Northwestern University

In 10 Minutes Time:
Societal speculation and warning in Black Mirror

Corey Schwaitzberg
Communication Studies Research Seminar
Dr. Glennon]
May 31, 2017

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 SF is a comically short label for the broad and multifaceted category of

story properly-titled Speculative Fiction. Though in the public conception Sci-Fi

might call strange aliens, distant galaxies, and epic spaceship battles to mind,

Speculative Fiction is capable of being much more subtle and much more serious

than that. Though futuristic technology and strange settings can indeed often be

found in the subset of SF known as Science Fiction, a compelling SF storyline

doesnt necessarily have to leave this planet or this decade to deliver a powerful

message. The central defining characteristic of Science Fiction isnt technology

per se, but rather technologically-facilitated speculation, handed down from the

very title of its parent genre imagining if the world were different. What

Fantasy (Speculative Fictions older child) achieves with magic and monsters,

Science Fiction does with technology.

Technology, in and of itself, is neither inherently good nor inherently bad.

Scientific advances grant human beings new capabilities, but they do not and

cannot force people to utilize them in any particular way. We, as a society,

choose to deploy technologies in ways that make them positive or negative forces

in the world. The exact same aerospace and propulsion science that lets us put

satellites in orbit also enables us, when we choose to apply it differently, to

reduce city blocks to rubble from thousands of miles away. Thus, many Science

Fiction writers and directors have taken it upon themselves to imagine, in a

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pragmatic and verisimilar way, the different choices humankind might make with

our technology. By doing so, SF texts show society where we might be headed

hopefully with enough time to decide if its really where we want to go.

In this paper, I will focus on a particular strategy some Science Fiction texts

use to unsettle our ideas of what a technologically-advanced society could and

should look like. Dystopian and near-future SF texts, like the popular BBC/Netflix

program Black Mirror, illustrate possible futures that are clearly recognizable and

only slightly extrapolated from our own technologically: in one episode there

might be a new social media platform with an intriguing feature while in another

there might be a popular new augmented reality device. However, despite the

modest natures of the technological changes imagined, the societies depicted in

the various episodes of Black Mirror are nevertheless extremely disturbing and

oppressive, like twisted version[s] of our present day, in which technology has

shackled us in various ways (Merry). Drawing its force from the two competing

themes of familiarity and strangeness, Black Mirror demonstrates how modest

and soon-to-be-realized technological developments could warp our society into

something alien and terrifying in 10 minutes time if were clumsy" (Brooker).

Furthermore, the pointed similarities between the shows posited societies and

our own serve to warn viewers that we are already choosing to go down these

horrific paths with our technology habits.

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 Not all Science Fiction operates this way, of course. More out-there

Science Fiction texts deploy futuristic technology and other plot devices much

more liberally to create perplexing and technologically foreign ethical, social, and

psychological scenarios that are hard to even imagine as possible within our

current social and technological limitations. These stories use technology

primarily for the scenarios it allows their authors to create, the wildly speculative

questions it allows them to ask. Meanwhile, still other kinds of texts should be

considered Science Fiction in name only, taking familiar storylines and merely

transposing them to a Science Fiction-evoking setting like the Moon, the stars, or

the future. The difference, suggests Scholes, might lie in the treatment of the

underlying social structure and norms described in the text. Proposing an

alternative meaning to the abbreviation SF, he writes that structural fabulation is

fiction that offers us a world clearly and radically discontinuous from the one we

know, yet returns to confront that known world in some cognitive way (Scholes,

29). Black Mirror and more far-flung shows like Star Trek both perform this

function the one with strange social structures birthed by relatively familiar

technology, the other with fantastical technological capabilities empowering a

relatively familiar society. While Black Mirror investigates how small technologies

might radically alter our society, Star Trek and the like speculate as to how our

current society might employ extremely powerful technologies though both

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share the aim of confronting viewers with the consequences of these

technological powers.

In contrast, Scholess pseudo-scientific sublimation might involve futuristic

technologies, exotic settings, or novel plot devices, but it fails to use these

elements to truly challenge the familiar (Scholes, 43). As a result, the audience is

left with another genre of fiction posing as science fiction (Graves, 44). Take

Star Wars for example: the universe of the movies teems with spacey and

futuristic plot elements, yet the core plot is a familiar hero story. There are

princesses, emperors, (Jedi) knights, and rogues, and the main story arc is of a

young man struggling with a dark family legacy and confronting his father. Very

few of the Sci-Fi plot elements are strictly necessary to tell this story, and

indeed, very similar stories have been told in other genres: the Young Adult series

Eragon follows an almost identical heroic plotline, transposed to a fantasy setting

(Paolini). They can be very entertaining, but mostly decline to seriously disrupt

our social ideas. Unlike the SF texts Im interested in, these types of story offer

neither critiques of our modern social phenomena nor speculation about

technologically-driven problems to come. Despite their highly-futuristic settings,

the social values of the characters are usually identical to ours today, and few

plot elements are included that would seriously trip audiences up cognitively

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such inclusions would detract and distract from the comfortable, familiar story

the text is trying to tell.

