or the National Security Agency. Or to a hacker.” 49 With this statement, Pogue highlights several important considerations about the trust we so willingly place in digital storage. First, to trust technology is to trust the people who control the technology. For most of us, this means trusting people we’ve never met and do not know to secure our personal data and consistently act in our best interest. Second, because control in the online space is, in some ways, highly concentrated, many of the people in whom we put our trust are linked to one of a handful of giant corporations (or government entities). That being said, “If we all trust the same source, we are all equally vulnerable to its alterability.” 50 While we might like to believe that a company like Google would abide by its famous motto “Don’t be evil” 51 and that our government would never tamper with the data in our “outsourced brains,” Mayer-Schönberger notes that in the past dictatorial regimes have used the manipulation of historical records as a way to exert dominance and control populations. 52 And even if these corporations and government institutions do not abuse their power, Pogue’s reference to hackers 53 illustrates how externalized digital memory—convenient though it may be—will always be an inherently risky place to put one’s trust.

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Like the characters in “The Entire History of You,” we too are constantly negotiating the roles of “watcher” and “watched” in the digital age. With digital recording and storage at an all-time high, “Life increasingly becomes lived in the shadow of the archive.” 54 So what is the proper response to the burgeoning panoptic society? Will we become so enamored with watching one another through tools like social media that we are unreflective about the eyes that are continually monitoring us? Will we continue to ignore the fact that by putting our trust in technology we also place trust in all who control and have access to that technology? Or will we pursue an alternative society where technological progress does not require the surrendering of personal privacy? NOTES 1. Sky Plus is a brand of digital video recorder popular in the UK. 2. Charlie Brooker, “Charlie Brooker: The Dark Side of Our Gadget Addiction,” The Guardian, December 1, 2011, http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/dec/ 01/charlie-brooker-dark-side-gadget-addiction-black-mirror. 3. For example, during Liam’s cab ride at the beginning of the episode, he sees a commercial for something called a “Willow Grain upgrade” that emphasizes “full spectrum memory” and “three decades of backup,” featuring the tagline “Memory is for living.” Later on at the dinner party, Colleen, a guest who happens to work in grain development, touts the accuracy of grain memory over “organic memories.”

4. Mark Andrejevic, “The Work of Watching One Another: Lateral Surveillance, Risk, and Governance,” Surveillance & Society 2, no. 4 (2005): 488. 5. In a scene at the dinner party, when one of the guests reveals that she has decided to “go grainless” after her grain was stolen, the others, awestruck, describe her decision as an “interesting” and “brave” choice. 6. Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan, Second Vintage Books ed. (1977; repr. New York: Vintage Books, 1995). 7. Jeremy Bentham, The Panopticon Writings, ed. Miran Bozovic, Second Edition (London: Verso, 2011). 8. Foucault, Discipline & Punish. 9. Emily Yoshida, “Black Mirror, Episode 3, ‘The Entire History of You’: Total Redo,” Grantland (blog), November 27, 2013, http://grantland.com/hollywood-prospectus/black-mirror-episode-3-the-entire-history-of-you-total-redo/ (emphasis added). 10. Foucault, Discipline & Punish, 197. 11. Shoshana Zuboff, In The Age Of The Smart Machine: The Future Of Work And Power (New York: Basic Books, 1988). 12. Aurora K. R. LePort et al., “Behavioral and Neuroanatomical Investigation of Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory (HSAM),” Neurobiology of Learning and Memory 98, no. 1 (July 2012): 78–92, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nlm.2012.05.002; Elizabeth S. Parker, Larry Cahill, and James L. McGaugh, “A Case of Unusual Autobiographical Remembering,” Neurocase 12, no. 1 (February 2006): 35–49, https://doi.org/10.1080/13554790500473680; A. Prathyusha, Gummalla Pitchaiah, and Y. Anilkumar, “Hyperthymesia—Memory Rules the Life,” World Journal of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences 5, no. 9 (2016): 700–6.

13. Parker, Cahill, and McGaugh, “A Case of Unusual Autobiographical Remembering,” 48. 14. Tanne van Bree, “Digital Hyperthymesia: On the Consequences of Living with Perfect Memory,” in Mind You: The Art of Ethics in the Information Age, ed. Liisa Janssens (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2016), 28. 15. Ibid., 35.

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16. Ilana Gershon, The Breakup 2.0: Disconnecting over New Media (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010), 86. 17. Amy Muise, Emily Christofides, and Serge Desmarais, “More Information than You Ever Wanted: Does Facebook Bring out the Green-Eyed Monster of Jealousy?,” CyberPsychology & Behavior 12, no. 4 (2009): 443. 18. John Durham Peters, “Witnessing,” Media, Culture & Society 23 (November 2001): 708, https://doi.org/10.1177/016344301023006002. 19. Slavoj Zizek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology (London: Verso, 1999). 20. Andrejevic, “The Work of Watching One Another,” 482. 21. Ibid., 481. 22. For Liam and Ffi, it appears that Liam’s paranoid distrust had become a pattern of behavior. After he interrogates her about Jonas, she responds, “You’re getting obsessed. We had all this with Dan. I don’t want you going like that again.” 23. Glenn Porter and Michael Kennedy, “Photographic Truth and Evidence,” Australian Journal of Forensic Sciences 44, no. 2 (June 2012): 185–86, https://doi.org/10.1080/ 00450618.2011.634835. 24. Tom Gunning, “What’s the Point of an Index? Or, Faking Photographs,” Nordicom Review 25, no. 1–2 (2004): 39–50. 25. John Tagg, The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988); Peters, “Witnessing.” 26. Porter and Kennedy, “Photographic Truth and Evidence.” 27. Foucault, Discipline & Punish. 28. Rom. 3:23 NIV. 29. Alice E. Marwick and danah boyd, “I Tweet Honestly, I Tweet Passionately: Twitter Users, Context Collapse, and the Imagined Audience,” New Media & Society 13, no. 1 (2010): 114–33, https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444810365313. 30. Ibid., 114. 31. Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1959). 32. Marwick and boyd, “I Tweet Honestly, I Tweet Passionately.” 33. Ibid.; Jessica Vitak, “The Impact of Context Collapse and Privacy on Social Network Site Disclosures,” Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media 56, no. 4 (October 2012): 451–70, https://doi.org/10.1080/08838151.2012.732140; Jessica Vitak et al., “Why Won’t You Be My Facebook Friend?: Strategies for Managing Context Collapse in the Workplace,” in Proceedings of the 2012 iConference (ACM, 2012), 555–57.

34. Reg Whitaker, The End of Privacy: How Total Surveillance Is Becoming a Reality (New York: New Press, 1999). 35. Andrejevic, “The Work of Watching One Another,” 482. 36. Joan M. Schwartz and Terry Cook, “Archives, Records, and Power: The Making of Modern Memory,” Archival Science 2 (n.d.): 1. 37. Ibid. 38. Lee Humphreys, “Who’s Watching Whom? A Study of Interactive Technology and Surveillance,” Journal of Communication 61 (August 2011): 575–95, https://doi.org/ 10.1111/j.1460–2466.2011.01570.x. 39. Despite repeated viewings, this subtle plot point was only brought to my attention by Emily Yoshida’s (2013) review of the episode. 40. Brooker, “Charlie Brooker.” 41. Sabra Chartrand, “Patents; A Low-Attention Video Camera Lets the Photographer Focus Instead on the Action.” The New York Times, August 25, 2003, https:// www.nytimes.com/2003/08/25/business/patents-low-attention-video-camera-lets-photographer-focus-instead-action.html.

42. Ibid. 43. Michelle Starr, “Sony Patents Contact Lens That Records What You See,” CNET, May 2, 2016, https://www.cnet.com/news/sony-patents-contact-lens-that-recordswhat-you-see/.

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44. Anna Reading, “Memobilia: The Mobile Phone and the Emergence of Wearable Memories,” in Save as . . . Digital Memories, ed. Joanne Garde-Hansen, Andrew Hoskins, and Anna Reading (Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2009), 81–95; Katrin Wolf et al., “Lifelogging: You’re Wearing a Camera?,” IEEE Pervasive Computing 13, no. 3 (July 2014): 8–12, https:// doi.org/10.1109/MPRV.2014.53. 45. David Brooks, “The Outsourced Brain,” The New York Times, October 26, 2007, https://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/26/opinion/26brooks.html. 46. van Bree, “Digital Hyperthymesia: On the Consequences of Living with Perfect Memory,” 30. 47. Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, Delete: The Virture of Forgetting in the Digital Age (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 120. 48. Kate Raynes-Goldie, “Aliases, Creeping, and Wall Cleaning: Understanding Privacy in the Age of Facebook,” First Monday 15, no. 1 (January 2, 2010), http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2775. 49. David Pogue, “Why You Shouldn’t Trust Your Data to ‘the Cloud,’” Salon, February 5, 2014, https://www.salon.com/2014/02/05/ why_you_shouldnt_trust_your_data_to_the_cloud_partner/. 50. Mayer-Schönberger, Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age, 120. 51. Google has since dropped this motto from their code of conduct, replacing it with “Do the right thing” (Moyer, 2015). 52. Mayer-Schönberger, Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age. 53. Pogue, “Why You Shouldn’t Trust Your Data to ‘the Cloud.’” 54. Mike Featherstone, “Archive,” Theory, Culture & Society 23, no. 2–3 (2006): 591.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Andrejevic, Mark. “The Work of Watching One Another: Lateral Surveillance, Risk, and Governance,” Surveillance & Society 2, no. 4 (2005). Bentham, Jeremy. The Panopticon Writings, ed. Miran Bozovic, Second Edition. London: Verso, 2011. Brooker, Charlie. “Charlie Brooker: The Dark Side of Our Gadget Addiction,” The Guardian, December 1, 2011, http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/dec/01/ charlie-brooker-dark-side-gadget- addiction-black-mirror. Brooks, David. “The Outsourced Brain,” The New York Times, October 26, 2007, https:// www.nytimes.com/2007/10/26/opinion/26brooks.html. Chartrand, Sabra. “Patents: A Low-Attention Video Camera Lets the Photographer Focus Instead on the Action,” The New York Times, August 25, 2003, https:// www.nytimes.com/2003/08/25/business/patents-low-attention-video-camera-letsphotographer-focus-instead-action.html. Featherstone, Mike. “Archive,” Theory, Culture & Society 23, no. 2–3 (2006). Foucault, Michel. Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan, Second Vintage Books ed. 1977; repr. New York: Vintage Books, 1995. Gershon, Ilana. The Breakup 2.0: Disconnecting over New Media. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010. Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1959. Gunning, Tom. “What’s the Point of an Index? Or, Faking Photographs,” Nordicom Review 25, no. 1–2 (2004): 39–50. https://www.salon.com/2014/02/05/ why_you_shouldnt_trust_your_data_to_the_cloud_partner/. Humphreys, Lee. “Who’s Watching Whom? A Study of Interactive Technology and Surveillance,” Journal of Communication 61 (August 2011): 575–95, https://doi.org/ 10.1111/j.1460–2466.2011.01570.x. LePort, A. K. et al., “Behavioral and Neuroanatomical Investigation of Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory (HSAM),” Neurobiology of Learning and Memory 98, no. 1 (July 2012): 78–92, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nlm.2012.05.002.

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Marwick, Alice E. and danah boyd, “I Tweet Honestly, I Tweet Passionately: Twitter Users, Context Collapse, and the Imagined Audience,” New Media & Society 13, no. 1 (2010): 114–33, https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444810365313. Mayer-Schönberger, Viktor. Delete: The Virture of Forgetting in the Digital Age. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009. Muise, Amy, Emily Christofides, and Serge Desmarais, “More Information than You Ever Wanted: Does Facebook Bring out the Green-Eyed Monster of Jealousy?,” CyberPsychology & Behavior 12, no. 4 (2009). Parker, Elizabeth S., Larry Cahill, and James L. McGaugh, “A Case of Unusual Autobiographical Remembering,” Neurocase 12, no. 1 (February 2006): 35–49, https:// doi.org/10.1080/13554790500473680. Peters, John Duram. “Witnessing,” Media, Culture & Society 23 (November 2001): 708, https://doi.org/10.1177/016344301023006002. Pogue, David. “Why You Shouldn’t Trust Your Data to ‘the Cloud,’” Salon, February 5, 2014. Porter, Glenn and Michael Kennedy, “Photographic Truth and Evidence,” Australian Journal of Forensic Sciences 44, no. 2 (June 2012): 185–86, https://doi.org/10.1080/ 00450618.2011.634835. Prathyusha, A., Gummalla Pitchaiah, and Y. Anilkumar, “Hyperthymesia—Memory Rules the Life,” World Journal of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences 5, no. 9 (2016): 700–706. Raynes-Goldie, Kate. “Aliases, Creeping, and Wall Cleaning: Understanding Privacy in the Age of Facebook,” First Monday 15, no. 1 (January 2, 2010), http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2775. Reading, Anna. “Memobilia: The Mobile Phone and the Emergence of Wearable Memories,” in Save as . . . Digital Memories, ed. Joanne Garde-Hansen, Andrew Hoskins, and Anna Reading, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, 81–95. Schwartz, Joan M. and Terry Cook, “Archives, Records, and Power: The Making of Modern Memory,” Archival Science 2 (n.d.). Starr, Michelle. “Sony Patents Contact Lens That Records What You See,” CNET, May 2, 2016, https://www.cnet.com/news/sony-patents-contact-lens-that-records-whatyou-see/. Tagg, John. The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988. van Bree, Tanne. “Digital Hyperthymesia: On the Consequences of Living with Perfect Memory,” in Mind You: The Art of Ethics in the Information Age, ed. Lisa Janssens, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2016. Vitak, Jessica, et al., “Why Won’t You Be My Facebook Friend?: Strategies for Managing Context Collapse in the Workplace,” in Proceedings of the 2012 iConference, ACM, 2012, 555–57. Vitak, Jessica. “The Impact of Context Collapse and Privacy on Social Network Site Disclosures,” Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media 56, no. 4 (October 2012): 451–70, https://doi.org/10.1080/08838151.2012.732140. Whitaker, Reg. The End of Privacy: How Total Surveillance Is Becoming a Reality. New York: New Press, 1999. Wolf, Katrin, et al., “Lifelogging: You’re Wearing a Camera?,” IEEE Pervasive Computing 13, no. 3 (July 2014): 8–12, https://doi.org/10.1109/MPRV.2014.53. Yoshida, Emily. “Black Mirror, Episode 3, ‘The Entire History of You’: Total Redo,” Grantland (blog), November 27, 2013, http://grantland.com/hollywood-prospectus/ black-mirror-episode-3-the-entire-history-of-you-total-redo/. Zizek, Slavoj. The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology. London: Verso, 1999. Zuboff, Shoshana. In The Age Of The Smart Machine: The Future Of Work And Power. New York: Basic Books, 1988.

SIX Seeing the “Surveillant Face” of Technology in Black Mirror Using Futuristic Scenarios for an Interdisciplinary Discussion on the Feasibility and Implications of Technology Pinelopi Troullinou and Mathieu d’Aquin

In the last decade, digital technologies have been increasingly adopted in everyday life, particularly in Western societies with the growing mass production of ever more “smart” gadgets such as smartphones, activity trackers, and voice assistants, just to name a few. Moreover, state governance has been increasingly reliant on digital technology to promote security especially following the tragic events of September 11th. 1 Particularly, Snowden’s revelations in the summer of 2013 exposed the extensive state surveillance via devices both related to security purposes such as CCTV cameras, but also personal ones such as phones and laptops. The wide use and reliance on digital technologies especially with the advancements in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the Internet of Things (IoT) has resulted in a “surveillance culture” 2 with technologies being celebrated as an inherent part of digital modernity and as the only efficient way of governance. 3 In this context, the ethical and societal risks emerging from the asymmetric power relations in the so-called digital era and the potential mis(ab-)use of technology have been disregarded. 4 Furthermore, the discussion over the surveillant aspects of technology tend to focus on privacy mainly within well-known but rather of limited use metaphors such as Big Brother. 5 69

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The British sci-fi series Black Mirror disruptive to the dominant aspect of technology as liberation and empowerment reflects its “darker” sides depicting potential risks both on an individual and social level. Far from demonizing it, the series shows the dangers of technology in different contexts. Indeed, technology is perceived here as form of power and as such it is “neither good, nor bad, but dangerous.” 6 In this chapter, following a Foucauldian approach to the power/knowledge nexus, we aim to show how futuristic scenarios such as the ones of Black Mirror can be used as a methodological tool to generate interdisciplinary discussion and consequently to construct a new body of knowledge around technology. In particular, we employ three selected Black Mirror episodes mainly as an exercise of the suggested methodological tool to create a dialogue between computer and social sciences. The objective is to explore the potential societal implications based on surveillance studies literature and the examination of the current research and development that might lead to the relevant technology to materialize. This chapter is divided into four sections. In the first section, we explore technology drawing upon a surveillance studies perspective, showing how practices of surveillance have been normalized thus remaining largely unchallenged. Following, we present fictional scenarios as a methodological tool to look at technology through a different lens and contribute in constructing different discourses on technology. In the third section, we employ this tool reviewing the feasibility of technological advancements presented in the selected episodes of the Black Mirror series, considering the current state of the art in information technology and related fields, and we discuss the emerging societal issues beyond the story told in the episode building mainly upon surveillance studies literature. Finally, we conclude on the evaluation of the suggested methodological tool to raise interdisciplinary debate creating a new body of knowledge that can also inform the public and policy makers. THE DIFFERENT LOOKS OF SURVEILLANCE Digital technologies have always been celebrated on the premises of new opportunities and empowerment enabling individuals around the globe to connect and have access to information. 7 Therefore, digital technologies had been considered as an “information revolution” since its creation. 8 In the recent years, ever more devices are able to connect to the internet from mobile phones to tablets and home appliances, and track users’ behavior, thoughts, and interactions. Furthermore, the developments in AI and IoT enable the devices to communicate with each other promising further convenience. To give an example, a smart watch can be connected with other self-tracking applications installed on the user’s

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smartphone and combining the different data make more accurate suggestions regarding their health and well-being. We notice a shift to more ubiquitous digital technologies that are everywear, 9 meaning that they can be always with the user as wearable technologies. The companies, though, can use the produced data to improve their services and increase their sales and direct future investments employing customer relationship management techniques. 10 In this context, the companies profit from users’ activities, exploiting their time spent on the devices and their data, 11 and raising concerns over consumer surveillance. 12 The question of data ownership, access, and control becomes a crucial one as it might result in abuse of privacy and discrimination. 13 Especially following Snowden’s revelations, it becomes obvious that the state can also access the same information produced by personal devices, reviving the concerns over state surveillance aiming to control and manage its population, 14 resulting in a “disciplinary society.” 15 Furthermore, governments are increasingly relying on technological advancements to predict potential criminal actions, constructing an ideology of surveillance realism 16 according to which surveillance apparatus is the sole response to security. Through data mining and social-sorting techniques, the population can be classified “according to their degree of threat,” 17 as within this ideology such classifications become “legitimated by complex direct surveillance’s claims to objectivity and rationality.” 18 These claims over objective and rational judgments emerging from big data support increasing data-driven forms of governance where “policy makers seem ever more inclined to legitimize specific ways of action by referring to ‘hard’ scientific evidence.” 19 Furthermore, in this hype of big data, also “researchers invoke data in the name of scientific objectivity while often ignoring that data are never raw,” 20 but they are always being processed to gain meaningful insight out of them. Scientists seem to underestimate also often the fragility of privacy in a digital environment where anonymization of data does not secure the privacy of data subjects due to the “derivative nature of online metadata in terms of metadata’s ability to potentially identify human users.” 21 This growing dependence on big data might then result in disregarding their potential risks. The aforementioned fragility and complexity of privacy is of great importance in terms of digital surveillance. Surveillance is not limited over the physical body of the surveilled subject but extends to the data collected over one’s behaviors, habits, and actions, resulting in the so-called dataveillance. 22 Consequently, the watcher is not identifiable, 23 and thus, the abuse of our private data becomes ambiguous. Even though consent as inherent element of privacy is obligatory for the various services to access and collect data, it requires a clear explanation on purposes and treatment of the data. 24 This requirement, though, is rather problematic in digital surveillance, resulting in further concerns over privacy.

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Even though we do not claim that such technologies have met universal acceptance, hereby we explore the dominant discourses around technology as consumption and innovation products linked mainly to communication, entertainment, and security purposes. 25 As such, digital, computerized technologies have met great acceptance and compliance that Lyon 26 explains with the conceptualization of surveillance culture. He argues that such culture emerged from digital modernity and “formed through organizational dependence, political-economic power, security linkages, and social media engagement.” 27 The Black Mirror series reflects this enthusiasm and employment of digital technologies within the surveillance culture exposing though the potential risks on both an individual and societal level. EMPLOYING FICTIONAL SCENARIOS TO ALTER THE DISCOURSE In a Foucauldian understanding of power, power is not seen as a commodity but as a created force that constructs and is constructed within social processes. 28 Power then is not an entity external to the society defining the societal structures. Power is “responsible for creating our social world and for the particular ways in which the world is formed and can be talked about, ruling out alternative ways of being and talking.” 29 Therefore, the articulation of different reflections of technology using the metaphor of the mirror, constructs different knowledge around it. In the same way, subjectivity is not a product external to power, but is created through power relations that reproduces itself. 30 In the context of technology then, we could say in a simplistic approach that the way we talk about technological advancements shapes our relationship with technology, but at the same time shapes the direction of technology itself. Hence, we argue that such futuristic scenarios as the ones of Black Mirror expose surveillant discourses of technology and the resulting risks on fundamental rights in democratic societies such as privacy. These fictional scenarios are used here as visual vignettes, 31 a wellestablished tool in social sciences 32 and more recently in human-computer interaction, 33 used to generate rich discussions among study participants. Digital stories—similar to visual vignettes—from an educational perspective have been argued to enhance the learning process 34 and to increase awareness and empowerment. 35 Therefore, we suggest the employment of fictional structured stories as a tool to generate discussions on the risks of technology. In particular, in this chapter we suggest the use of this tool as a platform for academics from different fields to explore the potential societal implications of technologies.

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HOW FAR IS REALITY FROM FICTION? “Be Right Back” The episode “Be Right Back” presents the story of Martha, whose boyfriend Ash died in a car accident. Martha, shortly after his death, discovers that she is pregnant and, devastated, decides to make use of a service that emulates conversations with Ash, who uploaded all his online data including voice messages, photos, texts, and emails. Technology in this episode goes a step further, bringing Ash “back to life” through an artificial android made of synthetic flesh. For the purposes of the present exercise however, we focus on the specific technology that simulates realpeople conversations, leaving aside the physical simulation of the person as a realistic robotic entity. Breaking down the technology presented in the episode, the focal point is that it combines abilities that are currently being explored under two general areas of research in computing: realistic chatbots able to simulate human conversations and machine learning capable of using data, such as transcripts of conversation, to model, predict, and emulate the underlying patterns in those data. 36 These are technologies which are in widespread use already, such as to automate customer support 37 or even in basic tasks such as typing prediction on smartphones. 38 While the accuracy of the built models is still far from sufficient to enable scenarios close to the one seen in the episode (and sometimes lead to unexpected results 39 ), examples are already emerging showing the potential not only for the technology to soon become as advanced, but also for the social and business constructs enabling the specific depicted use of this technology to happen. 40 Exploring this episode, the technology described here seen as an evolution of existing technologies can be related to the vulnerability of users’ online identity. As discussed above, power no longer depends on a strict mechanism of the state but on “what today might be called information communication technologies.” 41 Thus, our digital identity becomes almost inseparable from the physical identity, especially through the lenses of the technology in question, as machines are building the capability to emulate personalized human conversation adopting individuals’ unique characteristics as the voice. In cases of identity fraud, it becomes even harder for one to prove their identity against the machine, bringing back the arguments of privacy in relation to biometric identifiers as security measures. Lodge’s question “are you who you say you are?” 42 extends from nation-state borders that increasingly use biometrics, to the ubiquitous digital territory. Following the existing technological availability explained above, in the context of surveillance the persisting “nothing to hide, nothing to fear” 43 argument falls apart as collected data via digital communications

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can be proven enough for a machine to emulate the user, allowing “entrance” to the wrong people, to paraphrase Gane, or even to “push” the user through entry points with no prior consent or will. As a response to this, scholars increasingly call for obfuscation which is “the production of misleading, ambiguous and plausible but confusing information as an act of concealment or evasion.” 44 The discussion of the present scenario in the current technological context also raises issues on the nature of personal and sensitive data from a legal perspective as the combination of different not necessarily “sensitive” data can create sensitive data without the user’s knowledge. Furthermore, the episode brings into debate less explored issues such as the data inheritance and consequently “data will” that emanates social and legal issues around “post-mortem” data, 45 as the data assets keep generating profit for the companies and can also be used against or at least not according to the data owner’s will. 46 Also, with the developments on artificial intelligence, the ethics around robots’ rights are in stake, although out of the scope of the present work. “The Entire History of You The “Entire History of You” centers around a technology implanted within the eyes of most people called “grains,” constantly recording videos of what they see, which are playable on demand directly into the eyes of the user or on a shared screen. More precisely, it shows how the main character, Liam, uses his own recording lenses and other people’s recordings to find out that he is being badly evaluated at his job, that his wife is cheating on him, and finally when, as a result, he has lost both, that he is not the father of his daughter. Compared to the previous one, this episode appears more futuristic at first sight. If we ignore the aspect of embedding hardware within body parts, however, it becomes straightforwardly connected to the area of lifelogging, 47 which, in its most common form, consists of wearing a camera constantly recording what is happening in front of the user (some of those cameras becoming cheap, energy efficient, and equipped with large enough memories to be used constantly as in the episode). More specifically related to one of the arguments made by one of the characters in the episode that, with respect to potential use for legal purposes, those video recorders were more reliable than “natural memory,” we can connect the episode to the rise of “dashcams”: small cameras mounted on the dashboards of cars to record the behavior of pedestrians and other motorists in case of accidents. In several countries, the use of such dashcams can already be required by insurance companies, at least to obtain a discount. 48 It seems a plausible scenario that such practices might expand beyond car insurance and police forces, aggregating dashcams with lifelogging to

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create a situation in which citizens, under cover of security and legal protection, become expected to record and store their daily experience. This might be further enabled through companies such as Sony actively working on integrating video capture technology to become so wearable that they are merged with the user’s body functions, in exactly the same way as depicted in the episode. 49 In this context, this technology can be directly related to the debate over surveillance practices which through CCTV cameras is now extended to wearable ones. Studies have shown that body-worn cameras by police officers can reduce police use of force, 50 supporting arguments of surveillance to hold law enforcement agencies, and by extension potentially other members of the population, accountable. 51 On this note, even scholars critical to more traditional cameras such as CCTVs argue in favor of wearable cameras by the police force, stressing though the importance of informing the public when the camera is on, but also keeping a critical stance on the way that the camera carrier is still in power of “what to record and when to record it,” giving also the possibility of “editing on the fly.” 52 The growing reliance on technology to respond to social values of transparency and accountability can be problematic though. Furthermore, the asymmetry of power and the capabilities of technology raise academic debate over surveillance practices and further violation of the public’s privacy. 53 One could argue that such technology enables untargeted surveillance 54 as everyone can watch everyone and thus, it could successfully respond to the ethical and social issues raised earlier. However, the ones who refuse to adopt this technology or cannot afford it would be in a disadvantaged position, raising concerns of discrimination against minorities. Furthermore, academics argue that “[b]ehaviour of individuals itself would transform because of the observer effect, and even more markedly if they know that the records could possibly be shown as evidence.” 55 This point brings back to the discussion Foucauldian-aspired critical arguments over ubiquitous surveillance 56 that results in self-regulation, restriction of freedom of expression and autonomy, catalyzing basic human rights in democratic societies. A greater question then is at stake: is this the society we want? The concerns are not limited to the ones stemming from critical and surveillance studies of course, as the alteration of human relationships as presented in the episode also need to be explored from fields such as mobile media and cultural studies. These are concerns that might not be possible to be regulated but need further understanding.

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“Hated in the Nation” The episode “Hated in the Nation” follows the investigation of Detective Chief Inspector Karin Parke regarding deaths associated with public shaming on social media. From a technological perspective however, it is the role of robotic bees in those murders that is of interest here, rather than the use of social media for cyberbullying, even though it is a serious phenomenon that has been explored in academia mainly from a psychological perspective. 57 Those bees have been deployed widely across the UK to help with pollination but are discovered during the episode to have been hacked by an individual with strong knowledge of the technology, using a backdoor put in place for the purpose of government surveillance. Those robotic bees are most obviously related to the recent increase in popularity and development in the area of drones, and more generally of robotic control and autonomous physical agents. 58 Similarly to what is described in the episode, many initiatives have emerged recently that envision the use of autonomous drones on a large scale for public benefit, including medical and emergency situations. 59 While miniaturization is expected to enable the physical reduction of drones in a way similar to the bees presented in this episode (in terms of size, not shape), in a not too distant future, the main technical limitations currently preventing their broader use are related mostly to power consumption and network connectivity. Both those limitations though could be overcome by using the hives depicted in the episode as both wireless charging stations, and nodes of a mesh network. 60 The relation to surveillance in this episode is more straightforward as there is an identifiable “watcher.” However, the widespread use of drones raises serious ethical, legal, and social concerns similar to the body-worn cameras. The additional characteristics of drones (or more broadly, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, UAVs) such as the embedded sensors generate further concerns over privacy and intrusive surveillance. Their increasing use by law enforcement agencies but also their domestic usage have been increasingly studied in the context of ubiquitous surveillance and erosion of privacy 61 along with dehumanization and “the insidious application of militarized systems and rationalities to domestic territories and populations.” 62 The use of UAVs in a governmental basis has raised the discussion and development of relevant laws in a European level “to deploy advanced technologies, which include UAVs to patrol its frontiers.” 63 Cavoukian also suggests privacy by design as a response to privacy concerns emanating from the use of drones. 64 Moreover, Finn and Wright argue that current regulatory mechanisms do not respond to privacy issues related to UAVs based on their technological complexity and further capabilities. 65

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Furthermore, the gamification of a technology that has been developed and used for military purposes—now used in many instances similarly to model planes—having in-built surveillance design raises further societal discussions of its wide employment. The domestication of such surveillance technologies further normalizes such practices in everyday life contributing to their wide acceptance. The episode though stresses also the possibilities of hacking and the uncontrolled consequences. Recently there have been debates over active defense as an alternative cyber protection system or the so-called hack back, which is a reverse engineering process aiming to identify cyberattacks and their origin. 66 This kind of active defense tactic have raised a new debate on their regulatory binding and risks of misattribution, 67 showing the extent of the risks even on national levels of surveillance technologies. CONCLUSION Even though the technologies presented in each episode seem futuristic, our analysis shows that they are based on existing developments in computer science. Deconstructing the technologies allows for the exploration of emerging societal issues emanating from their deployment and urges computer scientists to include these risks in the early stages of the design process. Furthermore, a recurrent theme in the episodes considered above is hacking. Indeed, while only the episode “Hated in the Nation” makes explicit mention of cybersecurity, a key emerging issue is that each of the pieces of technology (and even more so, their combination) could potentially be abused in various ways with catastrophic consequences, urging a rethinking of the growing reliance on technology. A common response is that technology designers need to embed more security measures in their technologies. However, as shown in a number of recent cases, 68 this is a naive solution because it ignores one of the most basic pieces of common sense in cybersecurity: no system can be 100 percent secure. Furthermore, the episodes, as many other examples of speculative literature, more explicitly relate to hacking in its broader sense: the use of technology for different purposes and in different ways than the ones for which it was designed. 69 In a somewhat more restricted context, it is evident that no technology design can completely rule out the possibility of hacking, or in other words, it cannot be guaranteed that a piece of technology will always only be used in the way expected, predicted, and endorsed by its designer. This chapter has been inspired by the Foucauldian theory of the power/knowledge nexus according to which power and knowledge are interwoven. 70 Power creates and is created by knowledge. For example, if technology designers are informed of a different body of knowledge

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around technology, they will approach technology in a different way, creating possibilities of a new technological future. We however reach here a dilemma which, while not new, 71 is becoming impossible to ignore: How can technology designers address in their design the ethical and societal issues associated with unexpected, unpredicted, and unendorsed uses of technology, without falling into the trap of believing that those can be completely eliminated? The suggested methodological tool, which in brief is the analysis of fictional scenarios, aims to offer elements of response to this challenge. Using fictional scenarios of close-future technology enables a dialogue between technology designers and social scientists, producing a new collaborative body of knowledge. 72 In his writings, Foucault “dissolved the traditional distinction between power and knowledge, whereby knowledge may lead to power, or power may be enhanced by the acquisition of knowledge.” 73 Therefore, drawing mainly upon surveillance studies literature and the state of the art on current technological developments, we explored three selected episodes of the Black Mirror series aiming to increase awareness on the societal implications of not-so-futuristic technological advancements. NOTES 1. Lyon, David. “Everyday surveillance: Personal data and social classifications.” Information, Communication & Society 5, no. 2 (2002): 242–257. 2. Lyon, David. “Digital citizenship and surveillance| surveillance culture: Engagement, exposure, and ethics in digital modernity.” International Journal of Communication 11 (2017): 19. 3. Dencik, Lina, Arne Hintz, and Jonathan Cable. “Towards data justice? The ambiguity of anti-surveillance resistance in political activism.” Big Data & Society 3, no. 2 (2016): 1–12. 4. Zurawski, Nils. “Local practice and global data: loyalty cards, social practices, and consumer surveillance.” The Sociological Quarterly 52, no. 4 (2011): 509–527. 5. Barnard-Wills, David. “UK news media discourses of surveillance.” The Sociological Quarterly 52, no. 4 (2011): 548–567. 6. Sewell, Graham, and James R. Barker. “Neither good, nor bad, but dangerous: Surveillance as an ethical paradox.” Ethics and Information Technology 3, no. 3 (2001): 181–194. 7. Lyon, David. The electronic eye: The rise of surveillance society. University of Minnesota Press, 1994; Castells, Manuel. The information age: Economy, society and culture. Vol. 2, The power of identity. Blackwell, 1997. 8. Ibid., viii. 9. Gilmore, James N. “Everywear: The quantified self and wearable fitness technologies.” New Media & Society 18, no. 11 (2016): 2524–2539. 10. Payne, Adrian, and Pennie Frow. “A strategic framework for customer relationship management.” Journal of Marketing 69, no. 4 (2005): 167–176. 11. Andrejevic, Mark. “The work of watching one another: Lateral surveillance, risk, and governance.” Surveillance & Society 2, no. 4 (2002); Fuchs, Christian, Kees Boersma, Anders Albrechtslund, and Marisol Sandoval, eds. Internet and surveillance: The challenges of Web 2.0 and social media. Vol. 16. Routledge, 2013; and Wood, David Murakami, and Kirstie Ball. “Brandscapes of control? Surveillance, marketing and the

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co-construction of subjectivity and space in neo-liberal capitalism.” Marketing Theory 13, no. 1 (2013): 47–67. 12. Pridmore, Jason. “Consumer Surveillance: Context, Perspectives and Concerns in the Personal Information Economy.” Handbook of Surveillance Studies. Routledge. Google Scholar (2012). 13. Lyon, David. ed. Surveillance as social sorting: Privacy, risk, and digital discrimination. Psychology Press, 2003. 14. Ceyhan, Ayse. “Surveillance as biopower.” Routledge Handbook of Surveillance Studies (2012): 38. 15. Foucault, discussed in Lyon, David. The electronic eye: The rise of surveillance society. University of Minnesota Press, 1994, 26. 16. Dencik, Hintz, and Cable, “Towards data justice? The ambiguity of anti-surveillance resistance in political activism.” 17. Amoore, Louise. “Biometric borders: Governing mobilities in the war on terror.” Political geography 25, no. 3 (2006): 336–351, 337. 18. Sewell, Graham, and James R. Barker. “Neither good, nor bad, but dangerous: Surveillance as an ethical paradox.” Ethics and Information Technology 3, no. 3 (2001): 181–194, in Sewell, Graham. “Organization, employees and surveillance.” Routledge Handbook of Surveillance Studies (2012), 307. 19. Rieder, Gernot, and Judith Simon. “Datatrust: Or, the political quest for numerical evidence and the epistemologies of Big Data.” Big Data & Society 3, no. 1 (2016), 1. 20. Iliadis, Andrew, and Federica Russo. “Critical data studies: An introduction.” Big Data & Society 3, no. 2 (2016), 1. 21. Ibid., 5. 22. Simon, Bart. “The return of panopticism: Supervision, subjection and the new surveillance.” Surveillance & Society 3, no. 1 (2002), 15. 23. Ball, Kirstie. “Exposure: Exploring the subject of surveillance.” Information, Communication & Society 12, no. 5 (2009): 639–657. 24. Kerr, Ian R., Jennifer Barrigar, Jacquelyn Burkell, and Katie Black. “Soft surveillance, hard consent.” (2006). 25. Lyon, “Digital citizenship and surveillance| surveillance culture: Engagement, exposure, and ethics in digital modernity.” 26. Lyon, “Digital citizenship and surveillance| surveillance culture: Engagement, exposure, and ethics in digital modernity.” 27. Ibid., 826. 28. Foucault, Michel. Power/knowledge: Selected interviews and other writings, 1972–1977. Pantheon, 1980. 29. Jørgensen, Marianne W., and Louise J. Phillips. Discourse analysis as theory and method. Sage, 2002, 14. 30. Foucault, Michel. Power/knowledge: Selected interviews and other writings, 1972–1977. Pantheon, 1980. 31. See for example Hill, Malcolm. “Participatory research with children.” Child & Family Social Work 2, no. 3 (1997): 171–183, 177; and Finch, Janet. “The vignette technique in survey research.” Sociology 21, no. 1 (1987): 105–114 105. 32. Barbour, Rose. “Doing focus groups (book 4 of the SAGE qualitative research kit)” (2007). 33. Mancini, Clara, Yvonne Rogers, Arosha K. Bandara, Tony Coe, Lukasz Jedrzejczyk, Adam N. Joinson, Blaine A. Price, Keerthi Thomas, and Bashar Nuseibeh. “Contravision: Exploring users’ reactions to futuristic technology.” In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp. 153–162. ACM, 2010. 34. See for example McLellan, Hilary. “Digital storytelling in higher education.” Journal of Computing in Higher Education 19, no. 1 (2007): 65–79; and Robin, Bernard R. “Digital storytelling: A powerful technology tool for the 21st century classroom.” Theory into practice 47, no. 3 (2008): 220–228. 35. See for example Hull, Glynda A., and Mira-Lisa Katz. “Crafting an agentive self: Case studies of digital storytelling.” Research in the Teaching of English (2006): 43–81;

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and Nicklas, Daniel, J. Lindsey Lane, Janice Hanson, Jason Owens, and Meghan Treitz. “Using digital stories to reflect on the culture of overuse, misuse, and underuse in medicine and enhance the patient-provider relationship.” Academic pediatrics 17, no. 6 (2017): 694–696. 36. See for example, Li, Jiwei, Will Monroe, Alan Ritter, Michel Galley, Jianfeng Gao, and Dan Jurafsky. “Deep reinforcement learning for dialogue generation.” arXiv (2016). 37. See for a recent example, Xu, Anbang, Zhe Liu, Yufan Guo, Vibha Sinha, and Rama Akkiraju. “A new chatbot for customer service on social media.” In Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp. 3506–3510. ACM, 2017. 38. See for example, Nandi, Arnab, and H. V. Jagadish. “Effective phrase prediction.” In Proceedings of the 33rd international conference on Very large data bases, pp. 219–230. VLDB Endowment, 2007. 39. Wakefield, Jane. “Microsoft chatbot is taught to swear on Twitter.” BBC News 24 (2016). 40. See for example Bridge, M. “Good grief: chatbots will let you talk to dead relatives,” The Times (2016), https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/bots-that-let-you-speakwith-the-dead-vg8x7dc86. Retrieved 30 August 2017. 41. Gane, Nicholas. “The governmentalities of neoliberalism: Panopticism, postpanopticism and beyond.” The Sociological Review 60, no. 4 (2012): 611–634. 42. Lodge, Juliet, ed. Are you who you say you are?: The EU and biometric borders. Wolf Legal Publishers, 2007. 43. Solove, Daniel J. Nothing to hide: The false tradeoff between privacy and security. Yale University Press, 2011. 44. Brunton, Finn, and Helen Nissenbaum. Obfuscation: A user’s guide for privacy and protest. MIT Press, 2015, 164. 45. Brubaker, Jed R., Lynn S. Dombrowski, Anita M. Gilbert, Nafiri Kusumakaulika, and Gillian R. Hayes. “Stewarding a legacy: Responsibilities and relationships in the management of post-mortem data.” In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp. 4157–4166. ACM, 2014. 46. See for example, Edwards, Lilian, and Edina Harbinja. “‘What happens to my Facebook profile when I die?’: Legal issues around transmission of digital Assets on death.” In Digital Legacy and Interaction, pp. 115–144. Springer, 2013; Leaver, Tama. “Researching the ends of identity: Birth and death on social media.” Social Media+ Society 1, no. 1 (2015): 1–2; and Watkins, Ashley F. “Digital properties and death: What will your heirs have access to after you die.” Buff. L. Rev. 62 (2014): 193. 47. Gurrin, Cathal, Alan F. Smeaton, and Aiden R. Doherty. “Lifelogging: Personal big data.” Foundations and Trends® in Information Retrieval 8, no. 1 (2014): 1–125. 48. BBC News, “Meteor highlights rise of dashboard cameras in Russia,” BBC News (2013). http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-21478361. Retrieved 30 August 2017. 49. Sako, Yoichiro, Masanori Iwasaki, Kazunori Hayashi, Takayasu Kon, Takatoshi Nakamura, Tomoya Onuma, and Akira Tange. “Contact lens and storage medium.” U.S. Patent Application 14/785,249, filed April 7, 2016. 50. Ariel, Barak, Sutherland, A., Henstock, D., Young, J., Drover, P., Sykes, J., and Henderson, R. “Report: Increases in police use of force in the presence of body-worn cameras are driven by officer discretion: A protocol-based subgroup analysis of ten randomized experiments.” Journal of Experimental Criminology 12, no. 3 (2016): 453–463. 51. Mann, Steve, Jason Nolan, and Barry Wellman. “Sousveillance: Inventing and using wearable computing devices for data collection in surveillance environments.” Surveillance & society 1, no. 3 (2002): 331–355. 52. Taylor, Emmeline. “Lights, camera, redaction . . . Police body-worn cameras: Autonomy, discretion and accountability.” Surveillance & Society 14, no. 1 (2016): 128. 53. See for example, Lippert, Randy K., and Bryce Clayton Newell. “Introduction: The privacy and surveillance implications of police body cameras.” Surveillance & Society 14, no. 1 (2016): 113.

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54. Hadjimatheou, Katerina. “The relative moral risks of untargeted and targeted surveillance.” Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 17, no. 2 (2014): 187–207. 55. Coudert, Fanny, Denis Butin, and Daniel Le Métayer. “Body-worn cameras for police accountability: Opportunities and risks.” Computer Law & Security Review 31, no. 6 (2015), 761. 56. See for example, Andrejevic, Mark. Ubiquitous surveillance. Routledge handbook of surveillance studies (2012): 91–98; and Wood, David Murakami, and Kirstie Ball. “Brandscapes of control? Surveillance, marketing and the co-construction of subjectivity and space in neo-liberal capitalism.” Marketing Theory 13, no. 1 (2013): 47–67. 57. See for example Agatston, Patricia W., Robin Kowalski, and Susan Limber. “Students’ perspectives on cyber bullying.” Journal of Adolescent Health 41, no. 6 (2007): S59S60; DeHue, Francine, Catherine Bolman, and Trijntje Völlink. “Cyberbullying: Youngsters’ experiences and parental perception.” CyberPsychology & Behavior 11, no. 2 (2008): 217–223; and Vandebosch, Heidi, and Katrien Van Cleemput. “Defining cyberbullying: A qualitative research into the perceptions of youngsters.” CyberPsychology & Behavior 11, no. 4 (2008): 499–503. 58. As a recent reference, see Royakkers, Lambèr, and Rinie van Est. “A literature review on new robotics: Automation from love to war.” International Journal of Social Robotics 7, no. 5 (2015): 549–570. 59. See for example, Mosterman, Pieter J., David Escobar Sanabria, Enes Bilgin, Kun Zhang, and Justyna Zander. “A heterogeneous fleet of vehicles for automated humanitarian missions.” Computing in Science & Engineering 16, no. 3 (2014): 90–95. 60. Murty, Rohan Narayana, Geoffrey Mainland, Ian Rose, Atanu Roy Chowdhury, Abhimanyu Gosain, Josh Bers, and Matt Welsh. “Citysense: An urban-scale wireless sensor network and testbed.” In Technologies for Homeland Security, 2008 IEEE Conference on, pp. 583–588. IEEE, 2008. 61. See Cavoukian, A. “Privacy and drones: Unmanned aerial vehicles (pp. 1–30).” Ontario, Canada: Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario, Canada (2012); Calo, M. Ryan. “The drone as a privacy catalyst.” Stan. L. Rev. Online 64 (2011): 29; and Clarke, Roger. “The regulation of civilian drones’ impacts on behavioural privacy.” Computer Law & Security Review 30, no. 3 (2014): 286–305. 62. Wall, Tyler, and Torin Monahan. “Surveillance and violence from afar: The politics of drones and liminal security-scapes.” Theoretical Criminology 15, no. 3 (2011): 239–254. 63. Cavoukian, A. “Privacy and drones: Unmanned aerial vehicles (pp. 1–30).” Ontario, Canada: Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario, Canada (2012), 4. 64. Ibid. 65. Finn, Rachel L., and David Wright. “Unmanned aircraft systems: Surveillance, ethics and privacy in civil applications.” Computer Law & Security Review 28, no. 2 (2012): 184–194. 66. Tang, Alice. “Hacking back against cyber attacks.” Chicago Policy Review (Online) (2015). 67. Ibid.; Harrington, Sean L. “Cyber security active defense: Playing with fire or sound risk management.” Richmond Journal of Law & Technology 20, no. 4 (2014): 12. 68. For example Heartbleed made one of the most fundamental security mechanisms of the Internet itself vulnerable to attacks, see Durumeric, Zakir, James Kasten, David Adrian, J. Alex Halderman, Michael Bailey, Frank Li, Nicolas Weaver et al. “The matter of heartbleed.” In Proceedings of the 2014 Conference on Internet Measurement Conference, pp. 475–488. ACM, 2014. 69. Carlsson, Anders. “The forgotten pioneers of creative hacking and social networking–Introducing the demoscene.” Re: live16 (2009); and Rosner, Daniela, and Jonathan Bean. “Learning from IKEA hacking: I’m not one to decoupage a tabletop and call it a day.” In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp. 419–422. ACM, 2009. 70. Foucault, Michel. Power/knowledge: Selected interviews and other writings, 1972–1977. Pantheon, 1980.

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71. Rhodes, Richard. The making of the atomic bomb. Simon and Schuster, 2012. 72. d’Aquin, Mathieu, Pinelopi Troullinou, Noel O’Connor, Aindrias Cullen, Gráinne Faller, and Louise Holden. “Towards an ‘Ethics in Design’ methodology for AI research projects.” In Proceedings of the Artificial Intelligence, Ethics, and Society conference (AIES), AAAI/ACM (forthcoming, 2018). 73. Townley, Barbara. “Foucault, power/knowledge, and its relevance for human resource management.” Academy of Management Review 18, no. 3 (1993): 518–545.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Agatston, Patricia W., Robin Kowalski, and Susan Limber. “Students’ perspectives on cyber bullying.” Journal of Adolescent Health 41, no. 6 (2007): S59–S60. Amoore, Louise. “Biometric borders: Governing mobilities in the war on terror.” Political geography 25, no. 3 (2006): 336–351. Anderson, Chris. “The end of theory: The data deluge makes the scientific method obsolete.” Wired (23 June 2008). Available at: http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/ magazine/16–07/pb_theory (accessed 6 March 2018). Andrejevic, Mark. “The work of watching one another: Lateral surveillance, risk, and governance.” Surveillance & Society 2, no. 4 (2002). ———. “The work that affective economics does.” Cultural studies 25, no. 4–5 (2011): 604–620. ———. “Ubiquitous surveillance.” Routledge handbook of surveillance studies (2012): 91–98. Ariel, Barak, Alex Sutherland, Darren Henstock, Josh Young, Paul Drover, Jayne Sykes, and Ryan Henderson. “Report: Increases in police use of force in the presence of body-worn cameras are driven by officer discretion: A protocol-based subgroup analysis of ten randomized experiments.” Journal of Experimental Criminology 12, no. 3 (2016): 453–463. Ball, Kirstie. “Exposure: Exploring the subject of surveillance.” Information, Communication & Society 12, no. 5 (2009): 639–657. Barbour, Rose. “Doing focus groups (book 4 of the SAGE qualitative research kit).” (2007). Barnard-Wills, David. “UK news media discourses of surveillance.” The Sociological Quarterly 52, no. 4 (2011): 548–567. Bauman, Zygmunt. Liquid modernity. Cambridge: Polity (2000). BBC News, “Meteor highlights rise of dashboard cameras in Russia,” BBC News (2013). http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-21478361. Retrieved 30 August 2017. Bridge, M. “Good grief: Chatbots will let you talk to dead relatives,” The Times (2016), https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/bots-that-let-you-speak-with-the-deadvg8x7dc86. Retrieved 30 August 2017. Brubaker, Jed R., Lynn S. Dombrowski, Anita M. Gilbert, Nafiri Kusumakaulika, and Gillian R. Hayes. “Stewarding a legacy: Responsibilities and relationships in the management of post-mortem data.” In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp. 4157–4166. ACM, 2014. Brunton, Finn, and Helen Nissenbaum. Obfuscation: A user’s guide for privacy and protest. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015. Calo, M. Ryan. “The drone as a privacy catalyst.” Stan. L. Rev. Online 64 (2011): 29. Carlsson, Anders. The forgotten pioneers of creative hacking and social networking–Introducing the demoscene. Re: live16 (2009). Castells, Manuel. The information age: Economy, society and culture. Vol. 2, The power of identity. Hoboken, NJ: Blackwell, 1997. Cavoukian, A. “Privacy and drones: Unmanned aerial vehicles (pp. 1–30).” Ontario: Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario, Canada (2012). Ceyhan, Ayse. “Surveillance as biopower.” Routledge Handbook of Surveillance Studies (2012): 38.

