Each episode of “Black Mirror” — named for the way our screens look while powered down — paints a different nightmarescape of a future gone technologically awry. In one episode, for example, a woman uses a mail-order kit to create a golem of her deceased boyfriend using his social-media profiles. Another follows an obnoxious cartoon character as he becomes a powerful political figure after performing a series of public stunts. Still another imagines a post-peak-oil future, wherein people generate energy and currency by pedaling on stationary bikes, and the only escape from the drudgery is reality-show fame. The show feels like required viewing for our always connected, device-augmented lives. (...)
That the show probably owes its American stature to social media is perfectly appropriate, because the series fixates on our codependent and contradictory relationship with technology and media. We love being able to share our inner monologues and the minutia of our lives with one another, until, that is, it all goes horribly wrong in ways previously unimaginable. Or even if it doesn’t, we still find ourselves annoyed, jealous, infuriated and even depressed by the behavior of others (and occasionally ourselves) online. And yet we keep logging on. (...)
In America, we treat the release of each new Apple product with the reverence usually reserved for pop icons. The sly ingenuity of “Black Mirror” is that it nails down our love for the same devices we blame for our psychological torment. Brooker understands that even as we swear off tweeting and promise to stop Googling our exes, our phones are still the last things we see before falling asleep and the first things we reach for when we awaken.
To that end, the gadgets in “Black Mirror,” including the creepy memory-recording devices, look sleek enough to want, which is perhaps the show’s cleverest trick. It is impossible to watch the show and not idly fantasize about having access to some of the services and systems they use, even as you see them used in horrifying ways. (You might not feel this way about, say, “The Terminator.”) Most television shows and movies can’t even correctly portray the standard interfaces that we use to browse the Web, send a text message or make a voice call, let alone design them in a desirable way.
by Jenna Wortham, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Tom Gauld