Black Mirror, in contrast, does not attempt to dazzle the audience with

special effects or incredible capabilities, but instead features scenarios and

societies that are close to ours in many ways, just with a few key features

changed or exaggerated by means of technology. The technology itself isnt

exactly the direct object of inquiry or criticism, but rather facilit ates the real

discussion: the exploration of human situations made perceptible by the

implications of recent science (emphasis mine) (Scholes, 41-42). The topics at

issue are current social trends, magnified through a technological lens.

In a way, Black Mirror functions as a kind of Science Fiction satire. The

satirical model as described by Burke comprises three main stages: 1) Locate a

paradigm beginning to take hold, 2) state clearly the rules and norms of that

paradigm, and 3) describe what will happen if those rules and norms are applied

to specific cultural artefacts by tracking down all the possible implications of this

paradigm (Rutten, 4). Rutten, et al. claim that much of Science Fiction

(particularly, I would argue, near-future Science Fiction) actually maps very well

onto this satirical model, identifying notable or troubling cultural developments

and using technology to extrapolate and follow them to the end of the line

(Rutten, 4).

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 This kind of satire differs from other critical forms in the degree to which it

imagines its object of criticism winning, so to speak. The purpose of satire being

to argue by negative example, it must provide the most believable negative

example possible. Too many assumptions, requirements, and qualifications, and

the nightmare scenario becomes a fantasy rather than a truly plausible future. An

effective satire need only change, to borrow a term from the scientific method, a

single independent variable to demonstrate massive societal drawbacks. Swifts

Modest Proposal, for example, is undeniably modest and straightforward, but its

force comes from the extreme levels of graphic depiction involved. Swift not only

proposes the change in question, but illustrates for us all the minute details such

a society as adopted his proposal would contain, from human flesh recipes to

pricing and shipping. Satire leaps over the debate stage surrounding its object

of criticism, and goes straight to imagining what the world would be like should

the detested idea win.

Black Mirror follows this model closely, largely skipping the explicit

controversy surrounding debated technologies and related social values, and

opting to paint a world in which the technological phenomenon has already

become ubiquitous. For example, many of the shows stand-alone episodes, set in

the not-too-distant future, investigate different aspects of social media

technology and portray extremely plausible-seeming dystopian outcomes of its

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further development and uptake. The 2014 Christmas special White Christmas

involves a ubiquitous augmented-reality implant called the Z-Eye that has the

ability to enhance and modify human vision (White Christmas). One of the

most powerful applications of this technology is to block individual people: the

ocular implant greys-out and fuzzes that persons image and muffles their voice,

reducing them to an incomprehensible colorless blob from the perspective of the

blocker. Furthermore, the block goes two ways: the blockers image is similarly

obscured to the person blocked, both in person and in any visual representation

like a picture or a video.

In the plot of the episode, a character named Joe learns that his girlfriend,

Beth, is pregnant after finding a positive pregnancy test in the trash can. He is

ecstatic at the news, but Beth informs him that she does not intend to keep the

child. Joe, drunk at the time, is distraught, and becomes more so when he recalls

that Beth had been drinking heavily at dinner the night before, possibly

endangering the child. Their conversation escalates to an aggressive argument, at

which point Beth blocks Joe with her Z-Eye, reducing him to a mumbling grey

figure in her eyes, and her to the same in his. Accordingly, she cannot hear his

desperate attempts to apologize and leaves him the next morning, block still in

place. As if that were not enough, White Christmas continues to track Joe

through excruciating blocked years to come, outlining and exploring an entire

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fictional society, in keeping with the satirical model, in which the block has

already become part of everyday life.

White Christmas is clearly the dystopian end of the line satire attempts

to portray. More importantly, however, it also refers back to our current society

to serve as a warning. To begin, the episodes use of the term block to describe

this filtering is clearly loaded in the context of modern social media. Social

networking websites today, including Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit, often

include block functions that allow users to automatically reject and hide

messages from specific users. In these contexts, these features are generally used

to combat spam, trolling, and... harassment online, and such functions are

undeniably useful and important (KeyserSosa). The anonymity provided by social

media can facilitate all kinds of online abuse, from solicitation to threats to

harassment. Internet users are accordingly provided with tools to shield

themselves from unwanted contact and protect their privacy since most online

harassers can only communicate with their victims online, cutting off contact is as

simple as rejecting messages and hiding profiles. In real life, its decidedly harder

to bar people in your environment from interacting with you short of getting a

restraining order, a body guard, or a new place to live but online, people have

much more power. When protecting user privacy and mental well-being is as

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simple as clicking a few buttons, why would people willingly expose themselves to

negativity for no good reason?

The argument seems compelling in an online context, but Black Mirrors

purpose is to cross the line and make familiar social media mechanisms strange

and uncomfortable. White Christmas is no exception. Technologically, the

premise is simple: what would it look like if we could block people in real life?

The basic idea is already commonplace in our society, so the speculation comes

from taking it just a step further with the help of technology. The contexts in

which characters have real-world blocks handed to them closely replicate similar

online scenarios: the heated domestic dispute Joe has that ends in a block is very

similar, in many ways, to blocking a persistent ex-boyfriend on Facebook in 2017.