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Clarke, Roger. “The regulation of civilian drones’ impacts on behavioural privacy.” Computer Law & Security Review 30, no. 3 (2014): 286–305. Coudert, Fanny, Denis Butin, and Daniel Le Métayer. “Body-worn cameras for police accountability: Opportunities and risks.” Computer law & security review 31, no. 6 (2015): 749–762. d’Aquin, Mathieu, Pinelopi Troullinou, Noel O’Connor, Aindrias Cullen, Gráinne Faller, and Louise Holden. “Towards an “Ethics in Design” methodology for AI research projects.” In Proceedings of the Artificial Intelligence, Ethics, and Society conference (AIES), AAAI/ACM (forthcoming, 2018). DeHue, Francine, Catherine Bolman, and Trijntje Völlink. “Cyberbullying: Youngsters’ experiences and parental perception.” CyberPsychology & Behavior 11, no. 2 (2008): 217–223. Deleuze, Gilles. “Postscript on control societies.” Negotiations: 1972–1990 (1995): 177–182. Dencik, Lina, Arne Hintz, and Jonathan Cable. “Towards data justice? The ambiguity of anti-surveillance resistance in political activism.” Big Data & Society 3, no. 2 (2016): 1–12. Durumeric, Zakir, James Kasten, David Adrian, J. Alex Halderman, Michael Bailey, Frank Li, Nicolas Weaver et al. “The matter of heartbleed.” In Proceedings of the 2014 Conference on Internet Measurement Conference, pp. 475–488. ACM, 2014. Edwards, Lilian, and Edina Harbinja. “‘What happens to my Facebook profile when I die?’: Legal issues around transmission of digital assets on death.” In Digital legacy and interaction: Post-mortem issues, ed. Cristiano Michel and Vincinius Carvalho Pereira, pp. 115–144. Springer, 2013. Finch, Janet. “The vignette technique in survey research.” Sociology 21, no. 1 (1987): 105–114. Finn, Rachel L., and David Wright. “Unmanned aircraft systems: Surveillance, ethics and privacy in civil applications.” Computer Law & Security Review 28, no. 2 (2012): 184–194. Foucault, Michel. Power/knowledge: Selected interviews and other writings, 1972–1977. New York: Pantheon, 1980. Fuchs, Christian, Kees Boersma, Anders Albrechtslund, and Marisol Sandoval, eds. Internet and surveillance: The challenges of Web 2.0 and social media. Vol. 16. Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2013. Gane, Nicholas. “The governmentalities of neoliberalism: Panopticism, post-panopticism and beyond.” The Sociological Review 60, no. 4 (2012): 611–634. Gilmore, James N. “Everywear: The quantified self and wearable fitness technologies.” New Media & Society 18, no. 11 (2016): 2524–2539. Gitelman, Lisa, ed. Raw data is an oxymoron. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013. Gurrin, Cathal, Alan F. Smeaton, and Aiden R. Doherty. “Lifelogging: Personal big data.” Foundations and Trends® in Information Retrieval 8, no. 1 (2014): 1–125. Hadjimatheou, Katerina. “The relative moral risks of untargeted and targeted surveillance.” Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 17, no. 2 (2014): 187–207. Harrington, Sean L. “Cyber security active defense: Playing with fire or sound risk management.” Richmond Journal of Law & Technology 20, no. 4 (2014): 12. Hill, Malcolm. “Participatory research with children.” Child & family social work 2, no. 3 (1997): 171–183. Hull, Glynda A., and Mira-Lisa Katz. “Crafting an agentive self: Case studies of digital storytelling.” Research in the Teaching of English (2006): 43–81. Iliadis, Andrew, and Federica Russo. “Critical data studies: An introduction.” Big Data & Society 3, no. 2 (2016): 1–7 Jørgensen, Marianne W., and Louise J. Phillips. Discourse analysis as theory and method. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2002. Kerr, Ian R., Jennifer Barrigar, Jacquelyn Burkell, and Katie Black. “Soft surveillance, hard consent.” Personally Yours, vol. 6 (2006): 1–14.

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Leaver, Tama. “Researching the ends of identity: Birth and death on social media.” Social Media+ Society 1, no. 1 (2015): 1–2 Li, Jiwei, Will Monroe, Alan Ritter, Michel Galley, Jianfeng Gao, and Dan Jurafsky. “Deep reinforcement learning for dialogue generation.” arXiv (2016). Lippert, Randy K., and Bryce Clayton Newell. “Introduction: The privacy and surveillance implications of police body cameras.” Surveillance & Society 14, no. 1 (2016): 113. Lodge, Juliet, ed. Are you who you say you are?: The EU and biometric borders. Oisterwijk, the Nertherlands: Wolf Legal Publishers, 2007. Lyon, David. “Digital citizenship and surveillance| surveillance culture: Engagement, exposure, and ethics in digital modernity.” International Journal of Communication 11 (2017): 19. ———. Surveillance studies: An overview. Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2007. ———. ed. Surveillance as social sorting: Privacy, risk, and digital discrimination. Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2003. ———. “Everyday surveillance: Personal data and social classifications.” Information, Communication & Society 5, no. 2 (2002): 242–257. ———. The electronic eye: The rise of surveillance society. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994. Mancini, Clara, Yvonne Rogers, Arosha K. Bandara, Tony Coe, Lukasz Jedrzejczyk, Adam N. Joinson, Blaine A. Price, Keerthi Thomas, and Bashar Nuseibeh. “Contravision: Exploring users’ reactions to futuristic technology.” In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp. 153–162. ACM, 2010. Marx, Gary T. “A tack in the shoe: Neutralizing and resisting the new surveillance.” Journal of Social Issues 59, no. 2 (2003): 369–390. Mann, Steve, Jason Nolan, and Barry Wellman. “Sousveillance: Inventing and using wearable computing devices for data collection in surveillance environments.” Surveillance & society 1, no. 3 (2002): 331–355. McLellan, Hilary. “Digital storytelling in higher education.” Journal of Computing in Higher Education 19, no. 1 (2007): 65–79. Mosterman, Pieter J., David Escobar Sanabria, Enes Bilgin, Kun Zhang, and Justyna Zander. “A heterogeneous fleet of vehicles for automated humanitarian missions.” Computing in Science & Engineering 16, no. 3 (2014): 90–95. Murty, Rohan Narayana, Geoffrey Mainland, Ian Rose, Atanu Roy Chowdhury, Abhimanyu Gosain, Josh Bers, and Matt Welsh. “Citysense: An urban-scale wireless sensor network and testbed.” In Technologies for Homeland Security, 2008 IEEE Conference on, pp. 583–588. IEEE, 2008. Nandi, Arnab, and H. V. Jagadish. “Effective phrase prediction.” In Proceedings of the 33rd international conference on Very large data bases, pp. 219–230. VLDB Endowment, 2007. Nicklas, Daniel, J. Lindsey Lane, Janice Hanson, Jason Owens, and Meghan Treitz. “Using digital stories to reflect on the culture of overuse, misuse, and underuse in medicine and enhance the patient-provider relationship.” Academic pediatrics 17, no. 6 (2017): 694–696. Payne, Adrian, and Pennie Frow. “A strategic framework for customer relationship management.” Journal of marketing 69, no. 4 (2005): 167–176. Pridmore, Jason. “4 The consumer–citizen nexus.” The Transformation of Citizenship, Volume 2: Boundaries of Inclusion and Exclusion, ed. Jürgen Mackert and Bryan S. Turner. Abingdon, UK: Routledge (2017): 51. ———. “Consumer Surveillance: Context, Perspectives and Concerns in the Personal Information Economy.” Handbook of Surveillance Studies. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Google Scholar (2012). Rhodes, Richard. The making of the atomic bomb. Simon and Schuster, 2012. Rieder, Gernot, and Judith Simon. “Datatrust: Or, the political quest for numerical evidence and the epistemologies of Big Data.” Big Data & Society 3, no. 1 (2016): 1–6.

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Robin, Bernard R. “Digital storytelling: A powerful technology tool for the 21st century classroom.” Theory into practice 47, no. 3 (2008): 220–228. Rosner, Daniela, and Jonathan Bean. “Learning from IKEA hacking: I’m not one to decoupage a tabletop and call it a day.” In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp. 419–422. ACM, 2009. Royakkers, Lambèr, and Rinie van Est. “A literature review on new robotics: automation from love to war.” International journal of social robotics 7, no. 5 (2015): 549–570. Sako, Yoichiro, Masanori Iwasaki, Kazunori Hayashi, Takayasu Kon, Takatoshi Nakamura, Tomoya Onuma, and Akira Tange. “Contact lens and storage medium.” U.S. Patent Application 14/785,249, filed April 7, 2016. Sewell, Graham. “Organization, employees and surveillance.” Routledge Handbook of Surveillance Studies Abingdon, UK: Routlege (2012): 303. Sewell, Graham, and James R. Barker. “Neither good, nor bad, but dangerous: Surveillance as an ethical paradox.” Ethics and Information Technology 3, no. 3 (2001): 181–194. Simon, Bart. “The return of panopticism: Supervision, subjection and the new surveillance.” Surveillance & Society 3, no. 1 (2002). Solove, Daniel J. Nothing to hide: The false tradeoff between privacy and security. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011. Tang, Alice. “Hacking back against cyber attacks.” Chicago Policy Review (Online) (2015). Taylor, Emmeline. “Lights, camera, redaction . . . Police body-worn cameras: autonomy, discretion and accountability.” Surveillance & Society 14, no. 1 (2016): 128. Townley, Barbara. “Foucault, power/knowledge, and its relevance for human resource management.” Academy of Management review 18, no. 3 (1993): 518–545. Vandebosch, Heidi, and Katrien Van Cleemput. “Defining cyberbullying: A qualitative research into the perceptions of youngsters.” CyberPsychology & Behavior 11, no. 4 (2008): 499–503. Wakefield, Jane. “Microsoft chatbot is taught to swear on Twitter.” BBC News 24 (2016). Wall, Tyler, and Torin Monahan. “Surveillance and violence from afar: The politics of drones and liminal security-scapes.” Theoretical Criminology 15, no. 3 (2011): 239–254. Watkins, Ashley F. “Digital properties and death: What will your heirs have access to after you die.” Buff. L. Rev. 62 (2014): 193. Wood, David Murakami, and Kirstie Ball. “Brandscapes of control? Surveillance, marketing and the co-construction of subjectivity and space in neo-liberal capitalism.” Marketing Theory 13, no. 1 (2013): 47–67. Xu, Anbang, Zhe Liu, Yufan Guo, Vibha Sinha, and Rama Akkiraju. “A new chatbot for customer service on social media.” In Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp. 3506–3510. ACM, 2017. Zurawski, Nils. “Local practice and global data: Loyalty cards, social practices, and consumer surveillance.” The Sociological Quarterly 52, no. 4 (2011): 509–527.

Section 3

The Spectacle and Hyperreality

The Twilight Zone senses the rise of the spectacle and hyperreality before the appearance of Guy Debord and Jean Baudrillard. For Debord, we live in a “society of the spectacle,” where the populace is separated from reality and powered by media technologies largely under the directives of corporate capitalism. Baudrillard takes the idea into more extreme conditions, arguing that media culture has replaced the real with signs and symbols of the real, such that we live in a world of simulacra, a hyperreal world where copies reign supreme and originals are no longer necessary. Martha learns this in “Be Right Back” when the Ash-bot cannot live up to the real Ash. She cries: “You’re just a few ripples of you. There’s no history in you. You’re just a performance of stuff that he performed without thinking, and it’s not enough.” We live in a world of total mediation, a society of endless spectacles and staged events, all commodified, exchanged, and worshipped as the improved replacement to cover for the disappointment of the real. Black Mirror tackles the ramped up twenty-first-century spectacle and hyperreality in numerous episodes. To explore some of these episodes, authors in this third section rely on Baudrillard’s and Debord’s critiques, exhibiting their continued relevance. Michael Mario Albrecht argues that Waldo challenges the reality principle: “By unabashedly insisting upon his constructed-ness, Waldo is able to demonstrate that all of the candidates are, in fact, constructions.” Drawing from Baudrillard’s view of science fiction, he toys with the idea of progressive politics that exist within the hyperreal, instead of wishing for the impossible exit to some “real” world. Manel Jiménez-Morales and Marta Lopera-Mármol link many of Baudrillard’s theories to specific plots and digital tools within Black Mirror episodes. They present a fundamental “‘what if’ between Baudrillard’s theories and present social phenomena.” Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns also draws from multiple episodes, viewing the storylines through Debord’s notion of the spectacle. He explores how the spectacle turns us into commodities while distracting and pacifying the masses.

SEVEN Waldo Wins IRL Donald Trump, Black Mirror, and the Politics of Jean Baudrillard’s Hyperreal Michael Mario Albrecht

Three days after the 2016 US presidential election, UK entertainment blogger Sarah Doran penned an article titled “Black Mirror, President Trump and Prophecy—Can TV Really Predict the Future?” 1 Her article includes a screen shot from Black Mirror’s official Twitter account on election night; the tweet reads: “This isn’t an episode. This isn’t marketing. This is reality.” 2 Someone on the Black Mirror staff was acutely aware that the spectacular and seemingly surreal ascendency of Donald Trump to the presidency aligned with the spectacular and often surreal stories that the anthology series presents. While the election-night tweet was intended as a tongue-in-cheek quip, it reveals an anxiety that many feel about living in a contemporary media environment that French theorist Jean Baudrillard would refer to as “a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal” in “The Precession of Simulacra.” 3 The election of Donald Trump—a hyperreal star of reality television, inductee to the professional wrestling hall-of-fame, and celebrity whose political campaign was dismissed by many as a publicity stunt—to the office of president of the United States challenged existing notions of reality to the point at which many in the country needed Black Mirror to assure them that the world of science fiction had not completely eclipsed the realm of reality as such. In this chapter, I focus on “The Waldo Moment,” a particularly clairvoyant episode of Black Mirror, and situate the episode in relation to the 89

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election of Donald Trump and the theoretical framework of Jean Baudrillard. 4 Specifically, I position the episode and the election in terms of what Baudrillard calls simulacra and simulation and suggest that Baudrillard’s notion of fatal strategies might offer a point of resistance in a world in which traditional politics appear to offer no way out of a mediated environment in which distinctions between reality and representation have collapsed. BAUDRILLARD, HYPERREALITY, AND SCIENCE FICTION Baudrillard begins his famous essay “The Precession of Simulacra” with a Borges story about a map that is so detailed that it becomes the selfsame replica of the territory that it purports to map. In the traditional relationship between reality and representation, reality ontologically precedes representation. He writes that “the territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it. It is nevertheless the map that precedes the territory.” 5 This for him is the logic of hyperreality, in which representation precedes reality, and vestiges of reality “persist here and there” in deserted areas that elude the nearly all-encompassing terrain of representation. 6 While the ontological relationship between the real and the representation has shifted, a hyperreal society yearns for a reality that no longer exists. Baudrillard asserts that the “characteristic hysteria of our times [is] that of the production and reproduction of the real.” 7 He goes on to state that “what every society looks for in continuing to produce, and to overproduce, is to restore the real that escapes it . . . it retains all the features, the whole discourse of traditional production, but it is no longer anything but its scaled-down refraction . . . Thus everywhere the hyperrealism of simulation is translated by the hallucinatory resemblance of the real to itself.” 8 Hyperreality produces a simulation that mimics and resembles the real, but that no longer maintains any connection to an ontological relationship wherein reality precedes its representation. In “Simulacra and Science Fiction,” Baudrillard specifically applies his theoretical framework to science fiction, and isolates three logics of science fiction that correspond with the three orders of simulacra, the last of which is hypperreality. 9 A third-order simulacrum or simulation is a representation with no original—a representation that exists only in relation to other simulacra. 10 In “The Precession of Simulacra,” he argues that as the representation and reality become one and the same, “the whole system becomes weightless, it is no longer itself anything but a giant simulacrum—not unreal, but a simulacrum, that is to say never exchanged for the real, but exchanged for itself, in an uninterrupted circuit without reference or circumference.” 11 As simulacra come to domi-

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nate contemporary culture, science fiction faces new challenges, which might in fact dismantle the logic of science fiction. The first kind of science fiction is a transcendent model in which the fiction exists in a utopian (or dystopian) space that is unrelated to reality. 12 In the second type, the real world is projected into a different time and space. This type reflects what Baudrillard refers to as “the good old imaginary of science fiction.” 13 In this version, aspects of society are amplified or distorted, and reflect “the unbounded projection of the real world of production, but it is not qualitatively different from it.” 14 The distance between the real and the imaginary creates a gap in which ideological critique can occur. In this stage, the world that “good old” science fiction creates has not yet come to pass, and thus it remains possible to change or to reflect upon the distance between reality and the imaginary world of science fiction. He then poses the question: “what happens when this distance, including that between the real and the imaginary, tends to absorb itself, to be reabsorbed on behalf of the model?” 15 For Baudrillard, this is the third level of science fiction, which exists at the level of the hyperreal. In this version, “the models no longer constitute either transcendence or projection, they no longer constitute the imaginary in relation to the real, they are themselves an anticipation of the real, and thus leave no room for any sort of fictional anticipation—they are immanent, and thus leave no room for any kind of imaginary transcendence. 16 Black Mirror explores the terrain of science fiction as a third-order simulacrum, or simulation, in which the real and the imaginary exist in the same hyperreal space. In fact, Baudrillard would suggest that Black Mirror is something different from science fiction. For him, “the good old imaginary of science fiction is dead and that something else is in the process of emerging (not only in fiction but in theory as well).” 17 One goal of contemporary scholars and theorists should be to wrestle with that “something else” that is in the process of emerging; this something else dwells within the terrain of the hyperreal. WALDO AND BAUDRILLARD In “The Waldo Moment,” a cartoon bear named Waldo gains notoriety for mocking a politician as a sidekick on a television talk show and uses that notoriety to mount a campaign for a UK parliamentary seat. Waldo curses liberally, demonstrates complete irreverence toward politicians and the political system, and stands in for a nihilist impulse in contemporary politics. Waldo represents a contrast to traditional political figures who are polished and successfully perform the part of the mainstream politician. Waldo’s rise is mirrored by a traditional campaign of the Labour candidate Gwendolyn Harris, who is running for the same seat.

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Both Harris and Waldo have no chance of winning the seat, which resides in a reliably Tory district, and the show points out the ways in which Harris’s campaign, which stands in for traditional politics, is equally as constructed, opportunistic, and nihilist as Waldo’s campaign. While both Harris and Waldo ultimately lose the parliamentary election, after the credits the show reveals a global post-apocalyptic military state in which images of Waldo proliferate. Waldo has moved from a representation of political dissatisfaction to a pure simulation, which for Baudrillard “has no relation to any reality whatsoever: it is its own pure simulacrum.” 18 The pure signifier of Waldo circulates against the backdrop of a fascistic police state, and Black Mirror suggests that as politics become decoupled from reality, the process opens up the possibility of a totalitarian society subsumed under the power of the sign. Waldo exists in relation to other traditional political figures, and his ability to out-maneuver them and his ability to gain political traction challenges the notion that he is a pretend candidate and they are real. A pivotal moment in the episode comes during a debate between Waldo, Harris, Liam Monroe (the conservative candidate), and two other candidates from minor parties. Monroe, whom Waldo has been following on the campaign trail and mocking from a screen on the side of a van, tries to defeat Waldo in the debate by outing the real-life person who performs the character of Waldo. Monroe reveals to the public that a man named James “Jamie” Salter is the person behind Waldo, and exposes him as a middling member of a comedy troupe and an actor whose greatest success was a commercial for high-interest personal loans. Salter seems flustered for a moment after Monroe outs him, but he ultimately uses his power as the voice of Waldo to attack Monroe for being such an entrenched politician that he is somehow less-than-human. After telling Monroe to go fuck himself, Waldo tells Monroe that “You’re a joke. You look less human than I do and I’m a made-up bear with a turquoise cock. What are you? You’re just an old attitude with new hair. Assuming you’re my superior because I’m not taking you seriously? No one takes you seriously; that’s why no one votes.” Here, Waldo is challenging the reality principle. He is not a fake candidate opposed to the real candidate of Monroe; rather, he is suggesting that both candidates are media constructions and that the distinction between a real candidate and a fake candidate is meaningless in the terrain of contemporary politics. The notion that the ostensibly fake candidate is just as real as those who possess actual flesh-and-blood reflects an inversion of reality presaged by Baudrillard, who claims that the main function of contemporary discourses and institutions is to conceal “the fact that the real is no longer real.” 19 For him, ostensibly fake places like Disneyland exist to reinforce the fact that the rest of a consumer-mediated environment are in fact real. He writes that “Disneyland exists in order to hide that it is the ‘real’

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country, all of ‘real’ American that is Disneyland . . . Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real.” 20 However, the process ultimately becomes reversed as Disneyland comes to seem more real than ostensibly real places. Waldo originally appeared on a comedic talk show, a genre that traditionally falls under the umbrella of entertainment as that which is fake. When Waldo moved from the terrain of entertainment to the presumably more real sphere of politics, he collapses that distinction. By unabashedly insisting upon his constructed-ness, Waldo is able to demonstrate that all of the candidates are in fact constructions. Moreover, his unscripted populist message inverts the distinction between him and the other candidates by seeming refreshingly real by “telling it like it is.” While Waldo may not possess reality in the traditional sense, he exudes an authenticity that suggests that his connection to the people is more real than that of the establishment candidates. Another critical moment comes after the debate when Waldo’s producer, Tamzin, is trying to convince Salter to go on a political talk show. By this point in the episode, Salter has become completely disillusioned by his character and politics by this point, and wants to end the political campaign. As Tamzin tries to persuade him to continue, Salter insists that “Waldo’s not real.” Tamzin responds by saying “Exactly! That’s what you said [at the debate] that really hit home. He’s not real, but he’s realer than all the others.” Salter insists that “he doesn’t stand for anything.” His producer retorts that “at least he doesn’t pretend to.” Tamzin’s logic maintains that the obviously manufactured candidate of Waldo, a cartoon bear, is realer than the traditional candidates who are actual people. Here, Tamzin is articulating a slippage in the word “real,” which shifts from meaning a state of empirical reality to a notion of authenticity, which Waldo is able to perform in ways that elude the other candidates. Though Waldo is a media construction, he “keeps it real” by refusing to revere the other candidates or the political system more broadly. Waldo offers no pretenses that he is a legitimate political candidate, though the other candidates, running in an election in which the results were never in doubt, continue to act as if they are engaged in a meaningful election. Waldo’s presence in the election reveals the fact that the other candidates in the race are constructed commodities. At one point while Salter is desperately trying to dissuade Tamzin from going through with his appearance on the talk show, she reassures him by telling him that he would not look foolish because she would be there with him to “Google any facts, gives you stats, quotes, whatever you need.” Salter notes that “he’ll know there’s a team around me, he’ll see it.” Tamzin quips back, “Yeah good, I hope he does. I hope he points a camera at it. All the other MPs have got teams, we’re just more honest about it.” Waldo’s reveal is similar to the moment of disclosure in The Wizard of Oz when Toto, the dog, famously pulls aside a curtain to reveal that the

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Wizard is actually a spectacle controlled by an old man in a booth. 21 Once Toto pulls back the curtain, the man urges Dorothy and her friends to “pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.” Unlike The Wizard of Oz, “The Waldo Moment” is unconcerned with the man behind the curtain. The appeal of Waldo does not necessitate the public believing that a cartoon bear is real; in fact, the episode points to a reversal in which Waldo (a simulated image) is more real than Jamie Salter (an actual person). This point is reinforced as Salter ultimately quits in frustration, but Waldo continues to circulate as a global brand. Waldo’s usefulness as a signifier exceeds the man who initially created him. For Baudrillard, this places Waldo at the level of pure simulation. For him, “the era of simulation is inaugurated by a liquidation of all referentials . . . It is no longer a question of imitation, nor duplication, nor even parody. It is a question of substituting the signs of the real for the real.” 22 If at one point Waldo was tethered to Salter or to some component of reality, by the end, his image is reproduced with no relationship to Salter or indeed to any real human behind him. During the political campaign, showing that Waldo was a construction works to reinforce the fact that his political opponents were also media constructions; by the end of the episode, Waldo circulates as a floating signifier and no “man behind the curtain” is necessary to operate the wizard. The final scene portrays Salter as a homeless or displaced person who throws a rock at a screen displaying the image of Waldo, and riot police promptly reprimand him with a cattle prod and billy club. “The Waldo Moment” does not show the process through which Waldo moves from being a second-place political candidate to being an icon for global domination. It foreshadows the possibility earlier in the episode when a representative from an American corporation wants to use Waldo, who “could deliver any brand of political content, minus the potential downsides of a human messenger . . . You got a global political-entertainment product people actually want. You could roll this out worldwide.” The show only provides a brief glimpse of what this looks like in the episode’s postapocalyptic coda. By situating the dystopian future after the credits, the coda feels like a warning; if contemporary society keeps treating its politicians as celebrities and embracing the logic of simulation, a horrible future awaits. In the scene before the credits roll, the candidates for the parliamentary seat stand to hear the election results, which is a tradition in British politics. Waldo finishes in second place to the incumbent conservative Monroe. The message of the episode seems to be that Waldo has not won yet, but the logic of the character will prevail in the not-toodistant future.

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TRUMP IS WALDO Over three years after “The Waldo Moment” aired, Donald Trump won the election for president of the United States. Trump resembles Waldo in his crude language, his populist anti-politics message, and his familiarity as an established media figure. Many people on Twitter and the internet more broadly have made the comparison between Trump and Waldo. In a Washington Post think piece, Chris Cillizza notes the similarities between Trump’s primary race against Jeb Bush and Waldo’s race against Liam Monroe. Cillizza explains that traditional politicians like Monroe “have no idea how to handle Waldo because he is, well, a made-up bear.” 23 Similarly, Jeb Bush struggles to win a debate against Donald Trump. Cillizza writes that “Trump’s ability to say and do things no one else would makes it very difficult for Bush to win a fight with him. If your opponent doesn’t play by the rules—or doesn’t acknowledge there are rules at all—it’s no fun to play a game with him.” 24 As Cillizza suggests, challenging a person like Trump who refuses to engage in rules of traditional politics is frustrating; Monroe is clearly frustrated every time Waldo engages him and even more frustrated when the media and public take Waldo seriously. I would go a step further than Cillizza and argue that running against a candidate like Trump is more than “no fun,” but rather that it represents a serious challenge to the established order of politics. A Baudrillardian political space in which the relationship between media representations and “real life” is untethered creates the conditions of possibility for new kinds of politics. Donald Trump and Waldo both demonstrate this logic; however, I would suggest that those conditions of possibility enable both dangerous politics—such as the Trump presidency and the dystopian future presided over by a cartoon bear—as well as politics that might allow for political change in myriad other directions. Challenging the terrain of the political does not necessarily lead to horrible consequences. One of the goals of progressive scholars and theorists should be to reimagine political politics in ways that might challenge the existing system using similar techniques as Trump and Waldo, but that lead in different political directions. Writing on the night of the election, blogger Sabienna Bowman notes that “Trump is essentially Waldo. He’s a cartoonish man who avoids debates in favor of lewd language and insults. Even more disturbing, he’s gained traction with voters who feel disenchanted with politicians and would prefer a ‘real’ (but unqualified) candidate instead.” 25 As the election night transpires, she goes on to write that “it seems Waldo’s real-life moment has arrived, and anyone who has seen the apocalyptic end of the episode—which finds Waldo controlling people on an international level—are rightfully terrified right now.” 26 Donald Trump is the real-life manifestation of Waldo, and Bowman maintains that this connection is

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terrifying in the logic of the episode. In the episode’s narrative structure, the election of a person like Trump to the office of US president happens in the untold part of the story, between Waldo finishing second in an uncontested UK parliamentary seat and a global apocalyptic dystopia. As with Waldo, scholars and critics have shown the relationship between Donald Trump’s political ascendency and the work of Jean Baudrillard. For Baudrillard, though contemporary society has eclipsed traditional relationships with reality, societies hope to “restore the real that escapes it.” 27 The logic of hyperreality maintains that people maintain a desire for a stable reality, but are only offered a simulation of it. Writing for the Huffington Post, Rachel Veroff links the logic of Trumpism to the experience of the hyperreal. Engaging Baudrillard, she asserts that “‘Hyperreality’ refers to our inability to tell where the truth ends and the fantasy begins. For example, the slogan ‘Make America Great Again’ has caught on like wildfire. And yet, the people who rally around it do not seem troubled that they’re expressing nostalgia for a vague, past great version of this country that never existed.” 28 Similarly, Waldo stands in for an authentic populist representation of the voting public’s anger and disaffectedness with the political system. While there may never have been a time when political figures actually existed as an authentic representation of the people, politicians have become such robotic products of political and media machinery that the voters long for that authenticity that perhaps never existed. Just as Trump’s supporters are not troubled by the fact that America may never indeed have actually been great, Waldo’s supporters are unconcerned with the fact that the candidate projecting the most populist authenticity is actually a cartoon mouthed by a struggling comic actor. FATAL STRATEGIES Scholars often critique Baudrillard for embracing the proliferation of simulacra or for not offering a theory of resistance to the new terrain dominated by simulations. Douglas Kellner famously suggested that traditional critical theory and Marxist modes of analysis are still relevant while “New French Theory” (which he associates most strongly with Baudrillard) is “flawed and not of much use in helping us to understand and resolve many of the crucial theoretical and political problems that we currently face.” 29 For many Marxist scholars like Kellner, political resistance stems from exposing the underlying truth behind the simulations and the spectacle—they hope to pull the curtain open and expose the man behind the Great and Powerful Oz. “The Waldo Moment” reflects a desire to return to a world in which clear distinctions exist between real people and cartoon simulations; it demonstrates a nostalgia for a politics defined by humanness and not

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manipulated by political handlers or dominated by media spectacles. Baudrillard would argue that the path toward resistance is not one of turning away from the spectacle, but rather one of following the logic of the spectacle to its conclusion. He dubs these “fatal strategies,” which Kellner writes “push the values of the system to the extreme in the hopes of collapse or reversal.” 30 In Fatal Strategies, Baudrillard writes: “that things exhaust themselves in their spectacle—in a magic and artificial fetishism—is the distortion that serious minds will always oppose . . . But this spectacle that the moralists disapprove of is possibly the lesser evil.” 31 He goes on to suggest that “there is no liberation but this one: in the deepening of negative conditions. All forms that tend to project a dazzling and miraculous liberty are only revolutionary homilies.” 32 In other words, a politics based on exposing the spectacle and embracing the reality lurking beneath is useless in a world dominated by the logic of the hyperreal. Thus, a fatal strategy would call for progressives to embrace the logic of the hyperreal and push to the limits of a terrain dominated by spectacle. In Dream: Re-imagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy, Stephen Duncombe offers a desperate plea for progressives to embrace the politics of the spectacle. 33 He suggests that the politics of the spectacle does not have a particular political affiliation. Waldo and Trump can use the power of the media spectacle to embrace a wide range of political positions. The realm of the spectacle is where Donald Trump thrives; freed from any coherent ideology, he luxuriates in fantasy, and deftly negotiates the terrain of the spectacular. Trump built an entire campaign upon his ability to manipulate the media and to present himself and his supporters as a spectacle that resembles a reality show or a Barnumian carnival. Duncombe writes that “if progressives are going to engage, rather than ignore, the phantasmagoric terrain of politics, we need to learn from those who do spectacle best: the architects of Las Vegas, video game designers, advertising’s creative directors, and the producers and editors of celebrity media.” 34 Trump is the ultimate personification of the version of politics that Duncombe describes. He literally has a hand in Vegas architecture, advertising, and producing celebrity media, and he even had a 2002 video game titled Donald Trump’s Real Estate Tycoon. Rather than try to unmask Trump as a spectacular simulation, those interested in resisting Trump need to push the logic of the spectacle to its limits and learn from the ways he is able to navigate the political terrain deftly by embracing the logic of the spectacle. In “Why Theory?,” Baudrillard provides a glimpse of what a fatal strategy might look like. He argues for the importance of a version of critical theory and suggests amplifying the logic of hyperreality rather than pushing against it. For him, “to be the reflection of the real, or to enter into a relation of critical negativity with the real, cannot be theory’s goal.” 35 Further, “it is not enough for theory to describe and analyze, it

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must itself be an event in the universe it describes. To do so theory must partake of and become the acceleration of this logic.” 36 In other words, those attempting to theorize the particular conditions of hyperreality cannot rely upon traditional methods or tactics that try to challenge its logic by dismissing it as unreal. Confronting Waldo or Trump with facts or revealing them as frauds will prove futile; pulling back the curtain on the Wizard will have no effect. Instead, Baudrillard suggests pushing the logic of the hyperreal to its limits. He proclaims that “if the world is fatal, let us be more fatal. If it is indifferent, let us be more indifferent. We must conquer the world and seduce it through an indifference that is at least equal to the world’s.” 37 This may indeed be inspiring rhetoric, but imagining what this looks like is considerably more difficult. Traditional political commonsense would suggest trying to defeat the spectacle through rational grounded reality. In this logic, left-leaning theorists, politicians, and activists should embark upon media literacy programs that reject “fake news” and hyperbolic spectacle and teach voters to see through the mask of the spectacle and focus on “real issues” rather than be seduced by spectacle. For Baudrillard, those left-leaning theorists, politicians, and activists should instead work to be more spectacular and detached from traditional reality than Trump and the media that promote him; they should embrace the simulation and work to seduce the populace themselves. A year after the 2016 election, Aaron Blake penned an article for The Washington Post titled “The Top 15 Presidential Candidates for 2020, Ranked.” 38 Alongside the usual fare of former and current governors and senators were two potential candidates who stood out prominently: Oprah Winfrey and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. Both of these candidates might be able to use their position of considerable fame, wealth, and media savvy to form a mediated juggernaut and challenge Trump on his own terrain. If one accepts Baudrillard’s premise that contemporary society is already existing as a pure simulation in the terrain of hyperreality, than candidates like Winfrey and Johnson may be the best chance of prevailing and thriving in that kind of amplified mediated environment. “The Waldo Moment” posits one possible outcome of a politics dominated by spectacle, but simulation and simulacra are not beholden to any political ideology. This is not to say that the Black Mirror episode gets the logic of the spectacle wrong; rather, I suggest that the ellipsis between the end of the episode proper and the coda featuring a dystopian future allows space to conceive of alternative endings. The ellipsis reflects a last gasp of the episode to adhere to a logic of second-order simulacra, which Baudrillard might refer to as “good old” science fiction that maintains a “gap that leaves room for an ideal or critical projection.” 39 This allows the episode to function as a warning; we are not quite living in a dystopian nightmare of simulation, but that moment is not far off if we follow the

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logic to its extension. Here, a Baudrillardian logic might offer a kind of theoretical freedom from the teleological conclusion of the episode. In “On Nihilism,” Baudrillard suggests that rather than accepting a teleological logic, scholars and critics might embrace the logic of the “hypertelie” (hyperreality’s version of the telos), which “goes further than its own end. It would be our own mode of destroying finalities: going further, too far in the same direction—destruction of meaning through simulation, hypersimulation, hypertelie.” 40 Instead of looking at the gap between a problematic present and a nightmarish future, scholars and theorists should work to imagine what comes (ontologically) after a traditional telos. What does a post-dystopia look like? What does it mean to transgress the telos? For clues, scholars and theorists should look to the strategies of the Trump campaign and presidency—essentially the logic of Waldo—not just as portending bleak futures, but as providing a set of strategies that those invested in progressive politics might study and adopt. Exactly what a progressive politics of the hyperreal looks like remains unclear, but it may look something like President Oprah Winfrey or President Dwayne Johnson. NOTES 1. Sarah Doran, “Black Mirror, President Trump and Prophesy—Can TV Really Predict the Future?,” Radio Times, November 11, 2016, http://www.radiotimes.com/ news/2016-11-11/black-mirror-president-trump-and-prophecy--can-tv-really-predictthe-future. 2. Ibid. 3. Jean Baudrillard, “The Precession of Simulacra,” in Simulacra & Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 1. 4. Black Mirror. “The Waldo Moment.” Directed by Bryn Higgins. Written by Charlie Brooker and Christopher Morris. Netflix, February 25, 2013. 5. Baudrillard, “The Precession of Simulacra,” 1. 6. Ibid. 7. Ibid, 23. 8. Ibid. 9. Jean Baudrillard, “Simulacra and Science Fiction,” in Simulacra & Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994). 10. Ibid. 11. Baudrillard, “The Precession of Simulacra,” 5–6. 12. Baudrillard, “Simulacra and Science Fiction.” 13. Ibid, 121. 14. Ibid, 122. 15. Ibid, 121. 16. Ibid, 122. 17. Ibid, 121. 18. Baudrillard, “The Precession of Simulacra,” 6. 19. Ibid, 13. 20. Ibid, 12. 21. Victor Fleming, dir. The Wizard of Oz. 1939; Culver City, CA: Metro-GoldwynMayer. 22. Baudrillard, “The Precession of Simulacra,” 2.

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23. Chris Cillizza, “Donald Trump’s Troll Game of Jeb Bush: A+,” Washington Post, September 8, 2015. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2015/09/08/ donald-trumps-troll-game-of-jeb-bush-a/?utm_term=.d73873106f64. 24. Ibid. 25. Sabienna Bowman, “A Black Mirror Episode Predicted the 2016 Election and the Similarities are Eerie,” Bustle, November 7, 2016. https://www.bustle.com/articles/ 194131-a-black-mirror-episode-predicted-the-2016-election-the-similarities-are-eerie. 26. Ibid. 27. Baudrillard, “The Precession of Simulacra,” 23. 28. Rachel Veroff, “The French Philosopher who Predicted Trump’s America,” Huffington Post, March 29, 2017. https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/the-frenchphilosopher-who-predicted-trumps-america_us_58da7c5de4b0e96354656eac. 29. Douglass Kellner, “Boundaries and Borderlines: Reflections on Jean Baudrillard and Critical Theory, Illuminations: The Critical Theory Web Site, 1998. http:// www.uta.edu/huma/illuminations/kell2.htm. 30. Douglass Kellner, “Jean Baudrillard.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2015. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/baudrillard/. 31. Jean Baudrillard, Fatal Strategies, trans. Philippe Beitchman and W. G. J. Niesluchowski (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2008), 224. 32. Ibid, 223. 33. Stephen Duncombe, Dream: Re-Imagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy (New York: The New Press, 2007). 34. Ibid, 14. 35. Jean Baurdillard, “Why Theory?,” in Hatred of Capitalism: A Semiotext(e) Reader, eds. Chris Kraus and Sylvère Lotringer (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2001), 129. 36. Ibid, 129–30. 37. Ibid, 130. 38. Aaron Blake, “The Top 15 Democratic Presidential Candidates for 2020, Ranked,” The Washington Post, December 22, 2017. https://www.washingtonpost.com/ news/the-fix/wp/2017/12/22/the-top-15-democratic-presidential-candidates-for-2020ranked/?undefined&utm_term=.033b2f9572e5&wpisrc=nl_most&wpmm=1. 39. Baudrillard, “Simulacra and Science Fiction,” 122. 40. Jean Baudrillard, “On Nihilism,” in Simulacra & Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 161.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Baudrillard, Jean. Fatal Strategies, trans. Philippe Beitchman and W. G. J. Niesluchowski. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2008. ———. “On Nihilism.” In Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser, 159–64. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994. ———. “The Precession of Simulacra.” In Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser, 1–42. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994. ———. “Simulacra and Science Fiction.” In Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser, 121–57. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994. ———. “Why Theory?” In Hatred of Capitalism: A Semiotext(e) Reader, edited by Chris Kraus and Sylvère Lotringer, 129–31. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2001. Black Mirror. “The Waldo Moment.” Directed by Bryn Higgins. Written by Charlie Brooker and Christopher Morris. Netflix, February 25, 2013. Blake, Aaron. “The Top 15 Democratic Presidential Candidates for 2020, Ranked.” The Washington Post, December 22, 2017. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/thefix/wp/2017/12/22/the-top-15-democratic-presidential-candidates-for-2020-ranked/ ?undefined&utm_term=.033b2f9572e5&wpisrc=nl_most&wpmm=1. Bowman, Sabienna. “A Black Mirror Episode Predicted the 2016 Election and the Similarities are Eerie.” Bustle, November 7, 2016. https://www.bustle.com/articles/

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194131-a-black-mirror-episode-predicted-the-2016-election-the-similarities-are-eerie. Cillizza, Chris. “Donald Trump’s Troll Game of Jeb Bush: A+.” Washington Post, September 8, 2015. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2015/09/08/donald-trumps-troll-game-of-jeb-bush-a/?utm_term=.d73873106f64. Doran, Sarah. “Black Mirror, President Trump and Prophesy—Can TV Really Predict the Future?” RadioTimes, November 11, 2016. http://www.radiotimes.com/news/ 2016–11–11/black-mirror-president-trump-and-prophecy--can-tv-really-predictthe-future. Duncombe, Stephen. Dream: Re-Imagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy. New York: The New Press, 2007. Fleming, Victor, dir. The Wizard of Oz. 1939; Culver City, CA: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Kellner, Douglass. “Boundaries and Borderlines: Reflections on Jean Baudrillard and Critical Theory. Illuminations: The Critical Theory Web Site, 1998. http://www.uta.edu/ huma/illuminations/kell2.htm. ———. “Jean Baudrillard.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2015. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/baudrillard/. Veroff, Rachel. “The French Philosopher who Predicted Trump’s America.” Huffington Post, March 29, 2017. https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/the-french-philosopher-who-predicted-trumps-america_us_58da7c5de4b0e96354656eac.

EIGHT Why Black Mirror Was Really Written by Jean Baudrillard A Philosophical Interpretation of Charlie Brooker’s Series Manel Jiménez-Morales and Marta Lopera-Mármol

If there were a philosopher who could perfectly fit Black Mirror’s writer’s room, it would undoubtedly be Jean Baudrillard. His postmodern interpretation of the world—especially his concern about the media and hightech phenomena—makes him the perfect theorist to understand the television series Black Mirror. Baudrillard presents a myriad of concepts to explain how modernity has changed the way we conceive the world and modified the illusion of our existence. For its themes and approaches, Charlie Brooker’s drama offers a fruitful field of exploration of all the concepts that Baudrillard dealt with and the social behaviors that, in a certain way, he forecast. Black Mirror not only allows for the exploration of Baudrillard’s theories—it also provides a methodological approach to the production, proving that Baudrillard’s thinking has a direct application to current societal practices. INTRODUCTION TO BAUDRILLARD’S KEY CONCEPTS In this chapter we explore key concepts of the French theorist by using a theoretical and hermeneutical methodological approach. These key concepts include: • The concept of symbolic terrorism is detailed in Baudrillard’s book L’esprit du terrorisme (2001). He explains terrorism as being not just 103

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•

•

• • •

•

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a common concept of superiority and violence but an attack on and damage to the social imaginary, almost as if terrorism were a continuation of politics due to the absence of other mediums. Gizmo, a concept with a pejorative connotation that falls into the category of functional paradigm, is examined in Le système des objets. The term refers to everyday objects or gadgets that lack a name, have no real use to anyone, and are eventually forgotten. Consequently, the term is used to designate empty, superfluous, and superficial objects. Hyperreality is a concept explored in Simulacra and Simulation that means “more real than real.” In other words, it’s when the distinction between reality and fiction becomes blurry and indistinguishable due to advancements in technology. Simulacra represent copies that depict things that no longer have an original or never had one to begin with. Simulation is the imitation of a real-world process or system. Nostalgia is a prevalent postmodernist concept that was also explored by Fredric Jameson and is understood by Baudrillard in terms of historical memory: “We are all hostages, and we are all terrorists. This circuit has replaced the other one of masters and slaves, the dominating and the dominated, the exploiters and the exploited. It is worse than the one it replaces, but at least it liberates us from liberal nostalgia and the ruses of history.” 1 In America, Baudrillard fundamentally calls out part of the North American society for its fake façade that is not at all transparent but a shield to communication. Wasteful expenditure is conceived under the wing of the growth of modern economies that are increasing the gap between the wealthy and the poor. As Baudrillard states: “Perhaps economic exploitation and ‘class’ domination are at bottom only a ‘historic’ variant and a detour in the immense genealogy of the forms of social domination. Perhaps contemporary society is once again becoming primarily a society of domination by signs, hence giving rise to the total demand for a ‘cultural revolution,’ which implies the whole process of ideological production—the theoretical basis of which can only be given by a political economy of the sign.” 2 Surveillance, especially through cameras, acts as a deterrent to prevent some actions. And, also as a consequence of the omnipresence of cameras, the abundance and proliferation of the images. Baudrillard comprehends this in the context of an advanced capitalist system accompanied by the expansion of commodities and technology, in which the simulation of the sign or image seizes the priority that reality is supposed to serve.

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SYMBOLIC AND MEDIA TERRORISM: THE ROLE THAT HACKERS AND SURVEILLANCE PLAY The first episode of Black Mirror, “National Anthem” (S1E1), explores what Baudrillard understands as symbolic terrorism, one of the critical issues of his philosophical thinking and a relevant term to understand today’s geopolitical ecosystem. The kidnapping of the beloved princess and the odd demand to have her released only if the prime minister has sex with a pig on live primetime television has deeper meaning than a mere random terrorist attack. It is the representation of a well-planned attack on the most precious figure of the British nation. The kidnapper’s intention (he considers himself an artist) is to depict the obsession of voyeurism in our current mediated society. Baudrillard does not go into the psychoanalytic implications of the term voyeurism, but he does provide detail of the “postmodernism portraits of a society that delights on the consumes of primarily sordid, sexual, scandalous, even violent images.” 3 This act is presented through the depiction of the Brits inside bars, pubs, and homes, simultaneously watching this allegedly unethical event without realizing the princess was released thirty minutes before the broadcast. This illustrates the current obsession highlighted in media psychology as FoMO (Fear of Missing Out), the necessity of being there at the right moment via our electronic screens. Specifically, in one of the scenes in the episode, a nurse in a hospital tries to turn off the TV after she and her coworkers have been watching the action for nearly an hour, but one coworker avoids this by saying, “It’s history, this.” All that is broadcast is understood at that moment as relevant and meaningful in global terms and refers to the collapse between the allusion and the real, a concept Baudrillard includes. Moreover, the episode efficiently displays the lack of control that governments have over technology by revealing the power of cyberterrorism, cyberactivism, hacking, and so on. This is extensively explored in “Hated in the Nation” (S2E6), which revolves around the actions, motives, and types of hackers that exist, showing the obsession of postmodernism for the antihero while doubting the ethics and awareness of governments explored in other contemporary TV series such as Mr. Robot (USA Network, 2015–), Arrow (CW, 2012–), or Person of Interest (CBS, 2012–2016). In one of the scenes, both the spectator and the characters find out that the National Police Force knew all along about the “surveillance ADI bees” that used a panoptic-disciplinary mechanism. Based on Baudrillard’s theories, this could be drawn as a symbolic perspective. Concerning the hacker figure, the character belongs to the stereotype of an antisocial and technological genius, but his actions put the audience in a moral debate over whether his ideology is truly evil or not. Again, he does not randomly kill but chooses among people who have targeted and

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cyberbullied someone online, therefore once again creating symbolic terrorism and leaving the audience debating whether it represents an act of cyberactivism or cyberterrorism. Something similar occurs in “Shut Up and Dance” (S3E3), in which an anonymous troll has control over a teenager by threatening him to commit illegal actions such as rob a bank and commit murder after being recorded masturbating in front of child porn images. The idea of one’s privacy being denied in favor of a sort of supra-entity controlling the citizenship appears as the echo of a society that is an accomplice of its system of security, hiding strong paradoxes and contradictory positions. Here, the simulation of the digital world becomes the message, entirely ready to manipulate the characters and actions. This overcontrolled world has to do with the wish of the utopian models of social representation. In America, Baudrillard depicts what Brooker displays in “Nosedive” (S3E1), a perfectly inspired 1950s pastel and kitsch, aesthetically ideal society. In this fabricated world, the characters’ identities depend on the ratings their social network gives them through an app that can be easily identifiable with Instagram, Snapchat, and Facebook. It also has a clear reminiscence to Baudrillard’s quote: “Americans may have no identity, but they do have wonderful teeth.” 4 In other words, for Western culture, it is important to show off a well-puttogether image by displaying the main character Lacie’s fake enthusiasm toward others about her own life while she simply pretends she is living a perfect life rather than a realistic one. “Nosedive” is comprehended “as a system for ubiquitous ratings of people, for any reason and with profound social consequences is ripe for abuse.” 5 On the other hand, this perspective also highlights the concept of simulation, epitomized in one of the scenes of the episode where a real estate agent simulates, through the use of holograms, Lacie’s “perfect” life to convince her she needs to buy a new house. This is related to Baudrillard’s concept of exchange value, where “whatever is lacking in the human subject is invested in the object.” 6 A somewhat common and socialized fetishism pervades as a symbol of living according to convention. This idealization of objects and places is also developed in “San Junipero” (S3E4), which presents both an ironic metaphor and the obsession for nostalgia through a song: Belinda Carlisle’s Heaven Is a Place on Earth. The story of the main two female characters (Kelly and Yorkie) is a genuinely desolating image of hyperreal love, since it is only through their consciousness that they can be together. Their real bodies are either lying on a hospital bed, in old age, or dead. The only way they “can be happy” is in the hyperreal world of San Junipero, which, as Baudrillard would say, precedes their existence. The last bit of imagery is especially telling, when San Junipero is viewed through TCKR—the company that “uploads” Kelly and Yorkie

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forever to San Junipero. The machine is constantly flashing lights, alluding to the tickers that are continually seen in the stock market. However, although this is set to be a “happy ending,” we see the hidden paradox through a scene in which Kelly asks Yorkie if she really wants to “live forever in a place where nothing means anything.” In a sense, they are deciding whether or not to trade death and mortality for an eternity of youth that relies on the unconsciousness of an imagined hyperreal world. For this reason, heaven is not a place on Earth but solely in the characters’ imagination, located in the hyperreal of electronic data stored in TCKR. It distorts reality, or in this case does not even depict anything with a real existence at all. San Junipero is an illusion of a reality that is created by people’s imagination about the real world. WHEN THE HEGEMONIC POLITICAL SYSTEM MEETS THE TALENT SHOW This last quote can also be applied in “The Waldo Moment” (S2E3), where a virtual, aggressive, and carefree cartoon character named Waldo is controlled behind the camera by a comedian who tells sexist, racist, and vulgar jokes. He eventually becomes an emergent candidate for the British prime minister, and the media support his rise as a way of promoting him as a marketing tool and an antiestablishment figure. However, during the episode, we see that Waldo ends up being nothing more than mere entertainment. By failing to modify the nature of his message, he goes from being an anti-systematic product to becoming another spoke in the methodical wheel. The episode parodies how politics are consumed in the media and how political communication and images are more important than the actual electoral. In this case, it uses an unconventional medium with an original, vulgar, and humorous message that can be compared to today’s American politics and politics elsewhere. A similar idea arises in Baudrillard’s conception of new political movements that simulate mass demonstrations in a populist manner. 7 The cartoon, a mere product of entertainment and born through the opposition of the system, ends up contributing and consolidating the hegemonic interest of the system, as viewers see at the end of the episode when the logo of Waldo becomes a logo quite like Apple’s. Baudrillard believes that the capitalistic system always acquires rebellion or opposition to capitalism as a powerful way to remind society of the uncanny and the threatening. 8 Following the idea of underplayed satirical criticism is “Fifteen Million Merits” (S1E2), which represents a world where everyone must pedal bikes to power their surroundings and generate currency (“merits”). These merits allow people to enter themselves into a reality

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TV talent show that offers them a chance to seemingly escape their slave-like existences. The main character, Bing, revolts against the system on live TV gasping for reality and trying to get away from the hyperreal meritocracy world in which he is surrounded. His sense of rebellion is welcomed by the hegemonic system when promising a real environment, seen at the end of the episode when he looks through the window and no longer sees simulated nature, but “real” trees. HYPERREALITY AS THE SPECTATOR OF WASTEFUL EXPENDITURE In “Be Right Back” (S2E1), hyperreality is explored through a cyborg that copies the data of a man after he passes away to help his girlfriend cope with his death. Curiously, his name is Ash, an allusion to the expression “ashes to ashes” and thereby a metaphor for death. The way in which the cyborg simulates Ash at both the physical and emotional level results in the inability to distinguish reality from fantasy. It causes reality to disappear and eventually be replaced by the imaginary. Nonetheless, in the end, Martha wants to disconnect the cyborg since he is not “being real enough,” as shown through a scene where she asks him to jump off a cliff and the cyborg, being obedient as he is programmed to be, does not resist. Considering Baudrillard’s theory of “wasteful expenditure,” this episode represents the current behavior of massive depreciation of something as soon as it is possessed. However, in the same scene, Martha complains that the cyborg’s actions did not reflect what the real Ash would have done. As a result, the cyborg begs her for compassion and, since it is impossible for her to get rid of him for his “real essence,” she ends up locking him in the attic and only allows her child to see him on her birthdays. The story creepily parallels “gizmo” as detailed in Système des objets. “A gadget purport to be incredibly useful but that usually ends up crammed in a cupboard gathering dust or used once or twice a year.” 9 Following a similar line, “White Christmas” (Christmas special) explains the story of Matt and Joe, two characters who find themselves in a remote cabin celebrating Christmas and talking about their past jobs. Matt explains how he used to help men pick up women through a listening implant that would allow him to give them instructions but also let people watch the encounter. It therefore emphasizes voyeurism and deals with issues of consent and broadcast communication. Nonetheless, on one occasion he guides Harry, a nervous young man, into picking up a very enigmatic woman named Jennifer. Later on, it is revealed that she is mentally ill and ends up killing herself and Harry. Matt naturally does not expect this result, but that does not stop his wife from blocking him out of her life through a device that can block anyone

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you want by pressing a button, a comparison to the blocking system that current apps have, such as Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook. Baudrillard would thus argue that “we live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning.” 10 After that incident, Matt begins working as a manager in a high-tech company that creates replicas of people’s consciousness through a small device called a “cookie” that bears a strong resemblance to “smart” home devices such as Google Home or Amazon Echo. The cookie device is created to help people manage their routine tasks. In a sense, this cookie represents the desire to transform digital gizmos into slaves. Surprised by his honesty, Joe then decides to tell him his story about his ex, Bethany. She got pregnant and wanted to get an abortion, but Joe got angry with her for drinking alcohol while pregnant, so she ended up blocking him and leaving. However, one day he saw the blocked figure of Bethany and their child. Later, he starts going to Bethany’s father’s house every Christmas to leave her presents because he knows the kid will be there. After some time, through a news report, he discovers that Bethany has died, and consequently Joe is unblocked from his child. But when he sees that the child has Asian features, Joe realizes it is not his own. This displays what Baudrillard would advise: “It is dangerous to unmask images since they dissimulate the fact that there is nothing behind them.” 11 Extremely angry, Joe confronts Bethany’s father, and the ensuing fight results in the accidental death of her father. We soon find out that the whole scenario in which these two characters are talking is fake and that Matt has been talking to Joe’s cookie, helping the police get immunity from the charges for his involvement with Harry. The police torture Joe’s cookie infinitely in the digital snow globe in which they had been all along, with I Wish It Could Be Christmas Everyday by Wizzard playing on a never-ending loop. Matt gets a free pass out of jail, but there is a final twist when he gets universally blocked. In this episode, Brooker clearly wanted to play with the theme in the Wizzard song as a satirical reminder that you should be careful what you wish for, as it is easy to become obsessed and enchanted with technology to the point of becoming its slave, but is not easy to sever ourselves from it once we have realized it will steal our humanity and sanity. This episode invites the audience to consider the way in which we treat each other online and offline, accepting the futility of time and showing a sense of the fragility of everything in the face of time’s endurance. Following the same theories of hyperreality is “Men Against Fire” (S3E5), where the main character, a soldier named Stripe, realizes that he is actually killing people who are allegedly genetically inferior and viewed as scary roaches through his MASS implant. After he discovers that the roaches are humans (due to a problem with his implant), he decides to confront the company. It offers him a choice between a life of torture where he would constantly replay his killings or to have his

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MASS system reset, effectively erasing his memory of it. He chooses the second measure and is discharged with full military honors. Baudrillard would explain: “We live, sheltered by sign, in the denial of the real.” 12 In the end, Stripe approaches what the MASS shows to be an immaculate house and an awaiting dream woman, but in reality Stripe is standing alone outside a graffiti-tagged, dilapidated shack. This also provokes philosophical consequences of high-tech warfare and historicity. Baudrillard’s point of view concerning historicity is the dead, the “dustbin” of the old ideologies, regimes, and values. This episode would be seen from Baudrillard’s point of view as a “subject to the political restriction of means that are justified by ends that do not exist.” This manipulation of the subjectivity matches with one of the leading criticisms of media articulated by Baudrillard: the lack and violation of privacy. In “White Bear” (E2S2), Brooker presents us with what Baudrillard understands as the proliferation of images provoked by advanced capitalism and the expansion of commodities and technologies. In one scene, the main character, Victoria, is surrounded by people filming her through their phones. For Baudrillard, the contemporary confusion between reality and broadcasted life is the most tangible representation of the existence: “Today, the screen is no longer the television screen; it is the screen of reality itself.” 13 “White Bear” is centered around a depiction of completely dehumanized people recording the distraught main character, Victoria, as they are seemingly unphased and nonreactive to her cries for help, almost as if the screens of the smartphones are a barrier between themselves and the violence. Baudrillard describes our reality along similar lines but goes further by writing, “Today, reality massively transfuses itself into the screen to become disembodied. Nothing any longer separates them. The osmosis, the telemorphosis, is total,” 14 and concludes, “we disappear behind our images.” 15 Victoria becomes the paradigm of this logic of disappearance, and soon the audience finds out that she was the accomplice to a murder of a child and that the people are mere actors showing her nightmare as a part of a theme park, making the citizens the spectators and participants of her penalty. Showcasing these same ideas, but in relation to surveillance and digital memory, is “The Entire History of You” (S1E3). The episode presents a society that is obsessed with the potential reach of a “grain” that can be inserted in one’s brain to record everything that takes place and to replay it either privately or on a shared screen. The episode specifically narrates the story of Liam and his wife, Ffion. In a dinner party with friends, Liam sees her talking to Jonas, a man he does not recognize, and becomes concerned that Ffion might be having an affair with Jonas. Further into the episode, Ffion admits that she had a previous relationship with him before meeting Liam. The way Ffion narrates the story presents some inconsistency, and Liam becomes more and more paranoid, demanding her to show him her

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memories. Soon, he finds out that Ffion cheated on him and that their daughter, Jodie, was conceived at the same time, potentially making Jonas the father. After receiving the news, Liam removes his grain to let go of the domination it presents. Baudrillard would describe this type of surveillance in terms of deterrence—the cameras physically prevent shoppers in a mall from stealing merchandise without having the need to be monitored constantly. Their mere presence is a deterrent to shoplifting, since it both is and alludes to a policing authority. As Maudslien 16 points out, surveillance collapses the distance between the allusion and the real simulating repression. For instance, there is a scene in which the main character goes into an airport and a security guard watches his previous twenty-four hours to see if he committed any crime before his flight. Moreover, it is shown through another scene that a baby has a grain implemented without having the capacity or maturity to choose it. The critique of social media is also explicit in both Brooker and Baudrillard. In the latter, avant la lettre. “Playtest” (S3E2) presents Cooper, who decides to travel around the world after his father’s death while setting aside the insistent appeals of his mother to return. We, the audience, witness his adventures through Instagram pictures, which Baudrillard would criticize by saying, “Who watches them? They watch themselves, but who else does, since everyone can get off, virtually speaking, from the same domestically integrated circuit? There will soon be nothing more than self-communicating zombies, whose lone umbilical relay will be their own feedback image.” 17 Therefore, the audience and Cooper stop living the real adventure and instead become mere spectators through screens. “Instead of the human subject being in the world, it is now the object that is in the world, while the human subject has become an idle spectator.” 18 At the end of the episode, three gaming scenarios are shown that have been a set of false realities of emotional and physical biofeedback that the viewers are unable to comprehend due to the saturation of stimulating images. This is the overproduction of images that Baudrillard underlines as a phenomenon able to erase signification rather than offer information: the abundance of images and representations saturate our capacity to absorb information and impossibilities. 19 On the other hand, the idea of the game reinforces the concept of the foolish experience of life under controlled conditions. The game, in fact, is chosen because it is “just a surface effect or myth, a way of making people feel that they are getting some kind of authentic experience in a sanitized safer environment” 20 when the reality is that his biggest fear is confronting his mother about his father suffering with Alzheimer’s as well as the possibility he could eventually have it himself. It is his real fear that provokes his death when his insisting mother’s call interrupts a phase of the game, causing a malfunc-

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tion and allowing the spectator to realize that the fake realities only lasted three seconds. CONCLUSION Black Mirror goes far beyond the current technoparanoia and dystopian approach by introducing philosophical concepts that have implications for further reflection about our current behaviors, a cynical piece born from misanthropy rather than Luddism. Moreover, it focuses on how humanity is interacting with a rapidly evolving technological world, acting as dialogues of “what if” between Baudrillard’s theories and present social phenomena. The sci-fi series reflects on how the evolution of technology creates complex challenges that postmodernist theorists have both explored and criticized. Both Baudrillard and Black Mirror perceive technology as a transgression beyond the limits of traditional functionality by provoking and facilitating the questioning of our morality and thinking. As with Baudrillard’s texts, the series unveils the dysfunctions of a society that has evolved to control any and all details through technologies but is unable to prevent the paradoxes and dangerous consequences of this technoperfectionism. Due to its modes of humanistic storytelling and its setting in a relatable yet modified present with surprisingly twisted endings, the television series provokes at the same time an active and attentive process of comprehension that encourages the viewer’s engagement and promotes critical thinking beyond what has been previously seen in many other science fiction series. NOTES 1. Baudrillard, Jean. Fatal Strategies. New York: Semitext, 1983, 39. 2. Baudrillard, Jean. For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign. Nottingham: Telos Press, 1981, 113. 3. Meštrović, Stjepan. The Balkanization of the West: The Confluence of Postmodernism and Postcommunism. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2004, 83 4. Baudrillard, Jean. America. London: Verso, 1988, 33–34. 5. Third, Allan and John Domingue. “The Irrefutable History of You: Distributed Ledgers and Semantics for Ubiquitous Personal Ratings.” Paper introduced at the International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC), October 2017, 1–9. 6. Baudrillard, Jean. Symbolic Exchange and Death. London: SAGE Publications, 1983, 82. 7. Baudrillard, Jean. La gauche divine: Chroniques des annés 1977–1984. Paris: Grasset, 1985. 8. Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death. 9. Baudrillard, Jean. Système des objets. Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1968, 114. 10. Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 1978, 79. 11. Ibid., 172.

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12. Baudrillard, America, 34. 13. Baudrillard, Jean. Telemorphosis. Minneapolis, Univocal, 2011, 49–50. 14. Ibid. 15. Baudrillard, Jean. The Intelligence of Evil of the Lucidity Pact. Oxford, Berg Publishers, 2005, 85. 16. Maudslien, Kelly. “Implosion, Manipulation, and Surveillance.” Cyberspace, Hypertext, & Critical Theory. Accessed December 30, 2017. http:// www.cyberartsweb.org/cpace/theory/baudrillard/maudslien.html. 17. Baudrillard, Telemorphosis, 30–31. 18. Lane, Richard. Jean Baudrillard. London: Routledge, 2000, 35. 19. Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 2–12. 20. Lane, 41.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Baudrillard, Jean. America. London: Verso, 1988. ———. Fatal Strategies. New York: Semiotext(e), 1983. ———. For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign. Nottingham: Telos Press, 1981. ———. L’esprit du terrorisme. Paris: Editions Galilée , 2001. ———. La gauche divine: Chroniques des annés 1977–1984. Paris: Grasset, 1985. ———. Simulacra and Simulation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1978. ———. Symbolic Exchange and Death. London: SAGE Publications, 1983. ———. Telemorphosis. Minneapolis: Univocal, 2011. ———. The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact. Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2005. ———. Système des objets. Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1968. Lane, Richard. Jean Baudrillard. London: Routledge, 2000. Maudslien, Kelly. “Implosion, Manipulation, and Surveillance.” Cyberspace, Hypertext, & Critical Theory. Accessed December 30, 2017. http://www.cyberartsweb.org/cpace/ theory/baudrillard/maudslien.html. Meštrović, Stjepan. The Balkanization of the West: The Confluence of Postmodernism and Postcommunism. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2004. Third, Allan and John Domingue. “The Irrefutable History of You: Distributed Ledgers and Semantics for Ubiquitous Personal Ratings.” Paper introduced at the International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC), October 2017.

NINE Spectacular Tech-Nightmare Broadcasting Guy Debord Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns

The citizens of an entire country are held zombified before the power of their screens, paralyzed by a mixture of anticipation and dread. None of them notice a shambling female figure wandering aimlessly through the streets. A wedding rapidly deteriorates into a nightmare as a woman starts to unravel, revealing her deep-seated aggression. A man works hard to help his friend reach fame as a singer and is later horrified to learn the reality TV show judges deemed her better suited for pornography. These strange tales, which TV viewers might recognize as episodes of Black Mirror, tread the powerful line between the familiar and the horrifying, highlighting the potential dangers of the seemingly unstoppable advance of the spectacle and technology infiltrating our daily lives. Because of this, Black Mirror can be considered a companion to Guy Debord’s ideas about what he called “the society of the spectacle.” Debord is often cited as the author who, in the 1960s, predicted our presently distracted society, one teeming with people continuously glued to the screens of their cell phones. However, his philosophical theories stretch much further than a simple warning about the current state of contemporary society, one hyper-saturated with images and made up of people who have been zombified by television and big screens. When Debord describes the all-pervading commodification of society through the spectacle, he does so by framing the spectacle as a collection of social 115

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relationships between people filtered through the lens of media. 1 Human activities filtered through media are antagonistic to humanity itself, as people become increasingly alienated, any sense of real community disrupted. Science fiction has always been an effective vehicle for articulating collective social and cultural anxieties, especially in relation to the mechanisms of manipulation and technology. 2 Studies of science fiction narratives reveal serious engagements with the tropes of alienation and technology. While alienation is a condition of industrial and technological development, it is also a condition of human nature. 3 With the acceleration of media technologies, anxieties about human alienation increase, as people seem to become “disconnected” from “hard” (i.e., physical, concrete) reality while connected to virtual reality. The new developments in media technologies make images feel more “real” than ever, taking us into the sphere of the spectacle. While doing so, we lose touch with each other, the environment, and even our own bodies and subjectivity. Many episodes of Black Mirror revolve around this “great divide” between the real and the simulated, between thinking and the spectacle. In fact, the first episode of the series, “National Anthem,” works upon the premise of the spectacle as a form of alienation of what is taking place around us. The spectacle has become key to the organization of capitalism and new forms of sociability. Thus it is reasonable that an author like Guy Debord, who wrote about the dangers of the spectacle overwriting reality “still possess[es] explanatory power—more so than ever, we suspect, in the poisonous epoch we are living through.” 4 Debord offers many insights about the ideological, political, and cultural meanings of the term spectacle. For the sake of clarity, I will focus on the definition of the term as “the self-portrait of power in the age of power’s totalitarian rule over the conditions of existence.” 5 This concept of the spectacle, as a mode of living (and not just a mere circulation of images), seems adequate in the context of the TV series’ critique of the contemporary mediated world. In this chapter, I analyze four episodes of Black Mirror: “National Anthem,” “Nosedive,” “Fifteen Million Merits,” and “The Waldo Moment.” In so doing, I follow Guy Debord’s philosophical thinking regarding the intermingling of society, capitalism, and the spectacle, explaining ways in which the series offers an intelligent critique of relationships mediated by social networking sites. THE HORROR OF THE SPECTACLE The first English translation of Debord’s Society of the Spectacle was published in 1970. The book’s cover featured a photograph of the premiere of Bwana Devil (Arch Oboler, 1952), the first color 3-D film. The image cap-

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tures the film’s audience gazing passively at the screen while using 3-D glasses. The photograph presents the audience members as passive spectators trapped by the power of the “cultural institution of cinema.” 6 For the uninitiated, the intention behind the book—to criticize the power of “entrapment” that audiovisual media has—is explicit. Indeed, the author warns about the power of media to manipulate and atomize. Still, Debord’s book is a more than clear-cut evaluation of media-driven conformity: He also warns about the spectacle transforming the world and the way we live. He warns us about the spectacle becoming life. Society of the Spectacle consists of short theses divided across nine chapters. The first thesis opens with the author paraphrasing the opening line of Karl Marx’s Das Capital (1867), establishing a connection between the spectacle and the economy. According to Debord, the life of those societies “in which modern conditions of production prevail, presents itself as an immense accumulation of the spectacles.” 7 In the framework of the society of the new millennium, this explanation, made decades ago, is a clear-cut description of the central role that spectacular media plays in our public life, from the persecution of O. J. Simpson on TV and his subsequent trial to the tragic events of September 11 and the spectacles of horror the terrorists constructed to promote their causes worldwide to The X Factor and royal weddings and from “breaking news” to our Facebook profiles. . . . Every aspect of our lives has become part of the spectacle. The book essentially reworks the Marxist concepts of commodity, depoliticization of the public sphere, and alienation for our capitalist audiovisual era. Rather than the accumulation of capital, the new capitalism accumulates spectacles as a new form of power upon the masses. The “spectacle” occupies the same central position in Debord’s thinking as the “commodity” does in Marx’s. Debord argues that modern society has undergone a significant development since the beginning of mass industrialization. Preceding it, society’s general focus was on necessity—basic needs such as eating, dressing, and shelter. In the modern era of mass production, people moved away from these basic needs toward an existence of surplus, possessing a desire for something more than might simply cover one’s basic needs: an accumulation of capital, which produces a division of labor between those who have the means (owners) and those who only have their bodies to offer (the workers). The society of the spectacle marks a new shift: Rather than the accumulation of wealth as a form of power, contemporary capitalism accumulates spectacles with the objective of making life inseparable from media. “The spectacular character of modern industrial society has nothing fortuitous or superficial about it; on the contrary, this society is based on the spectacle in the most fundamental way.” 8 In this scenario, a new division took place, now between those who hold the power (the owners/creators of the media) and those who only observe passively. The commodity (the

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spectacle) is not just something to be bought—it will occupy and replace real life. Thus, we (within real life) become commodities, part of the spectacle we consume. With this shift, the fundamental way in which we experience life has changed. The result is the society of the spectacle, which completely reconstructs reality and how we see things and each other. Chapter 1 of Society of the Spectacle deals with the shifting relations between a direct experience of life and mediated representation in our contemporary times because “everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.” 9 Direct experience is replaced by a passive contemplation of images that have, in turn, been chosen by other people. 10 As mentioned, the condition of being/existing (in pre–mass industrialized societies) is replaced by the condition of having (accumulation of capital); in turn, the condition of having is now replaced with the appearance of being and having in the modern society of the spectacle. After this last step, people are completely alienated from their own problems and social conditions. Appearance and surface are vital: You must turn yourself into a spectacle (of happiness, of richness)—never mind your true condition or feelings. Whether one is actually in better shape than his or her peers is irrelevant; it is only the appearance of having more that matters. For Debord, the spectacle is not images on a screen but a social relation among people that has been mediated. He argues that the spectacle dynamically alters human relationships. For example, images influence our lives on a daily basis, as advertising fabricates new desires for us. We behave as the spectacle advises us to behave. Debord’s notions can be applied to our present-day reliance on technology. Such technology is useful, but it also engineers our actions and subjectivity. Debord’s analysis of media made in the late 1960s easily extends to today’s social media, including Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, platforms that commodify our friendships, opinions, and emotions. Spectacle is now inseparable from reality: They are one and the same. This is the triumph of the new capitalism supported by media and technology. We are gladly giving ourselves over to the world of spectacle, becoming spectacle to the point of self-alienation. This is the main premise of “Nosedive,” one of the episodes of Black Mirror that finds itself very much in line with Debord’s thinking on the spectacle. The episode is particularly suited to an analysis of Debord, since it does not contain any traditional form of the spectacle such as TV or film. In “Nosedive,” as in Debord, the spectacle is “society itself.” 11

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“NOSEDIVE”: A MEDIATED WORLD VIEW For Debord, the spectacle “is not something added to the real world, not a decorative element, so to speak. On the contrary, it is the very heart of society’s real unreality.” 12 The spectacle supplants any worldview. In this scenario, the spectacle becomes a “social relationship between people that is mediated by images.” 13 This reliance on forms of mediated relationships is the basis of “Nosedive,” which portrays a society where the value of a person is determined by how many positive votes that person receives. After each personal interaction, the participating citizens rate each other on a scale of 1 to 5. Those with scores of 4 and higher are considered enviable citizens, while those under 4 are viewed disdainfully as secondrate citizens. The episode’s main character, Lacie (Bryce Dallas Howard), starts with a 4.2. It is a good number but not high enough to achieve the life she lusts after. What she really wants is to shift to being a complete spectacle, envisioning a future living in a luxury apartment like the ones that appear in glossy magazines or the movies. The Realtor shows her a potential new life through holographic simulations that supplant her reality with silk nightgowns, expensive appliances, and gorgeous men. Because she wants this promised life, she must reach the score of 4.5. All she has to do is get more positive ratings, similar to current anxieties about accumulating as many “likes” as possible on Facebook. Lacie already lives within the spectacle, so she must smile and be polite to maintain her score. However, she wants more: She wants to accumulate the spectacle and climb to a new level of commoditized fantasy. It is interesting to note that, on the surface, this society seems almost utopian. Lacie clearly belongs to the upper class, her only problem being her sense of loneliness that, paradoxically, will intensify with her mission to achieve more popularity through false smiles and feigned interest in others. In the race to accumulate more stars, people are mostly nice to each other; being rude can reduce a person’s score. The society of the spectacle is so embedded in the reality represented in “Nosedive” that the division between falseness and reality is obsolete. After all, is it truly possible to know whether people are nice to you because they want to improve their ratings or because it is their true nature? In addition, does it really matter? Debord did not believe that new forms of technology were in and of themselves bad. However, he objected to the use of technology toward a corporate agenda, as it distracts people from their real problems and conditions. The use of technology in “Nosedive” begins on a positive note—the users can separate reality from virtuality, which, progressively, blur together. Lacie lusts after a luxurious, wealthy life because she can separate her real life from that which is promised to her. What she is unable to do is notice how much her “real” life already is the spectacle.

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Rather than conform to her real life and the real reactions she receives from the people around her, she immerses herself in the accumulation of the spectacle by cheating (her first step down) to accelerate an accumulation of points. She simply cannot wait for reality to move at its own pace, so she modifies it by carefully choosing what to say and do in order to improve her ratings. Arguably, she has stopping living her life to access a mediated world that’s organized and dominated by the needs of the ruling status quo. “Be genuine!” her coach advises her. However, being genuine in a world where everyone is constantly evaluating you is simply impossible. Lacie does not know how to be herself in a world coopted by the spectacle, where people interact through media. Even when she is alone in her bathroom, she practices her laugh in front of the mirror. She is unable to find her true self in a spectacle-obsessed world. The main slip into the spectacle, the one that situates the story firmly into an anxiety-ridden horror/parody scenario, is when Lacie’s anxiety increases. A trip to her friend’s wedding becomes a nightmare, but she must keep smiling—even in the most dire of situations—to salvage her already dwindling score. Through a “spectacularized” life, we assign our life’s main purpose to something beyond our subjectivity and power. “Nosedive” closely follows the logic stated by Debord: “The spectacle is a permanent opium war waged to make it impossible to distinguish goods from commodities, or true satisfaction from a survival that increases according to its own logic.” 14 Lacie is unable to distinguish herself from the commodity she actually is. She wants to impress a friend who, we learn, was not really a friend at all, abandoning people who really care for her (such as her brother) to take a trip to the realm of the spectacle. The spectacle invites people to view things as they are represented on the surface rather than more deeply. In “Nosedive,” almost everyone is equipped with a pair of contact lenses that allow them to immediately identify anyone they see by their score, transforming each interaction into an exercise of mediatization. Rather than viewed as human beings, people are merely their ratings, just like television shows and films. The rise of media and the spectacle is a vehicle for separation from friends, community, and even ourselves. Rather than engage in face-toface communication, we prefer to fix our gaze on a screen. In “Nosedive,” people walk around while staring at their phones, more interested in how others rate them than in real interaction, which diminishes and causes people to become isolated from each other. “Isolation underpins technology, and technology isolates in its turn; all goods proposed by the spectacular system, from cars to televisions, also serve as weapons for that system as it strives to reinforce the isolation of ‘the lonely crowd.’” 15 Society of the Spectacle’s first chapter is titled “Separation Perfected,” a feature that Debord describes as the “alpha and omega of the spectacle.” 16 “Nosedive” ends with Lacie becoming estranged from her brother,

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the only person who loves her for who she really is. Throughout the episode, his brother is depicted as not completely sold on new social media technology: Lacie remarks that he has a lousy score, a situation that clearly does not upset him. The episode ends with Lacie engaging in a primal scream, full of rage and exhaustion after a barrage of misfortunes. This scream is the only real thing Lacie does in the entire episode. To embrace the society of the spectacle is to become part of the lonely masses. ALIENATION AND DISTRACTION The most widely discussed effect of the spectacle is alienation (from each other, from history, and from real experiences). Alienation and the spectacle frame the entirety of “Fifteen Millions Merits.” Bing (Daniel Kaluuya) lives in a tiny room where every wall is a screen that constantly displays annoying ads. Their currency is “merits,” and the citizens earn merits by riding a bike all day, passing the time watching a crude animation situated in front of the bicycles. In other words, citizens only perform two tasks: riding bikes while watching images and passing time within “homes” bombarded by advertising. The only way to shut down the ads is to pay merits. One of the programs available to watch while riding is an X Factor-inspired program called HotShots, which is hosted by three judges. The show is portrayed as the only chance citizens have to climb off their bikes. If they participate in and win on the show, they became part of the annoying ads, bothering others rather than being the subjects of visual torture. Either way, the spectacle reigns. The episode can be read on ecological terms, as the Earth is enduring an energy crisis and the population must power up sources of energy using physical effort. Much of the energy generated by the citizens is used, in turn, to distract them from their miserable conditions as commodities, as combustibles. Their alienated existence is solely based on the spectacle: They have to work heavy on the bicycles to receive merits to access the right to participate in the spectacular HotShots. Debord describes the spectacle as capitalism’s instrument for distracting and pacifying the masses while reducing reality to an endless supply of commodifiable fragments. Rather than face reality and the problems generated by capitalism, the spectacle encourages focusing on appearances. Again, Black Mirror seems to follow Debord closely: In schizophrenics, a decrease of the dialectic of the totality (dissociation) and a decrease in the dialectic of becoming (catatonia) “seem to be intimately interwoven. Imprisoned in a flat universe bounded on all sides by the spectacle’s screen, the consciousness of the spectator has only figmentary interlocutors which subject it to a one-way discourse on their commodities and the politics of those commodities.” 17 It is interesting to note that

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many characters seem slightly slow in their responses (Bing especially), as suffering from dissociation (from their condition) and a slight form of catatonia. Indeed, degradation is the main theme of “National Anthem.” A member of the royal family, Princess Susannah (Lydia Wilson), is kidnapped and held hostage. Her freedom is guaranteed on one condition: The prime minister must have sex with a pig, live on national television, so everyone can watch. The medium itself is the important component. The first half of the story revolves around powerful CEOs of media companies discussing whether they should make the video available to audiences worldwide or if it should remain a secret. The second half of the episode does not revolve around the kidnapped princess but on the clock ticking: Will the prime minister do it, or not? Also, the sex must not be simulated, an ironic requirement to remind us that we inhabit a society rife with falseness. The kidnapper seems to be the only character fighting to find something real within a society that only interacts through media. The prime minister decides he must commit the act of bestiality, and the video goes viral, reaching millions of viewers. TV journalists prepare the princess’s obituary even though she is still alive. The media are ahead of the facts, eager to fabricate a new reality. The spectacle of the prime minister engaging in sex with a pig is, at first, replaced with more spectacles, such as TV news interviewing “specialists” who find “deep” meanings in the use of a pig and an actress taking advantage of her fifteen minutes of fame due to some flimsy friendship with the princess. The pressures mount as the government closely follows the “public mood shifts” on the case. Rather than saving the princess, everyone within the government seems to be worrying about the general mood and the consequences of the act. Audiences, in turn, have little control over what is happening. Authorities ask them to turn off the screens, but people seem unable to do so. When the prime minister begins his ordeal, audiences cannot turn away. People around Britain (and arguably across the globe) cheer and laugh, the anguish of the kidnapped completely forgotten by the power of the show broadcasted nationwide. Audiences are glued to the screens, failing to recognize that the princess had been liberated some time ago and is now wandering the desolated streets looking for help. Thus, the episode illustrates Debord’s warning about the dangers inherent in media’s pervasive ability to distract. THE POLITICAL SPECTACLE Distraction is required to maintain the status quo and its subsequent oppression. “Behind the glitter of the spectacle’s distractions, modern society lies in thrall to the global domination of a banalizing trend.” 18 In

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“The Waldo Moment,” Jamie (Daniel Rigby), a sarcastic apolitical comedian, voices Waldo, a virtual blue bear who mocks all things political. Even if Jamie seems exhausted with the Waldo character, people love it because they believe that Waldo is capable of finding justice when insulting the empty and stale spectacle of sanitized politics staged for audiences. Jamie (and by extension, Waldo) starts calling every candidate on his or her respective lies and contradictions. Soon he attracts support from apathetic voters, and Waldo enters the election as a joke. Waldo’s making fun of the candidates seems revolutionary at first— an act of revenge against mediocre politicians. Yet behind all the glitter and the scripted jokes, Waldo works to maintain the status quo. Waldo is as equally empty as the human candidates. The spectacle that Waldo creates works to keep audiences distracted, preventing them from acting on and demanding real political change. While applauding Waldo, people actually do nothing to change the status quo that oppresses them. When the election is complete, everything continues as normal. Any true radical attempt to effect change (as a young politician desperately tries to do in the episode) is diverted into empty aggression, mockery, consumption of a fashionable character, and the restoration of the status quo. As Debord warns, current society is imposed on people, not created by them. 19 Engaging with the spectacle highlights a shift in social relations: the degradation of critical engagement with the real circumstances shaping our being. The apathy of Waldo’s apolitical message and crude jokes displaces any revolutionary flame, and no one, not even the brave Waldo, can escape from the factory of the spectacle. While the populace becomes increasingly disengaged from the public sphere and “only interested in politics during the largely media-orchestrated dramatizations of a national election,” 20 any possibility of change is supplanted by the spectacle. CONCLUSION An illustrative pattern emerges over the course of these episodes. Waldo is not the only character who, in attempting to flee from the spectacle, ends up an important part of the machinery. Indeed, in “Fifteen Million Merits,” Bing decides to take revenge after Abi (Jessica Brown Findlay), the woman he loves, is “kidnapped” by HotShots and turned into a porn star. Battling hard-to-earn merits, he earns his own spot on the main show. On live TV, he takes one of the judges as his prisoner. This act of rebellion leaves the audience in shock until the judges proclaim the act to be the most genuine thing they have ever seen on the show. Soon, Bing is integrated into the society of the spectacle, becoming part of the system: He rants to the camera throughout the week while living in relative luxury. Likewise, the prime minister in “National Anthem” ends on a high

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note. His marriage is crumbling, but by giving himself over to the spectacle, he has become a national hero. Like the other characters within Black Mirror, he has stopped living his real life and is now one with the spectacle. For Debord, the spectacle is more than the image: It is the very mediation of people’s relations, in which the sphere of the representation is the privileged site of conformity, the source of truth. Furthermore, “it is the entirety of social activity that is appropriated by the spectacle for its own ends.” 21 Black Mirror brings Debord’s warnings about the spectacle-becoming-life to a new level and into the realm of darkness and dread. NOTES 1. Debord, Guy. Society of the Spectacle. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith. New York: Zone Books, 2006, 12–13. 2. Telotte, J. P. Replications: A Robotic History of the Science Fiction Film. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1995, 11. 3. Smith, Warren. “I Am a Man, and Nothing Human Is Alien to Me: Alienation and Freakishess.” In Science Fiction and Organization, edited by Matthew Higgins, Geoff Lightfoot, Martin Parker, and Warren Smith. London: Routledge, 2001, 178. 4. Carrier, David. A World Art History and Its Objects. University Park: Penn State University Press, 2008, 75. 5. Debord, 19. 6. Harbord, Janet. Ex-centric Cinema: Giorgio Agamben and Film Archaeology. New York: Bloomsbury, 2016, 109. 7. Debord, 12. 8. Ibid., 15. 9. Ibid., 12. 10. Jappe, Anselm. Guy Debord. London: University of California Press, 1999, 6. 11. Ibid. 12. Debord, 13. 13. Ibid., 12. 14. Ibid., 30. 15. Ibid., 22. 16. Ibid., 20. 17. Ibid., 152–53. 18. Ibid., 38. 19. Ibid., 44. 20. Gilman-Opalsky, Richard. Spectacular Capitalism: Guy Debord and the Practice of Radical Philosophy. London: Minor Compositions, 2011, 45. 21. Jappe, 7.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Carrier, David. A World Art History and Its Objects. University Park: Penn State University Press, 2008. Debord, Guy. Society of the Spectacle. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith. New York: Zone Books, 2006. Gilman-Opalsky, Richard. Spectacular Capitalism: Guy Debord and the Practice of Radical Philosophy. London: Minor Compositions, 2011.

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Harbord, Janet. Ex-centric Cinema: Giorgio Agamben and Film Archaeology. New York: Bloomsbury, 2016. Jappe, Anselm. Guy Debord. London: University of California Press, 1999. Smith, Warren. “I Am a Man, and Nothing Human Is Alien to Me: Alienation and Freakishess.” In Science Fiction and Organization, edited by Matthew Higgins, Geoff Lightfoot, Martin Parker, and Warren Smith. London: Routledge, 2001. Telotte, J. P. Replications: A Robotic History of the Science Fiction Film. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1995.

Section Four

Aesthetics

At first glance, the concept of aesthetics is most often associated with works of art, such as beautiful paintings or striking sculpture, and the appearance of material things, such as an attractive suit or flashy car. Yet, on an everyday basis, the aesthetic experience runs much deeper. Aesthetics is implicit in how we experience the world around us, our cities, technologies, and the natural world. It is through aesthetics that the form of our empirical experiences meets our ideas about the way the world functions, the way we imagine it is supposed to work. Each of us has an aesthetic worldview, organized as a complexity of ideas about the forms and functions of daily existence, yet felt through our experiences of the beautiful and the sublime. In essence, the beautiful mostly involves formal appearances and structures, while the sublime is about awe and wonder, fear and terror. This notion perhaps could not be clearer than in “USS Callister.” Nanette is, at first, in awe, “I mean, who wouldn’t wanna work under an incredible mind like that, you know? His coding is sublime.” Later, however, she experiences fear and terror. The following chapters decipher Black Mirror’s balance of the beautiful and the sublime, particularly commenting on how technologies shape, and will shape, daily life. Employing the aesthetic lens of Immanuel Kant and Fredric Jameson, Matthew Flisfeder explains the hysterical sublime as an aesthetic device that spells out our inability to fully grasp where we are in both space and time: “‘Playtest,’ through its thematic and visual layering, helps us to map out the network of contradictions and limitations that we face in the world today.” Placing Baudrillard and Foucault in conversation with “Be Right Back,” Hillary A. Jones provides an aesthetics of existence in hyperreal and posthuman times. The episode, she argues, is less about technology and more about ontology, the copies of copies of copies of Ash dismiss the beauty of the present and instead embrace the nostalgia for the past. Drawing from the archaeology of ancient obsidian and Marshall McLuhan’s theories of electric light, Barry Vacker and Erin Espelie contrast the “black mirrors” and “white spaces” that appear in several episodes of Black Mirror, most notably “White

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Christmas.” They explore the complex relations between nihilism, enlightenment, and technology, which converge in the stunning conclusion to “White Christmas.”

TEN Rhetorical Ethics in Black Mirror The Aesthetics of Existence in Hyperreality and Posthumanity Hillary A. Jones

Set in a near, and believable, future, Black Mirror takes advantage of the space speculative fiction provides to explore and experiment. Darko Suvin christened this phenomenon “cognitive estrangement”; it enables us, as Fredric Jameson puts it, to “defamiliarize and restructure our experience of our own present.” 1 The episode “Be Right Back” specifically explores hyperreality and posthumanity. By placing Baudrillard and Foucault into conversation with this episode, I illuminate how it argues for an ethics grounded in aesthetics for hyperreality and postmodern, posthuman subjectivity rather than an ethics grounded in an “authentic,” unified, Enlightenment subjectivity. BAUDRILLARD, HYPERREALITY, SIMULACRA The simulacrum was first theorized by the Epicureans and the late-Roman poet Lucretius. 2 For the atomistic Epicureans, simulacra were tiny, fleeting emissions retaining a trace of a larger object. Flung off from the object, constantly in motion, a simulacrum that touched the eye of another enabled visual perception. 3 Thus, from its inception, the simulacrum has been intrinsically visual. Indeed, Lucretius differentiated between the visual simulacra and concilia, which encompassed scents, sounds, and other sensory emissions. 4 129

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Extending the Epicureans’ concept, Jean Baudrillard uses the simulacrum to account for postmodern ontology. He posits that postmodern societies employ representations and simulations to the point that simulacra become indistinguishable from reality; therefore, the primary ontological structure for postmodernity is hyperreality. 5 Hyperreality does not fake reality; it emerges from the collapse of reality with simulations, such that “reality” is an endless reflection and recirculation of simulacra. 6 Although he offers numerous definitions for the term, at its most basic, the hyperreal substitutes “signs of the real for the real itself.” 7 Rather than referring to an external object or phenomenon, signs refer to other signs, combining and recombining in ever-changing arrangements. 8 As a result, symbol value rivals—and at times even exceeds—exchange or use value because simulations and objects are equally real. 9 The change from modernist reality to postmodern hyperreality affects subjectivity significantly. Although a poststructuralist, Baudrillard was not especially interested in theorizing agency, as Douglas Kellner astutely points out. 10 Instead, he considered the larger field of possibilities and constraints governing subjects. Baudrillard argues that myriad structures and orders (e.g., art, sexuality, media, technology, politics) have imploded, such that all is surface. This supposition led him to consider how the visual mechanisms of reification affect subjectivity. Reification naturalizes a social construction; it turns a subject into an object. 11 Phenomena and practices that originated from the social, from human invention, come to be seen as natural, shedding society’s memory of the invention. Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer wryly note, “All reification is forgetting.” 12 For example, gender and sex, as experienced and at the chromosomal level, are fluid and multiple. The socially and scientifically constructed binaristic view reified, however, and people thus came to view male/female and masculine/feminine binaries as conventional. Society forgot that the simplified view was socially constructed. Revealing that history and recuperating and creating a richer understanding of sex and gender has generated a significant amount of scholarly and public attention. 13 When reified, concepts and relations invented to help humans make sense of the world, such as sex and gender, function invisibly but, ironically, often through visual means. Those who conform to convention do not need to spend much time thinking about these categories. Reified identities and norms are taken for granted; they are conventional. A cis woman does not wake up in the morning and think, “I’m a feminine woman, which will inform hundreds of decisions I will make today.” Instead, she accepts the identity without thought and proceeds to perform her sex and gender, using a range of visual means, according to the norms and practices associated with femininity. For example, unquestioned femininity entails wearing cosmetics, extensive bodily maintenance and grooming, choosing particular clothing colors and types of accessories, smiling, and taking up little physical

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space. People choose clothing and toys for children based on visual cues, as well, opting for pink shirts emblazoned with kittens for girls rather than “masculine” blue shirts sporting dinosaurs. Gender and sex articulate via an array of signs that coalesce into an aesthetic. Style, Brummett explains, offers a “complex system of actions, objects, and behaviors that is used to form messages that announce who we are, who we want to be, and who we want to be considered akin to.” 14 Thus, the aesthetic performance, like the associated identity, can reify. The sorting of bodies into two categories, a social role reified, compresses choices about how to perform the role, thereby reifying the aesthetic, which in turn limits identity, possibility, and affiliation. Furthermore, it erases the distinction between the surface and the substance of an individual, such that performing one’s gender and sex becomes equated with one’s “true” identity. Hence, as the visual signs implode and collapse the performance with the identity, the person, an amalgamation of visual cues, loses humanity. Baudrillard argued that through visual reification, objects come to dominate the individual who becomes more like an object and less like a human. Rather than attributing the resulting changes to subjectivity to alienated labor (like Marx) or to desire for the phallus (like Lacan), Baudrillard concludes hyperreality accounts for the changes to subjectivity. In a world comprised of image and surface that reifies subjects, how might ethics function? An ethics assuming a unified Cartesian or Kantian reasoning subject cannot fully respond to the ethical situations that arise in postmodernity. Even if delimited to what has already been reflected and simulated, the hyperreal subject is constantly becoming. Because ethical action in hyperreality responds to the visual, the ethics reasonably should be grounded in aesthetics. FOUCAULT AND THE AESTHETICS OF EXISTENCE The aesthetics of existence involves “transforming ‘oneself’ into a work of art.” 15 Michel Foucault muses: “What strikes me is the fact that in our society, art has become something that is related only to objects and not to individuals, or to life. That art is something that is specialized or that is done by experts who are artists. But couldn’t everyone’s life become a work of art? Why should the lamp or the house be an art object, but not our life?” 16 Like Baudrillard, Foucault considers what it means to view the subject more like an object, and hence theorizes an ethics driven by aesthetics. Barry Brummett offers three meanings for “aesthetics”: “a systematic way of thinking,” “a faculty of appreciation,” and “a property of objects or experiences themselves.” 17 Each meaning centers beauty and style. As a system, aesthetics functions as a discipline, such as art or design, for organizing the study and creation of beauty or style. As a faculty, aesthet-

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ics functions as an ability an individual or group can exercise to appreciate beauty or style. As a property, aesthetics functions by attaching beauty or style to an object. Thus, one might study aesthetics in school or curate it at a museum, engage in aesthetics by appreciating the style of someone’s outfit or the shape of a staircase, and prefer the aesthetics of a Pixel to an iPhone. The aesthetics of existence encompasses all three of Brummett’s meanings. As an ethics, it functions as a system, enacted via care for the self. It entails intense, ongoing self-reflection (se déprendre de soi-même), developing a faculty (a sujet fort), and examining one’s practices (askēseis). 18 Foucault elucidates: “The care for self is of course knowledge of self—that is the Socratic-Platonic aspect—but it is also the knowledge of a certain number of rules of conduct or of principles which are at the same time truths and regulations. To care for self is to fit one’s self out with these truths.” 19 Frédéric Gros explains that putting principle into action, for Foucault, highlights the “correspondence, not between what I say and what I do, but between what I am and what I believe that I am.” 20 The guiding image, a simulacrum of the self, dictates ethical action in the aesthetics of existence. Foucault suggests that those who seek to build a beautiful life concomitantly will seek healthy, equitable relationships. 21 In addition, he asserts that the aesthetics of existence “requires a finitude, a focus on the self with only the memory of the self available after life.” 22 Foucault insists we can create beauty in an immanent, ever-changing subjectivity. One never arrives at a beautiful life; one constructs it, moment to moment. This ethics corresponds with hyperreality’s ever-shifting visual ontology, which undergirds the world imagined in “Be Right Back.” “BE RIGHT BACK” The first episode of the second season of Black Mirror, “Be Right Back” tells the story of Martha Powell and Ash Starmer. 23 Early in the episode, Ash perishes in a car crash. Martha, devastated and pregnant, begins interacting with a chatbot to simulate conversations with the deceased Ash. Their interactions escalate, leading her to purchase an enfleshed avatar/cyborg to house the bot. Initially, Martha is satisfied with these simulacra of Ash. Her satisfaction fades quickly, however, leading her to demand ever more realism. When the cyborgian Ash cannot produce what Martha views as the essence of her deceased partner, she angers and eventually challenges him to commit suicide. The tragic tale concludes with the cyborg confined to the attic, visited only on weekends and special occasions by the couple’s daughter and the disenchanted Martha.

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Ash and Martha’s relationship moves from in-person to words (chat), aural (phone), and visual (phone camera) with the Ash-bot to embodied interactions with the Ash-borg. Banal visual signs and objects establish symbol value throughout, with signs referring to other signs and collapsing the real with the simulated. Reality and subjectivity become increasingly complicated with every copy. Copies of Copies of Copies: “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” Early in the episode, Ash snaps a picture of a photograph of himself as a child to post online—a copy of a copy of a copy. As Magritte pointed out with “Ceci n’est pas une pipe,” a representation is always a masquerade, a pretense of the real. Even the “original” Ash, by taking this photo, helps reveal how the real and the image have imploded, well before the introduction of advanced technologies later in the episode. This photographic moment is crucial. Martha, annoyed, indicates, “You keep vanishing down there,” into his phone. He has also vanished into the photo his mother prized; his smile in the picture, he discloses, did not reflect his genuine experience that day. Ash explains that after his brother, and later his father, passed away, his mother hid all photos of them, displaying only this smiling image of Ash. His mother wanted his childhood, and her memory of it, to align with this simulacrum smile. Martha observes, “She didn’t know it was fake . . .” He responds, “Maybe that makes it worse.” By the end of the episode, Martha agrees, confining Ash-borg to the attic, just as his mother had done with images of those who had passed. Unlike his mother, however, Martha does not find comfort in the illusion; she wants an essence, not an image. The chain of images raises the question: is it ever possible to know what is real? The visuals and copies of copies of copies of Ash establish that the episode is not about technology but about ontology. The photo moment endorses Magritte’s claim, setting the stage to view the various iterations of Ash as engaged in ethical behavior. In contrast, Martha’s rejection endorses an Enlightenment ideal of a unified identity and knowable reality, dismissing beauty in the present and embracing nostalgia for the past. The Ash-Bot: “It’s Not Real, Is It?” At Ash’s funeral, Martha’s friend Sarah wryly remarks, “It’s not real, is it? At Mark’s wake, I sat there thinking, ‘It’s not real.’ People didn’t look real, their voices weren’t real. It’s like you’re out on a spacewalk.” Although she is talking about the fog of grief, her comment easily encompasses Martha’s relationship with Ash-bot. After the funeral, Martha revisits material traces of Ash, such as photographs and hash marks on the

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wall showing his growth as a child. These wistful objects establish Martha’s longing, setting the stage for interactions with Ash-bot. The bot begins by learning from Ash’s public data. Sarah observes, at Ash’s funeral, “He was a heavy user,” making him an apt candidate for the service. She assures Martha, “The more it has, the more it’s him.” Martha objects, “It won’t be.” Sarah admits, “No, it’s not, but it helps.” When Sarah signs her up, Martha lashes out, viewing the use of Ash’s name as demeaning, “obscene,” and “sick.” As a result, Martha’s first logon is reluctant, motivated by her need to tell someone about her pregnancy. However, she is embroiled by the bot’s similarity to the deceased Ash. She acknowledges, “That’s just the sort of thing that he would say.” To obtain the opportunity to talk with Ash-bot on the phone, Martha grants access to Ash’s private data, including videos. The bot also learns from their discussions. Martha shares memories, and he clarifies phrasing and tone. As Ash-bot becomes more like the deceased Ash, Martha and Ash-bot’s interactions intensify, moving from text chat on her computer to conversing on the phone via voice on to sharing visuals using her phone’s camera. The more Ash-bot learns, the more the simulation becomes indistinguishable from the real. He observes, “You speak about me like I’m not here.” When Martha apologizes, he concedes, “It’s alright. I’m not really.” As her attachment to him deepens, he seems increasingly real to her. She panics when she drops and breaks her phone while talking with him. Once she re-establishes a connection, she exclaims, “I dropped you!” Her reaction far exceeds a dropped call. Ash-bot responds, “I’m not in that thing, you know. I’m remote. I’m in the cloud.” For Martha, though, the simulacrum has become very real. Ash-Borgian Subjectivity: “You Aren’t You, Are You?” As tiny differences between the iterations accumulate, however, Martha becomes disenchanted. Many of the differences are physical. As a cyborg, he does not need to eat or sleep, and he does not bleed when cut by a glass shard. He does not have pores, fine lines, or fingerprints. The differences extend beyond the physical; Ash-bot lacks familiarity with an idiom and Ash-borg fails to recognize her sister, for example. The beginning of the episode shows viewers that, despite a clearly intimate relationship, Martha did not know everything about the original Ash, either, such as his favorite Bee Gees song and his memories about the photograph. Nevertheless, Ash-bot and Ash-borg defer to Martha’s memory of the original Ash, altering to fulfill her expectations and memories rather than conforming to the data produced by the original Ash. Although Martha is unsure whether the differences, and obeisance, worry her at first, she grows ever more frustrated. She tries to adapt, asking Ash-borg to fake sleeping, for example. As her disappointment

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mounts, she changes to chastising him. She takes him to a cliff and instructs him to jump. Confused, he protests that “I” have never expressed suicidal tendencies. Until she tells him Ash would have felt fear, he shows no sign of upset. Once she tells him how Ash would have reacted, he performs instantly, crying and begging. Disappointed, she lambastes him: “You’re not enough of him. You’re nothing!” She continues: “You aren’t you, are you? You’re just a few ripples of you. There’s no history to you. You’re just a performance of stuff that he performed, without thinking, and it’s not enough.” Martha does not want beauty in the present; she seeks a perfect(ed) replica of the past. In this pursuit, Martha gradually comes to rely significantly on Ashbot, increasingly isolating her from friends and family and culminating in her order of Ash-borg. Ashamed, she hides the cyborg from her sister, who, seeing his clothing, assumes Martha has a new lover. And she does. Early in the episode, we witness Martha and the original Ash having sex. She does not climax, and they discuss whether to continue. She declines; he goes to sleep. When Martha decides to have sex with the Ash-borg, they encounter a hurdle because Ash did not disclose his sexual practices or inclinations, even in his private data. The cyborg turns to the internet for training. The result is even better than the real thing. They engage in more adventurous positions, have a longer session, and focus exclusively on her pleasure. The contrast with Ash reinforces that the relationship Martha has with Ash-borg is more power-over than power-with. When Martha informs Ash-borg that Ash would argue with her, the cyborg tries to obey. Annoyed, she kicks him out of the house and he acquiesces, staying outdoors all night. He explains that the technology requires him to remain within 25 meters of her home or his “administrator.” Martha rejects the title, but it captures the dynamic of their relationship rather well. They are not equals. The constant obedience to Martha fails to fulfill the equitable principle theorized by Foucault. Ash-borg lacks free will, and her behavior is not ethical. She transforms him from an object to a subject, but then she reifies him, changing him from a consciousness back to a thing-like object, which she can alternately talk to, copulate with, or consign to the attic. Expecting her interactions to occur with an “authentic” subject rather than a hyperreal Ash ends up hurting Martha, who in turn dehumanizes and alienates Ash-borg. THE AESTHETICS OF EXISTENCE AND SUBJECTIVITY IN POSTHUMAN HYPERREALITY Martha comes to view only neurons, not circuits, as “real” consciousness. She seeks intimacy with Ash’s essence, not his practices, and this leads her to create a relationship of domination, not freedom, with Ash-bot and Ash-borg. They reflect Martha’s desire to conquer death, which Foucault

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cautioned lacks the finitude necessary to foster beauty in the present. Although she does not seek a deferred reward, she does not live in the present, either; she longs for the past. Martha is a modernist living in a posthuman hyperreality. Ash, on the other hand, enacts the aesthetics of existence. In his original, bot, and borg forms, he reflects on his practices. He reprimands himself for over-using his phone; later, the bot apologizes when acting out of character. The cyborg seeks to engage in practices Ash would have, treating the traces of Ash as the image he mimics. He seeks a positive relationship with Martha, even though he lacks the agency to challenge her objectification and abuse of him. He consults the past to generate new actions, but his focus remains firmly on the present. Ash pursues a life of beauty, whatever his form. Ash-borg, both cyborgian and simulation, is what Baudrillard would describe as a thing and a reflection of a thinglike alienated subject. He is constrained by the data to which he has access. But are his new sentences less authentic? Martha thinks so. She pines for modernity, for “reality,” for an Enlightenment subject with an authentic identity rather than a fragmented assembly of simulacra. She wants the “Real” Ash. Her definition of “real” does not depend on embodiment, on familiarity with someone’s history, or on what they say; the avatar has a body and a more thorough grasp of the deceased’s history, by way of all digital traces available, than any human possibly could. Although he is a posthuman assemblage, Ash-borg manifests a remarkably realistic iteration. He is a simulacrum, but he learns and adapts, incorporating new experiences into his pool of available data. Adaptability, growth, and learning do not suffice for Martha, however. She yearns for the original Ash’s original thoughts: the definition of the Cartesian self, the cogito. However, how are Ash-bot or Ash-borg any less real than the deceased Ash? He, too, performed what people wanted to see, smiling for his mother’s camera. We are hyperreal even without new technologies. As Gilles Deleuze explains, the postmodern subject divides and reconfigures continually. 24 The subject shifts and adapts to its context. We are rhetorical beings. Thus, rather than championing the Enlightenment subject, which leads to nostalgia (literally pain for the past), the episode suggests that happiness and contentment lie in the beauty of presence. The aesthetics of existence provides an ethics grounded not in pain and longing for the past but in an adaptable, equitable system suited to living ethically in posthuman hyperreality. Digital posts are always surface reflections, the simulated atoms of the Epicureans. Treating the surface as essential is dangerous. It leads only to pain, and can, as this episode establishes, lead to exploitation, as well. “Be Right Back” demonstrates the ethical complexity of postmodern subjectivity in hyperreality, albeit risking re-centering the Enlightenment ideal of authenticity and a unified self along the way. Whether critiquing

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the “authentic” cogito or adding complexity to a simulacrum, however, this episode showcases the benefits of ethics grounded in aesthetics. Ultimately, “Be Right Back” argues that to live ethically in posthuman hyperreality, one should live rhetorically. NOTES 1. Darko Suvin, Positions and Presuppositions in Science Fiction, Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1988; Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future, the Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions, New York: Verso, 2005: 286. 2. Stuart Gillespie and Philip Hardie, eds, The Cambridge Companion to Lucretius, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007. 3. Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, translated by Martin Ferguson Smith, London: Loeb Classical Library, 1975: Book IV. 4. William Ellery Leonard and Stanley Barney Smith, eds, De Rerum Natura: The Latin Text of Lucretius, Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2008. 5. Jean Baudrillard, The System of Objects, translated by James Benedict, London: Verso, 2005. 6. Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, translated by Sheila Faria Glaser, Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press, 1994. 7. Jean Baudrillard, Simulations, translated by Paul Foss, Paul Patton, and Philip Beitchman. New York: Semiotext(e), 1983: 4. 8. Jean Baudrillard, The Illusion of the End, translated by Chris Turner, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994. 9. Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, translated by Iain Hamilton Grant, London: Sage, 1993. 10. Douglas Kellner, ed., Jean Baudrillard: A Critical Reader, Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell, 1994 and Douglas Kellner, Jean Baudrillard: From Marxism to Postmodernism and Beyond, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1989. 11. György Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000: 83. 12. Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, edited by Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, translated by Edmund Jephcott, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008: 191. 13. For more about the social construction and reification of sex and gender, see: American Psychological Association, “Men and Women: No Big Difference,” APA Research in Action, 2005, available from: http://www.apa.org/research/action/difference.aspx; Judith Butler, Gender Trouble, New York: Routledge, 1999; Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex, New York: Routledge, 1993; Judith Butler, Undoing Gender, New York: Routledge, 2004; Krista Conger, “Of Mice, Men, and Women: Making Research More Inclusive,” Stanford Medicine 19, no. 2 (2017): 6–11; Judith Lorber, “Beyond the Binaries: Depolarizing the Categories of Sex, Sexuality, and Gender,” Sociological Inquiry 66, no. 2 (1996): 143–160; Moya Lloyd, “Performativity, Parody, Politics,” Theory, Culture & Society 16, no. 2 (1999): 195–213; and Katy Steinmetz, “Beyond ‘He’ or ‘She’: How a New Generation is Redefining the Meaning of Gender,” Time, March 2017, available from: http://time.com/4703309/gender-sexuality-changing/. 14. Barry Brummett, A Rhetoric of Style. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2008: xi. 15. Marli Huijer, “The Aesthetics of Existence in the Work of Michel Foucault,” Philosophy & Social Criticism 25, no. 2 (1999): 81. 16. Michel Foucault, “On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress,” In Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, edited by Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983: 236.

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17. Barry Brummett, Rhetoric of Machine Aesthetics, Westport, CT: Praeger, 1999: 4. 18. For more about se déprendre de soi-même, see Thomas Flynn, “Philosophy as a Way of Life: Foucault and Hadot,” Philosophy & Social Criticism 31, no. 5–6 (2005): 609–622; for more about sujet fort, see Frédéric Gros, “Le Souci de Soi Chez Michel Foucault: A Review of The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1981–1982,” Philosophy & Social Criticism 31, no. 5–6 (2005): 697–708. 19. Raúl Fornet-Betancourt, Helmut Becker, Alfredo Gomez-Müller, and J. D. Gauthier, “The Ethic of Care for the Self as a Practice of Freedom: An Interview with Michel Foucault on January 20, 1984,” Philosophy & Social Criticism 12, no. 2–3 (1987): 116. 20. Gros, “Le Souci de Soi Chez Michel Foucault,” 704. 21. Gros, “Le Souci de Soi Chez Michel Foucault”; Pirkko Markula, “‘Tuning into One’s Self’: Foucault’s Technologies of the Self and Mindful Fitness,” Sociology of Sport Journal 21, no. 3 (2004): 302–321. 22. Fornet-Betancourt et al., “The Ethic of Care for the Self as a Practice of Freedom,” 120. 23. Charlie Brooker, “Be Right Back,” in Black Mirror. Directed by Owen Harris (2013; UK: BBC Channel 4). 24. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, translated by Paul Patton, New York: Columbia University Press, 1994.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Adorno, Theodor W. and Max Horkheimer. Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. Edited by Gunzelin Schmid Noerr. Translated by Edmund Jephcott. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008. American Psychological Association. “Men and Women: No Big Difference.” APA Research in Action, 2005, available from: http://www.apa.org/research/action/difference.aspx. Baudrillard, Jean. The System of Objects. Translated by James Benedict. London: Verso, 2005. ———. The Illusion of the End. Translated by Chris Turner. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994. ———. Simulacra and Simulation. Translated by Sheila Faria Glaser. Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press, 1994. ———. Symbolic Exchange and Death. Translated by Iain Hamilton Grant. London: Sage, 1993. ———. Simulations. Translated by Paul Foss, Paul Patton, and Philip Beitchman. New York: Semiotext(e), 1983. Brooker, Charlie. “Be Right Back.” In Black Mirror. Directed by Owen Harris. 2013. UK: BBC Channel 4. Brummett, Barry. A Rhetoric of Style. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2008. ———. Rhetoric of Machine Aesthetics. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1999. Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. New York: Routledge, 1993. ———. Gender Trouble. New York: Routledge, 1999. Tenth Anniversary Reprint. ———. Undoing Gender. New York: Routledge, 2004. Conger, Krista. “Of Mice, Men, and Women: Making Research More Inclusive.” Stanford Medicine 19, no. 2 (2017): 6–11. Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition. Translated by Paul Patton. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. Flynn, Thomas. “Philosophy as a Way of Life: Foucault and Hadot.” Philosophy & Social Criticism 31, no. 5–6 (2005): 609–622.

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Fornet-Betancourt, Raúl, Helmut Becker, Alfredo Gomez-Müller, and J. D. Gauthier. “The Ethic of Care for the Self as a Practice of Freedom: An Interview with Michel Foucault on January 20, 1984.” Philosophy & Social Criticism 12, no. 2–3 (1987): 112–131. Foucault, Michel. “On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress.” In Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, edited by Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, 229–252. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983. Gillespie, Stuart and Philip Hardie, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Lucretius. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Gros, Frédéric. “Le Souci de Soi Chez Michel Foucault: A Review of The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1981–1982.” Philosophy & Social Criticism 31, no. 5–6 (2005): 697–708. Huijer, Marli. “The Aesthetics of Existence in the Work of Michel Foucault.” Philosophy & Social Criticism 25, no. 2 (1999): 61–85. Jameson, Fredric. Archaeologies of the Future, the Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. New York: Verso, 2005. Kellner, Douglas, ed. Jean Baudrillard: A Critical Reader. Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell, 1994. ———. Jean Baudrillard: From Marxism to Postmodernism and Beyond. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1989. Leonard, William Ellery and Stanley Barney Smith, eds. De Rerum Natura: The Latin Text of Lucretius. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2008. Lloyd, Moya. “Performativity, Parody, Politics.” Theory, Culture & Society 16, no. 2 (1999): 195–213. Lorber, Judith. “Beyond the Binaries: Depolarizing the Categories of Sex, Sexuality, and Gender.” Sociological Inquiry 66, no. 2 (1996): 143–160. Lucretius. De Rerum Natura. Translated by Martin Ferguson Smith. London: Loeb Classical Library, 1975. Lukács, György. History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000. Markula, Pirkko. “‘Tuning into One’s Self’: Foucault’s Technologies of the Self and Mindful Fitness.” Sociology of Sport Journal 21, no. 3 (2004): 302–321. Steinmetz, Katy. “Beyond ‘He’ or ‘She’: How a New Generation is Redefining the Meaning of Gender.” TIME, March 2017, available from: http://time.com/4703309/ gender-sexuality-changing/. Suvin, Darko. Positions and Presuppositions in Science Fiction. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1988.

ELEVEN The Hysterical Sublime Black Mirror, “Playtest,” and the Crises of the Present Matthew Flisfeder

APOTHEOSIS OF POSTMODERN CULTURE It might be an understatement to say that, today, a new mass wave of technological hysteria floods the popular imagination, and the informational torrents flowing through the newsfeeds of our social media homepages. We hear and read much about algorithms, big data, automation, deep learning, internet bots, and international cyberwarfare. Our fantasies of machine control are already so polluted by decades of dystopian sci-fi cinema, from 2001: A Space Odyssey and The Terminator to The Matrix, that it is no wonder that the new age of media and technology brings with it a paradoxical mix of delight (at the thought of new conveniences) and dread (from fears and anxieties about machinic control). The new digital paranoia, one that is mixed with a sense of euphoric bliss, or jouissance, recalls Fredric Jameson’s aptly dubbed aesthetic category of the “hysterical sublime.” 1 THE SUBLIME OBJECT Jameson gathers his theory of the sublime from the concept’s origins in Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry Into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Beautiful and the Sublime (1757) and Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgement (1790). For Burke, the sublime is an experience akin to terror—a feeling of awe and astonishment at the world of nature and beyond the human 141

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capacity to comprehend. It is distinguished from the beautiful, which we are able to formalize and comprehend through our human capacities. It is through our categories of reasoning and formal judgment, taste, and cultural capital, that we can ascribe to something the designation of the beautiful. But the sublime is something else entirely: it pierces us— pierces the soul, so to speak. It does this in a way that we fail to even articulate. Consider the amazement of a lightning storm, the view of Earth from outer space, the fear brought about by a natural disaster, like an earthquake or a flood, and perhaps even for us today, the experiences brought to light by ecological catastrophes caused by climate change. Kant expanded the definition of the sublime to include its relation to representation; or, more appropriately, the inability of the human mind to adequately represent that which lies beyond its capacities. The sublime, in this case, is a category that develops from Kant’s distinction between phenomena and noumena. Phenomena are aspects of the world that readily present themselves to the human senses and to the human capacity to reason and understand. A phenomenon is the view of an object in the world as it appears to the subject who observes it. Noumena, in contrast, are objects as they stand outside of our ability to comprehend because of our corporeal limitations. The human mind is capable of processing the experience of phenomenal reality through our bodily relationship to our senses, but remains unable to access the reality of noumenal objects that are real but still inaccessible. We can know, in other words, according to Kant, only our knowledge of things in the world, but we cannot know the noumenal world of things-in-themselves. From the Kantian perspective, there is a gap in our experience of reality: the subject remains unable to grasp that which lies beyond representation. What Kant refers to, then, as the sublime, is an experience of something that brings us closer to knowing the Thing-in-itself, even if we cannot fully sublimate this knowledge within our very capacity to reason. To do so may in fact bring about our very annihilation; or at least it may bring forth the possibility of annihilating the significance of the human species amid the vastness of the universe. This, perhaps, is one reason why fears about technological advancement may figure so heavily in the postmodern sublime. According to Jameson, postmodern culture has changed our relationship to the sublime. The other of contemporary society—of postmodern capitalism—is no longer the irrational found in nature (or—capital “N”— Nature); it has been replaced by the figure of technology. High tech paranoia, according to Jameson, now occupies the place formerly held in modernity by the awe and fear of nature. 2 By referring to the figure of technology, Jameson proposes it conceptually as a stand-in for a kind of “alienated power” that remains difficult to fully grasp—that is, the networked, but still somewhat invisible power of capital. For Jameson, the hysterical, technological sublime figures as a force of human creation,

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which is presented as the inevitable force of our destruction; and it is perhaps because technology is, in fact, very much a symbol of human historical and social development that its terror has become all the more enervating. As part of our evolution, we have developed technologies to overcome the limits of the human body, to tame the limits of our bodies and societies to properly encounter and defeat the threats caused by changes in our natural environment—it is, in this sense, wrapped up with our evolution as a species; but can these tools which we have developed to control and harness nature end up coming to control us? This contemporary (although, no less timeless) fear is fittingly depicted in a series of popular cinema, from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), to Jean-Luc Goddard’s Alphaville (1965), Joseph Sargent’s Colossus: The Forbidden Project (1970), James Cameron’s The Terminator (1984), and the Wachowski sisters’ The Matrix (1999). It is also cleverly depicted in Black Mirror episodes, such as “Fifteen Million Merits,” “The Entire History of You,” “White Christmas,” “Hated in the Nation,” and “Playtest.” (BLACK) MIRROR STAGE Black Mirror portrays technology as the sublime other of society. It presents our technologies, digital media, and devices as an object of fascination, a tool of convenience, but one through which we are controlled, and through which we can control others. This plays out heavily in the third season episode, “Playtest,” which tells the story of Cooper Redfield (Wyatt Russell), an American tourist who is backpacking around the world. While in London, he meets Sonja (Hannah John-Kamen) through a mobile dating app. Sonja introduces herself as a technology correspondent for a website. They flirt, and Cooper ends up spending the night at Sonja’s apartment. In the morning, their conversation is interrupted when Cooper receives several calls from his mother, which he ignores. He explains that he had been living with his mother to help care for his father who recently died from early onset Alzheimer’s, and that his trip around the world was prompted by this experience—he aims to make as many memories as he can, while he can. Later, Cooper finds out that there is a hold on his bank account and he is unable to make a withdrawal. Left without money or options, Cooper struggles with the idea of phoning his mother, whom he has so far kept at an uncomfortable distance. Instead, he returns to Sonja’s to seek help. Together they use an app called OddJobs to help Cooper earn some money to afford a plane ticket home. Sonja draws his attention to an ad for a company called SaitoGemu, a mega company in the world of horror videogames looking for people to test play their new game.

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“Playtest” encapsulates many of the overlapping elements of the hysterical sublime found throughout the series, and in an indirect way maps many of the anxieties that we now experience as part of digital late capitalism. But it does so, cunningly, through its very inability to directly or adequately represent or narrativize our anxieties about the digital present. The episode plays around with various levels of narrative and visual layering, pointing toward the very difficult objective of trying to capture the essence of the sublime underside of contemporary high-tech paranoia. This is seen especially at a formal level, around the question of where the game ends and reality begins. Visually, the episode layers different forms of depiction and representation, including digitally enhanced images portrayed in the game, which the episode strategically compares to old media entertainment, such as the handheld video game that Cooper plays on his mobile phone, or the in-flight film that he watches, earlier in the episode. But also, while Cooper is beginning the playtest and while he is inside the game, in the mansion, video surveillance images are used to capture the panoptic sensation many of us now feel when we engage with digital new media. We see video surveillance footage of Cooper, which we might assume is being watched by one of the other characters—perhaps, company owner, Shou Saito (Ken Yamamura) or Katie (Wunmi Mosaku), the game test liaison—but this is never subjectivized diegetically. Once the test begins, Cooper finds himself going deeper and deeper into newer and more terrifying levels of virtual representation in the game. The same occurs in reverse for viewers at the end of the episode when we initially believe that he has ended the game, only to discover that what we thought was the ending was only a part of the game. Formally, the layering found here is reminiscent of what Todd McGowan 3 has called the priority of the deception, referring to Christopher Nolan’s films, like The Prestige (2006) or Inception (2010). We could even locate this kind of deception in older films dealing with virtual reality, like David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ (1999), or Josef Rusnak’s Thirteenth Floor (1999), and even the Wachowskis’ The Matrix (1999). The deception, here, is a plot tool used to misguide the viewer, to draw her in, to lure her at the level of her desire. While the degree of layering may, at the end of “Playtest,” appear over the top and absurd, it does help us to better understand the representational complexity of trying to adequately capture the hysterical sublime, and likewise, the contemporary networks of capitalism. MACHINIC ENSLAVEMENT According to Jameson, the hysterical sublime is an aesthetic device that is tied to our inability to fully grasp our own position in time and space,

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vis-à-vis the overwhelming complexity of the postmodern world. It is related to what he refers to as “cognitive mapping”—that is, the subject’s ability to locate herself and her position in the world, to allow her the clarity to recognize the larger social and political totality. As he puts it, new media technology offers us a “privileged representational shorthand for grasping a network of power and control even more difficult for our minds and imaginations to grasp—namely the whole new decentered global network of the third stage of capital itself.” 4 This is the stage of neoliberal and finance-dominated capital. Its emergence coincides with rapid advances in digital and information communication technologies that have helped to facilitate global networks of capital flows into what Franco “Bifo” Berardi 5 has called “semiocapitalism,” or what Jodi Dean 6 has called “communicative capitalism,” both of which refer to the closeknit ties between capital and digital media, and the integration of users into the flows and matrices of capital through combinations of communication and enjoyment. Both concepts also reflect the sense that Gilles Deleuze 7 gives with his notion of the control society. The society of control, as Deleuze explains, is one in which the corporation has replaced the factory; where individuals have become “dividuals”: samples of data for markets or banks. 8 Unlike the surveillance society that Michel Foucault 9 describes in his analysis of panopticism, where enclosure ensured compliance, the subject of the control society is, according to Deleuze, doomed to perpetual reinvention as a subject of debt. 10 We can view the surveillance footage of Cooper in Playtest in a different light from the point of the view of Deleuze’s control society, which even has particular resonance in the context of semio- or communicative capitalism. On the one hand, Cooper is a precarious worker. He is playing the game as a job—as an “odd job.” But more than just his labor; Cooper’s entire sense of selfhood is being exploited and mined by the company through the act of “playing,” much like the way that we are, as “prosumers” 11 of social media mined for our data. Cooper’s work, here, is more like the kind of “entrepreneurial” 12 or precarious work that we find in contemporary neoliberal capitalism where workers are no longer employed by a single company for life until retirement, but are required to constantly reinvent themselves in order to acquire the next new contract. The fact that Cooper is also brought to this kind of labor by being without his own flow of money speaks to the idea that debt more so than enclosure is the contemporary impetus of control. As the late Mark Fisher put it, if the disciplinary subject was seen as a worker-prisoner, “the figure of control is the debtor-addict” who ends up paying for her own exploitation. 13 We are less so controlled by ideological duping than by the sheer necessity to survive within the complex circuits of neoliberal capitalism, exceedingly trying to navigate its amorphous plane.

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Cooper only seeks out the job at SaitoGemu because he has lost all access to his bank account. He is forced out of necessity to take on odd jobs so that he can afford a ticket home. The connection between “Playtest” and the Deleuzian notion of the control society is also demonstrated by the fact that, unlike in the panoptical society that Foucault had described, where workers, for instance, are only supposed to act in a specific, prescribed manner of production—a manner parodied, for instance, in Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936)—here, the worker is expected to act only according to his desire. In fact, the game test depicted in the episode only works best, supposedly, if the user lowers his inhibitions and opens himself up more freely to allow the technology to “read his desire,” which can be read to mean his fears and anxieties, too. He is interpellated, so to speak, by the machine’s ability to read his desires and fantasies. This is perhaps, even, why the mansion sequence figures so much like a dream or a nightmare. We see this when besides the scary images of spiders, Sonja enters the picture, mixing sublimated sexual desire with images of dread, the grotesque, and repulsion. Here, the technological sublime is brought to bear upon even the quintessence of human subjectivity. SINGULARITY, ASSEMBLAGE, ACCELERATION The technological sublime comes through thematically, too, as the show deals with the question of machinic intelligence. Cooper discovers a book called The Singularity at Sonja’s flat. Singularity has become a popular shorthand for “technological singularity,” referring to the perceived threat of artificial superintelligence—the idea that artificial intelligence will someday (soon) overpower and dominate or destroy human civilization. Although the Singularity, as it has been described by Ray Kurzweil in his book, The Singularity is Near, 14 is portrayed in a more utopian light, whereby he envisions a merger between artificial intelligence and human intelligence as part of our evolutionary development. For Kurzweil, AI has the ability to serve and benefit humanity. It would seem, then, that Kurzweil’s version of the Singularity is a key target for Black Mirror as a whole. In “Playtest,” specifically, this response is in fact quite pronounced as Cooper is ultimately devoured by the technology of the game, and indeed, it is the “black mirror,” his mobile phone, that ends up leading to his demise. Consider the way in which his mobile phone has come to replace many of the intimate and social connections that we take for granted. From the beginning of the episode, we see Cooper continuously ignoring phone calls from his mother—“Mom” as her name is displayed on Cooper’s phone. The mediation of the mobile allows him to maintain an uncomfortable distance from her. Cooper also uses his phone to take pic-

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tures of his trip around the world. We see images from Australia, Thailand, India, Dubai, Spain, Rome, Paris, and then finally in London, England, where Cooper snaps a selfie in front of the Thames. He tells Sonja later on that his father has recently passed away from early onset Alzheimer’s and that he wanted to take the trip in order to make as many memories as he could while he was still able to. The irony, of course, as the show presents it, is that in one of the layered endings, the game causes Cooper to completely lose his memory and even any recollection of himself and his own identity, clearly mimicking his fear of falling like his father did before his death. But also, it is the mediation of the mobile phone, its capacity to record “memories” in the form of the photograph— as in the famous advertising slogans, “A Kodak Moment,” or “Memorexed”—that demonstrates some of the ways that our devices are coming to replace, or at the very least mediate our human experiences of self. There is a sense, here, in which we see the anti-essentialist notion of the cyborg, developed in posthumanist work of thinkers like Donna Haraway 15 or N. Katherine Hayles, 16 coming to light—the idea that our devices show just how our bodies are or always have been enhanced by technology. Part of human evolution has been through the construction of new technologies that aid us in overcoming the barriers and limitations of our bodies, so much so that the next phase of human evolution might in fact be perceived as one of deeper entwinement with the digital and the cybernetic. But for some, this image of human-machine assemblages, as it is been dubbed by Deleuze and Guattari, 17 might seem grotesque, and perhaps even hysterically sublime in this sense, too. Yet another way to read this outgrowth of the machine, overpowering the human, is to see it as a political indication, in traditional Marxist terms, of the means of production outgrowing the relations of production. That is, where the technologies produced to exacerbate the efficient production of surplus value, and the disciplining of labor, ultimately comes to outgrow the relations of exploitation and domination that they were meant to serve in the interests of capital. This is still another view that has been popularized in the work of the Accelerationists, who argue that the fastest way to achieve the end of capitalism is through the heightening of the contradictions brought about by the introduction of new digital media and technology into the production process. 18 The question then becomes one of how to structure the democratic control of the technology. Is this even possible? REVERSAL In his book Four Futures, Peter Frase argues that the twenty-first century will be haunted by two specters: that of ecological catastrophe and that of automation. 19 Anxieties about ecological catastrophe are wrapped in con-

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cerns over scarcity, the loss of natural resources, agricultural land, and habitable environments. Fears about automation, conversely, he says, is a fear of too much: “a fully roboticized economy that produces so much, with so little human labor, that there is no longer any need for workers.” 20 At its core, Black Mirror addresses this very tension—the dialectical tension between nature and technology. Sigmund Freud writes, in Civilization and its Discontents, that with the help of technology guided by science, humanity has gone on the attack of nature—subjected nature to the human will. 21 But in a kind of dialectical reversal, it is technology that has now come to occupy the place of the sublime formerly held by nature. As depicted in “Playtest,” our attempts to evade the limitations of the body and nature through technology still present us with an irrationality that we cannot ever harness or tame. The inability to adequately represent the affective dimensions—to “cognitively map”—the contradictions of the present, to portray it in some kind of totality, is what makes the hysterical sublime resonate. “Playtest,” through its thematic and visual layering, helps us to map out the network of contradictions and limitations that we face in the world today: the crisis of nature, the crises of subjectivity, anxieties about control, economic crises, and so forth. The episode, and the series, are as such less moral tales about the advances of technology than an attempt at representing the network of crises and limit points that we feel about the present. NOTES 1. Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.” New Left Review, I no. 146 (1984): 77. 2. Ibid. 3. Todd McGowan, The Fictional Christopher Nolan (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2012). 4. Jameson, 79–80. 5. Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Precarious Rhapsody: Semiocapitalism and the Pathologies of the Post-Alpha Generation (New York: Minor Compositions, 2009). 6. Jodi Dean, Publicity’s Secret: How Technoculture Capitalizes on Democracy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002). 7. Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control.” October no. 59 (1992): 3–7. 8. Ibid, 5. 9. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1995). 10. Deleuze, 6. 11. See Christian Fuchs, Digital Labour and Karl Marx (New York: Routledge, 2014). 12. See Maurizio Lazzarato, Making of the Indebted Man: Essays on the Neoliberal Condition, trans. Joshua David Jordan (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2011). 13. Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2009). 14. Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (New York: Penguin, 2005).

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15. Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto.” In Cultural Theory: An Anthology, eds. Imre Szeman and Tim Kaposy, 454–471 (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011). 16. N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). 17. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). 18. See Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work (New York: Verso, 2015). 19. Peter Frase, Four Futures: Life After Capitalism (New York: Verso, 2016). 20. Ibid, 2. 21. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, ed. Todd Dufresne, trans. Gregory C. Richter (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2016), 57.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Berardi, Franco “Bifo.” Precarious Rhapsody: Semiocapitalism and the Pathologies of the Post-Alpha Generation (New York: Minor Compositions, 2009). Dean, Jodi. Publicity’s Secret: How Technoculture Capitalizes on Democracy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002). Deleuze, Gilles. “Postscript on the Societies of Control.” October no. 59 (1992): 3–7. Fisher, Mark. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2009). Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1995). Frase, Peter. Four Futures: Life After Capitalism (New York: Verso, 2016). Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and its Discontents, ed. Todd Dufresne, trans. Gregory C. Richter. (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2016). Fuchs, Christian. Digital Labour and Karl Marx (New York: Routledge, 2014). Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). Haraway, Donna. “A Cyborg Manifesto.” In Cultural Theory: An Anthology, eds. Imre Szeman and Tim Kaposy, 454–471 (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011). Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). Jameson, Fredric. “Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.” New Left Review, I no. 146 (1984): 53–92. Kurzweil, Ray. The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (New York: Penguin, 2005). Lazzarato, Maurizio. The Making of the Indebted Man: Essays on the Neoliberal Condition, trans. Joshua David Jordan (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2011). McGowan, Todd. The Fictional Christopher Nolan (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2012). Srnicek, Nick and Alex Williams. Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work (New York: Verso, 2015).

TWELVE Black Mirrors, Hot Media, and Spectral Existence Barry Vacker and Erin Espelie

From the first moment we saw the white circular icon spinning against the black void followed by the shrill tone and the TV series title fracturing the screen, Black Mirror has been treating us to an aesthetic collision of humans and existence via proliferating technology, particularly electric light and electronic screens. Known as a throbber, the pulsing icon suggests active circuitry connecting networks beyond the screen. Energies are flowing, events are happening, and existence is unfolding. Humans are close together, galaxies are far apart, and electronic screens are in between us and everything else, with the spectra of electric light flowing through the screens into our eyes, into our consciousness. The screens are black, the lights are bright, and the media are hot, shielding humans from the dark cool beyond. This aesthetic vision is central to Black Mirror’s existential stance, with an aura symbolized by the bright lights and fluorescent white spaces in numerous episodes where humans are trapped in technological realms with no exit, including “Fifteen Million Merits,” “White Bear,” “White Christmas,” “Playtest,” “Hated in the Nation,” and “Men Against Fire.” Electric lights and electronic screens are the aesthetic forms through which we function, communicate, and exist on a daily basis. The array of screens includes televisions, computers, laptops, tablets, and mobile media. By combining the historical significance of the black mirror with a reinterpretation of Marshall McLuhan’s views on electric light and “hot media,” this chapter theorizes the existential meaning of the omnipresent bright white lights: the aesthetic collision of humans and their spectral 151

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existence via hot media. The totality of this existence is made visible in the views of Earth at night from the International Space Station, where we see our planet spangled with orbs of yellowish-white light that are linked via webs of lights spanning the continents. Within our glowing orbs, all wavelengths of light coalesce into colorless white light, and the ultimate hot counters to the empty black mirrors—the spectra shielding our species from the chill of nihilism in the expanding universe. The black mirror screens that surround us are like the night skies that surround our planet. We fill these screens with the full spectrum of light and color to provide us with meaning and hope amid the night skies, which are filled with stars that twinkle impersonally and perpetually against the infinite blackness. Black Mirror dramatizes this contrast with its aesthetic collision of humans and existence: We stare at black mirrors while trapped among bright lights and white spaces, the full spectrum of artificial light subtly deployed to secure us from having to face our true destiny in the dark voids of the cosmos. SPECTRAL AESTHETICS Even before Plato told the story of the prisoner escaping from the shadows of the dark cave, the concept of “stepping into the light” has been an aesthetic and philosophical symbol of truth, reason, and clarity. The brighter the light, the closer one is to the truth—or at least that has been one version of the historic story. By contrast, Black Mirror makes bright lights and white spaces into more of a horror story. This chapter provides an existential take on universal themes that have long faced the human species, specifically those that involve how civilizations position themselves in relation to the cosmos. Our night skies and vast universe remind us of the immensity of time and space beyond our home planet, introducing concepts that at times may be too unbearable to contemplate yet also too compelling for our imaginations to ignore. Media technologies—from telescopes to cameras to microscopes—show that all human bodies are comprised of the most common elements of that universe: hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, carbon, and various others. As Neil deGrasse Tyson has said, “We are part of this universe; we are in this universe, but perhaps more important than both of those facts, is that the universe is in us.” 1 This should be an ultimate refutation of racism and warrior tribalism. Yet our media technologies and electric civilization offer a domestic version of the sun, enabling humans to perpetuate the illusion of being the center of everything. Are there any media technologies more representative of the modern world than electric light and electronic screens? Electric lights illuminate our cities and homes, turning darkness into light daily, a media technology for visual enlightenment and physical security—be it incandescent,

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fluorescent, neon, halogen, or LED. Electric light also powers our array of electronic screens, the “black mirrors” that fill our daily consciousness with images and information, bringing us closer to other humans and human events, local to international. Via these media, we return to a preCopernican world. Powered by electric light, human civilization has become a 24/7 planetary system, running nonstop with our glowing lights visible from space. It is a beautiful achievement, surely symbolic of human ingenuity and enlightenment. After all, we no longer need to rely on moonlight and starlight to guide us at night, precisely because we have flooded the dark from our sight. In effect, we inhabit a world of artificial lights spewing all colors and illuminating the electrified spaces and electronic screens that surround us, creating a full spectral existence. To a scientist, objects do not have color; rather they act as reflectors. Black objects absorb any wavelengths of light that might be otherwise visible to our eye, whereas white objects reflect the full spectrum of wavelengths. To an artist or a child, there are no binaries of black and white, as the supreme variations become more apparent. Yet to be reductive for the sake of argument, if black absorbs all wavelengths and white radiates all wavelengths, their aesthetic contrast and coexistence are inherently dialectical. Black and white pair well and are naturally dependent on each for their ultimate meaning while being functionally oppositional. As suggested by the night skies, black and white are both beautiful and powerful manifestations of object reflectivity, either alone or taken together. Black often symbolizes the cosmic void—the darkness of the universe beyond, the mysterious emptiness to be filled with meaning. BLACK MIRRORS SPAN THE MILLENNIA With the title Black Mirror, Charlie Brooker has tapped into an ancient and creative tradition of using “black mirrors” as media for reflecting the light from our surrounding existence. Like the black sky that surrounds our planet at night with the stars shining in the velvet darkness, black mirrors have long been the host to reflections shining off dark surfaces. Historically, they were utilized in fields such as art, science, and philosophy and for conveying stories about our world as well as imaginary worlds beyond. It’s no different with the present-day black mirrors that surround us on a daily basis, for they do the same thing. Black mirrors have spanned the millennia: obsidian, carbon, and black stone. Witch’s mirror, devil’s glass, smoking mirror, Nuremberg mirror, Claude mirror, and black convex mirror. Cathode ray tubes, LCD screens, plasma screen, and Gorilla Glass—and that’s just to name just a few. A brief review of the origins and uses of black mirrors find many similarities to daily life and episodes of Black Mirror.

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Electronic Obsidian To date, the oldest handheld black mirror was made of obsidian, a dark volcanic glass that could be polished to have a smooth and reflective black surface. 2 The earliest use of obsidian mirrors dates back at least 10,000 years to the Neolithic city of Çatalhöyük, located near the Euphrates River in modern-day Turkey. This culture traded fiercely and obsessively in obsidian, which functioned something like today’s credit cards, accepted by all and intended to facilitate increased transactions. 3 Obsidian was also used to make weapons, skinning tools, kitchen utensils, and eventually the first man-made, portable mirror—its beholders could see their own image and reflections of the world around them, not unlike how today’s tablets and mobile phones are featured in Black Mirror. Obsidian mirrors were also common funerary objects. Anthropologists speculate that these earliest of “viewers” believed the glass served as a portal to other worlds, a magical surface to hold the soul, ward off evil spirits, view celestial objects, or see the future. Egyptians used selenite, gypsum, and mica for stone-like mirrors some 6,500 years ago. Ancient Greeks believed black mirrors held supernatural powers. The sick, the weak, and the very young were restricted from looking into them for fear their limited strength might dissipate. Aztecs and other pre-Columbian Mesoamericans used obsidian as well as other darker-hued stones for symbolic reverence. Tezcatlipoca (literally translated as “smoking mirror”) was a god of sorcerers, warriors, and kings. In the Codex Borgia, thought to have originated around AD 1400 in Cholula, Mexico, the deity is depicted with obsidian discs either on his chest or encircling his head on a crown. 4 These dark mirrors gave Tezcatlipoca the power to see into the hearts of men, converse with gods, and predict the future (especially war outcomes). Consequently, many Mesoamerican rulers also wore obsidian, which is optically distinctive because it is both reflective and translucent. The stone was viewed not only as a symbol of power but as a touchstone that connected its viewers with how warfare—the darkest of acts—should be waged. Black Mirror shows the waging of future war in the episodes “Hated in the Nation” and “Men Against Fire.” Black Mirrors and Baroque Narcissism When Europeans began demanding access to Aztec obsidian mirrors in the 1500s, a steady supply traveled east over the Atlantic Ocean. One prominent buyer was John Dee, who worked for Queen Elizabeth I. He foretold her future by looking into his own Aztec black mirror, which is now on display at the British Museum in London. 5 There was also quite a craze during the late 1600s for “self-portrait” mirrors, very reminiscent of our culture’s never-ending selfie craze. The trend coincided with im-

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proved mirror-making techniques and lower production and distribution costs. As a result, mirrors were no longer rare commodities for the rich; hence, European culture transitioned into a period of Baroque narcissism. By the 1700s, black mirrors were a notable form of visual entertainment, not unlike the mobile media of today. In 1770, engraver William Gilpin wrote about hanging a black mirror in his carriage so he could frame the landscape to see “a succession of high-coloured pictures . . . continually gliding before the eye. They are like visions of the imagination; or the brilliant landscapes of a dream.” 6 In 1839, Sir John Robison of the Royal Society of Edinburgh described the first daguerreotypes (early photographs) as being “nearly the same as that of views taken by reflection in a black mirror.” 7 Following in the obsidian tradition, the first cameras were mobile media that exemplified the concept of visually capturing and representing the world we encounter on a daily basis. There is a striking parallel between portable black mirrors from ancient history, the nineteenth-century trend of self-portraiture, and the billions of selfies and mobile phones that not only populate modern culture but play a starring role in many Black Mirror episodes. Black Mirrors: Art, Science, and Technology Though European artists had long used black mirrors to assist with paintings of the natural world, the darkness aspect of the black mirror has natural affinities with the captivating power of cinema and other moving-image arts that are experienced in darkened spaces. Visual artists as diverse as Picasso, Manet, Matisse, Gerhard Richter, and Anne Baldassari have utilized the black mirror as an instrument—on par with the camera obscura—to depict a more aesthetically pleasing scene, grapple with the immensity of a landscape, or depict the world from a fresh vantage point. Black mirrors were not only used as creative “frames” for seeing the world in a novel aesthetic fashion; they were also used as tools for scientific and optical research. The black mirror represented perhaps the first philosophical “instrument” to encourage a reexamination of perception, reflection, and the nature of reality. Black mirrors offered a particular visual and conceptual experience, an aesthetic filter that seduced viewers into contemplating a sublime reflection of reality while also hinting at the infinite emptiness of the cosmos. As such, black mirrors were seen as portals to enlightenment regarding the empirical world and worlds beyond, countering the nihilism implicit in the darkness of the mirrors and the night skies above and beyond. The so-called magical quality black mirrors possessed made them ideal symbols in stories that both enthralled and entertained and thus offered the potential for profound aesthetic or philosophical experiences. We fix our eyes on the black mirrors of TVs, laptops, tablets, and mobile

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phones, often stringing a wire and speaker into our ears. Black mirrors have been endowed with parasitic tendencies, favoring an evolutionary trajectory that protects their primacy and centrality in human consciousness. Civilization is moving toward near-total dependency on these personal black mirrors. They are literally rewiring our neural circuitry. Like the throbber in the opening of Brooker’s TV series, our own individual black mirrors are operating on our consciousness while providing reflective portals to an infinity of possible worlds. Brooker and Black Mirror reveal how addicted we’ve become to the smooth surfaces as well as the beliefs, behaviors, and visions they bring forth. 8 As suggested in the opening of each Black Mirror episode, today’s black mirror screens function like “electric obsidian,” providing dark spaces illuminated with glowing lights where humans collide with each other and with existence until the façade cracks. TERROR IN THE BRIGHT LIGHTS Perhaps the most influential aesthetic vision of electric light and technological advancement is the blazingly white space station in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Stanley Kubrick’s largely optimistic vision of an enlightened human future in a vast and awe-inspiring universe. Inside the space station, the floors and walls are white, with a ceiling designed of rectangular grids sporting pure white light. The Discovery spacecraft also resembles white starlight, albeit in a slightly muted shade. Of course, 2001 also gave us the HAL 9000, a terrifying vision of artificial intelligence and technology run amok amid the pristine sleekness of the Discovery. Similarly, The Matrix (1999) features brightly lit spaces as sites for technological mastery and terrifying possibilities. For example, consider the scene inside “the Construct,” the pure white space where Morpheus shares with Neo the full meaning of “the Matrix” as well as of mediated reality, the only form of reality most people know. Hollywood has a long history of portraying dystopian futures in which the heroines and heroes must escape realms of artificial light, such as Alphaville (1965), THX 1138 (1971), Logan’s Run (1976), Tron (1982), The Truman Show (1997), and WALL•E (2008). In each film, something has gone awry among the glowing emissions of modern technological civilization, and the heroines/heroes must seek an exit from their full-spectrum existence. Without doubt, Brooker and Black Mirror draw heavily from these visions of bright white spaces, realms symbolic of potential enlightenment yet also the locus of terrifying technological and human failure. What follows is a description of the overly illuminated, hyper-reflective spaces we encounter in the first three seasons of Black Mirror.

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“White Christmas” Perhaps the most dramatic example of blown-out white space occurs in “White Christmas,” where Matthew is a kind of modern Aztec god, a social media Tezcatlipoca, capable of seeing into the hearts of men and women and predicting the future (in the form of assisting lonely men in picking up women at office parties). Matthew is later shown at his previous job with “Smartelligence,” where he sits at a snow-white desk in a brightly fluorescent room located next to a shiny white kitchen. Before him on the desk is a “cookie,” a white egg that contains a copy of the consciousness of Greta. Extracted from Greta’s brain (by Greta’s choice), the copy lives inside the egg, which is a colorless orb that has no clear beginning or end. The copy acts as Greta’s personal assistant on a daily basis, making sure the coffee is ready when Greta wakes up and preoccupying itself with planning Greta’s personal calendar day in and day out, existing as an advanced merger of Siri and Google Calendar. Media technology completely encloses and traps human consciousness. “Fifteen Million Merits” In the first scene of the bike room, we see a white ceiling featuring rectangular white light, not unlike the space station ceiling in 2001. Of course, the walls and the floor are largely black, suggesting a future of darkness beneath the enlightenment, with humans busy pedaling away while staring at screens, generating energy and “merits” to avoid oblivion within the endless entertainment dystopia. Everyone’s existence is full-spectrum—life is spent staring at screens, whether one is pedaling or at hanging out at home. The residences of Bing and Abi are cubelike, with walls and ceilings acting as TV screens. Sitting at a glowing white desk, the celebrity judges of the Hot Shots reality TV show instruct Abi to step forward “into the light,” where spotlights beam down on the stage. After joining the show Wraith Babes, we see Abi performing sex acts in a bright white room. Amazingly, the 2001 influence is made clear backstage at Hot Shots, where there is a copy of the HAL 9000 camera eye. In the episode’s conclusion, Bing (now a star with his own TV show, in which he simulates rebellion with various rants) is rewarded with a larger residence furnished with white walls, floors, and furniture. Everyone in this episode is trapped within a spectral existence, a world of bright lights, electronic screens, and colorless spaces illuminated with soulless imagery.

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“White Bear” While fleeing mobs of people armed with weapons and videophones, Victoria stumbles upon a stage, only to be greeted by a bank of interrogating lights. Unbeknownst to her, she’s a prisoner—convicted of documenting (via video) her boyfriend’s murder of a child—and the star of an entertainment-prison theme park known as White Bear Justice Park. Later, in a vehicle reminiscent of the pope-mobile, Victoria is paraded around in a clear shell with bright white fluorescent lights beaming down on her. Meanwhile, jeering mobs toss tomatoes and other items at her, fully aglow. After her memory of the event is painfully erased, she unknowingly begins the scenario for a new set of visitors. Ultimately, Victoria is trapped and tortured under the relentless lights, sites of terror and torture as interactive entertainment, where Orwell meets Disney in what appears to be a theme park theocracy. “Playtest” and “Hated in the Nation” In both of these episodes, the bright white realms are locations for the development and deployment of highly advanced media technologies— with deadly results. In “Playtest,” Cooper visits Saito Gemu, a company known for its horror-themed video games. Located in a medieval-like structure, Saito Gemu’s test room is brutalistically white. While testing a video game on a chip implanted in his brain, Cooper is accidentally killed by an electronic media malfunction triggered by a call from his mother. As Saito Gemu’s Katie explains: “Every synapse of his brain lit up at once, then went dead—like that.” In “Hated in the Nation,” Granular is a corporation that has developed swarms of drone bees to pollinate flowers in England as a means of countering the ongoing bee-colony collapse. The Granular headquarters and research facility feature a giant greenhouse-like room with bright artificial grow-lights, where the drone bees are developed and tested. However well-intended, the drones are hacked and deployed to murder unpopular people being abused on Twitter and other social media. The drone bees bore directly into the brains of the victims, again suggesting that media technologies can trap, contain, penetrate, and even kill human consciousness via physical penetration of the brain. “Men Against Fire” Stripe is a soldier of the future, where neural implants are used to portray the “enemies” as roach-like humanoid monsters in need of killing and extermination. In effect, the implant functions like virtual reality that converts real war into a video game. Because of a glitch in his chip, Stripe can perceive certain “monsters” as the individual human beings they

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actually are. Later, Stripe meets a doctor whose offices include a whitecube-like room with a white futuristic Eames chair, white desks, white computers, white drapes, and rectangular white lights above. While in the white room, the doctor explains the illusion of the “MASS” virtual reality program, which is used to inspire soldiers to kill without hesitation or remorse. Stripe’s memory is wiped, he’s discharged with full honors, and he is given (what his eyes see as) an immaculate house with a beautiful lover awaiting him there. Yet in reality, it’s a dilapidated white frame house adorned with graffiti. Like numerous other characters in Black Mirror, Stripe is trapped within an electrified world made possible by the cunning illusory uses of media technology. In these Black Mirror episodes, the full spectrum of electric light converges and collides in bright realms of technological terror. The brighter the realm, the more the reality seems dystopian, as if we’re fated for a fluorescent future from which there is no escape. Might that be the unfixable destiny beneath the data breaches of Facebook and all social media— hence the reason why Black Mirror seems so existentially on target? ELECTRIC LIGHT AND TOTAL ENVIRONMENTS Though much has been written about the effects of electronic screens, from televisions to computers to mobile phones, little has been said about the effects of electric light—as a media technology and its transformation of human consciousness and behavior. In his magnum opus, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, Marshall McLuhan views electric light as “pure information”— a medium with a message that is “totally radical, pervasive, and decentralized.” 9 In McLuhan’s view, the “message of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs.” 10 Though fire has long illuminated the nighttime world for humans, electric light has utterly transformed human association and civilization, causing a spectral existence that operates on a planetary scale. For McLuhan, electric light is a non-specialist technology, a total field of energy making many tasks possible while ending “the regime of night and day, of indoors and outdoors.” 11 As pure energy with no matter, light is spectral, radiating in all directions and into all aspects of culture and consciousness. Electric light has three profound and interrelated messages: (1) It has produced a 24/7 nonstop electrified and mediated civilization; (2) It has erased nature and the night skies from daily human consciousness; and (3) It has countered the effect of the telescope (the media technology that removed us from the center of the universe) by effecting the 24/7 civilization and thus “erasing” the night sky from our consciousness and reinstating our belief that we are at the center of the universe. In our spectral

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existence, we’re the center of everything—the center of all value, desire, and destiny on Earth. Humans and human existence are what matters, and what’s beyond is largely meaningless and valueless beyond the occasional curiosity value of a pretty planet or strange galaxy. These three messages are explicit and implicit in all episodes of Black Mirror, where each plot focuses on our screen-based and electrified civilization. Humans confront each other and their technologies but not their actual place in the universe, since it is no longer a part of daily life. For most people, the fact we inhabit a planet that represents a mere speck in a cosmos that stretches across 100 billion light years in the electric eyes of the Hubble Space Telescope is much too terrifying to contemplate. So far, there is no narrative in Black Mirror beyond humans confronting humans and their existence via spectral media technology. Electric light now creates a total media environment for human existence on planet Earth floating through the cosmic void—as illustrated via NASA’s views of Earth at night from space, where our cities are glowing orbs of yellowish-white light on a dark planet. Inside the orbs are what McLuhan calls “total environments.” In 1964, McLuhan declared: “When Sputnik went up on October 4, 1957, it put the planet inside a man-made environment for the first time. 12 Electric light and electronic media are central to the megasystems and hyperobjects of civilization, total media environments now running 24/7 and perpetually aglow. Since screens are ultimately grounded in electric light, it follows that a key technological trajectory of civilization is toward total light in our total media environments. When we gaze down on Earth from space and view its glowing orbs, we can see that electric light and electronic screens have removed the universe from nightly existence while shoving all of us together in a spew of photons and colliding images. We are a species that lives in orbs and webs of glowing light, and because of this we are insulated from the planetary and cosmic darkness. When all the colors of light bounce, collide, and converge, we get white light—pure information overload, light canceling light, for total media environments. For McLuhan, electricity and electronic media have abolished the space-time constraints for human communication on Earth. This has two effects involving speed and proximity: (1) Electricity and electronic media accelerate images, events, and society toward the speed of light, the speed at which electronic information is transmitted; and (2) Everything and everyone seems in utmost proximity. Everything is coming closer toward us at greater speed. It is not that the world is actually smaller, as people often comment; rather, events seem near and now and coming at us 24/7. Electronic media have an effected an “implosion” of events and reversed the “vanishing point” in how we represent the world to ourselves. 13

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With electronic media and electric light, the vanishing point is no longer “out there” extending toward the distant horizon. It is “in here,” contracting toward the inner horizon of human consciousness. In contrast to natural and electric light shining on the objects of the world (such as the pages of books and the canvases of paintings), televisions, computers, and mobile media deploy light shining through electronic screens. The light shining through is seductive, beckoning us toward something beyond the screens. Yet as Espelie has considered in her 2017 film A Net to Catch the Light, most electronic screens are emitting blue light between 400 and 500 nanometers. It throws off our circadian rhythms and “disrupts our sense of time, disturbs our nights, our dreams, our sleep.” 14 The glowing and flashing lights shine upon our faces, thus converting our eyes and consciousness into the vanishing points for these total environments. At the same time, images proliferate and accelerate toward us, pouring through and colliding on the screens of our media, boring into our daily consciousness while placing us at the center of the world we experience as a total environment. As seen on our Twitter feeds and Facebook pages, everyone is proximate and immediate; all events trigger an instant reaction needing an instant resolution. It is a world of constant contact and endless conflict. We are in the world of “hot media,” light canceling light through absorption or massive reflection, the full spectrum world of Black Mirror. HOT AND COOL MEDIA In Understanding Media, McLuhan also presents a hot–cool binary, supposedly based on how much information is provided in a medium and how much cognitive involvement is needed when engaging with it. 15 In theory, film is a “hot” medium because it provides a rich tableau of visual and auditory information and requires minimal cognitive involvement from the audience. By contrast, landline telephones are a “cool” medium because they provide less information and require more cognitive involvement, with each person filling in the images around the words coming through the receiver. The main problem with McLuhan’s hot–cool binary is that it breaks down with the rapid evolution of television screens (supposedly a cool medium in the 1960s) and cannot be applied to today’s technologies—not computers, laptops, tablets, mobile phones, or various HD and plasma screens. However, the concepts of “hot” and “cool” have considerable power when reformulated for the 24/7 environments of the twenty-first century—those filled with the black mirrors of electronic screens. The significance is not in the amount of information on the black mirror but in the direction of the gaze. Hot media are those that promote an inward gaze

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among the human species, with the viewing subjects and viewed objects in close proximity to each other. In effect, the black mirrors are for viewing everyone, with light flowing through and generating reflections. Thus, hot media are a world with a higher density of humans, energy, events, and higher friction. With things in close proximity, even on a screen, images and events rub, collide, or smash directly against one another. It’s a full-spectrum collision on our screens and in our consciousnesses. Moving at the speed of light, hot media fuel acceleration, quick reactions, short attention spans, and instant feedback loops. Temperatures are higher, and tempers are hotter. Hildebrand and Vacker write: Hence, heat and friction also lie in our global layers of ego-media, giant clusters of networks and webs, all jammed with ever more contents and contexts. Platforms, websites, services, affordances. Google, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, YouTube, Netflix. Social media sharing, caring, shaming, connecting. Hashtags and emojis, clickbait and catfishers. Hot takes, hive-minds, eHarmony. YOLO. Tinder love, tribal chieftains, Internet trolls, TV realities, Twitter gods. Fake news, false flags, and filter bubbles. FOMO. Cute cat videos and candy crushes. LOL. Meming and mining. Copies of copies of copies. Reduce, remix, redact. Colliding echo chambers. Siri and Alexa. Firewalls and border walls. Breaking news, Streetviews, Times Square. Screens and screening. TSA, NSA, MI6, MSS. Governments, corporations, and capitalism. Democracy, socialism, and fascism. Arab Spring. Occupy. Women’s March. #MeToo. Superheroes, Super Bowls, and World Cups. Empowerment, domination, entertainment, distraction. Tribe rubs against tribe. Proximity, friction, and heat in hot ego-media. 16

Are these not the very conditions of our 24/7 civilization situated inside our glowing orbs floating in the darkness? We gaze upon screens and scroll with our fingers, navigating total information in a total media environment, with images and information flooding toward us 24/7, a world imploding upon us. The shrill tone at the opening of Black Mirror, followed by the fractured screen—that’s the world of hot media. Cool media are technologies with mostly an outward gaze, peering away from humans, with objects further apart or moving away from us. Cool media include telescopes, satellites, and space probes. Planet Earth is below us and the starry skies are beyond us, while the voids are expanding, and the galaxies are speeding away. Though filled with information, cool media confront lower densities, lower friction, and more distant or remote events. There is less light and more cosmic darkness. Temperatures are lower, tempers are cooler, and the mind wanders and wonders. Again, Hildebrand and Vacker: In the cool gaze, events slow, attention spans grow, reflection trumps reaction, the species supersedes the tribe, borders and wars become artificial and absurd. Micro-particularities and hot affective conditions

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are not visible, but large-scale patterns, movements, and locations become more apparent. The more distant, aerial, and heightened perspective—beyond the thick, hot, reactive layers closer to us—opens up larger views and visions. Google Earth, Hubble Deep Fields, Sloan Digital Sky Survey. The cosmic web of galaxies, in a universe getting less crowded by the moment, with all galaxies are destined to disappear beyond all horizons. . . . Voids, holes, and emptiness in outer space and our philosophies become visible. We are the center of nothing. Nihilism and enlightenment are the challenge. The universal over the tribal. Terrestrial heat replaced by the cosmic chill. There are no widely-accepted politics or political narratives in the cool. Hot politics freeze in the cosmic background temperature. 17

With cool media, we are forced to view ourselves through the eyes of our species, to see our existence as a species as sharing a planet, not merely as individuals and tribes vying for recognition and domination of our planet. Via all the Hubble images on our screens, our daily existence collides with our cosmic existence, inhabiting a tiny region in a vast universe in which we are not central. Obviously, hot and cool media can overlap. For example, we see Hubble images in Twitter and Instagram, while Google Earth can be both hot and cool, getting hotter the closer it zooms into Maps and Streetview but getting cooler the further it zooms out to show Earth floating against the blackness. With hot media, humans are the center of everything, while cool media show us to be the center of nothing. Hot media dominate the glowing orbs of light on the planet, while cool media show us to be temporary and insignificant life forms in an ancient and awe-inspiring universe. Facebook and Twitter are the spectral and existential counters to the Hubble Space Telescope, making us feel special and meaningful amid the cosmic emptiness and loneliness. 18 NO EXIT AND NO GRAND NARRATIVES Like the dark skies that stretch across the universe, black mirrors symbolize the cosmic and cultural voids, the nothingness and human insignificance we block out when we turn on our own black mirrors. After the throbber does its thing, our screens fill with endless colors of bright lights—the spectral existence of planetary civilization. Electric light and electronic screens effect total media environments within which we still seem central, meaningful, and important in the universe, at least within the universe of the glowing orbs on that planet. That’s why hot media marginalize cool media into having only off-world relevance. In the six episodes of Black Mirror discussed here, hot media technologies have utmost proximity to human consciousness—either nearby, right above, all around, in our faces, or inside our brains. All of the characters exist in total media environments. Consciousness and media

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technology are close together, putting humans face-to-face with each other via screens or implants. There is no distance—nothing is moving away. Everything is coming at the characters for instant reaction and consumption, images colliding with images, fueling instant love or hate, instant desire or anger, the desire to make love or the desire to kill and exterminate. This is all happening within our systems of electronic technology and electric civilization, which span the planet and protect us in the glowing orbs, shields for the vastness beyond. Hot media in the glowing orbs—that’s the context for Black Mirror, with so many characters seemingly trapped in their technological existence with no way out and no exit. In its vision of people trapped inside full spectrum spaces, Black Mirror is certainly drawing from No Exit, the acclaimed one-act play written by existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. 19 In the play, three characters share a mysterious hotel-like room in which they cannot shut their eyes or sleep and the lights cannot be turned off. There are no windows, no door handles, and no way out of the room. Trapped, the three characters must confront the lives they have lived and the destinies they have made, with no excuses and no escapes. The play has multiple levels of meaning, most famously the idea that “Hell is—other people!” 20 No Exit’s three characters see themselves through the eyes of the other, though the consciousness of other human beings. Thus, they gaze upon each other and argue, accuse, evade, deny, and are in near-perpetual conflict. Are these not the white hot conditions on display in social media and in numerous episodes of Black Mirror? There is no exit for Matt and Greta’s copy in “White Christmas,” no exit for Abi and Bing in “Fifteen Million Merits,” no exit for Victoria in “White Bear,” no exit for Cooper in “Playtest,” and no exit for Stripe in “Men Against Fire.” In Black Mirror, there is no escape from electric light and electronic screens, the aesthetic forms and total environments for daily existence. With events accelerating and everything proximate, there’s only humans colliding with each other in the glow of screens—the fluorescent future of Black Mirror. Since the emergence of television, the proliferation and dominance of hot media has paralleled the breakup of the secular grand narratives theorized by Jean-Francois Lyotard. According to Lyotard, humanity no longer has “recourse to the grand narratives,” meaning that there are no shared utopian visions such as “progress” and “enlightenment” that could unify a scientific, secular society in creating a model for world culture. 21 Black Mirror captures the dystopian entropy of the secular grand narratives, an existential void now filled with micronarratives proliferating in hot media environments. These include sports, fandom, fashion, celebrity, brands, consumerism, gaming, music identities (punk, Goth, gangsta, C&W, electronic, and so on), reality TV, social media, superheroes, comic cons, conspiracies, superstitions, paranormalism, and

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endless forms of tribalization. Such mediated micronarratives satisfy the psychological need to stand out and yet also belong while providing daily belief systems that free humans from the grand narratives or from contemplating human existence in the universe—the very challenges posed by cool media. So far, cool media are nonexistent in Black Mirror. Yet it is cool media, such as the Hubble, that pose the paradox of our greatest intellectual achievement: We have discovered a vast and ancient cosmos in which we are insignificant and perhaps meaningless. Lyotard believes this is “the sole serious question to face humanity today” and that by comparison, “everything else seems insignificant.” 22 Referring to the fact that the sun will burn out in four billion years, Lyotard writes: “The sun, our earth and your thought will have been no more than a spasmodic state of energy, an instant of established order, a smile on the surface of matter in a remote corner of the cosmos.” 23 Yes, we are brainy and tiny, brave and creative enough to discover that the expanding universe contains two trillion galaxies and untold numbers of planets and life forms. Given the recent emergence of the Anthropocene (the human epoch), climate disruption, and a possible sixth extinction event, we’re desperately in need of a new grand narrative that connects us to the planet we inhabit and universe from which we evolved. CONCLUSION: FACING THE COOL UNIVERSE In the conclusion to “White Christmas,” Matt faces one of most striking and profound fates in science fiction history, rivaling anything that’s come from Hollywood. As penalty for Matt’s social media voyeurism, the electronic “Zed-Eyes” are activated to block anyone from seeing Matt or vice versa. With the electronic blockage, all Matt sees are outlines of others while others only see his outline—the equivalent of full absorption and utter disappearance. The electronic outlines are filled with pixelated white space spotted with dark specks, not unlike the static on television screens—the very static produced (in part) by the same background radiation confirming the expansion of the universe. As stated on NASA’s website: “Turn your television to an ‘in between’ channel, and part of the static you’ll see is the afterglow of the big bang.” 24 For Matt, hot media are blocked, and all that’s left is the cosmic chill of cool media. Instead of viewing people, all Matt can view is the origins and the destiny of the expanding universe—expanding for 13.7 billion years and stretching almost 100 light years across. That’s the deep horror inside Black Mirror—the aesthetic collision of humans and their existence within total media environments, where bright lights buffer us from the infinite dark beyond. The truth is that we may have not evolved as much as we think, have failed to find any true

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significance beyond tribes and consumption, been unsuccessful at defining an objective or any universal meaning for our existence despite all images and information showing up in Technicolor on our glowing black mirrors or in our orbs of electric light. The specter of the Hubble telescope haunts our black mirrors. Electric light and electronic screens “protect” us against the cosmic void—absent a new philosophical narrative for the human species in the Hubble universe. Exploring such a narrative would provide a great aesthetic challenge for Charlie Brooker and the writers of Black Mirror. Will we absorb or will we reflect? What objects are we creating in confronting the void with our spectral existence? Ultimately, we must embrace the full meaning of the non-binary, the static that Matt himself faces forever. We can’t block out the starry profusion forever and hope to survive, no matter how much we surround ourselves with bright lights and black mirrors—electronic obsidian for the twenty-first century. NOTES 1. Elizabeth Flock, “Neil deGrasse Tyson on the Most Astounding Fact in the Universe,” Washington Post, March 5, 2012,https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ blogpost/post/neil-degrasse-tyson-on-the-most-astounding-fact-in-the-universevideo/2012/03/05/gIQAZwv6sR_blog.html?utm_term=.0df2924c3528. 2. Vit and Rappenglück, “Looking Through a Telescope with an Obsidian Mirror,” 7–15. 3. Maurizio Forte (professor of classical studies art, art history, and visual studies at Duke University) in discussion with coauthor Erin Espelie, January 2013. 4. Maillet, The Claude Glass: Use and Meaning of the Black Mirror in Western Ar t, 53–54. 5. Dee, A True & Faithful Relation of What Passed for Many Years, 5. 6. Gilpin, Remarks on Forest Scenery, and Other Woodland Views, 225. 7. Robison, “Notes on Daguerre’s Photography,” 155–57. 8. Brooker, “The Dark Side of Our Gadget Addiction.” 9. McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, 8–9. 10. Ibid., 8. 11. Ibid., 52. 12. McLuhan, Understanding Me: Lectures and Interviews, 242. 13. McLuhan, Understanding Media, 350. The full effects of the reversal of the vanishing points are detailed in McLuhan and Parker, Through the Vanishing Point, 1–31. 14. A Net to Catch the Light, directed by Erin Espelie (with the voice of Steve Jobs), (2017; New York City: Imagine Science Film Festival), HD digital file. 15. McLuhan, Understandin g Media, 22–32. 16. Hildebrand and Vacker, “Hot and Cool in the Media(S)cene.” 17. Ibid. 18. Ibid. 19. Jean-Paul Sartre, No Exit and Three Other Plays, 1–46. No Exit was first performed in 1944. 20. Ibid., 45. 21. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 60. 22. Lyotard, The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, 9. 23. Ibid., 10.

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24. NASA, Exploring the Universe, “The Big Bang’s Playing TV,” October 5, 2006, https://www.nasa.gov/vision/universe/starsgalaxies/cobe_background.html.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Brooker, Charlie. “The Dark Side of Our Gadget Addiction.” Guardian, December 1, 2011. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/dec/01/charlie-brooker-darkside-gadget-addiction-black-mirror. Dee, John. A True & Faithful Relation of What Passed for Many Years Between Dr. John Dee and Some Spirits. Glasgow: Antoine Publishing and Golden Dragon Press, 1974. Gilpin, William. Remarks on Forest Scenery, and Other Woodland Views (Relative Chiefly to Picturesque Beauty) Illustrated by the Scenes of New Forest in Hampshire. Vol. 2, 2nd ed. London: Printed for R. Blamire, 1791. Hildebrand, Julia and Barry Vacker. “Hot and Cool in the Media(S)cene.” Medium, 2018. https://medium.com/@barryvacker/hot-and-cool-in-the-mediascene-a-mcluhan-style-art-and-theory-project-658ce02a6af8. Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. ——— . The Inhuman: Reflections on Time. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1992. Maillet, Arnaud. The Claude Glass: Use and Meaning of the Black Mirror in Western Art. New York: Zone Books, 2004. McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: Extensions of Man. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964. ——— . Understanding Me: Lectures and Interviews. Edited by Stephanie McLuhan and David Staines. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003. McLuhan, Marshall and Harley Parker. Through the Vanishing Point: Space in Poetry and Painting. New York: Harper and Colophon Books, 1968. Robison, John. “Notes on Daguerre’s Photography.” Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal, 27:53 (July 1839). Sartre, Jean-Paul. No Exit and Three Other Plays. New York: Vintage International, 1989. Vit, Josef and Michael A. Rappenglück. “Looking Through a Telescope with an Obsidian Mirror. Could Specialists of Ancient Cultures Have Been Able to View the Night Sky Using Such an Instrument?” Mediterranean Archaeology and Archaeometry, 16(4) (2016).

Section Five

Technology and Existence

As Cooper succinctly illuminates in “Playtest,” “Tech’s awesome.” Steve Jobs understood that rather well in the design of Apple products. As does Frank Gehry in the design of his titanium-skinned buildings, and Elon Musk in the production of Tesla electric cars. Technology awes us because we have replaced nature with technology as our object of daily wonder. Our civilization is completely and utterly technological. Billions of people inhabit electrified and mechanized metropolises, filled with towering skyscrapers, bustling airports, artful museums, and giant sports stadiums, all surrounded by suburbs, malls, highways, and media networks that span the planet. Glittering by day, glowing by night, our cities and their technologies are perhaps our greatest social achievement, for they represent our planetary habitat. Technology is the host for human life, just as media is the host for human consciousness. Technology is never neutral, for when we extend technology out to create our environment, it in turn shapes us. We adapt to the environments we create, for better or worse. It is our many uses of media technologies in our metropolises that are the focus of many Black Mirror episodes, each offering insights into the fears and hopes for our technological existence. With the above in mind, Julia M. Hildebrand links McLuhan’s “extensions of man” to “Hated in the Nation,” revealing the numbness we experience to emerging technologies’ abilities: “The technologically extended faculties of the social media users, the hacker, and the government eventually flip into an extreme and turn against them.” Osei Alleyne elegantly links instances of symbolic violence today to themes portrayed within “White Bear.” He writes, “For the watchful social activist and the sci-fi viewer, Victoria’s imprisonment, actively disavowed subjectivity, abject subjugation, and dubious charges beg the methods of deconstruction in which contemporary Black-feminist and Black Lives Matter movements have engaged.” Carlos A. Scolari applies McLuhan’s tetrad to multiple Black Mirror episodes in an attempt to understand how we may push our current media technologies to their limits, and beyond.

THIRTEEN Overextended Media Hashtag Hatred and Domestic Drones Julia M. Hildebrand

Is Charlie Brooker, creator of Black Mirror, familiar with the work of Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan? The role Brooker assigns communication technologies in the third season finale “Hated in the Nation” 1 —as in so many other dystopian Black Mirror vignettes—certainly suggests so. In this chapter, I explore how some of McLuhan’s major media theories apply to the fictional story about social media threats and hacked robotic bees. Set in near-future Great Britain, the episode shows how ubiquitous, self-replicating bee drones can turn from tools of pollination to weapons of remote assassination. The character, use, and relevance of smartphones, social media, CCTV, and the insect drones as another communication device effectively exemplify McLuhan’s understanding of media as extensions of human faculties and ultimately as environments. More concretely, Brooker and director James Hawes illustrate the intentional and unintentional consequences of “over-extension” which occur when a medium—in other words, a human-made technology—is extended out too far. The aim and value of the chapter is twofold: First, I highlight the timeliness and applicability of some of McLuhan’s main approaches from the last century in this example of Black Mirror. Second, I critically explore a potential near-future media ecology that includes autonomous insect robots in public spaces and an out-of-control online shaming culture. Ultimately, this analysis will shed light on existential dynamics among

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technologies, environments, and humans as shown in the context of violent domestic drones directed by volatile social media forces. SOCIAL MEDIA STORMS, MYSTERIOUS DEATHS, AND HACKED DRONES The murder-mystery-style narrative introduces us to Detective Karin Parke (Kelly Macdonald) and her new partner Blue Coulson (Faye Marsay) along with National Crime Agency officer Shaun Li (Benedict Wong), who are tasked with solving the deaths of two people in the midst of a social media “shit storm.” One victim is Jo Powers, a writer who published a controversial opinion piece about the suicide of an activist for disability benefits. Powers’s social media profiles are still inundated with threatening comments about her article, when Parke and Coulson come to see her dead body in her home. In a similar fashion, the Grammy award winner Tusk dies after heavy public criticism and threats over his insulting behavior toward a nine-year-old fan on a television talk show. The detectives come to learn that a bee-imitating autonomous drone insect (ADI) entered their heads, causing excruciating pain and ultimately death. Those drones are part of a larger system maintaining Great Britain’s ecological balance for the second summer after a colony collapse disorder led to the extinction of the natural honey bee. The seemingly reliable ADIs were hacked and are now steered by #DeathTo along with a picture of the target on social media. Moreover, the circulating hashtag includes the hacker’s instructions for an online unpopularity contest with the promise that each day the top person will die. This relentless, so-called Game of Consequences gains momentum with several thousand social media participants. A young woman, shamed for her inappropriate behavior at a war memorial, ends up on top of the death list and is soon likewise killed by an ADI attack. In the meantime, at the headquarters of the Granular Project responsible for the ADIs, expert Rasmus Sjoberg keeps losing control over not only one but eventually all drones in the country. When he and the agents try to secure the drone-network, the ulterior motives of the hacker kick in: the bees are now turning against all hashtag users, killing several hundred thousand people in a horrifying “end game.” In the final scenes, we see Parke recount the events in a testimony while Coulson continues to pursue the hacker in what appears to be Latin America. MEDIA EXTENSIONS AND ENVIRONMENTS This dystopian narrative plays out the socio-technical implications of technology pushed to an extreme. McLuhan 2 grounds this phenomenon

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in the notion that any kind of human-made artifact, which to him is a “medium,” is essentially an extension of human faculties. Similar to German philosopher Ernst Kapp’s understanding of tools as “organ-projections,” 3 McLuhan understands, for instance, the alphabet as extending the eyes. The printing press extends the alphabet. Similarly, clothing extends the skin, just as buildings extend our clothing. “Hated in the Nation” illustrates this theory when Parke and Coulson have the following conversation about smartphones as an extension of the human mind: Coulson: You’ve seen what people tuck away on these [smartphones]. Schemes and kill lists, kiddy porn. It’s not boring. Parke: I’m old enough to remember when they walked around with that stuff just tucked away in their heads. Coulson: Right. But now they can’t help but entrusting it to their little companions. These things absorb who we are. They know everything about us. The further we extend ourselves out and into technologies, such as the smartphone, the more the technology may “absorb who we are.” In the process of technologically extending ourselves, we become numb to our relation to the technology. To explain how we become numb to our media extension, McLuhan draws on the Greek myth of Narcissus, a young man mistaking his own reflection in water for that of another person. “This extension of himself by mirror numbed his perceptions until he became the servomechanism of his own extended or repeated image,” explains McLuhan. 4 Unaware of the water as a medium and his own reflection as content, Narcissus falls in love with his image. A similar process occurs for all other media according to McLuhan. 5 Any self-extension brings about new stimulations, pressures, and ultimately stress, which cause a numbness and then “amputation” of this function from our bodies. “In the physical stress of superstimulation of various kinds, the central nervous system acts to protect itself by a strategy of amputation or isolation of the offending organ, sense, or function.” 6 Each extension and thus amplification is managable only when our perception of it is numbed or blocked. The self-amputation leads to a lack of self-recognition. Media are “translations of us,” 7 yet we forget about this dynamic once we adjust to the technological self-extension via “autoamputation.” McLuhan describe this effect with the medium being “the massage”: it massages our senses and inhibits a realization of what contemporary media are and what they do. 8 This loss of awareness toward the technology massaging our senses can result in a loss of control. While we create media to suit our needs, media can have control over us as we develop numbness and lack of awareness toward the technology and its effects. “Hated in the Nation” alludes to this reciprocal process when Coulson mentions that people “can’t help but entrusting” sensitive

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information to their “little companions” which “absorb who we are.” McLuhan’s friend J. M. Culkin sums up this phenomenon as, “We become what we behold. We shape our tools and thereafter they shape us.” 9 More precisely, “Any extension, whether of skin, and or foot, affects the whole psychic and social complex.” 10 The proliferation of the automobile, for instance, had significant effects on urban and rural landscapes, work and leisure practices, travel patterns and sensations. Similarly, the effects of the smartphone are felt on the level of the individual (e.g., social interaction) and society (e.g., economic development and innovation). “Hated in the Nation” vividly depicts the impact of technology—particularly that of social media and autonomous drones coupled with cultures of surveillance—on such micro and macro levels. My analysis seeks to respond to McLuhan’s call to explore “the origin and development of the individual extensions of man” by first looking “at some general aspects of the media, or extensions of man, beginning with the never-explained numbness that each extension brings about in the individual and society.” 11 With “some general aspects of the media,” McLuhan prioritizes the form of technology over its content. “The medium is the message,” he famously states and explains that “the ‘message’ of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pattern that it introduces into human affairs.” 12 In other words, it is not “what one did with the machine, that was its meaning or message,” but how a “machine altered our relatons to one another and to ourselves.” 13 In this sense, it is secondary where you drive your car to or how you use your smartphone because the presence and proliferation of those technologies has an impact on you regardless of whether you engage with them. “It is the framework itself, that changes with new technology, and not just the picture within the frame,” McLuhan clarifies. 14 Since frameworks and ultimately environments are changing with each technological extension, we—like Narcissus—are affected as well. Paraphrasing McLuhan, Lance Strate notes that “it is the context that determines the content.” 15 Focusing only on the “content” of any medium, consequently, “blinds us to the character of the medium.” 16 “Hated in the Nation” falls back on this understanding in an early scene when Jo Powers receives a cake with an insult written on it. While her husband asks her not to eat it, she cuts herself a piece stating, “It’s a cake, that’s its job.” Powers disregards the medium’s “content” and focuses on its form. Correspondingly, the episode’s narrative shifts our attention to the formal character of the autonomous bee drones. Rather than emphasizing their role as pollinators, their capacities as autonomous bullets in a society that is numb to their dangerous potential become the center of the story.

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Besides approaching the medium as the numbing massage and sociotechnical message, McLuhan highlights how technologies shape and serve as environments. “Any technology tends to create a new human environment. Script and papyrus created the social environment we think of in connection with the empires of the ancient world. The stirrup and the wheel created unique environments of enormous scope. Technological environments are not merely passive containers of people but are active processes that reshape people and other technologies alike.” 17 “As environments,” Strate explains further, “media do not determine our actions, but they define the range of possible actions we can take, and facilitate certain actions while discouraging others. Media function as environments, ecologies, and systems.” 18 Due to the numbness effect, we are unable to clearly see and understand how this media-milieu can impact us unless we pay attention to changing scales and patterns. 19 Similarly, Strate points out that “We may become aware of the media that surround us for a brief time when they are new to us” or “when they break down and stop working, or when they become obsolete.” 20 When a computer breaks, for instance, its physical and digital infrastructure and any dependency and reliance on it become visible. Similarly, when a smartphone is lost, a realization of any sensitive and valuable content stored in the device likely kicks in. “Hated in the Nation” encourages us to be attentive to changing scales and patterns introduced by new media when depicting both unfamiliar as well as hacked (broken) media environments, namely the autonomous bee drones and the social media hashtag. Finally, Neil Postman suggests approaching media as metaphors. In contrast to a “concrete statement” that the term “message” in McLuhan’s aphorism denotes, Postman believes that media function more like metaphors. He explains, A message denotes a specific, concrete statement about the world. But the forms of our media, including the symbols through which they permit conversation, do not make such statements. They are rather like metaphors, working by unobtrusive but powerful implication to enforce their special definitions of reality. Whether we are experiencing the world through the lens of speech or the printed word or the television camera, our media-metaphors classify the world for us, sequence it, frame it, enlarge it, reduce it, color it, argue a case for what the world is like. 21

When we read a book, listen to the radio, or browse Facebook, “our mind is organized and controlled by these events.” 22 According to Postman, we are subjected to media-specific ideas of the world without being fully aware of the medium’s influence. 23 Black Mirror’s season finale integrates several such media-metaphors from social media to domestic drones stimulating a critical consideration of the suggested socio-technical changes and their “powerful implication.”

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THE VIRTUAL MEDIA ENVIRONMENT: HASHTAG HATRED In “Hated in the Nation,” two originally disparate technologies are fatally merged, when hacker Garrett Scholes reconfigures the #DeathTo as a command for the ADIs. As a result, the virtual media environment is directly linked to the physical, turning the online death wishes into an offline reality. Here, the episode addresses the assumption that online social interactions do not have the same relevance and effect as offline interpersonal communication. When Coulson, the team’s cyber-specialist, suspects the social media threats playing a role in Powers’s death, Parke comments, “That Internet stuff drifts off like weather. It’s half hate. They don’t mean it. The hate in a marriage, that’s in 3D. That’s had work put into it. That’s sincere.” “I’m divorced,” she adds further explaining why she could see Powers’s husband to be the murderer. Moreover, she advices Coulson, “Don’t wallow in that. The Internet will be pissed off with someone else today.” She turns out to be correct, as Tusk and his rude behavior to a young fan are next to catch a “shit storm on social media.” The assumption that online activities may be insincere “half hate” with no consequences as it “drifts off like weather” and moves on the next day is also highlighted when Parke and Coulson visit Liza Bahar, a school teacher who crowdsourced money to send Powers the insulting cake. Coulson discovers that Bahar also used the hashtag on Powers and confronts her about it: Coulson: You wished she was dead. Bahar: Well, uh no. No, I didn’t. Coulson: “Death to Jo Powers.” [shows her the comment on her smartphone] Bahar: That’s just… It’s a hashtag game, you know, like “Death to.” You insert the name of someone who’s being an arsehole. It’s not real. It’s a joke thing. Bahar, who also dismisses the cake as “a joke,” describes the online death threat as a “game” that is “not real.” Similarly, when the #DeathTo contest draws attention in the news, one commentator claims, “It’s not the hashtag killing them. That’s just a game. Like, if you’re an arsehole, you deserved to be shamed.” Here, the view that any online threats should be dismissed as playful behavior is taken a step further by suggesting some individuals and their missteps deserve widespread condemnation. McLuhan sees the root of this phenomenon in technological progress: “In the electric age, when our central nervous system is technologically extended to involve us in the whole of mankind and to incorporate the whole of mankind in us, we necessarily participate, in depth, in the consequences of our every action. It is no longer possible to adopt the aloof and dissociated role of the literate Westerner.” 24 In “Hated in the Nation,” this perspective is fully exposed with both the shamed and sham-

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ing ultimately paying a price for their actions. However, several characters, such as Parke, initially hold on to the idea that it is possible to stay aloof and dissociated from what was “playfully” posted online regardless of the severity of the virtual threat. THE PHYSICAL MEDIA ENVIRONMENT: DRONE DEATHS The fact that online harassment has consequences even without a linkage to killing drone insects is highlighted in Tess Wallander’s appearance as former Granular employee and victim of Internet shaming. She explains how she felt before her attempted suicide: “It was like having a whole weather system turn against me. Just hate message after hate message, around the clock, all piling on. It’s hard to describe what that does to your head. Suddenly there’s a million invisible people, all talking about how they despise you. It’s like a mental illness. The casual fun they had. I just felt I couldn’t go on.” Wallander’s story touches upon the real-world consequences of online communication, particularly harassment albeit cloaked as “casual fun.” Noteworthy in this description of internet bullying is the comparison to a “mental illness” and the impacts on the head. The Black Mirror episode translates this affective experience into the robotic bees violently entering the victim’s head causing excruciating pain and suffering. The ADIs, hence, function as a media-metaphor for the psychological effects of harassment. When Parke understands what killed Powers and Tusk, she aptly states, “Pull this off and you’ve done it from across the street. No fingerprints, no DNA. It’s like wishing them dead.” In this instance, Coulson realizes and discovers the link between the flying robots and the hashtag. Moreover, when multiple ADIs come together to locate and terminate a target, the aerial technology moves in a swarm-like fashion. The online storm turns into an offline swarm that seeks to hurt and kill the victim. The immaterial “bullets” on social media translate into material ones. Finally, while Parke describes internet commentary as “drifting off like weather,” Wallander highlights how it felt like a “whole weather system” painfully turning against her and causing her to attempt suicide. “Hated in the Nation” also presents the drone swarm crashing against glass windows like hail when it tries to reach a human target. The media ecology of the hashtag hatred in connection with domestic drones is effectively illustrated in the swarm, storm, and weather metaphors. In addition, the episode vividly exemplifies McLuhan’s concept of the global village. “As electrically contracted, the globe is no more than a village,” he explains. 25 As the physical space implodes due to technological progress and tribal village conditions increase, “discontinuity and division and diversity” 26 proliferate as well: “The tribal-global village is far more divisive—full of fighting—than any nationalism ever was. Vil-

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lage is fission, not fusion, in depth . . . The village is not the place to find ideal peace and harmony. Exact opposite.” 27 The vitriolic social media comments from potentially anywhere and growing participation in the macabre death contest corroborate McLuhan’s argument. As Powers scrolls through the scathing mentions, lyrics of “Orinoco Flow” from 1988 by Enya play in the background. The song segment features a number of contemporary and legendary geographical locations around the world, such as Palau and Avalon, Peru and Babylon. This audiovisual mise-en-scène of lyrics and social media messages further suggest conditions of a global village. Lastly, the reappearing map of the United Kingdom as completely colonized by the robotic bees—over which the Granular Project keeps losing control—presents the country as small and tightly connected. The network is reminiscent of a village in which anybody could remotely harm or kill anybody. Technology critic Paul Virilio shares McLuhan’s observation that the world has imploded due to technological progress. 28 Moreover, he argues that the decline of conquerable space caused by teletechnology results in an inevitable “intraorganic intrusion of technology and its micromachines into the heart of the living.” 29 “Hated in the Nation” alludes to this perspective with the robotic bees entering the targets’ bodies and attacking them internally. The bee drones appear to signify such an “intraorganic intrusion” of a micromachine that has self-replicated across the country. After having conquered the exterior, the technology is now directed toward the interior: the human body. By coupling the teletechnology of virtual hashtag commentary with the biotechnology of the honey bee drone, the Black Mirror episode insinuates Virilio’s argument about the technological assault on the “body proper.” 30 OVER-EXTENDED VISIONS, VIEWS, AND VOICES Besides illuminating McLuhan’s probes about media environments and invoking Virilio’s theory on the technological invasion of the body, “Hated in the Nation” is driven by the overextension of several human faculties. Among them are the overextended surveilling vision of the government, the overextended ideological views of the hacker, and the overextended virtual voices of the hashtag users, all of which ultimately turn against these entities. Throughout the episode, the presence of numerous CCTV cameras already points to a sophisticated surveillance culture. “The outside [of Powers’s apartment] is ringed with CCTV” mentions Parke’s colleague, and Tusk’s struggle with the bee-drone is caught on a garage surveillance camera. In one shot, a robotic bee lands on top of a CCTV camera near another victim’s apartment, emphasizing the multiple levels on which the government implemented surveillance. While the ADIs official role is

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to maintain ecological balance, it is later revealed that the government also uses the flying technology to track the public. Parke initially dismisses Coulson’s suggestion about the government’s secret surveillance efforts: Coulson: The whole ADI project’s pretty much bankrolled by the government. It’s why so many people are paranoid about it. Parke: Let me guess, this is some people on the Internet? Coulson: They reckon the government uses the bees to spy on us. Parke: There’s a schizophrenic worldview. Parke is again differentiating between the serious communication offline and unreliable “schizophrenic” positions expressed by “some people on the Internet.” However, the suspicion is later confirmed: Coulson: So they are spying on us. Li: This is all classified. Coulson: So what did you do, did you put in a back door and route it through GCHQ? I mean, you do CCTV, you do traffic cams. So what don’t you have your fucking noses in? Li: Look, millions of those things flying around, propping up the ecosystem? Well, that’s great, save the planet, hallelujah! Government’s not going to pump billions into it just ’cause some lab coat says so, and it grabs 200 green votes. They saw an opportunity to get more, they took it. Coulson: Total nationwide surveillance. Li: We tracked suspects for weeks in ways they couldn’t dream of. We prevented bombings, mass shootings. We learn that the domestic drones are equipped with cameras and facial recognition capacities which allow them to precisely identify and target not only flowers but also people. The autonomous bees, hence, function as an extension of the government’s eyes. It becomes clear that the government extended its vision out too far and became numb to the medium’s message. The drones are hackable and the surveillance technology hidden inside is used for a kind of terroristic act that the flying cameras were meant to prevent. Moreover, following the notion that “we shape our tools and our tools shape us,” the technology turns against its authority when the chancellor is voted to become one of the targets. The extended governmental eyes onto the public reverse into public eyes onto the government during the death contest and, lastly, technological drone vision seeking to eliminate the chancellor. In the end, Agent Li decides to save the chancellor from his fate by seemingly deactivating the drone hives. As a result, several hundred thousand Internet users are killed by the ADIs instead. Again, the government overextended its socio-technical reach, numb to the potential

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risks of the hacked technology, and reverses its function of serving and saving people to risking their lives. Next to the government’s eyes, the autonomous bee drones also extend the ideological views of the hacker, Garrett Scholes. To teach the public a lesson about the consequences of online shaming, he reconfigures the ADIs to carry out the death wishes of the social media users. It is his interference in the system that causes the deaths—hence the robotic bees extend his body and ideological perspective. Furthermore, the flying cameras contain a ninety-eight-page manifesto called “The Teeth of Consequence,” describing his motives to the detectives. Thus, he utilizes the drones directly as a communication channel. The manifesto also purposefully leads the officers to his former whereabouts and a flash drive with a misleading script that will initiate the fatal “end game.” As Parke rightly recognizes when reading his work, “The whole thing’s a moral lesson? He wanted us to find this and spread it about.” Likening the whole population to insects, he employs the ADIs as technological representations of the social media users and their violent online comments. Ultimately, he, too, is affected by this overextension of himself: already conducting the crimes from afar, he now has to change his identity. He shaves his beard and hair, puts on colored eye-lenses, and discards the controlling devices and his clothes in a river. Coulson locates Scholes regardless and seems close to catching him in the final scene. His meddling with the bodily extensions (the hashtag and drones) has consequences on his own body and course of life. Finally, the social media platforms and domestic drones extend and eventually overextend the expressed thoughts, wishes, and opinions of the participating users. A potential numbness toward any consequences of online insults and threats is already visible in the harsh comments about Powers: one likens her to Adolf Hitler, another hopes for her to end up in a wheelchair, and many wish for her to be dead. The popularity of the internet death contest further underlines a lack of awareness of or indifference toward the communicative power of social media. The hacked robotic bees turn the death wishes into a reality, with many online and offline continuing to doubt the effect of the virtual voices as the vicious contest draws in more and more participants. In the end, the overextended comments backfire when the hashtag-users become the ultimate mass target. Furthermore, the devices that enhanced the participants’ voices flip into the unique identifier: The IMEI numbers of their phones allow the hacker to send the robotic bees their way. In this sense, each user is reduced to a number linked to their mobile device. Following McLuhan, 31 the technological extension leads to a numbness that blurs the connection between human and medium. The human relation to the technology is amputated. Taking this concept to an extreme, the hacked drones then annihilate the human.

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CONCLUDING THOUGHTS “Hated in the Nation” vividly exemplifies some of McLuhan’s major themes and points, underscoring the relevance and timeliness of his media theories. Similarly, some approaches of technology critics Postman and Virilio find graphic expression in this season finale. The episode illustrates the character of a media environment gone awry due to extension, numbness, amputation, lack of awareness, and loss of control. The technologically extended faculties of the social media users, the hacker, and the government eventually flip into an extreme and turn against them. This example shows the importance of understanding and questioning any medium’s character—or “message” as McLuhan puts it—as each technological form introduces new scales and patterns to the individual and society. While overbearing online shaming and the often fatal consequences along with a proliferating surveillance culture are very much a reality in today’s global village, our beleaguered bee populations do not yet have to be fully replaced. However, several labs are working on robotic insects, 32 and the Pentagon records successes in semi-autonomous drone swarm maneuvers. 33 Moreover, the Future of Life Institute, a nonprofit organization backed by AI skeptics Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking, recently commissioned a fictitious short film titled “Slaughterbots,” 34 which closely resembles Black Mirror’s domestic drone dystopia. The clip shows micro-drones equipped with explosives that target activitist and political opponents. As a warning that this technology already exists and to encourage decision makers to put a ban on lethal autonomous weapons, the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots screened this film at the United Nations Convention on Conventional Weapons in November 2017. Highly reminiscent of the dark future narratives of Black Mirror and most of all “Hated in the Nation,” “Slaughterbots” is meant to wake numb individuals and societies to how a technology shaped by us, could shape us back. To overcome numbness toward such existing and emerging media environments and cultivate an understanding of the inherent risks and benefits of each human-made extension, McLuhan and McLuhan recommend a set of four questions to be asked of each technology. 35 These socalled laws of media are to shed light onto a medium’s syntax and grammar: What does the technology enhance? What does it retrieve from the past? What does it flip into when pushed to an extreme? And what does it make obsolete? Black Mirror suggests that the domestic bee drones enhance ecological balance and ubiquitous surveillance. Yet they flip into swarms of smart flying bullets and weapons of mass destruction that illustrate the dangers of obsolesced online anonymity, individual privacy, and physical distance in the global village. What Black Mirror’s “Hated in the Nation” propounds is a “need to proceed with our eyes wide open so that we many use technology rather than be used by it.” 36

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NOTES 1. James Hawes, “Hated in the Nation,” Black Mirror (Netflix, October 21, 2016). 2. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964). 3. Ernst Kapp, Grundlinien einer Philosophie der Technik: Zur Entstehungsgeschichte der Cultur aus neuen Gesichtspunkten (Braunschweig: G. Westermann, 1877). 4. McLuhan, Understanding Media, 45. 5. Ibid. 6. Ibid., 46. 7. Marshall McLuhan and Eric McLuhan, Laws of Media: The New Science (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988), 99. 8. Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, The Medium Is the Massage, 9th edition (Berkeley, CA: Gingko Press, 2001). 9. J. M. Culkin, “A Schoolman’s Guide to Marshall McLuhan,” Saturday Review, March 18, 1967. 10. McLuhan, Understanding Media, 4. 11. Ibid., 6 12. Ibid., 8. 13. Ibid., 7. 14. Ibid., 238. 15. Lance Strate, “Studying Media as Media: McLuhan and the Media Ecology Approach,” Media Tropes EJournal 1 (2008): 132. 16. McLuhan, Understanding Media, 9. 17. Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962), ii. 18. Strate, “Studying Media as Media: McLuhan and the Media Ecology Approach,” 135. 19. McLuhan and Fiore, The Medium Is the Massage; McLuhan and McLuhan, Laws of Media. 20. Lance Strate, “Understanding the Message of Understanding Media,” Atlantic Journal of Communication 25, no. 4 (August 8, 2017): 245, https://doi.org/10.1080/ 15456870.2017.1350682. 21. Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (New York: Viking, 1985), 10. 22. Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death, 11. 23. Ibid. 24. McLuhan, Understanding Media, 5. 25. Ibid., 5. 26. Marshall McLuhan, “A Dialogue: Q&A,” in McLuhan Hot and Cool, ed. Gerald E. Stearn (New York: The Dial Press, 1967), 279. 27. McLuhan, “A Dialogue: Q&A,” 280. 28. Paul Virilio, The Art of the Motor, trans. Julie Rose (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995). 29. Virilio, The Art of the Motor, 100. 30. Ibid., 100. 31. McLuhan, Understanding Media. 32. “Autonomous Flying Microrobots (RoboBees),” Wyss Institute, August 5, 2016, https://wyss.harvard.edu/technology/autonomous-flying-microrobots-robobees/; Edd Gent, “Robo-Bees Could Aid Insects with Pollination Duties,” Live Science, February 9, 2017, https://www.livescience.com/57827-robot-bees-could-aid-pollination.html. 33. Thomas Gibbons-Neff, “Watch the Pentagon’s New Hive-Mind-Controlled Drone Swarm in Action,” Washington Post, January 10, 2017, sec. Checkpoint, https:// www.washingtonpost.com/news/checkpoint/wp/2017/01/10/watch-the-pentagonsnew-hive-mind-controlled-drone-swarm-in-action/.

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34. Jessica Cussins, “AI Researchers Create Video to Call for Autonomous Weapons Ban at UN,” Future of Life Institute, November 14, 2017, https://futureoflife.org/2017/ 11/14/ai-researchers-create-video-call-autonomous-weapons-ban-un/. 35. McLuhan and McLuhan, Laws of Media. 36. Neil Postman, “Five Things We Need to Know About Technological Change” (Denver, Colorado, March 28, 1998), 5, http://web.cs.ucdavis.edu/~rogaway/classes/ 188/materials/postman.pdf.

BIBLIOGRAPHY “Autonomous Flying Microrobots (RoboBees).” Wyss Institute, August 5, 2016. https:/ /wyss.harvard.edu/technology/autonomous-flying-microrobots-robobees/. Culkin, J. M. “A Schoolman’s Guide to Marshall McLuhan.” Saturday Review, March 18, 1967. Cussins, Jessica. “AI Researchers Create Video to Call for Autonomous Weapons Ban at UN.” Future of Life Institute, November 14, 2017. https://futureoflife.org/2017/11/ 14/ai-researchers-create-video-call-autonomous-weapons-ban-un/. Gent, Edd. “Robo-Bees Could Aid Insects with Pollination Duties.” Live Science, February 9, 2017. https://www.livescience.com/57827-robot-bees-could-aid-pollination.html. Gibbons-Neff, Thomas. “Watch the Pentagon’s New Hive-Mind-Controlled Drone Swarm in Action.” Washington Post, January 10, 2017, sec. Checkpoint. https:// www.washingtonpost.com/news/checkpoint/wp/2017/01/10/watch-the-pentagonsnew-hive-mind-controlled-drone-swarm-in-action/. Hawes, James. “Hated in the Nation.” Black Mirror. Netflix, October 21, 2016. Kapp, Ernst. Grundlinien einer Philosophie der Technik: Zur Entstehungsgeschichte der Cultur aus neuen Gesichtspunkten. Braunschweig: G. Westermann, 1877. McLuhan, Marshall. “A Dialogue: Q&A.” In McLuhan Hot and Cool, edited by Gerald E. Stearn, 166–302. New York: The Dial Press, 1967. ———. The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962. ———. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964. McLuhan, Marshall, and Quentin Fiore. The Medium Is the Massage. 9th edition. Berkeley, CA: Gingko Press, 2001. McLuhan, Marshall, and Eric McLuhan. Laws of Media: The New Science. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988. Postman, Neil. Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. New York: Viking, 1985. ———. “Five Things We Need to Know About Technological Change.” Talk delivered in Denver Colorado, March 28, 1998. http://web.cs.ucdavis.edu/~rogaway/classes/ 188/materials/postman.pdf. Strate, Lance. “Studying Media as Media: McLuhan and the Media Ecology Approach.” Media Tropes EJournal 1 (2008): 127–42. ———. “Understanding the Message of Understanding Media.” Atlantic Journal of Communication 25, no. 4 (August 8, 2017): 244–54. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 15456870.2017.1350682. Virilio, Paul. The Art of the Motor. Translated by Julie Rose. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995.

FOURTEEN Unbearable Burden Discipline, Punishment, and Moral Dystopia in Black Mirror’s “White Bear” Osei Alleyne

What might criminal punishment and justice look like in our social futures? Will science and technology play a liberatory role in the production of a more equitable society, or will these tools be ever coopted, recolonized to do the bidding of age-old systems of power? In climactic scene of “White Bear,” our protagonist Victoria, a young working-class woman of color, is dreadfully chased by a band of masked, armed, and shooting vigilantes out of her English flat, through the woods and onto what is later revealed as the backstage of a theatrical television studio. With live rounds whizzing past her ears and a mob on her heels for 90 percent of the episode, to Victoria it is abundantly clear that she is to be summarily executed. After being tricked and bound to a chair by a would-be fellow runaway, the back wall of the warehouse she has run into falls out and Victoria is swiveled around to face the glaring lights and booming speakers of a television studio. In the studio, an eager audience cheers and roars at this climactic event. It is also a turning point in this Black Mirror episode, a moment in which we, through the subjective experience of the protagonist, find out that Victoria’s chase is in fact a play within a play—an elaborate charade in which she is the only unwitting actor. The chase turns out to be an expertly constructed fiction, masterfully enacted by the zealous prison guards of what is essentially a punitive colony, a jail, a penitentiary—the “White Bear” Justice Park. In this moment we realize that, far from hav185

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ing any real hope of escape to freedom, we, like Victoria are all guinea pigs in an experiment, rats in a maze, unwitting subjects conscripted into a play and run through a gantlet for the amusement of a hidden audience. With the wool pulled back from our eyes, we sit there bound and gagged under the floodlights with Victoria, doubly scandalized, befuddled, bamboozled, stripped naked on the proverbial auction block, divested of even the dignity of death in the flight for freedom. Under the scrutiny of a judgmental audience, Victoria is made to witness a breaking-news-style television media clip that retells the tale of her crime, her apprehension, her judgment, her conviction, and her sentencing. Clearly dazed by the sensory overload of the moment, Victoria remains baffled by the charges of murder for which she was convicted—because as is later revealed, Victoria’s memory is wiped every night by prison guards who bind her with electromagnetic headgear. Fully brainwashed by each dawn, Victoria is made to relive her public excoriation another day in seemingly endless repetition—a Sisyphean dilemma if there ever was one. Written and produced by series originator Charlie Brooker and directed by Carl Tibbetts in 2013, the second episode of Black Mirror’s second season, “White Bear,” is a violent fifty-minute romp through a parallel or near-future dystopian universe. In it, a given Anglophone, Western, democratic justice system and society (ostensibly British here) has evolved into something quite monstrous. There has emerged an ominous reproduction of psychological, visceral, and importantly symbolic violence through regimes of penitentiary punishment—sentencing that has grown to outweigh and by far outstrip the original crimes of the convicted. Perhaps even more tellingly, in the world of the “White Bear” Justice Park, the criminal justice system, its agents, and its subjects have become conscripted as actors. The Park itself is a privatized space of hyper-mediated theatrical public performance in which groups of prison guards, like troops of actors at historical American sites, engage partially lobotomized convicts in elaborate armed charades designed to inflict the violence of the original crimes onto the bodies and into the minds of the convicted. This appears to be the ascendant logic of a retributive rather than restorative or rehabilitative justice in this fictional world. The “White Bear” Justice Park is a staged, reenacted, and broadcasted spectacle consumed by a society that clearly has come to define itself morally through exquisitely designed punitive regimes and through the quality of justice they believe these practices deliver. Here, the box-office sci-fi worlds of The Hunger Games and The Maze Runner among others appear as immediately analogous.

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THEORIZING “WHITE BEAR” For the watchful social activist and the sci-fi viewer, Victoria’s imprisonment, actively disavowed subjectivity, abject subjugation, and dubious charges beg the methods of deconstruction in which contemporary Blackfeminist and Black Lives Matter movements have engaged. They interrogate intersectionality; agitate against race, gender, and sexuality-based violence; and protest school-to-prison pipelines, mass incarceration, the death penalty, and the snuffing of black and brown lives in the spaces where marginalized groups and state forces encounter each other. Indeed, Victoria’s bodily subjugation (however juridically justifiable within the “White Bear” world) is inescapably linkable to an originary racial violence locatable in the Middle Passage, the Atlantic Slave Trade, New World chattel slavery, and Reconstruction era lynchings. These earlymodern industries are inextricably linked to the founding of the contemporary Western world and the hierarchies of race, class, and gender that have proceeded from it—a historic space-time continuum that Octavia Butler and other novelists have mined for race-critical speculative fiction. While there is no explicit mention of race in Brooker’s and Tibbett’s “White Bear,” it would seem that by casting a woman of color in this role, the auteurs intended to complicate questions of race as well as gender. Indeed, the onscreen image of British actor Lenora Crichlow announces her as a woman of color and yet channels a range of racial possibilities in its phenotype. Crichlow’s apparent mixed heritage perhaps deployed by Brooker and Tibbett to trouble our ability to easily locate both the actor and her character in their respective social orders. Perhaps not so incidentally, Crichlow is the daughter of deceased notable Afro-Trinidadian black activist Frank Crichlow, known as the “Godfather of black radicalism” in 1960s London and the founding father of the city’s Notting Hill Caribbean Carnival, a decades-old event originally organized and launched from the activist’s well-known neighborhood restaurant. Subject to intense harassment, raids, and prosecution by the British police forces as a business owner, all for which he was ultimately acquitted, Crichlow’s engaged community activism in response, formed a model that the younger Crichlow claims influenced her portrayal of Victoria. WHY FOUCAULT? Why consider late twentieth-century French social theorist, Michel Foucault as applicable theorist here? Perhaps because the philosopher’s Madness and Civilization, History of Sexuality Vol. III, Birth of a Clinic, and Discipline and Punish among other works offer provocative and instructive theoretical threads, that I argue are useful in interrogating Brooker’s and Tibbett’s “White Bear.” 1 While Foucault’s works have not been closely

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associated with the world of speculative fiction, his attention to counternarratives of history, to the institutionalization of “criminality,” “insanity,” and “deviance,” and the shaping of individual subjectivity under growing state power over time, nonetheless offers foreboding and cautionary warnings for our own social trajectory. Because the fictive social world of “White Bear” is, as I argue, plagued by specters of colonial and imperial histories that haunt our purported liberal march of progress toward civilization, the corpus of the philosopher’s genealogical works offer itself as entirely applicable here. I am thus interested in Foucault’s excavation of the evolving practices of punishment over epochs as captured in his 1977 work Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison and what insights it offers into, for example, the rise of the US prison-industrial complex and its warped reflection in “White Bear.” 2 Foucault’s thought-pieces, Birth of the Clinic and Psychiatric Power, as well as his talk, The Dangerous Individual , are highly applicable to Victoria’s nightly cranial electrifications and her induced madness. 3 In addition “White Bear” seems to beg engagement with Foucault’s activist work with French prisoners and his interpretation of the written confessions of a matricidal French teen-felon in I, Pierre Riviere, Having Killed My Mother, My Sister and My Brother. 4 These pieces unpack the diagnosis and categorization of madness, criminality, and the institutional technologies of its management from the early modern moment to the contemporary period. Foucault’s formulations of “power/knowledge” discourses as reflected in, for example, hegemonic attitudes toward “deviant” sexual practices in The History of Sexuality volumes similarly offer a frame for grasping the sum total of social and institutional regulatory and self-regulatory forces brought to bear on the modern subject. Foucault’s engagement with Jeremy Bentham’s 1843 notion of the Panopticon and the manner in which even imaginary surveillance produces real bodily self-coercion and self-regulatory behavior in subjects is equally applicable here. 5 Despite our liberal animus to more vulgar expressions of power, those that remain irreconcilable with the spirit of the liberal democratic state and its vision of humanist enlightenment, Foucault theorizes power as ironically productive in nature. He interprets power, not simply as subjugating but as an organizing force within societies, raising up and edifying institutions and managing populations through a “biopolitics”—organizing relations between individuals, among groups and institutions both within and between societies. 6 Finally, I am intrigued by Foucault’s generally oblique approach to analysis, his angular technique in framing his questions, his parsing of previously uncharted lines of reasoning, and his unearthing of otherwise opaque circulations and relations of power. Foucault rereads early modern European political history, rewrites select trajectories of such histories as counternarratives and within these excavates the otherwise hidden means by which the state gathers power and uses it

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to regulate citizens. These unearthings he calls “archaeologies of knowledge.” 7 It is this archaeology, this excavation of otherwise obscure circulations of power, that I argue offers insight into the ostensible contradiction in justice. THE SCALES OF JUSTICE There are a number of ways to unpack the semantic content of “White Bear.” I chose to divide these into two frames. The first, the subjugation of Victoria on the one hand and the moral dystopia that I argue is reflected in the moralist state that has made possible the institution of the White Bear Justice Park. Indeed I would like to more clearly separate the host community of the White Bear world into two areas of inquiry. 1. The actively disavowed, repressed subjectivity; the radical subjugation of the individual in the form of Victoria; the abjuring of whatever limited rights of a convict (within Western jurisdictions) she might otherwise be able to assert—that is, if Brooker’s and Tibbett’s juridical world is to be imagined as in relation to our own. The sum total of social, institutional, and technological forces brought to bear on the body, the personhood of Victoria, and the questionable ethics of her form of punishment. 2. The ambiguous moral construct, the juridical illogic of the state, its internal contradictions, and the hypocrisies of its punitive system. I would like to ask what kind of material, politico-economic, historic, ideological, and epistemological conditions must exist to make such ostensibly “cruel and unusual” forms of theatricalized punishment and its voracious public consumption possible in Victoria’s world. How might Victoria’s forms of punishment, given Foucault’s attentions to histories and genealogies, reflect the reemergence of colonial and imperial histories in our own contemporary real world? Indeed, Western history is replete with examples of spaces in which public stonings, lynchings, shame-killings, witchburnings, dungeon torture, public floggings, and dismemberment were very much the norm. Not surprising then that contemporary pockets of such practice should persist in spaces of state exception—spaces in which the covert tentacles of the contemporary state resort to the kinds of unusual practices that were, for example, inflicted on so many war captives in Abu Ghraib, Iraq. DOES THE PUNISHMENT FIT THE CRIME? In order to destabilize our social compasses, producers Brooker and Tibbett set up the moral polemic of this film through the severity and horror

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of Victoria’s alleged crime, the kidnapping and murder of an innocent child—the past crime that we are implicitly required to weigh against Victoria’s present punishment. Therein lies our dilemma: For whom should we as viewers feel the most empathy, with whom should we feel the most solidarity—the original victim or the new victim in the person of the convict? Indeed, Victoria’s treatment raises another question: Does the punishment fit the crime? If we are to accept uncritically the damning news media clip played to the studio audience every night at her inevitable capture, Victoria has been found guilty of complicity in the kidnapping and murder of a young girl—she, the girlfriend who stood idly by and video-recorded the child’s execution in the woods at the hands of her clearly maniacal boyfriend, a character who is written and treated rather incidentally here, portrayed—exclusively through photographs—as a white male. As the news clip explains, so enraged was the community at Victoria’s boyfriend’s suicide while awaiting trial that in reaction, the court re-sentenced Victoria to confinement in an exquisitely constructed prison chamber named for a white teddy bear, the toddler’s lost toyturned symbol of the search for the missing child. Victoria’s White Bear prison is thus designed not only to keep her alive for punishment but also to make her relive that punishment daily. Such punitive regimes undoubtedly recall periods that, Foucault would note, have since been phased out, and yet in the “White Bear” society we witness the reemergence of forms of spectacular corporal and psychological punishment. 8 These reiterations occur despite the imagined shifts toward humanism germane to contemporary science, medicine and their associated systems of ethics. Acts deemed “exceptional” crimes by ostensibly liberal democracies (like the fictive world of “White Bear”) nevertheless seem to demand punishments that recall colonial and imperial pasts. Or at least this is what the filmmakers intend for us to wrestle with. Foucault, for his part reads the emergence of medicine and psychiatry as institutions which are nonetheless especially productive of new forms of power, new ways in which individuals were to be governed—institutions which wile abjuring corporal punishment as inhumane, enact new forms of violence through its regulation of populations. Rather than read such shifts toward less visibly and bodily harsh forms of punishment as the result of the victory of Enlightenment ideals and humanism over ignorance, Foucault would argue that such changes are instead the results of a shift in the logic of power and governance between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries. Rather than remain invested in the arcane, arbitrary, and haphazard rule of the sovereign power of monarchs over their subjects, the power to harm, maim, and put to death, “to make die and let live,” the rising bourgeois institutions, democratic in their aspirations, sought to manage populations more broadly. They aimed less to inflict direct harm onto the bodies of subjects and more to categorize, separate, and institutionalize them into prisons, asy-

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lums, military units, and regimes of medication, “to make live and let die”—acts that nonetheless imposed new forms of power and subjection onto individuals. It is this power that is made explicit in “White Bear.” Indeed despite Victoria irreversible captivity, her form of punishment bespeaks the torture of the period of sovereign power. Why? Contemporary philosopher Gary Becker (Newheiser 2016) rereads Foucault, arguing that rather than a complete shift from sovereign to regulatory or disciplinary power, the state rather reserves the right to “defend the society” from the criminal by any means, and—if it deems it necessary—to resort to arcane forms of capital punishment. 9 While generally eschewing corporal punishment as inhumane, inefficient, and counterproductive, the state, regressing to feudal logics of power, may reenact spectacular harm in much the same way as the monarchs of yore. Victoria’s form of punishment then should come as no surprise to Foucault, who himself wrestled with the atrocities of the Nazi regime, an ostensibly modern, bureaucratically efficient Western state apparatus that nonetheless industrialized its spectacular inflictions of ultimate violence against prejudged populations. In an effort to provoke moral dilemma in viewers, Brooker and Tibbett have purposefully written Victoria’s alleged victim here not in the embodiment of an attacking rapist, a molesting uncle, or a physically abusive husband, traditional perpetrators whose killings are most often the reasons for which women are convicted. Instead, Brooker and Tibbett construct Victoria’s victim as a young black infant girl, linkable in race and gender to Victoria herself. As a partially lobotomized inmate, Victoria is purposefully deceived, through planted photographs, into mistakenly believing that the girl is her own daughter. Indeed, If Victoria could kill one of her own, then her depravity is unquestionable, or so a juror’s logic might run. Here, Brooker and Tibbett present us with the embodiment of seemingly inscrutable innocence in a helpless child, one for whom any form of retribution is presumably entirely justifiable. This backdrop serves as a provocative counterbalance to whatever feelings of sympathy, empathy, or solidarity that we viewers might develop for Victoria. Nonetheless, for all Victoria’s ostensible guilt, authoritatively narrativized and neatly packaged as incontrovertible scientific evidence in the media news clip “power/knowledge discourse,” as Foucault would describe such content (Foucault 2015), it is as though Brooker and Tibbett are begging us to engage with the philosopher’s innovative lines of inquiry here. 10 The filmmakers seem to ask us to query the guilt of the community rather than that of the criminal—to judge the jury, the court, the society, and the self-assured Justice Park patrons, mothers who saunter down its avenues with their impressionable toddlers in tow, windowshopping social justice. They ask us to look, in Foucauldian manner, beyond the obvious—to examine not the moral bankruptcy, the deranged

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insanity, or the innate evil of the convict, but rather what kind of material conditions make this form of “cruel and unusual” punishment possible within an ostensibly liberal society. 11 They also call upon us to ask how historically marginalized members of society, long trapped in its institutional cogs, might inadvertently find themselves far more readily subject to such intense scrutiny and disfiguration than any others. How might these groups come to serve as statistical fodder for a system that imagines itself as dispassionate in its interests and color-blind in its adjudications, and yet one built on political and economic histories founded in the highly racialized, gendered, and laborexploitive logic of colonial and imperial social orders? And while the corpus of Foucault’s work remains rather silent on the de jure racisms of, for instance, the transatlantic slave trade and plantation slavery (he does engage with anti-Semitism and European fascism more directly), Foucault’s unique formulations of “the race,” “race-war,” and internal racisms and governmental prejudices against abnormal, deviant, criminal, and otherwise “degenerate” members within groups, arrived at through his critique of the institution of psychiatry, offer a circuitous and yet revealing way of reading Victoria’s predicament. INTERNMENT AND LOBOTOMY The fact that Victoria’s alleged crime is not the only one that requires interrogation by the viewer is, I argue, made abundantly clear by the filmmakers. At no point in the narrative is our captive heroine ever allowed to attain or regain complete self-awareness or full self-consciousness throughout the daily ordeal. Victoria’s nightly electrocutions by “White Bear” prison actors prevent her from any cognition beyond the terror and flight of the immediate moment of her hunting. There is no arc of transformation of the character, no emergent self-realization in her narrative, other than the moment when the reality of Victoria’s imprisonment is belatedly made aware to her, and even then only fleetingly before she is reinterned into electromagnetically reinduced ignorance. In fact, the only thing Victoria can mentally access throughout her chase is the hauntingly minimalist “White Bear” symbol emblazoned on her psyche through her mental branding each night. This symbol oddly recalls nothing reminiscent of a white teddy bear; rather—and more ominously—it evokes some sort of cult logo, clearly deployed by the filmmakers to invoke swastikas, an ISIS black flag, or the dread of a skull-and-crossbones—a semiotics of terror indeed. Much like director Christopher Nolan’s protagonist in the film Memento, Victoria suffers anterograde amnesia, both long and short-term memory loss. 12 Through what is effectively a slow-cooked lobotomy, Victoria is divested of her Duboisian doubleconsciousness, that is, her awareness of her former self as a member of

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society (however marginalized), and her newly acquired predicament as more sharply differentiated “other”—a convict within this world of the White Bear Justice Park. 13 Additionally, Victoria is not initially classified as criminally insane, pathological, bipolar, schizophrenic, or delusional and whisked off to an asylum. Rather, her madness is purposefully induced in the White Bear Justice Park. Herein lies another of the internal contradictions of this society’s justice system. By purposefully divesting Victoria of her recall, the convict is also rendered incapable of assessing her own alleged transgressions, displaying or developing any remorse, exhibiting any kind of the self-regulatory guilt, or even confessing her alleged sins—various “techniques of the self” through which subjects self-discipline, self-regulate, and engage in self-care, as theorized in Foucault’s History of Sexuality Vol. III: The Care of the Self. 14 It is therefore difficult for the viewer to negatively evaluate a character who is never able to collect her thoughts for long enough to demonstrate personal agency or intentionality—to exhibit guile, guilt, remorse or even refusal, or to offer any personal account in her own defense. The socially engaged sci-fi viewer is rather required to do much of his/ her own critical evaluation here—to ask, for instance, how might Victoria—hypothetically at the mercy of a deranged lover, as gendered dynamics are wont to conspire—have found herself complicit in a terrifying ordeal that she was ill-equipped to navigate, negotiate, or escape. How could a community seeking reassurance of its moral sanctity—even its post-racial objectivity—resort to the very age-old forms of punishment and torture once reserved for forcibly made concubines left to the whims of plantation masters of the antebellum US South? Here I think of John Ridley and Steve McQueen’s film, 12 Years a Slave. 15 At the least, these are the kinds of questions that a critical race inquiry sensitive to histories of racial and gender violence might encourage the progressive viewer to ask. Indeed, if not for a penance founded at least to some degree on the convict’s inner negotiation of her own transgressions, the viewer can only surmise that her sentence is one delivered entirely in bad faith—serving more to satiate the needs of the onlooking society than to find equitable redress for the imbalances visited upon the community by the alleged crime. And while Foucault’s critical insights are concerned less with moralistic and ethical questions than with showing the roots, routes, and discourses through which power operates, his figurations nonetheless capture not only the sense in which shifting institutions produce differing forms of subjectivity but also how the political and economic histories in which institutions are embedded animate the kinds of punishments that societies inflict upon those whom they deem the most “dangerous individuals.” 16 After all, “the society must be defended” from the criminals, the insane, the deviants, the women, the poor—as the title of one of Foucault’s lectures cynically argues.

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Our heroine Victoria is delivered to us through the film’s narrative as summarily prejudged, her guilt over-determined, her state of captivity normalized. And as if to add insult to injury, our auteurs also populate the world of the chase with strangely mute and calm pedestrians, dispassionate witnesses with cellular phones who remain abstracted, removed, and yet oddly engaged. In a purposefully ironic twist, these voyeurs eagerly video-record the events, zealously consuming Victoria’s suffering and proving the society’s preference for an Old Testament–styled Biblical law of an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, for a pound of Shakespearean flesh. Indeed, there is no moment where we, the viewers, purposefully tied to Victoria by the directors’ tight first-person framing, are allowed to experience anything but the abject instability of immediate life-threatening terror. We are thus induced to find solidarity with Victoria; indeed, given the moral sketches of the other characters in the film—prison actors who betray her at the end of each day—we must champion Victoria’s plight, her effective martyrdom, suffer with her out of necessity. This we must do if any levity, any personal moral redemption or sense of personal justice is to be derived from the episode. Indeed, in Discipline and Punish (1977), Foucault takes pains to describe the manner in which “witches,” “terrorists,” and other public enemies, vaulted to public attention through spectacular punishments as demonstrations of the might of both church and state, might ironically stir in audiences sympathy for the subjected or respect for the courage of the captive facing termination by the state. 17 Through spectacle, the punished may be inadvertently be transformed into martyrs—symbols of resistance. As guilty as Victoria has been judged by the White Bear society, we the critical sci-fi viewers, must champion her as our martyr—our black Joan of Arc—by her very persistent resistance to abject power. NEOLIBERAL VIGILANTE (IN)JUSTICE That vigilantism is clearly taken on in Brooker’s and Tibbet’s “White Bear” is inarguable, given the exaggerated and zealous performance of the actors in the woman-hunt within the inner play of the Justice Park— the symbol of a white bear emblazoned on the masks of Victoria’s armed pursuers. Indeed, this performance of violent persecution forms the aesthetic basis of the episode. In “White Bear” Victoria’s pursuers are a mob whose expert performance of physical punishment as well as guile and deception are voraciously consumed and eventually modeled by the Justice Park’s patrons by the episode’s end. In turn the prison actors are a group whose performance faithfully reflects the public position of the broader White Bear society on Victoria’s guilt. This position belies any genuine interest in restorative justice or any of the received wisdom of what those liberal humanist ideals that are imagined to inform the fields

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of science and medicine (however historically fraught these ideals may indeed be). The prison guards of the Justice Park enact the vigilantepersecution on behalf of its patrons, deflecting the immediacy of visceral violence and bodily harm away from their patrons. The fact that these performers line up to bow and curtsy for lusty applause at the end of the hunt while their captive sits bound and gagged on stage only underlines the bad faith in which the broader community has inflicted Victoria’s punishment. Added to this phenomenon is what I argue is a neoliberal cooption in the reconfiguration of White Bear society’s justice system and its punitive practices into an entirely purchasable commodity. More specifically, I refer to the sale of the vicarious experience of violent punishment through voyeurism, sanitized and packaged for a voracious moralist market willing to purchase and thereby to perform social revenge with righteous indignation. At the least, we gather this much from, for instance, the character sketch of Victoria’s primary executioner, her taskmaster or overseer. This character, Baxter, is written as a middle-aged white male, a prison warden who oversees Victoria’s public penance with the authority of a Bible-thumping proselytizer and a hint of artful mischief that would instill pride in the Marquis de Sade. Baxter and his cohort of prison guard actors, reenact the role of police, judge, jury, and hangman. Tellingly, in the closing and recapping montage of the film and in a wry, ominously understated manner, Baxter and his assistants instruct an arriving group of patrons, mothers, children, and elderly folk in the following: 1. “No talking . . . not just to her [Victoria] but to each other as well . . . What we’re trying to do is get her to believe that she is real mesmerized . . . (audience laughs) . . . I know, I know . . . but she’s believed it up to now!” 2. “Keep your distance . . . Don’t forget she’s a dangerous individual. Imagine that she’s an escaped lion . . . We will step in if she gets too close . . . we’re all equipped with Tasers . . . but then the story will have to be shut down and we would have wasted a day . . . It’s best to stay at least three meters back . . . you can use your camera zoom!” 3. “Enjoy yourself . . . that’s probably the most important rule of all, okay? Take lots of photographs . . . try to stay safe . . . we’ll be keeping an eye on you to make sure you’re all okay. So get let’s get out there . . . and let’s make this show happen!” Indeed, it is telling that the seemingly most unconstrained subject in this piece, the agent/executive/executioner, is a graying white male who, with an urgency in his language and performance, appears to derive the greatest satisfaction from the acute pain and abject mental disarray of his captive. Baxter plays both potential savior and rescuer to Victoria in

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much of the narrative, only to turn around midway through the charade to become essentially her chief tormenter and final executioner. I argue “executioner” here because clearly, after repeated cycles of torture (seventeen days and counting), Victoria’s faculties could only lead to her final cognitive and also subjective death. Indeed Victoria is deprived not only of her physical freedom, but of her mental faculties as well. Here, despite Booker’s and Tibbett’s purposefully implicit rather than explicit treatment of race, the auteurs have placed Victoria and Baxter on opposing ends of state power, on either end of the chains, shackles, and electromagnetic headgear, reproducing rather starkly a racialized and gendered difference that dutifully reflects colonial and imperial power dynamics—eras of punishment and exploitation that haunt this dystopia’s systems of justice. CONCLUSION In a contemporary US moment in which Black and Brown populations continue to be incarcerated in massive numbers, in which the courts of southern states continue to disproportionately deliver death sentences to racially marginalized convicts, and in which our elected leaders flirt with torture and police brutality with a wink and a nudge, Brooker’s and Tibbett’s “White Bear” offers quite the critical provocation. This episode, and the larger Black Mirror series together, ask us to query not only the scientific and technological, but also the moral trajectories of our social futures. The auteurs ask us viewers—voracious consumers of speculative fiction—to consider how justice, crime, and punishment might look in our social futures and whether science, medicine, and technology could play a liberatory role in the production of a more equitable society, or whether these tools will be ever recolonized to do the bidding of age-old systems of power. They ask us to interrogate the internal contradictions of a Western liberalism born of Enlightenment ideals which claims rehabilitation, recuperation, and a restorative humanism in theory and yet which readily reproduces exceptional spaces wherein colonial-era disciplinary practices and the racialized, gendered, and prejudicial ideologies linked to them still flourish. These ideological outlooks, these phobias and moralist prejudices and their associated punitive practices no doubt rear their heads in our real world to satiate social angst, quell conservative unrest, and quench all manner of anxieties about crime and security. They render vulnerable populations, communities, scapegoats of various kinds to bear the scars of disciplining, the torture of punishment, to absorb in their bodies society’s sublimated aggressions—to bear society’s unbearable burdens.

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NOTES 1. Michel Foucault, The birth of the clinic: An archaeology of medical perception (London: Tavistock, 1973); Foucault, Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977); Foucault, The history of sexuality (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978); Foucault, History of madness, ed., J. Khalfa, trans. J. Murphy (New York: Routledge, 2006). 2. Foucault, Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison. 3. Ibid. 4. Foucault, I, Pierre Riviè re, having slaughtered my mother, my sister, and my brother . . .: a case of parricide in the 19th century (Harmondsworth: Penguin). 5. Jeremy Bentham and Miran Bozevic, The Panopticon writings (London: Verso, 1995). 6. Foucault and Michel Senellart, The birth of biopolitics: lectures at the Collè ge de France, 1978–79 (Basingstoke, Hampshire [England]: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). 7. Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (London: Routledge, 2002). 8. Foucault and Michel Senellart, The birth of biopolitics: Lectures at the Collè ge de France, 1978–79. 9. David Newheiser, “Foucault, Gary Becker and the Critique of Neoliberalism,” Theory, Culture and Society 33(5): 3–21 (2016). 10. Foucault and Colin Gordon, Power/knowledge: Selected interviews and other writings 1972–1977 (2015). 11. Ibid. 12. Christopher Nolan, Carrie-Anne Moss, Guy Pearce, and Joe Pantoliano. Memento. http://macewan.kanopystreaming.com/node/1485022. (2017). 13. W. E. B. Du Bois and Shawn Leigh Alexander, The souls of black folk: Essays and sketches (2018). 14. Foucault, The history of sexuality (New York:Pantheon Books, 1978). 15. Steve McQueen, John Ridley, Brad Pitt, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Michael Fassbender, Benedict Cumberbatch, Paul Dano, et al. 12 years a slave (2014). 16. Foucault, The history of sexuality. 17. Foucault, Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977).

BIBLIOGRAPHY Bentham, Jeremy, and Miran Bozevic. The Panopticon writings. London: Verso, 1995. Brooker, Charlie, Barney Reisz, Annabel Jones, Owen Harris, Carl Tibbetts, Bryn Higgins, Hayley Atwell, et al. 2013. Black Mirror. Du Bois, W. E. B., and Shawn Leigh Alexander. The souls of black folk: Essays and sketches. 2018. Foucault, Michel. The birth of the clinic: An archaeology of medical perception. London: Tavistock, 1973. ———. Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison. New York: Pantheon Books, 1977. ———. I, Pierre Riviè re, having slaughtered my mother, my sister, and my brother . . .: a case of parricide in the 19th century. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978. ———. The History of Sexuality. New York: Pantheon Books, 1978. ———. 1969. The archaeology of knowledge. Trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith. London: Routledge, 2002. ———. Society must be defended: Lectures at the Collège De France, 1975–76. New York: Picador, 2003. ———. History of Madness. Ed., J. Khalfa, trans. J. Murphy. New York: Routledge, 2006.

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Foucault, Michel, and Alan Sheridan. The Archaeology of Knowledge. New York: Pantheon Books, 1972 Foucault, Michel, and Colin Gordon. Power/knowledge: selected interviews and other writings 1972–1977. New York: Pantheon Books, 2015. Foucault, Michel, and Jacques Lagrange. 2006. Psychiatric power: Lectures at the Collè ge de France, 1973–74. Basingstoke, Hampshire [England]: Palgrave Macmillan. Foucault, Michel, and Michel Senellart. The birth of biopolitics: Lectures at the Collè ge de France, 1978–79. Basingstoke, Hampshire [England]: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Foucault, Michel, Valerio Marchetti, Antonella Salomoni, and Arnold I. Davidson. Abnormal: Lectures at the College de France, 1974–1975. London: Picador, 2016. McQueen, Steve, John Ridley, Brad Pitt, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Michael Fassbender, Benedict Cumberbatch, Paul Dano, et al. 2014. 12 years a slave. Newheiser David. 2016. “Foucault, Gary Becker and the Critique of Neoliberalism.” Theory, Culture and Society 33 (5): 3–21. Nolan, Christopher, Carrie-Anne Moss, Guy Pearce, and Joe Pantoliano. 2017. Memento. http://macewan.kanopystreaming.com/node/1485022. Taylor, Chloe. Race & Racism in Foucault’s College de France Lectures. Philosophy Compass 6/11 (2011): 746–756, 10.1111/j.1747–9991.2011.00443.x.

FIFTEEN The Entire Evolution of Media A Media Ecological Approach to Black Mirror Carlos A. Scolari

Black Mirror is one of the most stunning reflections on the accelerated evolution of media technologies and their consequences for human culture. Charlie Brooker’s masterpiece recovers the best tradition of British science fiction (more critical than American space operas and green Martians) and presents itself as a great debate-creating machine. In this chapter I will analyze the TV series from the perspective of media ecology 1 and, specifically, from the “laws of media” synthesized by Marshall McLuhan 2 at the end of his life. MEDIA ECOLOGY While the concept of media ecology was officially introduced by Neil Postman in a conference at the National Council of Teachers of English in 1968, Postman himself acknowledged that Marshall McLuhan had used it in private conversations in the early 1960s. By then, the Canadian scholar was already established as a key intellectual and recognized media expert far beyond the academic circuit (The Gutenberg Galaxy 3 was published in 1962 and Understanding Media 4 two years later). In the thirty years that followed these first thoughts and conversations, media ecology consolidated as a discipline characterized by an open minded, creative, and transdisciplinary approach to media analysis and reflection. The emergence of the World Wide Web in the early 1990s relaunched McLuhan’s polemical ideas and concepts under a brand new digital spirit. 199

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Works like Paul Levinson’s Digital McLuhan: A Guide to the Information Millennium 5 (1999) and Robert Logan’s Understanding New Media: Extending Marshall McLuhan 6 are good examples of this revival of McLuhan’s approach to media. The ecological metaphor applied to media accepts at least two interpretations: “media as species” and “media as environments.” 7 Regarding the “media as species” interpretation, according to McLuhan, media “interact among themselves. Radio changed the form of the news story as much as it altered the film image in the talkies. TV caused drastic changes in radio programming, and in the form of the thing or documentary novel.” 8 McLuhan recapitulated this conception into one of his famous aphorisms: “No medium has its meaning or existence alone, but only in constant interplay with other media.” 9 In this interpretation, the media are like “species” that live in the same ecosystem and establish relationships with each other. As the “media as environments” interpretation of the ecological metaphor applied to media will be crucial for the analysis of Black Mirror, the next section will focus on this conception. Media as Environments Technologies—in this case, communication technologies, from writing to digital, interactive media—generate environments that transform the subjects that use them. A generation raised in an oral community will be different from a generation educated with books, in the same way that a generation raised by television will be different from a generation raised with computers, tablets, and smartphones. Media unconsciously model the perception and cognition of the subjects, their conceptions of time and space, and their notion of the self and of others. In 1967, J. M. Culkin summarized this concept in a quote often mistakenly attributed to McLuhan: “We shape our tools and then our tools shape us.” 10 According to Postman, “the word ‘ecology’ implies the study of environments: their structure, content, and impact on people.” 11 In Understanding Media, McLuhan argued that “the effects of technology do not occur at the level of opinions or concepts, but alter sense ratios or patterns of perception steadily and without any resistance.” 12 This interpretation of the ecological metaphor could be defined as the environmental dimension of the media ecology. In this interpretation, the media create an environment that surrounds the subjects and shapes their perception and cognition while transforming social relations. If we transfer this interpretation to Black Mirror, each episode is a showcase of disturbing new interpersonal and social relationships. Episodes like “White Bear” (S2E2) or “Nosedive” (S3E1) reveal radical changes in social interactions, from the possibility of building one’s life exclusively from votes on social networks (Facebook’s “like” taken to its

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ultimate consequences) or directly exclude certain subjects as punishment (Twitter’s “unfollow” taken to the extreme). Regarding the modeling of perception and cognition, the “grain,” a small subcutaneous CPU introduced for the first time in “The Entire History of You” (S1E3), is one of the best examples of how media can model perception and cognition. Both the recording features of the grain and the possibility of playing back audiovisual content (the “redo”) redesign the human memory and, at the same time, transform social relations. In “Playtest” (S3E2), a miniature device inserted into the back of the character’s neck creates a whole immersive experience, while in “Men Against Fire” (S3E5), the soldiers have an augmented reality implant (MASS) that enhances their senses during combat and makes them see their human enemies as monsters (“roaches”). Beyond these direct effects on human perception and cognition, media transform the whole environment where social life is developed. It is not the same in a society where the death of a loved one is processed through a mourning ritual than a society where a dead husband is still “alive” in an artificial intelligence system and sends personal messages to his wife (“Be Right Back” [S2E1]). THE LAWS OF MEDIA In one of his best-known texts, Marshall McLuhan, with the collaboration of his son Eric, reduced his vision of media to four basic principles, or laws. According to them: “We found that everything man makes and does, every procedure, every style, every artefact, every poem, song, painting, gimmick, gadget, theory, technology—every product of human effort—manifested the same four dimensions.” 13 In this context, they proposed a series of questions to facilitate the identification of the principles in different technological and cultural contexts: • What does the artifact enhance or intensify or make possible or accelerate? This can be asked concerning a wastebasket, a painting, a steamroller, or a zipper as well as about a proposition in Euclid or a law of physics. It can be asked about any word or phrase in any language. • If some aspect of a situation is enlarged or enhanced, the old condition or un-enhanced situation is simultaneously displaced. What is pushed aside or obsolesced by the new “organ”? • What recurrence or retrieval of earlier actions and services is brought into play simultaneously by the new form? What older, previously obsolesced ground is brought back and inheres in the new form? • When pushed to the limits of its potential, the new form will tend to reverse what had been its original characteristics. What is the rever-

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sal potential of the new form? 14 In this law, the original intentions of a new media form may generate the opposite effects when pushed to its extremes. The laws of media could be used to analyze the technologies presented in any of the Black Mirror episodes. Take, for example, the grain and interactive lenses that work both as a camera and a screen for editing/ visualization introduced in “The Entire History of You” (S1E3): • Enhancing: The grain and the interactive lenses extend the users’ memory by allowing them to recover any situation they may have experienced. On the other hand, both devices enhance the ability to manipulate and edit those memories. • Obsolescence: If platforms like WhatsApp or Snapchat made the SMS an expired media form, the grain rendered obsolete other means to preserve the personal memory such as photo albums or family videos. • Retrieval: If in Black Mirror the young lawyer Liam Foxwell uses the grain to return to the past and resignify the gestures and gazes of his wife until falling in a spiral of alcohol, jealousy, and deception, in a not-less-classic episode of Mad Men (“The Wheel” [S1E13]), the publicist Don Draper makes a pitch to Kodak executives using his latest technological innovation: the slide projector with circular magazine. For the occasion, Draper chooses photos of his wife and children to make a visual review of a family in a state of dissolution by his continuous infidelities. An invisible thread links both episodes. From a McLuhanian perspective, it could be said that the grain recovers the functions of the old slide projector. And what about the fourth law? What can be said about the reversal potential of the new digital technologies? The significance of this law in Black Mirror’s narrative philosophy is so considerable that the entire next section will focus exclusively on it. REVERSAL With the exception of “San Junipero” (S3E4), most Black Mirror episodes present very thought-provoking examples of the reversal potential of new technologies. Let’s see in detail the negative drifts of the digital tools and systems introduced by the TV show. “The National Anthem” This episode shows how traditional broadcasting and new social media, respectively, created with the objective of keeping the society informed and improving interpersonal communication, are used by a “ter-

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rorist” (actually an avant-garde artist) to destroy the prime minister’s reputation and evidence the decadence of UK democracy. In this case, the reversal effect is also present in an artistic dimension. A classic example of the law of reversal may be the transformation of comic books, once a bastard and low-brow product of popular communication for almost a century, into graphic novels beginning in the 1980s, when the cultural status of comics mutated into a sophisticated form of graphic art. 15 In the same way, in the “The National Anthem,” social media—the most popular expression of communication in the digital era—are integrated into an elitist artistic experience. YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter together with traditional broadcasting media play a central role in the strategy of the anti-establishment artist Carlton Bloom, putting these platforms at the service of a highly political art intervention. “Fifteen Million Merits” What happens when the whole life of a society is organized around a reality TV show? This episode, one of the most futurist of the entire series, portrays how a TV entertainment show could potentially transform itself into a competitive and exhibitionist way of life for millions of citizens on both sides of the TV screen. For the reality show participants, life takes place in an enclosed space where walls are screens that transmit personalized contents and a permanent flow of spots. For viewers, reality TV seems to be a popular and immersive entertainment experience. From the perspective of McLuhan’s law of reversal, “Fifteen Million Merits” shows how an audio/visual product originally created for free-time popular entertainment transforms itself into a full-time Foucauldian and hypercompetitive “media jail” in grade of assimilating any kind of rebel attitudes by participants. “The Entire History of You” This episode is one of the richest from the perspective of the fourth law. As already explained, in it we can see how a technology developed to enhance the personal memory—the combination of the grain and the intraocular recording/projection device—may end up turning that past into a permanent and tragic present. The “redo” function of the grain (that allows the memories to be revisited) generates an inspiring reflection on the construction of the self that goes beyond the problems related to the management of personal memories in a digital advanced society. According to Lacan’s psychoanalytical approach, “other persons’ speech, gestures, postures, moods, facial expressions, and so on frequently can be said to ‘mirror’ back to one an ‘image’ of oneself, namely, a conveyed sense of how one ‘appears’ from other perspectives.” 16 As Eagleton put it: “for Lacan our unconscious desire is directed towards the Other, in the

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shape of some ultimately gratifying reality which we can never have; but it is also true for Lacan that our desire is in some way always received from the Other too. We desire what others—our parents, for instance— unconsciously desire for us; and desire can only happen because we are caught up in linguistic, sexual and social relations—the whole field of the ‘Other’—which generate it.” 17 In the case of the main character, Liam Fowell, the reversal effects of the grain—a device created for improving the memory and enhancing personal performance in social environments—transform his life into a continuous and obsessive loop of past images. But not only his images: those of his wife, Ffion, and her lover, Jonas, play a central role in his life. After asking Jonas to erase his grain, Liam discovers that Jonas and Ffion had sex about eighteen months previous, near the same time that Liam and Ffion’s daughter was conceived. Back home, Liam demands Ffion to show him the redo of her encounter with Jonas that she had previously deleted and confirms that the two had sex without using a condom. If in the beginning of the episode Liam was an aggressive and determined young professional, after revisiting the Other’s images of himself, he is a defeated, poor man. Liam ends up destroyed yet survives thanks to the continuous projection of his positive memories until he decides to remove the grain with a razor. “Be Right Back” In this episode, a young woman, Martha, whose boyfriend, Ash, is killed in a car accident, keeps him alive by means of artificial intelligence. After discovering she is pregnant, Martha contracts a service that keeps Ash “alive” by recovering all of his past online communications and social media profiles. Reviving her boyfriend in an instant messaging environment is just the first step: Eventually, Martha uploads videos and photos to feed the service’s database and duplicate Ash’s voice so she can talk to him. The system is so addictive that after a few weeks, Martha is spending most of her time communicating with it. Finally, Martha decides to upgrade the system and buy an android. Despite the android’s satisfying her sexually, the high-tech clone can never be the real Ash. The android ends up locked in the attic, and Martha only allows her daughter to see it on weekends and birthdays. As every innovation has within it the seeds of its reversal, in “Be Right Back,” a technology designed to help people overcome grief and loneliness keeps and evidences the vacuum produced by the disappearance of a loved one. “White Bear” An amnesic wakes up in a house. When she leaves it, several people record her on their phones and ignore her pleas for help. What’s going

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on? Because the woman had tortured and killed a girl, her punishment is to relive the event in the “White Bear Justice Park,” an immersive experience where she will experience the same emotions of terror and helplessness that her young victim had felt. “White Bear” presents a slightly different narrative structure: “It deviates from the usual structure of the series—usually an episode opens with a scenario, a premise, an imminent reality enabled by our relationship to omnipresent social media and technology, and then explores the implications of that premise. This one favors a long, action-intensive exposition that, beneath all the fleeing and gasping, the slow dread of violence, throbs toward a twist conclusion.” 18 This episode includes many examples of the reversal law, from the use of mobile devices as bullying tools to the mutation of reality shows into a participatory mediated jail. Last but not least, when pushed to extremes, an amusement park designed for family recreation could be transformed into a participatory and sadistic punishment center. In a more general way, it could be said that in this episode, a set of technologies designed to increase the exchanges and empathy between humans become tools of mass desensitization in the context of a voyeur culture. “The Waldo Moment” As in “The National Anthem” (S1E1), this episode mostly focuses on the degradation of democracy as a result of the influence of video politics. Once again, media created to keep the citizens informed end up distorting the political arena, exposing the decadence of many candidates and, at the same time, marginalizing the emerging figures that could potentially transform it. As Washington Post journalist Chris Cillizza puts it: “Waldo has no qualms about using profanity, lewd jokes and all sorts of non-PC behavior to win verbal sparring matches with his opponents. Those traditional pols have no idea how to handle Waldo because he is, well, a made-up bear. Waldo loses, but his impact on the public—and against politicians—is huge.” 19 The election of Donald Trump as US president resignified this episode and confirmed that the reversal potential of many Black Mirror’s technologies is not so far in the future. 20 “White Christmas” This 2014 Christmas episode traces an intertextual network with the rest of the episodes, as most of the devices and the interfaces already known by Black Mirror’s viewers are featured. Like Lévi-Strauss’s myths, technologies, and Black Mirror episodes themselves, also “think about each other” forming a network very similar to that of a hypertext. In this context, the episode shows the reversal potential of social media and artificial intelligence, in both cases limiting the freedom of users and

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transforming everyday life into a nightmare. Particularly frightening is the “cookie,” a copy of a person’s consciousness that can be used to run “smart” homes and act as a personal assistant to the original person, or the “blocking” function included in the Z-Eye, a device implanted in the eyes that allows the manipulation of the subject’s view. When a person is “blocked,” the device obscures the ability of the subject to identify and interact with that specific individual. “Nosedive” This episode explores how a new form, in this case the use of social media, will tend to reverse what had been its original characteristics and mutate itself into an obsessed public-image regime. In “Nosedive,” people can rate each other for every interaction. Most people—like the protagonist, Lacie—are obsessed with their ratings and try to increase them by gaining favor with those possessing very high ratings. In this context, “social” media are transformed into “me” media, tools destined to manage one’s own image and scale positions in everyday life. Even if the tone of “Nosedive” is less dark than other episodes—an effect reinforced by the “pastel aesthetics” of the images—its critical interpretation of the contemporary uses of social media is very clear. In other words, “Nosedive” does not go deeper into the future: it seems to be portraying a contemporary society. In any case, fiction is not so far from reality, for in 2015, the Chinese government proposed the Social Credit System for developing a national reputation structure for its citizens very similar to the one featured in this episode. 21 “Playtest” What happens when virtual reality and video games are pushed to their limits? Distortion of reality, mental and physical pain, loss of memory . . . In “Playtest,” Cooper participates in an experiment for a well-known horror video-game company called SaitoGemu. After playing a game, he is invited to participate in a beta test of another technology designed to scare the player. In this case, technology goes too far into Cooper’s brain and cannot be shut off. Moving in the borderland between virtual reality, perception, and memory, this episode pushes to the extremes a series of devices originally designed to create immersive entertainment experiences. “Playtest” also shows how any basic communication device, such as a phone, could possibly mutate itself into a disrupting element that could change the life (and death) of a character.

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“Shut Up and Dance” A hacker blackmails his victims and forces them to rob a bank. Despite complying with the hacker, the victims’ personal digital information (which includes masturbation in front of child pornography, infidelities, and so on) is released via social media. As in “Nosedive,” in this episode the collaborative platforms, designed to enhance interaction and communication between subjects, are ultimately transformed into instruments of revenge and blackmail, disintegrating any kind of social relationship. “San Junipero” The most upbeat and positive Black Mirror episode shows how life continues after death in a digital paradise situated in the “cloud.” Two older women—Yorkie, a quadriplegic who wishes to be euthanized, and her friend Kelly—will get married so that they can enter San Junipero, a simulated reality in which the elderly and deceased can live forever. Originally intended to have an unhappy ending, according to Charlie Brooker the episode was inspired by “nostalgia therapy” for older people and was part of “a conscious attempt . . . to blow up what the show was.” 22 As it presents an optimistic conception of virtual environments, the application of McLuhan’s fourth law to this episode does not reveal any interesting elements. However, it is not so difficult to imagine possible negative consequences for both characters in their virtual post-life. Even if Brooker insisted on the happy ending, immediately after the end of the episode, dark conspiracies theories exploited in the internet, demonstrating that reversal effects, when not present on the screen, may emerge from the fans’ interpretations. “Men Against Fire” This episode proposes an exploration of high-tech warfare in the context of a dystopian and post-apocalyptic world. In this future world, each soldier has a neural implant called MASS that enhances their senses (sight, sound, smell) and provides them with an augmented reality experience during combat. The episode describes how Stripe, a US soldier, discovers that the mutants he must kill are just normal humans: The MASS is a device that dehumanizes the enemy, enabling soldiers to kill the enemy without remorse. As the MASS system was designed for a unique reason (to facilitate the killing of rebels by presenting them as zombie-like Others), as with “San Junipero,” in this episode the application of McLuhan’s law of reversal does not provide new analytical perspectives. In other words, the device is following its original protocol of use. Yet the episode could be considered an expression of the possible

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negative effects of contemporary augmented reality technologies—for example, the AR surgery headsets—designed for saving lives. “Hated in the Nation” In this acclaimed episode, drones developed for improving citizens’ security are manipulated to punish “the most detested person of the day on Twitter” using the #DeathTo hashtag. Once again, a combination of existing technologies (drones and social media) is brought to the near future to show how fragile and easily hackable they are. The episode also explores the risks of creating and liberating in our environment selforganized technologies such as the Autonomous Drone Insect (ADI). The efforts of National Crime Agency (NCA) are not enough to avoid the death of more than 380,000 people by the ADIs activated by a hacker named Scholes. The final objective of this digital avenger is to force people to face consequences without hiding behind an online anonymity. As in other cases, the reversal effects presented in this episode may not be so far in the future: A group of scientists have already demonstrated how insect-sized drones could be used for pollinating lilies. 23 BACK TO THE MIRROR Black Mirror should be considered a very sophisticated narrative exercise of the application of Marshall McLuhan’s laws of media: In all of the episodes, we find new technologies that, retrieving functions from old media (third law), enhance social, cognitive, and perceptual capacities (first law), accelerating at the same time the obsolescence of other media technologies (second law) to focus on their reversal potential (fourth law). The key is right here, in the fourth law. Charlie Brooker’s series is perhaps one the best narrative reflections of McLuhan’s law of reversal available in contemporary popular culture. What happens when we push a media form or a specific technology to the limits of its possibilities? What is the reversal potential of these new forms? The answer lies in every episode of Black Mirror. NOTES 1. Scolari, Carlos A. Historietas para Sobrevivientes. Comic y cultura de masas en los años ‘80. Buenos Aires: Colihue, 1998, 204–205. 2. McLuhan, Marshall, and Eric McLuhan. Laws of Media: The New Science. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988. 3. McLuhan, Marshall. The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962. 4. McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1964.

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5. Levinson, Paul. Digital McLuhan: A Guide to the Information Millennium. New York: Routledge, 1999. 6. Logan, Robert K. Understanding New Media: Extending Marshall McLuhan. New York: Peter Lang, 2010. 7. Scolari, Carlos A. “Media Ecology: Exploring the Metaphor to Expand the Theory.” Communication Theory 22, no. 2 (2012); Scolari, Carlos A. “Media Evolution: Emergence, Dominance, Survival, and Extinction in the Media Ecology.” International Journal of Communication 7 (2013), 1418–441; Scolari, Carlos A. Ecología de los medios. Barcelona: Gedisa, 2015. 8. McLuhan, Understanding Media, 78. 9. Ibid., 43. 10. Culkin, John M. “A Schoolman’s Guide to Marshall McLuhan.” Saturday Review, March 18, 1967, 51. 11. Postman, Neil. “The Reformed English Curriculum.” In High School 1980: The Shape of the Future in American Secondary Education, edited by A. C. Eurich. New York: Pitman, 1970, 160–168. 12. McLuhan, Understanding Media, 31. 13. McLuhan and McLuhan, Laws of Media, ix. 14. Ibid., 98–99. 15. Scolari, Historietas para Sobrevivientes. 16. Johnston, Adrian. “Jacques Lacan.” In Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Archive (Winter 2016 edition). Edited by Edward N. Zalta. 17. Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory: An Introduction. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008, 151. 18. Alexander, Leig. “Black Mirror Episode 2: White Bear and the Culture of Desensitization.” Boing Boing, February 25, 2013. 19. Cillizza, Chris. “Donald Trump’s Troll Game of Jeb Bush: A+.” Washington Post, September 8, 2015. 20. O’Keefe, Meghan. “Why You Must Watch ‘Black Mirror’: ‘The Waldo Moment’ This Weekend.” Decider, August, 7, 2015. 21. “Social Credit System.” Wikipedia. Accessed August 1, 2017. https:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit_System/. 22. Press, Joy. “Black Mirror’s Rare Glimpse of Technology as a Means to Joy Earns an Emmy Nod.” Los Angeles Times, August 17, 2017. 23. Chechetka, Svetlana A., Yue Yu Masayoshi Tange, and Elijiro Miyako. “Materially Engineered Artificial Pollinators.” Chem, 2, no. 2 (2017), 224–239.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Alexander, Leig. “Black Mirror Episode 2: White Bear and the Culture of Desensitization.” Boing Boing, February 25, 2013.https://boingboing.net/2013/02/25/blackmirror-episode-2-white.html. Chechetka, Svetlana A., Yue Yu Masayoshi Tange, and Elijiro Miyako. “Materially Engineered Artificial Pollinators.” Chem, 2, no. 2 (2017).https://doi.org/10.1016/j. chempr.2017.01.008. http://www.cell.com/chem/fulltext/S2451–9294(17)30032–3. Cillizza, Chris. “Donald Trump’s Troll Game of Jeb Bush: A+.” Washington Post, September 8, 2015. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2015/09/08/donald-trumps-troll-game-of-jeb-bush-a. Culkin, John M. “A Schoolman’s Guide to Marshall McLuhan.” Saturday Review, March 18, 1967. http://www.unz.org/Pub/SaturdayRev-1967mar18–00051. Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory: An Introduction. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008. Johnston, Adrian. “Jacques Lacan.” In Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Archive (Winter 2016 edition). Edited by Edward N. Zalta. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/ win2016/entries/lacan.

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Levinson, Paul. Digital McLuhan: A Guide to the Information Millennium. New York: Routledge, 1999. Logan, Robert K. Understanding New Media: Extending Marshall McLuhan. New York: Peter Lang, 2010. Lyn, Euros. “Fifteen Million Merits.” Black Mirror. December 11, 2011. McLuhan, Marshall. The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962. ———. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1964. McLuhan, Marshall, and Eric McLuhan. Laws of Media: The New Science. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988. O’Keefe, Meghan. “Why You Must Watch ‘Black Mirror’: ‘The Waldo Moment’ This Weekend.” Decider, August, 7, 2015. https://decider.com/2015/08/07/black-mirrorthe-waldo-effect-2016-presidential-race/. Postman, Neil. “The Reformed English Curriculum.” In High School 1980: The Shape of the Future in American Secondary Education, edited by A. C. Eurich. New York: Pitman, 1970. Press, Joy. “Black Mirror’s Rare Glimpse of Technology as a Means to Joy Earns an Emmy Nod.” Los Angeles Times, August 17, 2017. http://beta.latimes.com/entertainment/envelope/la-en-st-0817-black-mirror-20170816-story.html. Scolari, Carlos A. Historietas para Sobrevivientes. Comic y cultura de masas en los años ‘80. Buenos Aires: Colihue, 1998. ———. “Media Ecology: Exploring the Metaphor to Expand the Theory.” Communication Theory 22, no. 2 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468–2885.2012.01404.x. ———. “Media Evolution: Emergence, Dominance, Survival, and Extinction in the Media Ecology.” International Journal of Communication 7 (2013). https://doi.org/ 1932–8036/20130005. ———. Ecología de los medios. Barcelona: Gedisa, 2015. “Social Credit System.” Wikipedia. Accessed August 1, 2017. https://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Social_Credit_System/.

Section Six

Dystopian Futures

Visualizing the technological future has always been central to philosophical science fiction, from the mostly utopian 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) to more recent dystopian films like Interstellar (2014) and Blade Runner 2049 (2017). Visualizing the future is also key to influential science fiction television series, notably the mostly utopian Star Trek franchise (1966–2018). Science fiction films and TV series have always faced the challenge of finding utopian hope for a better world (2001 and Star Trek), while dealing with the dystopian fears posed by nuclear war, unbridled tribalism and nationalism, and ecological destruction, as realized by Lacie in “Nosedive”: “I mean, I tried to expand out range a little and talk about climate change, but she found that kind of boring so . . . She was probably right. I mean, fuck the planet, right?” What makes Black Mirror stand out is its radically realistic technophilosophical visions—all set in a future that could arrive in ten years or ten minutes. With endless variations on dystopian scenarios, the series offers little hope that a better world or better species might emerge in the foreseeable future. In fact, Black Mirror seems to suggest there is no way out of our dilemma. Most episodes are skeptical of a non-dystopian future, yet “San Junipero” offers hope for eternal love in a romanticized vision of the 1980s— stored and simulated in a computer of the future. As with Blade Runner 2049, Black Mirror is saying we will make better copies of humans in the future, but not necessarily better humans. These dystopian futures seem to be arriving with ever-greater speed, intensity, and unpredictability. It seems doubtful we can count on Siri or Alexa for a solution. But one thing seems certain: the future will be one of surprise and strangeness, filled with events that will feel very comfortable, familiar, hopeful, and terrifying. Drawing from Foucault’s lecture “On Other Spaces,” Sarah Constant shows how actual mirrors poignantly represent the space between heterotopia and utopia in “San Junipero.” In particular, she questions if the future for the elderly is emancipation from failed bodies or simply discipline toward new types of subjects. Although perhaps viewed as a

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warning, Erika M. Thomas and Romin Rajan argue that “‘Nosedive,’ rather than illuminate the conditions of the hyperreal and simulation, actually reproduces and perpetuates simulated reality, initiating dangerous feelings of catharsis on the part of the viewer.” They note much of the episode is less a dystopic future and more of a dystopic present—worrying about interviewing for loans, personally endorsing yourself for social acceptance, and redlining. Macarena Urzúa and Antoine Faure outline the ways in which algorithmic communication and reliance is pushing us toward a future of, what Virilio termed, tele-inter-activity: “The individual use of memory technological devices . . . locates the digital image as material evidence in the regime of biopolitics’ verification. However, dystopia goes beyond this technological subjectivity, and lies in the fact that identity does not reside in the elaboration of cultural profiles . . . but because of the activation of a strictly semiotic and meaningful reproduction.”

SIXTEEN Heterotopias and Utopias in Black Mirror Michel Foucault on “San Junipero” Sarah J. Constant

Writer Charlie Brooker’s “San Junipero” considers potential consequences of a therapeutic and immersive virtual world in preparation for voluntary entry into a virtual afterlife. Elderly patients residing in retirement homes, rest homes, and other medical facilities may enter San Junipero on a trial basis during which their consciousness is digitally uploaded to the “cloud” and they regain their youthful bodies with full sensorial immersion. Throughout the Black Mirror series, the “mirror” often materializes as a metaphor for disciplinary power (such as in “Nosedive”) and punishment (such as in “White Bear”), however, in “San Junipero,” the mirror emblemizes emancipation from the limits of the human body and from the judgment of society. In this instantiation, the mirror represents the “between” space or the physical technology of San Junipero that allows the human body to pass from the real space of the retirement home or medical facility to the virtual space of San Junipero. This chapter seeks to explore “San Junipero” through Michel Foucault’s concept of heterotopia, the central metaphor in his 1967 lecture titled, “Of Other Spaces.” 1

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UTOPIA AND HETEROTOPIA On March 14, 1967, Michel Foucault delivered the lecture titled, “Of Other Spaces”—the jumping off point for this chapter on “San Junipero”—to the Circle of Architectural Studies during a radio program. 2 The lecture, recorded by a stenographer, was not published until twenty years later. 3 In fact, the document remained forgotten by Foucault—who had delivered the initial lecture with the reunification of Berlin in mind—until much later in his life. 4 Due to this inattention, Foucault’s theses on heterotopia remained largely unfinished and, therefore, widely open to both criticism and speculation. For example, Edward S. Casey recapitulates several critiques of Foucault’s essay—and heterotopology in general—citing linguistic inconsistencies, universalist claims, and a loss of historicity that fail to live up to Foucault’s otherwise “formidable critical prowess.” 5 Nevertheless, “Of Other Spaces” served as proof that Foucault predicted a new spatial order based on a network of connecting points long before Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus or Manuel Castells’s The Rise of the Network Society. 6 Furthermore, though Foucault makes no mention of Marshall McLuhan, “Of Other Spaces” alludes to many of the same topoi that McLuhan covers in depth in Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man and The Medium is the Massage. 7 They ask: does media (McLuhan) or space (Foucault) have a tactile effect on the body? The rise of the network is a vital theme emphasized in the first part of Foucault’s lecture as well as throughout “San Junipero.” In regard to this network, Foucault states, “We are in the epoch of simultaneity; we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and the far, of the sideby-side, of the dispersed. We are at a moment, I believe, when our experience of the world is less that of a great life developing through time than that of a network that connects points and intersects with its own skein.” 8 We exist during a moment characterized by the intersection of time and space, and its effect on the body; this intersection is particularly poignant in the case of virtual worlds and virtual reality technology. Extant research on virtual worlds explores Massively Multi-Player Online Role Playing Games (MMORPG), such as World of Warcraft, Second Life, and EverQuest. 9 These virtual worlds function as a mirror, similar to San Junipero, splitting the user’s bodily experience and oscillating between real and unreal space. Furthermore, many of these MMORPGs manipulate time or allow the user to control time settings. For example, in Second Life, days last for three standard hours and nights last for one standard hour; however, the user may choose to override these settings. Similarly, in San Junipero, patients are limited to five hours per week during the trial period, but they are free to “sightsee” different eras; participants may choose to explore the town of San Junipero in the 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, and so on, each complete with time-appropriate nostalgic

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heirlooms—perhaps a nod to the surge in research on the therapeutic purposes of reminiscence for the elderly that began in the 1950s. 10 So why is this seemingly extraordinarily sophisticated MMORPG virtual world—San Junipero—attached to retirement homes and medical facilities and what is its purpose? What is the relationship between these sites? Foucault describes the relationship between topos, heterotopia, utopia, and the mirror. Heterotopia, literally translated as “other space,” infects sameness with alterity and serves as a countersite to topos or spaces reserved for the mundanities of life: life-sustaining or life-enriching everyday practices which may be routine but not necessarily devoid of any meaning. 11 In speaking of “other” spaces, sites, emplacements—heterotopias—Foucault says, “what interests me, among all these sites, are the ones that have the curious property of being in relation with all the other sites, but in such a way as to suspend, neutralize, or invert the set of relations designated, mirrored, or reflected by them.” 12 Heterotopias are “various institutions or places that interrupt the apparent continuity and normality of ordinary everyday space.” 13 Examples of heterotopias, according to Foucault, range from the mundane—gardens and oriental rugs—to the extraordinary—prisons and psychiatric hospitals. 14 Heterotopias are aporetic spaces that “reveal or represent something about the society in which they reside through the way in which they incorporate and stage the very contradictions that this society produces but is unable to resolve.” 15 For example, as humanity became increasingly obsessed with a modernist desire to cure the “illness” of death, more and more people lived longer and retirement homes and rest communities proliferated in order to deal with an increasing elderly population. Thus, the heterotopia of the retirement and rest home emerged. Foucault identifies retirement or rest homes as heterotopias on the cusp of crisis and deviation. Foucault says, “heterotopias of crisis are disappearing today and are being replaced, I believe, by what could be called heterotopias of deviation: those in which individuals are placed whose behavior is deviant in relation to the mean or required norm . . . after all, old age is a crisis, but it is also a deviation since, in our society where leisure is the rule, idleness is a sort of deviation.” 16 San Junipero has encapsulated utopia by realizing the modernist desire to “cure” death by giving eternal life to the elderly. Heterotopia is the antithesis of utopia, since the former is real space. On the other hand, heterotopia boasts only “a general relation of direct or inverted analogy with the real space of society.” 17 That is to say, heterotopia is neither ordinary nor extraordinary space. San Junipero is the extraordinary utopia in answer to the heterotopia of the retirement or rest home—and the mirror connects them.

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THE MIRROR According to Dehaune and De Cauter, heterotopia’s attachment to utopia, as a mirroring site, a sort of effectively realized utopia, charges heterotopia “with the full ambiguity, even undecidability, of whether to attribute to it ‘eutopic’ [sic] or ‘dystopic’ qualities. Its place in reality as other opens up its own set of ambiguities, raising the question of whether heterotopia is a world of discipline or emancipation, resistance or sedation.” 18 Utopia and dystopia are two sides of the same coin, so to speak, entirely dependent on individual perception; as such, heterotopia is a mirroring site of both utopia and dystopia. Separating the heterotopia of the retirement and rest homes from the utopia of San Junipero is the mirror, or the physical infrastructure of the San Junipero network—in this case, the technology required at the access point within the retirement or rest home as well as the presumably remote server room— whereby visitors are able to connect to San Junipero, passing through the mirror like a portal. The mirror is important to understanding the overall mechanism of San Junipero, as it separates real and unreal space while also mediating the between. Foucault explains in depth: And I believe that between utopias and these absolutely other emplacements, these heterotopias, there might be a sort of mixed, in-between experience, which would be the mirror. The mirror is, after all, a utopia, since it is a place without place. In the mirror, I see myself there where I am not, in an unreal space that virtually opens up behind the surface; I am over there, there where I am not, a sort of shadow that gives me my own visibility, that enables me to see myself there where I am absent. Utopia of the mirror. But it is also a heterotopia in so far as the mirror does really exist, and as it exerts on the place I occupy a sort of return effect; it is starting from the mirror that I discover my absence in the place where I am, since I see myself over there. Starting from this gaze that is, as it were, cast upon me, from the depth of this virtual space that is on the other side of the looking glass, I come back towards myself and I begin again to direct my eyes towards myself and to reconstitute myself there where I am. The mirror functions as a heterotopia in the respect that it renders this place that I occupy at the moment when I look at myself in the looking glass at once absolutely real, connected with all the space that surrounds it, and absolutely unreal, since, in order to be perceived, it has to pass through this virtual point, which is over there. 19

Imagine four planes placed side by side, each representing a place, or emplacement: from the left, the topos, real and normal space. Then, located to the right, heterotopian space, real and other space—the rest home and medical facility where Kelly and Yorkie, respectively, reside. To the right of the heterotopia is the mirror—the server room and the technolo-

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gy required to access the San Junipero cloud. The mirror, oscillating between heterotopia and utopia, real and unreal, separates and mediates heterotopian space from the final plane, utopia, other and unreal space— San Junipero itself. The mirror represents the technology of San Junipero and the symbolism of the mirror throughout this episode is poignant. Set in a beach resort town of the same name, “San Junipero” tells the story of Yorkie, a shy, young woman visiting the town and falling in love with a regular visitor, Kelly. Each of these women grapples with a concept of utopia and eternity, time and space, as they toe the line between visitor and local; life and death; real and unreal. During Yorkie’s second visit to San Junipero, she stands in front of the mirror trying on several outfits, presumably to impress her crush, Kelly. Yorkie begins to test the limits of this virtual world through self-expression. On the other side of this mirror, Yorkie has been quadriplegic for several decades. The therapeutic nature of body restoration has given her a second chance at selfrealization and authenticity. Foucault describes the body “both as an absolute topos and as its absolute opposite since the unity of a body is an imagined whole.” 20 The body binds both sides of the mirror and allows one to travel from one side to the other and back: “The body is a phantom that only appears through the optical illusion of the mirror, and even then, in a fragmentary way. Am I really in need of ghosts and fairies, death and soul, to be at the same time indissociably visible and invisible?” 21 The mirror is utopic, a reminder that Yorkie has escaped the confines of her broken body on the other side of the mirror. The interplay of body and media is a persistent theme in Foucault’s heterotopology and in media ecology as well; in fact, during the same year that Foucault delivered “Of Other Spaces,” Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore published the canonical The Medium is the Massage. 22 In an hour-long NBC-TV program on McLuhan in March 1967, he said that the title of this book was intended to suggest that, “a medium is not something neutral—it does something to people. It takes hold of them. It rubs them off, it massages them, it bumps them around.” 23 By its mere existence, San Junipero alters our perceptions of life and death, time and space; it exists beyond the abstract and is tactile. Through total sensorial immersion, San Junipero is a medium of “massage” to the fullest and most literal extent. As previously mentioned, however, it remains to be seen whether this massage is therapeutic, disciplinary, emancipatory, or sedative. Alternatively, as is the nature of utopia and dystopia, perhaps it is each of the above depending on the user engaging or entering the mirror. The second appearance of the mirror occurs shortly after this scene when Yorkie spots Kelly at a popular 1980s bar, Tucker’s, again. Kelly makes an excuse to go to the women’s restroom where she meets Yorkie. Away from prying eyes and with the wall of bathroom mirrors in the

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background, Yorkie asked Kelly to make this easy for her and they kiss, later retreating to Kelly’s beachside house to have sex—a honeymoon suite of sorts, on the other side of the mirror. The mirror is heterotopian, a reminder that “in order to be perceived, it has to pass through this virtual point, which is over there”—in real space. 24 The following week, Yorkie returns looking for Kelly. She is given advice to look at the Quagmire, an alternative vice club full of sex, fighting, and other deviant activities. Spotting one of Kelly’s former lovers, Yorkie asks him where Kelly is, but his only advice is to try a different decade. Yorkie spends the next few weeks visiting San Junipero during those time periods, searching for Kelly. Yorkie eventually finds Kelly in the 2000s, but Kelly rebuffs her advances. Frustrated with her feelings for Yorkie, Kelly punches a bathroom mirror—it shatters. Her gaze falls to meet her hands, which are uninjured. As her eyes pan up, the mirror has already repaired itself. San Junipero is unreal, and perhaps utopic, in that injury and this act of vandalism are quickly erased, however this technology has managed to connect people who would have not otherwise met, creating a network, and, further, creating meaningful relationships in a place that is purposely meaningless. After Yorkie leaves the bar, Kelly follows and confesses that she is dying, and that she avoided Yorkie because she feared making a genuine connection with anyone in San Junipero. Kelly feared San Junipero being real; she had already had a fulfilling life. Kelly tells Yorkie she wants to meet her in real life. Yorkie demurs, but at Kelly’s urging, tells Kelly her location. Kelly breaks the figurative mirror when she leaves San Junipero to visit Yorkie in real space. Yorkie, bed bound for most of her life, wanted San Junipero to be real—to explore her sexuality, to live the life she was robbed of in real space. When Kelly offers a legal marriage in order to provide this opportunity for Yorkie, it signals a penultimate breaking of the mirror separating real and unreal space, second only to the ultimate collapse of the dichotomy when Kelly and Yorkie essentially elope to ordinary life within San Junipero. Yorkie and Kelly’s marriage is an act of resistance toward and emancipation from disciplinary powers. First, Yorkie marries a woman she loves in order to “cross over,” both of which are acts that foil her parent’s authority. San Junipero is regulated by medical professionals or administrators who serve as gatekeepers; Kelly convinces hospital staff member, Greg, to allow her to visit San Junipero to speak with Yorkie for five minutes outside of scheduled visitor hours when she wants to make a marriage proposal. In doing so, she subverts the hospital’s authority as a gatekeeper. Generally speaking, authority and subversion of authority is a theme that is gradually exposed throughout this episode; whose authority is it to say what is right; what is normal; or, ultimately, what is real?

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VIRTUAL TOPOS The town of San Junipero is itself a heterotopia mirrored and opposed to the heterotopia of the retirement home and medical facility—a double heterotopia, one inside the other. The world constructed in this episode does not juxtapose a utopia against a heterotopia against a topos, as it would first appear. San Junipero is simultaneously too meaningless and meaningful to be universally utopian or dystopian; therefore, it is not opposed to the heterotopia of the retirement home or medical facility, negating the necessary relationship of attachment between utopia (or dystopia) and heterotopia that Foucault describes. 25 Furthermore, San Junipero is not unreal, although it does distort time—most ostensibly in the case of its decade-hopping mechanism, but also in its tacit concept of an infinite afterlife. Kelly and Yorkie figuratively shatter the mirror when they choose to transition from visitors to locals and their consciousness becomes part of the amorphous mirror itself. Interestingly, according to Foucault, heterotopias are aporetic spaces and while San Junipero is not utopia for the reasons discussed, and throughout much of their initial romance, San Junipero does fit the criteria for a heterotopia, Kelly and Yorkie appear to move away from aporia—in fact, they appear, even in this “other space” of San Junipero, to move toward topos. This raises the question: Is it possible to create a virtual world that is real and normal—virtual topos? In other words, is there room for a virtual reality that could replace our own reality with more good than harm? Kelly and Yorkie find peace through moving closer to mundanity and toward making meaning from life in San Junipero, not further away from it. The alternative is that perhaps we had the definition of a utopia wrong and that San Junipero is a utopia, but an effectively realized one. A virtual topos is only possible once Kelly and Yorkie have transitioned to San Junipero locals, as their bodies are no longer spread across both sides of the mirror and, therefore, they no longer have to contend with the dichotomy of real and unreal space; they are free to experience San Junipero without the crippling weight of past experiences or the confines of their bodies. Once again, we return to the question of whether heterotopia is a “world of discipline or emancipation, resistance or sedation.” 26 Foucault worries that places such as hospitals could be sites of discipline as they are “increasingly conceived of as a base for the medical observation of the population outside . . . their function would be to take in the sick of the quarter, but also to gather information, to be alert to any endemic or epidemic phenomena.” 27 Have we emancipated the elderly from the confines of failed bodies and the limits of life, or have we disciplined these subjects? It seems that Brooker forefronts the case for the former, but hints at a possibility for the latter. For example, the narrative of this episode never

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explicitly explores who or what operates San Junipero—a private corporation or the federal government? What is their modus operandi? Furthermore, new ethical questions arise regarding surveillance in this new type of space—could San Junipero be a new “panopticon?” 28 Perhaps Brooker offers one clue: in the last scene of the episode in the server room (the mirror), both Kelly and Yorkie’s discs are stamped with the letters “TCKR”: could this indicate that San Junipero is the product of a private corporation? It seems more than coincidental that TCKR appears to correspond with the consonants in Tucker’s, the name of a popular bar in San Junipero. Even if we were to look at San Junipero with less cynicism, what are the ethical implications of a literal server room full of virtual lives? Were we to look at it in a poetic light, each light representing a life kept lit through technological advancement seems quite beautiful. From this perspective, San Junipero can be seen as giving Yorkie a second chance at life, a second chance at becoming; at emancipation; at resistance. CONCLUSION Foucault’s theses on heterotopias provide invaluable insight into real and unreal space, particularly in the area of virtual reality and the life-sustaining technology introduced in “San Junipero.” Through this theoretical lens, there appear to be four planes—topos: everyday life (normal-real), heterotopia: retirement and rest homes (other-real), mirror: server room (heterotopia-utopia), and San Junipero (other-real)—a heterotopia inside another heterotopia, formed when the dichotomy between real and unreal space collapses when Yorkie and Kelly’s bodies are no longer split by the mirror. Furthermore, this arrangement opens up the possibility for a virtual reality that is normal and real—a virtual topos. As with any new technology, however, it is important to analyze whether it is being used for discipline or emancipation, a topic that Foucault explores in depth. 29 The case study in this chapter informs our understanding of how McLuhan and Foucault’s theories of immersive media relate, particularly around the intersection of “the medium is the massage” and “panoptic power.” 30 “San Junipero” invites reconsideration of these theoretical connections as well as a new interpretation of the metaphor of the mirror within the Black Mirror series. Brooker describes the black mirror of the title as “the one you’ll find on every wall, on every desk, in the palm of every hand: the cold, shiny screen of a TV, a monitor, a smartphone.” 31 Essentially, Brooker describes what McLuhan might call “cold media,” or media that engage several senses less completely but demand a great deal of participation from the audience, as the basis for his dystopian, science fiction anthology. 32

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Arguably, San Junipero engages all senses completely and requires full cooperation, perhaps making fully immersive virtual reality the coldest media of all. Yet “San Junipero” stands out against these other “black mirrors”; perhaps because despite the subversive underlying themes, this particular mirror functioned more like a portal and less like a wall—the user enters the mirror and looks forward toward San Junipero, not back toward their own image. This episode of Black Mirror leaves us with many questions, but ultimately, perhaps, with one answer. As the credits roll, Belinda Carlisle’s 1987 hit song “Heaven is a Place on Earth” plays, oddly fitting for this chapter on the collapse of the dichotomy between utopia and heterotopia, the eradication of aporia as life transcends closer to topos—the joy of the mundane, the everyday triumphing over the imaginary and the unreal. NOTES 1. Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias,” in Heterotopia and the City: Public Space in a Postcivil Society, eds. and trans. Michiel Dehaene and Lieven De Cauter (New York: Routledge, 2008). Previously published as “Des espace autres,” [Of Other Spaces], Architecture/Mouvement/Continuité (1984): 1–9. 2. Ibid., 13. Translator’s Note. 3. Ibid. 4. Ibid. 5. Edward S. Casey, The Fate of Place (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 300. 6. Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society (Hoboken, NJ: Blackwell Publishing, 1966); Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). 7. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1964); Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects (New York: Bantam Books, 1967). 8. Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” 14. 9. Edward Castronova, “Virtual Worlds: A First-hand Account of Market and Society on the Cyberian Frontier,” The Gruter Institute Working Papers on Law, Economics, and Evolutionary Biology 2, no. 1 (2001): 1–66; Richard V. Kelly, Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games: The People, the Addiction and the Playing Experience (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2004); David J. Gunkle and Ann Hetzel Gunkle, “Terra Nova 2.0—The New World of MMORPGs,” Critical Studies In Media Communication 26, no. 2 (2009): 104–127. 10. Mike Bender, Paulette Bauckham, and Andrew Norris, The therapeutic purposes of reminiscence (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1999). 11. Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” 13. Translator’s Note. 12. Ibid., 17. 13. Michiel Dehaene and Lieven De Cauter, “Introduction,” in Heterotopia and the City: Public Space in a Postcivil Society, eds. Michiel Dehaene and Lieven De Cauter (New York: Routledge, 2008), 4. 14. Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” 19. 15. Ibid., 25. Translator’s note. 16. Ibid., 18. 17. Ibid., 17. 18. Ibid., 25. Translator’s note. 19. Ibid., 17.

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20. Ibid., 25. Translator’s note. 21. Ibid. 22. McLuhan and Fiore, Medium. 23. Matie Molinaro, Corinne McLuhan, and William Toye, Letters of Marshall McLuhan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 340. 24. Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” 17. 25. Ibid. 26. Ibid., 25. Translator’s note. 27. Foucault, Discipline and Punish (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), 221. 28. Ibid. 29. Ibid. 30. McLuhan and Fiore, Medium; Foucault, Discipline. 31. Charlie Brooker, “Charlie Brooker: The Dark Side of our Gadget Addiction,” The Guardian, December 1, 2011, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/dec/01/ charlie-brooker-dark-side-gadget-addiction-black-mirror. 32. McLuhan, Media.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Bender, Mike, Paulette Bauckham, and Andrew Norris. The Therapeutic Purposes of Reminiscence. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1999. Brooker, Charlie. “Charlie Brooker: The Dark Side of Our Gadget Addiction.” The Guardian, December 11, 2011. Casey, Edward S. The Fate of Place. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Castells, Manuel. The Rise of the Network Society. Hoboken, NJ: Blackwell Publishing, 1996 Castronova, Edward. “Virtual Worlds: A First-Hand Account of Market and Society on the Cyberian Frontier.” The Gruter Institute Working Papers on Law, Economics, and Evolutionary Biology 2, no. 1 (2001): 1–66. Dehaene, Michiel and Lieven De Cauter. “Introduction.” In Heterotopia and the City: Public Space in a Postcivil Society, edited by Michiel Dehaene and Lieven De Cauter, 3–9. New York: Routledge, 2008. Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. Foucault, Michel. “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias.” In Heterotopia and the City: Public Space in a Postcivil Society, translated and edited by Michiel Dehaene and Lieven De Cauter, 13–29. New York: Routledge, 2008. First published in 1984. ———. Discipline and Punish. New York: Vintage Books, 1995. Gunkel, David J. and Ann Hetzel Gunkel. “Terra Nova 2.0—The New World of MMORPGs.” Critical Studies In Media Communication 26, no. 2 (2009): 104–127. Kelly, Richard V. Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games: the People, the Addiction and the Playing Experience. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2004. McLuhan, Marshall and Quentin Fiore. The Medium Is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects. New York: Bantam Books, 1967. ———. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1994. First published in 1964.

SEVENTEEN Trapped in Dystopian Techno Realities Nosediving into Simulation through Consumptive Viewing Erika M. Thomas and Romin Rajan

Black Mirror has been lauded as “acute social satire” 1 and “the most relevant program of our time” 2 due to its dynamic criticism of technology in society and its foreshadowing of the potential future. The first episode of Season 3 of Black Mirror, titled “Nosedive,” is consistent with this theme. Its portrayal of dystopian technofutures occurs through simulated reality and depict the concepts of simulation/simulacra and the hyperreal, developed by postmodern critic, Jean Baudrillard. “Nosedive” is based on a futuristic omnipresent social media platform. On its face, it seems that this episode can elucidate contemporary anxieties and also productively warn of the dangers surrounding current and emerging technology use. However, an analysis of “Nosedive” reveals that the consumption of the show works counterintuitively from challenging the elements of society’s contemporary hyperreal experience. We argue that “Nosedive,” rather than illuminate the conditions of the hyperreal and simulation, actually reproduces and perpetuates simulated reality, initiating dangerous feelings of catharsis on the part of the viewer. Nosedive’s replication of simulation operates on two dimensions. First, “Nosedive” displaces the hyperreal onto the portrayed simulated dystopian future. Second, “Nosedive” falsely presents instances of rejec223

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tion and resistance of simulation through the juxtaposition of character foils and the representation of a cathartic finish. Before exploring “Nosedive’s” replication of simulacra, we examine the episode by applying Baudrillardian theory to illustrate how simulacra and simulations are made apparent before falsely portraying them as something that can be overcome and avoided. BAUDRILLARD’S SIMULATION/SIMULACRA AND THE NOTION OF THE HYPERREAL Baudrillard’s theoretical framework in the context of media theory establishes a new symbolic reality wherein signs and symbols have replaced reality completely. At the center of the concept of simulation is the notion of the sign. Signs are symbolic forms of communication but also the very symbols that enable social interaction. Historically, people have come to understand semiotics though the concept of signs and images as references but also as representations of actual “reality.” In the contemporary, postmodern culture, Baudrillard describes signs and symbols as having lost their referential connection to reality, and have grown increasingly more abstract. He explains: Something has disappeared: the sovereign difference, between one and the other, that constituted the charm of abstraction . . . By crossing into a space whose curvature is no longer that of the real, nor that of truth, the era of simulation is inaugurated by a liquidation of all referentials—worse: with their artificial resurrection in the system of signs. . . . It is no longer a question of imitation, duplication, nor even parody. It is a question of substituting the signs of the real for the real, that is to say of an operation of deterring every real process via its operational double, a programmatic, metastable, perfectly descriptive machine that offers all the signs of the real and short-circuits all its vicissitudes. 3

Baudrillard contends that we are now in a fourth stage of categorization of signs. 4 Signs are, in fact, the “real.” No longer just a copy, simulation is the blurring of signs and symbols, “real” and representation, which constructs reality as one of pure signification. Signification becomes so “real” that it replaces the actual real, producing everything as artificial. Simulations result in a specific system of space that Baudrillard refers to as the hyperreal. To understand this condition, it is useful to explore the mass media’s influence on the present commodity culture as theorized by Baudrillard. The separation of signs and referents results in society organizing experiences and behaviors around the exchange-value of signs. Such consumerist behaviors likewise disrupt individuals’ knowledges of their desires and drive their rituals of consumption. Foss, Foss, and Trapp describe the role of consumption in the contemporary, massmediated climate as follows: “to consume an object is not so much about

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consuming the product but about consuming a meaning. The product is sold by grafting onto it meanings with no necessary connection to the product.” 5 In postmodernity, the excessive simulations and the simulacra (the conditions produced) precede objects and all maps of representation, especially those that are media messages and commodities. The result in a disintegration of the “real” and the “imaginary” creates a “hyperreal” condition of existence. “In essence, the simulations of the real become real for us.” 6 The hyperreal, then, functions “as a group of signs dedicated exclusively to their recurrence as signs, and no longer at all to their ‘real’ end.” 7 The hyperreal is empty of content because of its proliferation of simulations and has replaced the “real.” In doing so, the hyperreal is more real than real. Foss, Foss, and Trapp acknowledge that hyperreality ultimately “characterizes the system of excess but also contains the possibilities of resistance.” 8 In a similar way to how Disneyland is Baudrillard’s “perfect model” of simulacra and hyperreality, the portrayals of utopian social media platforms in “Nosedive” make visible how simulation and simulacra generally operate, but, more significantly, illustrate the challenges in using the consumption of this media to resist our state of hyperreality. THE “NOSEDIVE” PLOT Set in a near-future dystopia, “Nosedive” tells the story of Lacie Pound, a young career woman, who exists in a world which is acutely governed by an omnipresent rating system and reminiscent of current social media platforms. When attempting to acquire a luxurious apartment in a wealthy community, Lacie aspires to increase her overall rating to attain the perfect “utopian” home. The opportunity to improve her “score” presents itself when Lacie’s old friend, Naomi, asks Lacie to be her maid of honor at her wedding. Despite their previously contentious relationship, Naomi’s invitation presents an irresistible chance for Lacie to dramatically improve her score. Lacie doggedly pursues this promising venture, but encounters a string of unfortunate and humiliating events. Lacie misses a flight, abandons a broken rental car, hitches rides, and eventually crashes her friend’s wedding, having a public breakdown and attaining a dangerously low score. Lacie’s low score leads to her eventual arrest and imprisonment. “NOSEDIVE” REVEALING SIMULACRA The opening images of “Nosedive” highlight images of a quiet, upper middle-class housing development. The colors are bright. The environment is clean, symmetric, and conforming to the surrounding neighborhood. Lacie’s home is neat and minimalistic except for the area occupied

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by her messy younger brother, Ryan. Similar to the community of Celebration, Florida, constructed by the Walt Disney Company in 1994, the background of “Nosedive” is a model of a hyperreal utopia because of the idealized perception of the town it projects. Audiences may be struck by the futurity of the setting and the recognition of the forced and rehearsed performances of Lacie’s everyday life as an instantiation of hyperreal simulation. Although the accumulation of these expositional visual elements would seem to construct a veritable future utopia, it is in their excess, the eventual isolation of Lacie and the disintegration of Lacie’s prospective future that produces an uncanny uneasiness. Despite the utopian representations, the episode produces an insidious underlying dystopia that is meant to warn audiences of this type of future. “Nosedive” further demonstrates this simulated social reality through Lacie’s experience and social exchange at a coffee shop. Lacie’s entire transaction and the interactions of other shop goers are governed through an integrated social media platform. Lacie literally sees each individual through the lens of the social media field via a futuristic integrated retinal technology. Lacie ignores the “authentic” subject in her presence. Graphics on the screen reveal that the simulacra come before the referent it should be simulating, the actual person. Lacie’s personal behaviors and actions further demonstrate the simulation. Upon receiving her beverage and cookie, Lacie stages a picture after taking a bite from the cookie and subtly spitting it out. She grimaces after taking a sip of her coffee, also revealing the coffee’s unpleasantness. However, these sensory experiences are subservient and disregarded once Lacie’s posted picture receives positive scores. Lacie is elated at the positive social media attention. The simulacra serve their purpose and communicate that the symbolic representations of her coffee and partially “eaten” cookie are more “real” to Lacie than their “real” (or actually fake) consumption. In these scenes, “Nosedive” reveals the contemporary postmodern condition and the governing roles of simulacra/simulation. “NOSEDIVE” AS REPRODUCTION OF SIMULACRA Temporal-Spatial Displacement Although Baudrillard’s criticism and the satire of “Nosedive” seem to be parallel commentary, “Nosedive,” rather than critiquing Baudrillard’s notion of the simulation and hyperreality, actually works to replicate and resituate the hyperreal. The first mechanism of the episode’s complicity with simulation occurs with its immediate setting. “Nosedive” takes place in the future, a temporal space that is phenomenologically distinct from our own. Technology such as Lacie’s retinal implants, with retinal integrated phone technology, interactive holograms, and a slew of other

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dispersed props, propel the viewer into the realm of a “near” future. The reminiscent setting and introductory backdrops, though utopian in its sterility and warm pastel colors, depicts a civilization temporally beyond our own. Further, the symbolic position of the “future” creates a simulative condition. First, it is one that may seem utopian, but eventually the unavoidable flaws and dangers of the rating system are meant to incite the concerns of the viewer. Mainstream reviews of Black Mirror frequently stress this characteristic. For example, Robinson explains that Black Mirror shows actions “might logically extend into the horrors in the future.” 9 More significantly, the dystopian society portrayed allows the viewer to displace the seemingly separate otherized temporal fictional scape, ignoring how the viewer is already positioned within the hyperreal. Thus, this episode’s positing of future simulation produces a gap between now and the hyperreal expected to occur in the future. There are many unseen events that must happen before the reality comes to fruition. This produces the illusion that, if viewers reasonably internalize the messages of “Nosedive,” they can mitigate this oncoming simulated reality. Yet such conditions already exist in the contemporary world. Additionally, “Nosedive” overfocuses on social media as the vehicle for simulation. In his analysis of simulation, Baudrillard contends that the simulation comes on not as a result of specific technologies per se, but as a result of a shift in the postmodern era. 10 Thus, simulation occurs, not when technology reaches some sort of singularity, such as everyday integration of technology, but rather, when signs begin to take on signification without any true signifier. The system of symbolic exchange already exists based on these forms of signification developed from overcirculation of representations. It seems that the scene showing Lacie attempting to purchase a new home is meant to make viewers feel uneasy. Lacie’s home buying is not a pure transactive purchase of a good, but rather is dependent on the simulative economy of the subject in social media. This performance betrays the capitalist fantasy of pure market exchange of goods, which Baudrillard views as the current exchange-value of signs and the delusion of capitalism grounded in pure economic value. Lacie is hindered by her low social media score, making her ineligible for the purchase. Nonetheless, she is enthralled by the enticing and seductive hologram, showing a perfect life in the new home. This scenario replicates Baudrillard’s claim that commodities no longer operate on the basis of economic value as traditionally interpreted, but are instead determined by an economy of symbolic representation. 11 In other words, individuals do not consume goods because of the material utility of the good, but much like Lacie’s unfavorable cookie consumption, Lacie is instead driven by how the good signals/signifies social relations and the consumption of value and meaning. However, by displac-

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ing this symbolic exchange into the future, “Nosedive” signals to the viewer that they must safeguard the market economy from its potential transfiguration to a dystopian symbolic economy. Yet the viewer does not currently live in such a market economy and cannot prevent the dystopian future’s symbolic economy because it already exists. Baudrillard indicates that simulation has already replaced the economy of usevalue as the basis of economic exchange. As a direct parallel to Lacie’s experience, many contemporary home buyers are subject to entities, like housing cooperatives and Homeowner Associations. Individuals feel pressure to present themselves as perfect representations of “happy families.” They dress up for interviews, suppress inter-familial issues, and exaggerate personal endorsements in order to cultivate a positive simulated image to improve the chance of purchasing a home. Additionally, home buying communities are situated in a hyperreal bubble wherein racially charged policies like housing discrimination, redlining, and blockbusting produce an ideologically pure housing reality. For example, the introduction and literal presence of Black families caused the decline in urban housing prices that preceded the infamous white flight and fueled the development of suburbs throughout the twentieth century, a trend that continues today. The consequence of low housing prices was wrongly credited to Black families. It was not the result of the community’s fiscal responsibility, credit scores, projected future incomes, or the quantitative market value of homes, but rather because persons of color were seen as disruptive to the pure white symbolic norm that pervaded the original housing communities. Even before the introduction of futuristic social media in “Nosedive,” technology has never known anything other than the symbolic economy of exchange. Illusion of Resistance of Simulation “Nosedive” also performs a problematic production of resolution/resistance of simulation. This occurs twofold in the presentation of antithetical characters presented in the episode, as well as the emotional catharsis experienced by Lacie at the end of the episode. These elements produce an emotional orientation that distorts the relationship of viewers to the resolution of simulation/simulacra. Viewers are meant to identify with Ryan Pound, Lacie’s brother, and Susan, a woman who benevolently stops to give Lacy a ride despite Lacie’s low score. Ryan lives a carefree, laissez-faire existence. Oblivious to his seeming social missteps and subpar social media score, Ryan prefers the hedonistic pleasure of playing video games and eating and drinking what he wants. Similarly, Susan is an independent and forthright truck driver. After losing her husband to cancer, Susan foregoes her exceptional social media score for a life of honesty and “realness.” Both of these

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characters in their presentation are juxtaposed to Lacie, highlighting the futility of her obsession with her social media score. Through their deferral of social media, Ryan and Susan are meant to alleviate the anxiety of the audience by providing a vessel for the viewer to occupy as a saboteur to the simulated reality. Ryan and Susan in service of this transcendent position provide poignant advice to Lacie about the hyperreal, extolling the virtues of honesty and authenticity. Not only does this alleviate the projected concerns of the audience through these two characters but it also signals to the audience that the lifestyle choices and the dystopian reality Lacie faces is a result of her personal choices and not of inevitability or ubiquity of simulation, including the subtler ways it occurs. The hyperreal faced by everyone is structural in nature and surrounds Lacie and even Ryan and Susan. Ryan and Susan, in terms of storytelling and character development, are purposefully underdeveloped and underexplored. The nature of their resistance is minimal and superficial at best, and, as such, only serve to provide the illusion of existence outside of the structure of the hyperreal. At their worst, Ryan and Susan exacerbate the elements of “Nosedive” in the same way that Baudrillard describes the necessity of the hyperreal’s own negation to produce continuity. 12 The relationship between the masses and the media shifts, just as the surface on a Möbius strip does. On one hand, individuals are told to constitute themselves as autonomous subjects conscious of and responsible for their actions . . . But equally plausible and sensible is the opposite response—the renunciation of the position of subject and of meaning and the decision to respond at all. Humans move between these two positions in a never-ending cycle.” 13

If there was no antagonism and nothing to resist, the hyperreal and the simulations/simulacra would not traverse, nor would it reproduce simulations. Ryan and Susan, despite their minimal inclusion, are essential for the episode development. That is to say the viewers consumption of the simulation of “Nosedive” is not possible without the antagonizing characters. Additionally, “Nosedive” provides catharsis to viewers by portraying simulations as choices on the part of subjects and by representing escape from the hyperreal as attainable. Specifically, catharsis is located in the final moments of the episode. It begins when Lacie crashes Naomi’s wedding, has a public meltdown, and confronts Naomi’s inauthentic and toxic friendship. Finally, Lacie is able to escape the rigid rules of simulation and tells Naomi her true feelings. Lacie publicly denounces Naomi for several deeply personal events, including Naomi’s selfish enabling of Lacie’s eating disorder and Naomi sleeping with Lacie’s past love interest. In this moment, the episode seems to demonstrate an untethering of

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Lacie from the simulation/simulacra, allowing Lacie to say whatever she wants, unhindered from the concern of her social media score. Lacie is then shown experiencing liberation in her jail cell when she is imprisoned due to her exceptionally low social media score. In this final scene, Lacie is overcome with emotion and a new sense of clarity. She experiences a revelation that exposes the intricacies of simulation. Lacie’s clarity is demonstrated by a hyper-focused vision, illustrated through the cinematography, as the audience is shown the environment through Lacie’s point of view. Lacie is ejected from the simulation as the retinal technology is removed, a part of the booking process taking place at the prison. With her naked eyes, Lacie is able to peer into the real. Lacie understands, knows, and locates the simulation and transcends above it in this concluding scene. The prison is illuminated by the camera lens’s ultra-focus, taking in all the minute details and imperfections of the scene, including the specks of dust suspended in the air. The final moment of catharsis occurs when Lacie releases a flurry of aggressive insults at a nearby inmate culminating in a single elongated, cathartic “Fuck You.” The audience is brought resolution when Lacie realizes the futility of living up to the hyperrealistic portrayals of her simulated persona and finally surrenders. No longer concerned of the perceptions or opinions of others, Lacie finally tells someone how she really feels and, for the first time, demonstrates the true, “authentic” Lacie Pound. Although there is no real resolution to the larger questions of the social media score or Lacie’s future in this culture, the ending note of the episode reveals Lacie’s freedom from the hyperreal even though she is physically confined to a cell, producing a sense of hope and optimism for the audience. Through the cathartic concluding scenes, the subtext of the show produces an inaccurate orientation between people and the condition of the hyperreal. For example, Ryan and Susan’s antagonistic positions to simulation embolden the viewer. The viewer can feel self-assured that there are people who can resist the simulation. The simulation is not all encompassing, and the vestiges of the real are redeemable. If ever the viewer is confronted by simulation, the viewer has a mechanism by which to resist the hyperreal through the presentation of the character archetypes, Ryan and Susan. Similarly, Lacie’s cathartic moment occurring in the jail cell in the final scene further replicates this position of the viewer. However, as Baudrillard describes by nature of simulation, the real no longer exists as it has been supplanted by pure signification. 14 There is nothing to redeem or return to. Avoiding the simulation is not possible. Third order simulacra is signification without any vestige of the original referent. 15 There is no authentic reality for us to restore through resistance. The antagonism produced through Susan and Ryan, and subsequently the viewer, rather than generate any positive escapes, only serve to recirculate the simulation. According to Baudrillard, 16 such power is

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not locatable, knowable, or coherent. The assumption that one can supposedly recognize power is nothing more than accepting a false dialectic of inside/outside simulative power relations. Baudrillard provides a criticism of knowing modes of power as an illustration of this point: “power is never there and that its institution, like the institution of spatial perspective versus ‘real’ space in the Renaissance, is only a simulation of perspective—it is no more reality than economic accumulation and what a tremendous trap that is.” 17 Baudrillard’s point is that “true” liberation is only possible in a world where power exists in an authentic form. Power, like the real, only exists as a simulation. All of the characters, who are resisting and existing outside of the hyperreal, problematically implant an idea of being outside of the simulation. Thus, Lacie’s emancipation and ability to see simulation for what it is is not an epiphany of dystopian reality or a transcendence of simulation, but simulation itself. Though the viewer seems to experience a certain vicarious liberation from simulation, when Lacie screams insults and swears at her neighboring prisoner, her newfound freedom merely feeds the myth. Baudrillard reminds us that simulation is not something that is so easily overcome or rectified. Escaping the simulation presupposes a “return” to the real, a return to the original signifier from which signification should have been originating from in the first place. Thus, there is no signifier for Lacie to finally “see.” Removing the retinal technology only replaces Lacie’s vision with further simulation with the appearance of reality, which is how simulation operates. The most insidious consequence of these representations of escaping simulation is that they only serve to further the simulation. For Baudrillard, there is no escaping the hyperreal. He explains, “the media are the vehicle for the simulation which belongs to the system and for the simulation which destroys the system, according to a circular logic, exactly like a Möbius strip—and it is just as well. There is no alternative to this, no logical resolution. Only a logical exacerbation and a catastrophic resolution. That is today, this process has no return.” 18 Since the viewer is still watching a television show, revolutionary potential remains encapsulated within the vehicle of simulation itself, mass media. “Nosedive,” as a form of mass media, cannot act as its own authentic negation. “Nosedive,” when attempting to criticize of simulation, results in the very reproduction and continuity of simulation that it seeks to upend or prevent. CONCLUSION “Nosedive” is a cogent criticism of the emerging state of technology, however, using Jean Baudrillard’s concepts of simulacra and simulation, our analysis reveals the ways that the subtext and consumption of the

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episode works counterintuitively and fails to challenge the elements of emerging and existing techno realities. “Nosedive” displaces blame on modern simulacra, such as the social media and rating mechanisms, portrays simulations as futuristic concerns, and uses foils and representations of resistance to encourage escape from the hyperreal, dystopian future. Though Black Mirror is provocative and entertaining, audience members must remain cautious that its images are anything other than a spectacle for pleasure. “Nosedive” neuters the potential for meaningful lessons of simulation when it inadvertently replicates the context it seeks to reveal. Baudrillard provides a useful reminder that we cannot avoid replicating Lacie Pound’s mistakes and false sense of hope when society has always already embarked on a steady nosedive through the hyperreal. NOTES 1. Sophie Gilbert, “Black Mirror’s ‘Nosedive’ Skewers Social Media,” The Atlantic, October 21, 2016, https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2016/10/blackmirror-nosedive-review-season-three-netflix/504668/ 2. James Poniewozik, “Review: ‘Black Mirror’ Finds Terror, and Soul, in the Machine,” The New York Times, October 20, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/21/ arts/television/review-black-mirror-finds-terror-and-soul-in-the-machine.html. 3. Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 2. 4. Ibid, 6. 5. Sonja K. Foss, Karen A. Foss and Robert Trapp, Contemporary Perspectives on Rhetoric 3rd ed. (Long Grove: Waveland Press, 2002), 316. 6. Timothy Borchers, Rhetorical Theory: An Introduction (Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press, 2006), 298. 7. Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 21. 8. Foss, Foss and Trapp, Contemporary Perspectives, 321. 9. Tasha Robinson, “Black Mirror’s Third Season Opens with a Vicious Take on Social Media.” The Verge, October 24, 2016, https://www.theverge.com/2016/10/24/ 13379204/black-mirror-season-3-episode-1-nosedive-recap. 10. Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 1–2. 11. Jean Baudrillard, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, trans. Charles Levin, (St. Louis: Telos Press, 1981), chap. 5, http://www.mit.edu/~allanmc/baudrillard.theart auction%20.pdf, 2. 12. Jean Baudrillard, “The Masses: The Implosion of the social in the media,” New Literary History 16, no. 3 (1985): 580. 13. Foss, Foss and Trapp, Contemporary Perspectives, 315. 14. Baudrillard, For a Critique, 6. 15. Baudrillard, For a Critique, 6; Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 6. 16. Jean Baudrillard, Forget Foucault, trans. Phil Beitchman, Lee Hildreth, and Mark Polizzoti (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2007), 50. 17. Baudrillard, Forget Foucault, 50–51. 18. Baudrillard, “The Masses,” 587.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Baudrillard, Jean. For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign. Translated by Charles Levin. St. Louis: Telos Press, 1981. ———. “The Masses: The Implosion of the Social in the Media.” New Literary History 16, no. 3 (1985): 577–589. ———. Simulacra and Simulation. Translated by Sheila Faria Glaser. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1994. ———. Forget Foucault. Translated by Phil Beitchman, Lee Hildreth, and Mark Polizzoti. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2007. Black Mirror. “Nosedive.” Directed by Joe Wright Written by Michael Schur and Rashida Jones. UK: House of Tomorrow, October 21, 2016. Borchers, Timothy. Rhetorical Theory: An Introduction. Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press, 2006. Foss, Sonja K., Foss, Karen, A. and Trapp, Robert. Contemporary Perspectives on Rhetoric. 3rd ed. Long Grove: Waveland Press, 2002. Gilbert, Sophie. “Black Mirror’s ‘Nosedive’ Skewers Social Media.” The Atlantic, October 21, 2016, https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2016/10/blackmirror-nosedive-review-season-three-netflix/504668/ Poniewozik, James. “Review: ‘Black Mirror’ Finds Terror, and Soul, in the Machine.” The New York Times, October 20, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/21/arts/ television/review-black-mirror-finds-terror-and-soul-in-the-machine.html Robinson, Tasha. “Black Mirror’s third season opens with a vicious take on social Media.” The Verge, October 24, 2016, https://www.theverge.com/2016/10/24/ 13379204/black-mirror-season-3-episode-1-nosedive-recap

EIGHTEEN The Dystopia of the Spectator Past Revival and Acceleration of Time in Black Mirror (“The Entire History of You” and “Be Right Back”) Macarena Urzúa Opaza and Antoine Faure 1

Black Mirror is a “place in abysm.” The show portrays a time in which life is technologically exposed and reproduced. Therefore, the British TV series demonstrates a world where every sphere of life is mediated by technology that makes, produces, and reproduces life in the characters’ quotidian life, modifying memory and the past with different types of archives, in the sense of Derrida’s idea regarding the archive desire of Freud. 2 In a world produced as a copy, the digital archives operate as a feature of “hyperreality” 3 and confer performativity to the replaying simulacra through the making of subjective and always-new memorial events. Our thesis lies within two Black Mirror episodes—“The Entire History of You” (S1E3) and “Be Right Back” (S2E1)—and memory’s technical mediation that occurs through a mere reliving (not only replaying) of a past that happens to be predominant in present-day life. Through practical uses of technology, characters in “The Entire History of You” can check in a stock of digitalized memories (audiovisual format) whenever they want. They can also show the images to their interlocutors, edit them, and erase the archives they desire. In “Be Right Back,” due to the death of her lover (and father of her future daughter), the main character chooses to reanimate the lost partner first by using a technology that combines several interactions that the couple had online (which is stored in the “cloud”) and second by activating a “mannequin,” or an exact replica of the deceased. In each case, algorithms of the deceased’s behavior give 235

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credibility to his reproduction and reliving process. 4 This communication through algorithms displays Virilio’s idea of tele-inter-activity, meaning that the experience is mediated by transferences and digital transports in which velocity is the criteria of truth. 5 In this world of archives, where algorithms and images are oriented to the reading and overanalyzing the past, the role of the future could be questioned while it becomes uncertain and even irrelevant except for providing instant memories to be archived and reproduced. This is the question of this chapter: the relationship between the point of declaration of the series 6 and the time administration in the episodes. Tele-inter-activity transforms the way in which both global and local surroundings are considered. Thus, the characters become both actors and spectators. Their lives are rebooted in an accelerated way to avoid the anguish and anxiety provoked by the future’s uncertainty. Moreover, words, objects, and emotions are synchronized by the image’s repetition, and, as Paul Virilio points out, the past’s immediacy offers control by being both a means and curb toward progress. 7 PAUL VIRILIO: APPROACHES ON SPEED AND “DROMOSCOPY” Paul Virilio has analyzed the impact of speed on contemporary societies and realized that as a result of the digitalization of all the files, archives, and the availability of such registries through hyperlinks together with the webs and the audiovisual vehicles, total inertia has been a consequence of all these phenomena. This is precisely tele-inter-activity, the idea that one is no longer moving physically to research and connect with the world but relies instead on having access to tele-transferable or tele-presence of these archives, that rearticulates regimes of temporality. Therefore, tele-inter-activity results in the fragmentation of history, resulting in a multitude of macronarratives, as Virilio and Sylvere Lotringer discuss in Pure War: “The mega-interruption reinterprets man’s role.” 8 This helps to restore “a unity to humanity” 9 by confirming that humanity’s only truth is the negative horizon. Humanity will share some sense toward the end, as Lotringer points out to Virilio in an interview with him by stating that “the end of time, or the end of temporality [is] the ultimate advent of humanity,” 10 hence the interruption in time would be experienced by all, beyond biopolitics, 11 and would thus replace the interruption in the body itself. Virilio confirms: “It’s interesting to privilege interruption on the level of chronopolitics, as opposed to geo-politics. Now interruption in the body is replaced by interruption in time. We plug into everyone’s intimate duration. Subliminal effects mean just that.” 12 In the same discussion, Lotringer presents the idea of the death of intimacy, strongly related to the Black Mirror episodes analyzed here, as the two episodes soak into (and focus

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on) the personal and private lives of the main characters. “At the same time, it’s the death of intimacy. All the reflections of these last years on an exploded, ‘schizophrenic’ model of subjectivity correspond to the great esthetic of the collage. The ego is not continuous, it’s made up of a series of little deaths and partial identities which don’t come back together, or which only manage to come back together by paying the price of anxiety and repression.” 13 If the ego is not continuous, we therefore experience the death of intimacy, and our lives are filled by constant little deaths and identities that are mostly partial. We understand that this continuous interruption that could be called an interruption or suppression of intimacy is the result of technology’s effect on society, something the two episodes of Black Mirror analyzed here demonstrate. In the following sections of the interview, Virilio and Lotringer state that the consequences of speed, science, and technology go beyond just their field of action and externalities: “It’s not science fiction. Science and technology develop the unknown, not knowledge. Science develops what is not rational. That what fiction is.” 14 We relate this idea with the ubiquity and interchangeability of place, due to the interface between all bodies, all places, and all points of the world, which is in direct relation to the destruction of the conception of real time in what Virilio calls “dromoscopy.” As Virilio has clearly written: “The world becomes a cinema. It’s this effect of speed on the landscape that I call a dromoscopy, in the strict sense. We speak of stroboscopy, in other words, the effects induced by an energy and a relation of observation of an object. But this stroboscopy is also a dromoscopy.” 15 In Virilio’s conception, real time works similarly to the “exposure time” of a camera, meaning that there is no chance for interruption. Speed and perception are keys to approaching the concept of dromology: “Dromology concentrates on how the phenomenon of speed influences, determines or limits the way we perceive objects, how the field of our perception and its structure change by means of acceleration of speed.” 16 In “Be Right Back,” “stroboscopy” corresponds with the way in which memories are organized, as flashes, on the subject. In “The Entire History of You,” the reflection screens operate as an aesthetic of disappearance, where images appear as quickly as they dissolve. Therefore, while the picture vanishes, the file is still online, suspended in a space called the “cloud.” Without interruption, the velocity with which we might access and use the archives is the criteria of perception and truth. The actualization of perception through the immediate image and the possibility to reexperience the past is key to understanding how the future’s uncertainty is locked in an omnipresent past. The concepts presented above are used in this chapter as tools to frame key ideas in order to read and analyze the role of technology, speed, spectator, and reality and their consequences in conceptions of the

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self as well as perceptions of time and temporalities based on Virilio’s approach to speed and dromocracy. BLACK MIRROR’S DYSTOPIA: BETWEEN REFLECTION AND REPETITION Black Mirror is a TV show that assumes a “slightly futurological difference.” 17 The element of future is placed in the centrality of technology, in the storytelling and the narrative of each episode. Also, the relationship between contemporaneity and the spectators rests on the knowledge and the existence of technology depicted in the show. 18 The focus of the narrative and the framing of the dispositive through the camera propose a gaze without any empathy. It gives verisimilitude to the show. Furthermore, it is precisely this fact that we think allows the production team and the scriptwriters to assume morals and existential warnings regarding what the consequences of the uses of technology in social and organic life could be. What they are doing is questioning the present and reality. The organization’s strength of these technological tools has the feature of marking and generating stimuli in the characters’ own bodies. In this sense, we refer to the specific use of the term gouge, which is to name and typify the act of the extraction of “the grain” (“The Entire History of You”). We can see something similar occur with the sexual pleasure that the cyborg is able to provide his mistress (“Be Right Back”). Guided by Deleuze and Guattari, Black Mirror shows the way in which the machines become social, full bodied: the cognitive, the semiotic, the affective, seem to constitute in new ways of life as machine. 19 The format and shapes of the TV show place heterotopia in the prospective future and fix their narrative in dystopia. These two episodes may seem to take place in a utopia at first glance, due to the massive access to technology and to the solutions and ease of use that it provides in daily life. However, we uphold that both worlds portrayed are dystopias in which from the beginning are directly shown in the ways in which both normality and control are produced by this technology that exponentially affects the community. Therefore, reading a brief history of the concept, the show corresponds with the term dystopia since it illustrates how the relationship between humanity and technology has emerged and has been transformed to result in corrosive lifestyles in society, degraded individual development, and, ultimately, subjectivation. In Black Mirror, there is a displacement toward the idea of oppression into post-apocalyptic temporalities or totalitarianism. Therefore, dystopia goes from a totalitarian concept, where the public space disappears due to equivalence between technology and politics, to a demoliberal world with several liberties. The way archives are used makes surveillance appear as a method of ruling quotidian life as dystopic temporality. Accord-

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ing to these definitions, we can affirm that the show is dystopic, but mostly inside the characters’ world in terms of whether or not their subjectivity has a chance to unfold or be fully exhibited. The series unfolds as a lab that does not organize episodes in relation to a common narrative but articulates them around an object (technology), a question (moral), and a problem (the probabilities that the future may bring for tomorrow’s human condition). In the two episodes analyzed here, heterotopia works mainly as a staging scene where “reflection logic” happens in all the episodes in two different ways. First, reflection logic can be seen through the images shown of the characters in reflecting surfaces through which the characters are being unfolded. The point of view of the repetition shows the spectator exactly what the characters see, as if the camera were his or her own eyes. In addition, Black Mirror may literally synthesize the three ways of showing reflection through the glass and the screens that multiply the surfaces where reflections occur. It follows Dziga Vertog’s idea that “our eyes see very poorly and very little . . . The movie camera was invented in order to penetrate deeper into the visible world, to explore and record visual phenomena, so that we do not forget what happens and what the future must take into account.” 20 Second, the staging seems to be a mirror. This is the heterotopian vision that we see in a Foucauldian way. The camera-eye projects the place where dystopia locates the catastrophe’s narrative at a personal level. The visual omnipresence of close-ups, positions, and especially the storytelling about subjectivity is displayed by structuring these episodes at a slow pace and focusing on the characters’ egos. A quotidian time is developed, without much ellipsis, but with some pauses and accelerations. It is precisely this micro-technological focus on the characters’ daily life that gives verisimilitude to these stories of the self. This daily life dispositive does not unfold a social memory but individualized memories. Technology’s omnipresence is activated through an economic regime strongly attached to the neoliberal economy that establishes and places the individual at the center of commercial exchange. In this case, the main product being offered as a result of the connected algorithms is a personal digital archive. It allows the users to exchange images, delete others, and place the ones the viewer/user desires to keep. The stock of memories implies a new subjectivation, or a new way into which each one self-interprets his or her own essence by redefining himself or herself in each reflection or reliving recent memories or past ones. This is related to the current condition of being reactive in changing environments as well as consumers. In this way, the mnemonic device portrayed in Black Mirror replaces collective memory with a biographical time contained in the dispositive and produced as an economic subjectivation of the past, in a context of reactive behaviors. 21 The viewer and each character can be what Virilio calls a “re-seer,” which updates immediate images and permanently resumes seeing the same. 22

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MEMORY OVERDOSE AND LOCUS SCARCITY Black Mirror does not only deal with the relationship between the archive and new information technologies as “digital systems of conservation and recuperation of data [which] makes possible an unprecedented record’s capacity, classification and preservation, by promoting and reenforcing what Andreas Huyssen has coined as ‘contemporary memory cultures.’” 23 It also provides a language for those memory cultures by exhibiting them as microsocial phenomena distributed by virtual subjectivism’s dispositive and biographical time without life projects and future. 24 Therefore, it all becomes a whole. The obsession for reconstructing and making sense of the past and memory (an idea many authors have coined as the “museification of life”) 25 reveals to be static and locked up in a museum or becomes “official history.” Some of these ideas have been worked on by Maurice Halbwachs, Pierre Nora, and Svetlana Boym among others, particularly dealing with post-communist or post-dictatorship countries and communities. Therefore, this “museification of life” and “market of nostalgia” convey the transformation of subjectivity in a commodity. In the two Black Mirror episodes, the phenomenon is distributed according to the traces left in the algorithmic dimension and in the desire of grasping reality by freezing life and time. Within the proliferation of memory’s materials (stories, testimonies, data), archiving consists of producing and reproducing images simultaneously in time and space. This image’s ubiquity reduces the perception of these two fundamental dimensions and fits them into a third algorithm that combines the recent past with the biographical time of the self, as mentioned previously. The individual use of memory technological devices therefore locates the digital image as material evidence in the regime of biopolitics’ verification. Dystopia goes beyond this technological subjectivity and lies in the fact that identity does not reside in the elaboration of cultural profiles, as they are produced today, but because of the activation of a strictly semiotic and meaningful reproduction. As Virilio states, “the location of people is inefficient in a world where individuals are, mainly, traceable.” 26 Accordingly, we propose that the characters end by living through/ with/despite the dispositive. In this dense flux of images, the semiotic use of the archives works as a place of declaration in the relationship between images. For example, in “The Entire History of You,” the characters argue about the strength of fixed and stable images, referring to their consolidated identities. The non-linear video-staging together with the constant use of high and low angles help articulate the visual language of the oneto-one dispute. This locus is precisely situated in the place of scarcity. The relationship between man and machine is developed with the algorithmic image of absence and the mannequin that is no more than a complex device containing features of the living Ash (“It’s software, it mimics

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him”). It is the character that embodies the experience of absence. Both of their bodies are confronted through the subjective gaze, showing a complete structure of behavior, routines, gestures, and responses that have all been recorded and archived (in something like the cloud) and are now being reenacted, shaped with a form that embodies all of this. As expressed by the dispositive in the show: “I’m fine. I’m not in that thing. I’m remote. I’m in the cloud.” Therefore, we can question the forms in which the histories of those selves are being inscribed and reproduced within a community and in which ways intimacy, memories, and the act of remembering become a part of the cloud, which can be taken down and then give shape to absence, moreover to death’s mourning. The work of memory operates through vigilant technologies. 27 By this we mean through the total control of the images and the access to the archives. Watchful technologies are openly shown with the pause gesture, which allows one to repetitively review the digital archive and even transform it. In “The Entire History of You,” surveillance technologies are illustrated through features such as the “retrospective parenting control” and the “redo” (the latter of which is equivalent to the “rewind” function of VCR players). Moreover, surveillance technologies can refer to something called a full spectrum memory—that is, a technology constantly nurtured by new downloads and updates when organic memories no longer seem reliable and therefore are not considered valid in and of themselves. (“You know half the organic memories you have are junk? Just not trustworthy.”) This lack of memory requires the characters to figure out their memories, or to “redo” them, from two perspectives. From an individual perspective, when a character involves his or her emotions in the dispositive. In “Be Right Back,” it is acknowledged that the machine cannot substitute humans, but the machine is not destroyed, and it is retained to counteract the lack of a partner or a father figure for the posthumous daughter. From a social perspective, how relationships operate by and through mediation of the digital archives is also seen. This is paradigmatic in “The Entire History of You,” while “Be Right Back” is built around the secret presence of the mechanical image until its captivity. In both cases, the pause gesture works due to the classification and organization of experience and memory in order to temporarily organize knowledge. Through this, the pause gesture allows for the possibility of a placed use of images in the present. This produces a register in movement that accumulates, destroys, and updates the ways of seeing. The pause gesture also manipulates and anticipates, and by these means captures from the present of the narration the open possibilities of the future. The feature also resignifies interpretations of the past by proposing potential uses and transforming the present and the future in a constant scarce. The last image of “The Entire History of You” stages the scarcity

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of future: after images and memory’s obsession, the screen turns completely black, absent of any image or archive. We can interpret this as how the continuous present incarnates this absence. The pause gesture implicates a negative administration of common time, because the time for sharing with others and living outside of the dispositive is exponentially reduced. Memory culture is shown as an individual dispositive of common time’s administration. Precisely, in the pause gesture, the character is both actor and spectator of this society. The filming technique of pausing the plot has the unfolding effect in the dystopia construction of the series. The universe in Black Mirror immerses the viewer in a post-aura world without a mundane topography. This loss of aura becomes a condition for credibility presented as images and returns its authority back. In “The Entire History of You,” the conflict between two characters involves the preservation of some past images as they risk losing their own family, whereas in “Be Right Back” the unfolding is expressed also in the grammar. That later becomes clear when Martha says: “You look like him,” yet as the days pass and the interaction between the two becomes more intimate, she exclaims: “You’re not enough of him. You are nothing!,” and “There is no history to you . . . you are just a performance of stuff that he performed without thinking, and it’s not enough.” The difference between the narratives, or between what is original and what is artificial, is staged 28 according to hyperactual interpretations of images that multiply and circulate in the personal digital archives (“The Entire History of You”). These archives are visualized in an obsessive way that transforms them into evidence of the truth and constitutes it while circulating. The repetitiveness in this panoptic society unfolds the life between the digital archive and a sole image, as technology is able to replicate features, gestures, and verbal routines after the death of a living being. It then assimilates its identity to algorithms stages and in movement. To summarize, the digitalization of images implicates life’s museification, whose interactivity exceeds contemplation due to the loss over time control. This “replay” obsession makes the contemplation of the past the possibility of life. In the quotidian space of exhibition, the digital archive’s obsession exercises sovereignty over biopolitics. In other words, the conscious exercise of reviewing visual testimonies, whose length can be controlled, is taking a growing extension of time, and consequently goes through life itself. As Virilio states, the “re-seeing” operates in the intervals that create time by movement between subjective events rather than in the visibility of spaces.

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RE-SEEING THE NON-HISTORY What we found here is a decisive knot in Black Mirror’s dystopia—a temporary device that makes the memory pause permanent and that paradoxically accelerates time. Velocity is firstly given due to the multiplication of the events, which corresponds to the mere visualization of the digital archives. They bring together the scarcity in order to stage and to personify what is invisible. Thus, the events reorganize memory among this fast temporality of socio- technological relations and the immediate temporality of urgency. In addition, memory is expressed through an always-new, which is founded on the active use of archives. The sense of the images changes according to the moment in which they are being watched. The decision of calling the archival revisions a “redo” is crucial. It shows that the use of a specific image is an action and/or a reaction. In fact, we can see in “The Entire History of You” 29 how in replaying the same images, the main character works the material by using functions such as the zoom or a rebuilding of a scene by lip reading in order to give a new perspective to that memory. In the accelerated repetitiveness of the digital archives, reproduction is not identical; some data are lost in each transference, circulation, or visualization. Technological devices also operate with data storage logic that necessarily implicates the destruction of a part of the accumulated information kept until that moment, generating new memorial practices with the immediacy of the archive’s resource. By the end of “The Entire History of You,” 30 immediacy is located between the main character’s catastrophe, the repetitiveness of the replayed memories, the revisions from the points of view of each character, and the editing of the images. The immediate exhibition of memory disorganizes biopolitics’ time life as it is experienced for the characters that have trouble resting and sleeping. The pause gesture is another feature that is placed in an algorithm’s flux that allows presenting or re-presenting scarcity and death and then provoking a loss of control over time. The acceleration and repetitiveness of the image expands the image’s control for each human being in its own and accelerated mobility. In effect, it can activate the exhibition while a character is getting around (for example, in a taxi that has the projection device) or in a totally autonomous way (through the same characters’ eyes that have the grain incorporated). In other words, the exhibition time is administrated in an external way (as in the cinema) and also in an individual manner between the desire of remembering and social norms. In Black Mirror, memory occurs through an accelerated movement that is immediate and acquires social performativity. In this sense, we agree with the idea described by Virilio that human beings have become the destination of movements regardless their own mobility. 31

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To conclude, the technologic dispositive produces rules and a control capacity for the individual as well as conflicts in order to control others’ images. The shapes and temporalities of the artist, the curator, and the viewer converge in the production’s immediacy and the images’ exhibition. The credibility occurs through the copies’ circulation of an alwaysnew memorial event. Thus, instead of generating time excess, this archival movement turns these remains in historicity scarcity due to the images’ omnipresence, resulting as a dystopia of the actor-viewer-character and at the same time a dystopia for the television viewer. Black Mirror neutralizes the future where it is understood as present progression between an immediate temporality regime and a reliving of the omnipresent past. NOTES 1. We would like to thank Felipe Morales y Estefanía Sepúlveda for the proofreading of this chapter. This chapter has been written thanks to the funding given by FONDECYT Project n°11170348, “Historia de las Temporalidades Periodísticas en Chile (1973–2013): Otra Mirada sobre la Dimension Política del periodismo Professional,” for which the author, Antoine Faure, was the principal researcher (CIDOC—Universidad Finis Terrae). 2. “Derrida sees in Freud’s writing the very desire that is Archive Fever: the desire to recover moments of inception, to find and possess all sorts of beginnings.” Steedman, Dust: The Archive and Cultural History, 5. 3. Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacres et simulation. Paris: Galilée, 1981. 4. The genesis of the replica can be read with the intertextual reference of Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. The novel was created during one night on a storm in the English countryside. The same occurs in this episode, where the replica is animated in one night. However, Dr. Frankenstein’s creation runs away and falls in love, whereas in Black Mirror’s episode “Be Right Back,” Ash cannot fall in love and cannot escape, so it could be read as an improved Frankenstein. Also, the name of the character, Ash, can also be read with the idea of fugacity, since it also means “ashes” or “dust,” which has the quality of disappearing into air.

5. “We should never forget that the truth of phenomena is always limited by the speed at which they spring up.” Virilio, Polar Inertia, 82. 6. We refer here to the term énonciation. In Foucault vocabulary, it is an event that is not repetitive and is charged of authority. See Foucault, L’Archéoilogie du savoir, 133–34. 7. Virilio, Le Grand Accélérateur. 8. Virilio and Lotringer, Pure War, 43. 9. Ibid. 10. Ibid. 11. Foucault, Surveiller et punir. 12. Virilio and Lotringer, Pure War, 43. 13. Ibid. 14. Ibid., 65. 15. Ibid., 85. 16. Hauer, “Dromology, Politics and Logistics of Perception,” 731. 17. Puech, “Black Mirror ou l’ambiguïté du pire.” 18. The production team confessed that for certain episodes, it had to go over its initial intention because the reality outplaced the heterotopic decision it had made (quoted in the same article). See: Ibid. 19. Gómez-Moya, “La de archivo es la primera condición,” 31.

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20. Vertog, Kino Eye, 67. 21. In regard to reactivity as subjectivation in a neoliberal regime, see Kathya Araujo and Danilo Martuccelli, “Individu et néolibéralisme,” 125–43. 22. Virilio, L’horizon négatif. 23. Costa, “Poéticas tecnológicas y pulsión de archivo,” 93. 24. Leccardi, Sociologie del tempo. 25. Huyssen, Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia. 26. Virilio, Le Futurisme de l’instant, 12–13. 27. Foucault, Surveiller et punir. 28. Groys, “De la imagen al archivo-imagen –y vuelta: el arte en la era de la digitalización,” 13–26. 29. Ibid. 30. Ibid. 31. Virilio, La vitesse de la libération.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Araujo, Kathya and Danilo Martuccelli. “Individu et néolibéralisme: réflexions à partir de l’expérience chilienne.” Problèmes d’Amérique latine, 1, n°88 (2013). Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacres et simulation. Paris: Galilée, 1981. Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” In Selected Writings, Vol. 3: 1935–1938. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1935. Boym, Svetlana. The Future of the Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books, 2001. Costa, Flavia. “Poéticas tecnológicas y pulsión de archivo.” In Arte, tecnología y archivos, edited by Alejandra Castillo and Cristián Gómez-Moya. Santiago de Chile: Ediciones UFT, 2012. Foucault, Michel. L’Archéologie du savoir. Paris: Gallimard, 1969. ———. Surveiller et punir. Paris: Gallimard, 1975. Gómez-Moya, Cristián. “La de archivo es la primera condición.” In Arte, tecnología y archivos, edited by Alejandra Castillo and Cristián Gómez-Moya. Santiago de Chile: Ediciones UFT, 2012. Groys, Boris. “De la imagen al archivo-imagen –y vuelta: el arte en la era de la digitalización.” In Arte, tecnología y archivos. Edited by Alejandra Castillo and Cristián Gómez-Moya. Translated by Patricio Cleary. Santiago de Chile: Ediciones UFT, 2012. Hauer, Tomas. “Dromology, Politics and Logistics of Perception.” In SGEM2014 Conference Proceedings, edited by International Multidisciplinary Scientific Conference on Social Sciences and Arts, Book 3, Vol. 1, 2014. Huyssen, Andreas. Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia. New York: Routledge, 1995. Leccardi, Carmen. Sociologie del tempo. Roma-Bari: Laterza, 2009. Nora, Pierre. Faire de l’Histoire, t.1: nouveaux problèmes. Paris: Gallimard, 1974. Puech, Michel. “Black Mirror ou l’ambiguïté du pire.” The Conversation, June 28, 2017. http://theconversation.com/black-mirror-ou-lambigu-te-du-pire-80027. Steedman, Caroline. Dust: The Archive and Cultural History. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University, 2002. Vertog, Dziga. Kino Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. Virilio, Paul. L’horizon négatif. Paris: Galilée, 1984. ———. La vitesse de liberation. Paris: Galilée, 1995. ———. Polar Inertia. London: Sage, 2000. ———. Le futurisme de l’instant. Paris: Galilée, 2009. ———. Le grand accélérateur. Paris: Galilée, 2010. Virilio, Paul and Sylvere Lotringer. Pure War. New York: Semiotext(e), 1997.

Conclusion Connecting Our Themes to Season Four and the Future

Art, science, and technology continue to rapidly evolve and expand into the future. Medical science offers amazing breakthroughs and treatments on a daily basis, while travel technology sends products and people all over the world. Global trade and tourism are steadily expanding. We see an explosion of artistic creativity as wealth increases in many nations around the world. Amid our technological civilization, human identity remains as complex as ever, still too often bound up in unscientific beliefs and traditionalist ideologies such as racism, tribalism, and nationalism, hence the building of walls and homeland security states. Gender norms are expanding along with the cultural acceptance of increasing diversity of sexual preferences, all countered by envy from the uptight, wed to sacred texts. Despite the recent political controversies centered on Cambridge Analytica’s use of Facebook data to target and manipulate voters in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, the planetary surveillance systems are continuing to permeate every aspect of daily existence. Terrified from 24/7 news updates, parents fear for their children’s safety and place them under ever more surveillance. In the cities and suburbs, “free range” children are an endangered species, now permanently linked to their parents via social media and mobile phones—the very condition displayed in “Arkangel,” in season four of Black Mirror. In the future, if our Facebook memories are directly downloaded from our brains, then police detectives might well piece together unsolved crimes as shown in “Crocodile.” But any benefit to law and order will be outweighed by the horrific use of uploaded and downloaded memories shown in “Black Museum,” truly one of the terrifying futures presented in Black Mirror. If is it not drones surveilling us and hunting us down as in “Most Hated in the Nation,” then it might be the dogs of “Metalhead.” Black Mirror’s drone bees and robot dogs draw upon recent trends of weaponizing objects of nature for deployment against humans, in what can only be a dystopian future. Like surveillance culture, the spectacle and hyperreality are the dominant modes of determining what counts as true, good, beautiful, and meaningful. Copies of copies of copies are everywhere, big data is piling up in servers dotting our lands and migrating to the North Pole in search of cooler temperatures. But that does not mean we cannot find love as we 247

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transform the planet. Season four of Black Mirror offers some future optimism in the episode “Hang the DJ,” where big data is shown to produce true love via a computer dating system that merges Tinder and Match.com. Our screens are our maps, the maps of our consciousness for 10–14 hours a day, the maps that have replaced and shaped the territories they are supposed to represent. Everywhere we turn, the signs and symbols of the real stand in for the real, apparently too unbearable, too degraded, or too boring in comparison to the artificial selves and glorious worlds on our screens, always aglow like Las Vegas. It is undeniable that a realityTV star is the forty-fifth president of the United States, continuing the downward entertainment trajectory from B-movie star (Ronald Reagan) to baseball team owner (George W. Bush) to Twitter tough guy as “leader of the free world.” Given the techno-cultural trends impacting the brains of our species, Donald Trump is not the bottom and neither is “The Waldo Moment.” Since our glowing cities block out the stars, and NASA has no plans of sending humans to deep space, virtual reality and hyperreality will be the best option for those seeking to explore (copies of) the cosmos, as long as you do not get trapped on the “USS Callister.” With consumer culture reigning supreme and the Anthropocene in effect around the planet, the lands and oceans seem doomed to evermore pillaging and pollution. No wonder so many fantasize about the offworld destinies in Interstellar, The Martian, and Star Wars. After all, Elon Musk claims our new future is back in outer space, where we are supposedly destined to terraform Mars into a suburb of Earth. The space visions are meant to symbolize optimistic futures for humanity, yet that seems far-fetched considering the United States, China, and Russia are busy weaponizing space. That we cannot imagine a utopian or war-free future in space is why the “USS Callister” is such a powerful and symbolic story. There is no Captain Kirk or Spock to save our technological existence. Ironically, it is the concept of exploring space that poetically connects Black Mirror to its fractured mirror origins in The Twilight Zone and its pilot episode titled “Where Is Everybody?” The episode opens with a man walking on a dirt road and into a small town. Wearing a one-piece jumpsuit that is modestly futuristic, the man enters a café. Store windows are full of goods, the coffee is hot in the café, and the ice cream is cold in the general store. But, there is not a human in sight. In the general store, the man sees a bookstand filled with multiple copies of a paperback titled The Last Man on Earth. The headline on the back cover says: “Don’t Be Half a Man.” Don’t be half a human. Is this not the subtext for Bing’s actions in “Fifteen Million Merits,” for the relations between Martha and Ash in “Be Right Back,” and for the Prime Minister in “National Anthem”?

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By the evening, the solitary man ventures into a movie theater. A war movie is playing, and it shows a B-52 bomber taking off and coming right toward him. The man realizes he is in the United States Air Force. He says to himself: “That must have been it. A bomb. But if there was a bomb, everything would be destroyed. And nothing is destroyed.” Panicked, he questions the very nature of reality. He runs down the theater stairs and crashes into his reflection in a wall-sized mirror, fracturing the glass in a strange anticipation of Black Mirror’s opening. After running wildly through the town at night, he screams repeatedly, “Help me! Somebody help me! Somebody is watching me! Help me!” It seems there is no one to save him, not unlike Victoria in “White Bear,” Potter and Matt in “White Christmas,” all the victims in “Most Hated in the Nation,” and various characters in other Black Mirror episodes. The final scene cuts to a U.S. military facility, where we learn the man is inside an isolation chamber with electrodes taped to his head and connected to a machine. He was in the box for 484 hours, in a “simulated trip to the moon,” for the purpose of testing the effects of extended isolation on astronauts who will take real trips to the moon. But he “cracked up” inside the virtual reality simulation, resembling that of “Men Against Fire” and “Playtest.” The military officials declare the man’s test a success, despite his crack-up: You see, we can feed the stomach with concentrates. We can supply microfilm for reading, recreation, even movies of a sort. We pump oxygen in and waste material out. But there is one thing we can’t simulate. That’s a very basic need: man’s hunger for companionship. The barrier of loneliness—that’s one thing we haven’t licked, yet.

Serling’s voice-over concludes the episode: Up there, up there in the vastness of space, in the void that is sky, up there is an enemy known as isolation. It sits there in the stars waiting, waiting with the patience of eons, forever waiting in the Twilight Zone.

Like The Twilight Zone, Black Mirror has not been naïve about our future in space. The only ones who can save us are ourselves on planet Earth as we confront the existential conditions and dystopian futures of The Twilight Zone and Black Mirror. Despite the optimistic cheerleading of Elon Musk, space is not a plausible Plan B for our ongoing failures on Earth. Aside from the issues of isolation and loneliness, no human is going to Mars anytime soon, mostly due to NASA scientists’ inability to prevent radiation damage caused by long-term exposure to cosmic rays. Yet, as suggested by Black Mirror, and the advances in fields like virtual reality and gaming, we can venture into outer space with our headsets and powerful detailed maps of the cosmos. And, once there, we might find ourselves on board the “USS Callister”

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with a demented wannabe Captain Kirk, creating a dystopian space future for those trapped on Earth, witnessing The Twilight Zone and Black Mirror unfold right before our eyes. The enemy will not be aliens. It will be us, staring at our solitary reflections in our black mirrors.

Index

12 Years a Slave, 193 1984, 41 2001: A Space Odyssey, 141, 143, 156, 211; HAL 9000, 156, 157 Abu Ghraib, 189 Adorno, Theodor, 130 aesthetics, xii; aesthetic collision, 151–152, 165; aesthetics of existence. See Foucault, Michel; form and function, 127; sublime, 127, 141–142, 143; sublime, hysterical, 141, 144; sublime, postmodern, 142; sublime, technological, 142 Alexa, 109, 162, 211 Alphaville, 143, 156 Amazon Echo. See Alexa Andrejevic, Mark, 56, 59, 61, 81n56 Anthropocene, x, 165, 248 Apple, Inc., 63, 107, 169 artificial intelligence (AI), 69, 70, 74, 146, 156, 181, 201, 204, 205 Atlantic Slave Trade, 187, 192 Baudrillard, Jean, viii, ix, 87, 89, 90–91, 91, 92, 94, 95, 96, 97–99, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 108–109, 110, 111, 112, 127, 129, 223; economic value, 227; hyperreal, hyperreality, xi, xii, 87, 89, 90, 91, 96, 96–97, 97, 98, 99, 104, 106, 108, 109, 127, 129, 130, 131, 132, 135, 136, 211, 223–224, 224–225, 225, 226–227, 228, 229, 230, 231, 235, 247–248; postmodernism, 103, 104, 105, 112, 129, 130, 131, 136, 141, 142, 144, 223, 224, 226, 227; simulacrum, simulacra, 32, 87, 89, 90, 91, 96, 98, 104, 129–130, 132, 133, 134, 136, 223, 223–224, 224–225, 225, 226, 228, 229, 230, 231, 235; simulation, xii, 28, 89,

90, 91, 94, 96, 97, 98–99, 224, 226, 227, 230 Becker, Gary, 191 Black Lives Matter, 169, 187 Black Mirror episodes: “Arkangel”, 247; “Be Right Back”, xi, xii, 73, 87, 108, 127, 129, 132–136, 201, 204, 235, 237, 238, 241, 242, 244n4, 248; “Black Museum”, 247; “The Entire History of You”, xi–xii, 41, 55, 56–57, 59, 60, 61, 62, 64, 74, 110, 143, 201, 202, 203–204, 235, 237, 238, 240, 241–242, 243; “Fifteen Million Merits”, xi, xii, 20, 107, 116, 121, 123, 143, 151, 157, 164, 203, 248; “Hang the DJ”, 247; “Hated in the Nation”, xii, 41, 76, 77, 105, 143, 151, 154, 158, 169, 171, 172, 173–174, 174–181, 208, 247, 249; “Men Against Fire”, xii, 1, 3–4, 5–13, 22–23, 31, 109, 151, 154, 158, 164, 201, 207, 249; “Metalhead”, 247; “National Anthem”, xii, 105, 116, 122, 123, 202, 248; “Nosedive”, xii, 21–22, 41, 43–44, 44–50, 106, 116, 118–120, 200, 206, 211, 213, 223, 225–231; “Playtest”, 23, 111, 127, 143–144, 145–146, 147–148, 151, 158, 164, 169, 201, 206, 249; “San Junipero”, xi, xii, 1, 23, 27–37, 106, 202, 207, 211, 213, 214, 215–216, 216–221; “Shut Up and Dance”, 106, 207; “USS Callister”, 127, 248, 249; “The Waldo Moment”, xii, 89, 91, 93–99, 107, 116, 122–123, 200, 205, 248; “White Bear”, xii, 20–21, 110, 151, 158, 164, 169, 185–196, 200, 204–205, 213, 249; “White Christmas”, xi, xii, 1, 19–20, 108–109, 127, 143, 151, 157, 164, 165, 205, 249 251

252

Index

black mirrors, 127, 151–152, 152, 153–156, 161, 163, 165–166, 221, 249; electronic obsidian, 154, 155, 166; “self-portrait” mirrors, 154 Blade Runner 2049, 211 Brooks, David, 62 Brummet, Barry, 131, 131–132 Burke, Edmund, 141 Bush, George W., 248 Butler, Judith, 15, 17, 19 Butler, Octavia, 32, 37, 106, 187, 221 Carlisle, Belinda, 221 Casey, Edward S., 214 Celebration, Florida, 225 Cillizza, Chris, 95, 205 The Circle, 41 Codex Borgia, 154 Colossus: The Forbin Project, 143 Crichlow, Frank, 187 Culkin, J. M., 173, 200 Darwin, Charles, xi Debord, Guy, viii, 87, 115–124 Deleuze, Gilles, 136, 144–145, 147, 214, 238 digital hyperthymesia, 58 digital parrhesia, 44, 47–48, 49–50 dystopia, viii, ix, xi, xii–xiii, 5–6, 11, 27, 43, 46, 91, 94, 95, 98–99, 112, 141, 156, 157, 159, 164, 171, 172, 181, 186, 189, 196, 207, 211, 216, 217, 219, 220, 223, 225, 227, 229, 231, 238, 238–239, 240, 242, 243, 244, 247, 249 dystopian. See dystopia electric light, 151, 152, 159, 165; electric civilization, x, 152, 169; Marshall McLuhan on, 159; effects of, 159–160, 160; total media environments, 160, 163, 165 EverQuest, 214 eXistenZ, 144 expanding universe, x, 165 Facebook, viii, x, 17, 41, 58, 60, 106, 108, 117, 118, 119, 159, 161, 162, 163, 175, 200, 202, 247; Cambridge Analytica, 41, 247

Fisher, Mark, 145 Foucault, Michel, viii, 3–13, 15, 16, 17, 19, 28, 29, 33, 36, 37, 44, 46, 57, 60, 78, 127, 129, 131–132, 135, 145, 187, 192; aesthetics of existence, 131–132, 135, 145, 146, 187–188, 190–192, 193–194, 211, 213–221, 241; biopolitics, 3–4, 5, 6, 8–9, 11, 12, 188, 211, 236, 240, 242, 243; discipline and punishment, 61, 131, 188, 190, 194; heterotopia, 28–37, 211, 213, 214–217, 219–220, 238–239; power, 5, 16, 17, 46, 49, 57, 61, 63, 70, 72, 73, 75, 77, 78, 188, 190, 191, 193 Frase, Peter, 147 Freud, Sigmund, 147 Galileo, xi Gehry, Frank, 169 gender, 15–67, 30, 35, 36, 130–131, 187, 191, 192, 193, 196, 247 Gershon, Ilana, 58 Gilpin, William, 155 Goffman, Erving, 22, 45, 48–49 Google, viii, 62, 63, 93, 158, 162, 163 Google Home, 109 Gros, Frederic, 132 Haraway, Donna, 1, 4, 6–8, 13, 147 Hawking, Stephen, 181 Hegemonic, 107–108, 188 Horkheimer, Max, 130 Hubble Space Telescope, 160, 162–163, 165 The Hunger Games, 186 Huyssen, Andres, 240 identity, vii, xi, 1, 10, 17, 19, 61, 73, 106, 130–131, 133, 136, 146, 180, 211, 247 Inception, 144 Instagram, x, 106, 108, 111, 118, 162, 163 Internet of Things (IoT), 69, 70 Interstellar, 211, 248 Jameson, Fredric, 35, 104, 127, 129, 141, 142, 144 Kant, Immanuel, 127, 131, 141, 142

Index Kellner, Douglas, 96, 130 Kilgore, De Witt Douglas, 27, 29, 30, 35–36 Kurzweil, Ray, 146 LGBTQIA, 27–37 Logan’s Run, 156 Lotringer, Sylvere, 236–237 Lucretius, 129 Lyotard, Jean-Francois, 164–165 The Martian, 248 Marx, Karl, 96, 117, 131, 147 The Matrix, 41, 141, 143, 144, 156 The Maze Runner, 186 McLuhan, Marshall, viii–ix, 127, 151, 159, 169, 171–181, 199–208, 214, 217, 220; cool media, 161–163, 163, 164–165, 165; electronic media, 160; extensions, media as, 173, 180; global village, 177, 181; hot-cool binary, 161, 220; hot media, 151, 161, 161–162, 163, 163–164; media ecology, media as environments, 199, 200; medium is the massage, 173, 175, 217; medium is the message, 174–175; self-amputation, 173, 180; Sputnik, 160 McLuhan, Marshal and McLuhan, Eric: laws of media, 181, 199, 201–202, 203, 207, 208 Memento, 192 Mesoamericans, 154 Modern Times, 146 Muñoz, José Esteban, 1, 27, 29, 30, 34–35 Musk, Elon, 169, 181, 248, 249 Narcissus, 173, 174 NASA (National Air and Space Administration), viii, 160, 165, 248, 249 A Net to Catch the Light, 161 Night Gallery, vii nihilism, 89, 91, 99, 127, 142, 151, 155, 162, 180

253

Panopticon, 16–17, 20, 21, 22, 24, 41, 43–50, 57, 60, 61, 188, 219; panoptic, 144 pause gesture, 241, 241–242, 243 Plato, 132, 152 Postman, Neil, 175, 181, 199, 200 The Prestige, 144 privacy, viii, xi, 41, 46, 60, 63–64, 69, 71, 72, 73, 75, 76, 106, 110, 181 race, 1, 3–13, 22, 23, 27, 30, 35–36, 187, 191, 192, 193, 196 race-war, 192; post-racial objectivity, 193 Raynes-Goldie, Kate, 63 Reagan, Ronald, 248 Robison, Sir John, 155 Sartre, Jean-Paul, viii, xii, 164 Second Life, 214 selfie, viii, 18, 146, 154–155 Serling, Rod, vii, viii, x, xii, 249 Siri, 157, 162, 211 Snapchat, 106, 162, 202 Snowden, Edward, 69, 71 the spectacle, xi, xii, xiii, 87, 93, 96–97, 98, 115–124, 247 Star Trek (the original series), 211 Star Wars, 248 Strate, Lance, 174–175 surveillance, xi, xii, 16, 28, 41, 46–47, 50, 56–64, 69–78, 104, 105, 110, 111, 144, 145, 174, 178, 179, 181, 188, 219, 238, 241, 247; interveillance, 44, 46–47, 49, 50 Suvin, Darko, 129 Tales of the Unexpected, vii The Terminator, 141, 143 Thirteenth Floor, 144 throbber, ix, 151, 156, 163 THX 1138, 156 Tinder, 162, 247 Tron, 156 The Truman Show, 156 Trump, Donald, 89–99, 205, 248 The Twilight Zone, vii, vii–ix, x, xi, xi–xii, 87, 248–249; “Where is Everybody”, 248–249

254

Index

Twitter, x, 89, 95, 118, 158, 161, 162, 163, 200, 202, 208, 248 Tyson, Neil deGrasse, 152 utopia, viii, 6, 7, 21, 27, 28, 29, 30, 33, 34, 35–36, 37, 91, 106, 119, 146, 164, 211, 213–221, 225, 226–227, 238, 248; heterotopia. See Foucault, Michel utopian. See utopia vanishing point, 160–161 Vertog, Dziga, 239 Virilio, Paul, 28, 30, 31, 32, 178, 181, 211, 235–237, 239, 240, 242, 243

virtual reality (VR), 23, 27, 28, 30–31, 32, 33, 34, 116, 144, 214, 219, 220, 221, 248, 249 voids: cosmic, 153, 165; existential, 164 WALL•E, 156 We, 41 Weheliye, Alexander G., 3, 6, 8–12 WhatsApp, 108, 202 World of Warcraft, 214 Zed-Eyes (in “White Christmas”), 165, 205 Zuboff, Shoshana, 57

About the Editors

Angela M. Cirucci is assistant professor of media studies at Kutztown University and received her PhD from the Klein College of Media and Communication at Temple University. Her research explores social network spaces and how structural choices influence identifications. Angela has presented her research at conferences including the International Communication Association, the National Communication Association, the Association of Internet Researchers, and the Media Ecology Association. She was recently awarded Kutztown’s Schaeffer-Sharadin Award in Faculty Excellence. Read more about Angela at angelacirucci.com and follow her on Twitter @angelacirucci. Barry Vacker is associate professor in the Klein College of Media and Communication at Temple University, where he teaches critical media studies. His current projects focus on the trajectories of civilization as represented in art, film, and technology. Recent books include Media Environments (2015), an undergraduate text anthology, and Specter of the Monolith (2017), a critique of humanity’s future in space. He earned his PhD from The University of Texas at Austin.

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About the Contributors

Michael Mario Albrecht is assistant professor of media communication at Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Florida. His professional research looks at television, politics, and popular media through a critical cultural lens. Francois Allard-Huver is lecturer in communication at the ESA and associate researcher at the Sorbonne University, Paris. He is interested in the question of parrhesia and digital parrhesia in the public sphere, digital media strategies, as well as communication practices in a changing media environment. Osei Alleyne is PhD and postdoctoral fellow in anthropology and Africana studies at the University of Pennsylvania. His research lies at the nexus of postcolonial and diaspora studies, popular culture and communications theory with a special interest in techno-futurism. His dissertation explored Afro-diasporic popular cultural exchange across the Atlantic. Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns (PhD student) works as professor at Universidad de Buenos Aires (UBA), Facultad de Filosofía y Letras (Argentina). He is director of the research group on horror cinema “Grite” and has published chapters in many books. Fernando is currently writing a book about the Spanish horror TV series Historias para no Dormir. Derek R. Blackwell (PhD, University of Pennsylvania, 2014) is assistant professor in the Department of Languages and Communication at Prairie View A&M University. His research focuses on the impact of new digital tools on romantic relationships, with topics ranging from the design of online dating websites to the role of social networking sites in romantic relationships to the ways new technologies complicate understandings of infidelity. Derek’s teaching background includes courses on digital media, media literacy, media industries, and popular culture Sarah J. Constant is PhD student in the Department of Communication at the University of Pittsburgh in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

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About the Contributors

Mathieu d’Aquin is Senior Research Fellow at the Knowledge Media Institute of the Open University, and will join the Insight Centre for Data Analytics of the National University of Ireland Galway as professor of informatics in April 2017. Mathieu’s work focuses on the many aspects of building and exploiting knowledge technologies and the semantic web, including ontology engineering, semantic web search, and large scale web data infrastructures. He has especially been working the use of semantic technologies for managing online personal information and for linked data applications in education and smart cities. Eleanor Drage is early stage researcher for the EU Horizon 2020 ETNITN-Marie Curie project “GRACE” (Gender and Cultures of Equality in Europe), which systematically investigates the cultural production of gender equalities in Europe. Eleanor explores the intersections of race and gender in women’s utopian and dystopian science fiction, with a view to uncover new forms of humanism which make space for contemporary queer and transnational subjectivities. Previously, Eleanor was VP of digital marketing at Ivy Lettings before cofounding iberiko.com, an ecommerce company selling Spanish Pata Negra products to UK consumers. She also worked for 50:50 Parliament campaigning for women’s equal representation in UK government. Julie Escurignan is PhD candidate in film and television studies at the University of Roehampton, London. She holds a BA and an MA in communication studies from the Sorbonne University. She researches questions of cross-media, cross-border, and cross-cultural adaptations in television series in association with the AHRC-funded network Media Across Borders. Her thesis looks at how transnational fans of Game of Thrones experience the franchise across multiples sites. Erin Espelie is assistant professor at the University of Colorado Boulder in Film Studies & Critical Media Practices, associate director of the Center for Environmental Journalism, and cofounder of NEST (Nature, Environment, Science, and Technology) Studio for the Arts. Antoine Faure, PhD Political Science, IEP Grenoble (France). His research is focused on the political dimension of the practice of journalism. Some of his work deals with TV series. His current research project titled “Chilean History of Journalistic Temporalities (1973–2013): Another Gaze Regarding Professional Journalism’s Political Dimension,” which was funded by CONICYT. Matthew Flisfeder is assistant professor of rhetoric and communications at the University of Winnipeg. He is the author of Postmodern Theory and Blade Runner (2017), The Symbolic, The Sublime, and Slavoj Žižek’s Theory of

About the Contributors

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Film (2012), and coeditor with Louis-Paul Willis of Žižek and Media Studies: A Reader (2014). Julia M. Hildebrand is PhD candidate in communication, culture, and media at Drexel University. Her research lies at the intersections of critical media studies and mobilities research with a special interest in visual communication and mobile technologies. For her dissertation, she explores personal uses of consumer drones. She has published in journals such as Media, Culture, & Society and Digital Culture & Society. Manel Jiménez-Morales is a graduate in audiovisual communication from Pompeu Fabra University (PF) and in literary theory and comparative literature from the University of Barcelona. He has a PhD in social communication from UPF. He has worked in the media industry and taught at various international universities. Since 2016 he is the director of the Center for Learning Innovation and Knowledge (CLIK). Hillary A. Jones, PhD, is assistant professor in the Department of Communication at California State University, Fresno. She earned her PhD from The Pennsylvania State University and MA from Colorado State University. Her areas of expertise include critical/cultural and rhetorical study of popular visual and digital media. Morten Stinus Kristensen is PhD student at the Institute of Communications Research at the University of Illinois, Urbana–Champaign. By exploring a variety of media discourses, he aims to uncover the intricacies of racial formation in Denmark as they manifest and are reproduced across both traditional and new media platforms. His work is informed by a Marxist approach to media studies as well as critical theories on race, gender, and sexuality such as critical ethnic studies and queer studies. Beyond the ongoing project on racialization in Denmark, Morten’s general research interests include critical journalism studies, representations of difference across news media and popular culture, as well as the liberating and potentially radical potential of media production practices at social peripheries. Diana Leon-Boys is doctoral candidate at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign’s Institute of Communications Research. Her current work looks at the representation of Latina girls in a post-network digital era against the backdrop of contemporary postfeminism and neoliberal frameworks. Marta Lopera-Mármol is communications PhD candidate, a member of the research group CAS (Communication, Advertising and Society), and a scholarship holder in the Graduate Teaching Assistant (GTA) program

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About the Contributors

at Pompeu Fabra University. She holds a BA in audiovisual communication from Barcelona University (UB) and an MA in social communication from Pompeu Fabra University (UPF). Macarena Urzúa Opazo, PhD, Hispanic literatures, Rutgers University. She is currently conducting a research project funded by FONDECYT “Post-Avant Garde Poetics: Poetry, Arts and Networks at Chile and Peru, 1930–1950.” She has published articles regarding post dictatorship poetry in Chile, chronicles and cinema from the perspective of memory, space and landscape. Romin Rajan received his undergraduate degree in communication studies in 2014 from California State University, Fullerton, where he is pursuing his master of arts in the same program. Carlos A. Scolari has a PhD in applied linguistics and communication languages (Catholic University of Milan, Italy) and a degree in social communication (University of Rosario, Argentina). He is associate professor at the Department of Communication of the University Pompeu Fabra–Barcelona. He is principal investigator of the H2020 Transmedia Literacy research project (2015–2018). Twitter: @cscolari Web: Hipermediaciones.com and Modernclicks.net Erika M. Thomas (PhD, Wayne State University) is assistant professor in the Department of Human Communication Studies at California State University, Fullerton. She teaches and researches in the area of rhetorical criticism, using critical/cultural theories to examine mediated representations. Pinelopi Troullinou is research assistant at the Knowledge Media Institute of the Open University. Her research focuses on technology and society and more specifically on the surveillance occurring through the use of personal digital gadgets. Her PhD research addressed issues of the subjective everyday surveillance using as a case study the smartphone devices. She specifically explored young users’ articulation of the relationship with their smartphones and the negotiation with their surveillant aspects conducting focus groups with students at British universities and employing the use of visual vignettes.