At the end of the episode, Jon Hamms character, Matt, is informed that he

has been registered as a sex offender and that, though he will avoid jail, he will

have a mandatory universal block put in place. We are soon shown what that

means: every single person Matt encounters for the rest of his life appears to him

as a mumbling grey blur, while he appears to everyone else as an incoherent red

figure. This case, too, is uncomfortably similar to patterns already emerging in

the real world. In 2014, nineteen-year-old Zachary Anderson met a fourteen-

year-old girl through a dating app. After she lied to him about her age, claiming

she was seventeen, they met in person and had sex on a playground. The police

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found out when her family got involved, Zachary was convicted of fourth-degree

sexual misconduct, and he was placed on the sex offender registry. This sequence

of events, though unfortunate, is relatively unremarkable. Where it begins to

resemble Black Mirror, however, is in one of the conditions of his sex offender

registration: as part of his sentence, in accordance with the web-based nature of

his offense, he was barred from accessing the Internet for five years. This ban

obviously put an end to his computer science studies at community college,

though the state senator who authored Michigans sex offender registry laws

reassured him that there are lots of jobs that dont involve computers. Truck

drivers, welding. There are other opportunities (Bosman). With our everyday

social interactions increasingly dominated by social media technology, however,

Zacharys web-ban is disturbingly dystopian imagine how much of your life is

mediated by the Internet, and now imagine those parts of your life, your routine,

your identity, completely severed for five years. Given this context, Jon Hamms

techno-isolation is not a frightening dream, but a dire warning of where our

society is likely headed if we dont re-evaluate our choices.

It is clear that the social mechanisms at play in White Christmas are

familiar ones, extrapolated only slightly from things we are already doing with our

social media today. This extrapolation wouldnt be as frightening if it required

extreme or fantastic technologies to practically carry out, but even that comfort

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is denied us; the scientific and computational advances required to make White

Christmas possible are only a handful of years away. Brand Killer, an actual

recent invention out of a University of Pennsylvania hackathon, is an augmented

reality headset that allows the user to blur brand logos and advertisements out of

their visual field in real time an opt out option for everyday life(Crider, 15).

Facial, body, and voice recognition is somewhat more complicated, but not

inconceivably so. Cortana, the voice-controlled AI assistant on the laptop Im

typing on, can already differentiate my voice from everyone elses for the

purposes of listening for my commands, and facial recognition software is already

good enough to identify people even when video of them is grainy or even if the

video is shot at an odd angle (Young). The technology portrayed in White

Christmas is similar enough to what we have today to impart viewers with a

sense of immediacy, with a sense that the world depicted in the episode could

come to be. Viewers are then presented with a question: given that the necessary

technology is very close to existing, why not extend the same protections we

enjoy in the online sphere to the physical world?

The goal of White Christmas, of course, is to show the audience exactly

why not. In doing so, it critiques and complicates not just the idea of real-world

blocking, but also that of virtual blocking as augmented reality technology

collapse[s]... the traditional polarity of digital and physical domains (Crider, 16).

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In the type of near-future Science Fiction Black Mirror exemplifies, our norms and

values are replicated meticulously and our technology is enhanced only slightly,

but the consequent social ramifications are demonstrated to be both dramatic

and undesirable. Though the episode, as a satire, never explicitly makes the

argument against expanding social media protections to the real world, the

twisted, alien society we see on-screen does the persuading all by itself. As a

result, this speculative strategy forces us as viewers to ourselves call into

question the benevolence of the very social systems that were previously so

familiar and desirable to us. Viewers are evidently hearing Black Mirrors warning

call loud and clear, if a Peabody award and an International Emmy are any

indication (IMDB). One must hope we still have enough time to act on it.

Other types of Science Fiction texts also employ similar tactics to analyze

the consequences of technological uptake, even when they dont set out to

condemn a particular phenomenon. The strictly satirical strategy followed by

Black Mirror criticizes modern social values by demonstrating how our current

society would torture itself if given access to a particular technology, but other

texts like Star Trek take a more optimistic, (as well as a further-seeing) approach.

Rather than using technology as a tool to make a negative statement on

specific social trends, Science Fiction frequently does actually examine possible

positive or even just interesting effects of acquiring new technologies. In

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these texts, a particular dramatic event, discovery, or invention frequently serves

as a centerpiece for discourse, often from unusual angles that are ha rd to work

into more traditional or realistic storylines. Though these plots also necessarily

raise questions about the world today by virtue of being different from it, the

social commentary might be less direct or specific.

For example, several episodes of Star Trek center around specific events or

technologies that present challenges to the established social, ethical, or political

system. The Star Trek universe certainly involves a number of different social

norms than we have today, but it is largely presented as a utopia. Utopia are

distinct from the world we currently live in, but only along certain dimensions: as

utopia are largely inspirational and achievable models, Ott and Aoki suggest that

part of the appeal of utopian texts is the presence of familiar and comfortable

elements alongside the altered elements (Ott and Aoki, 395). The corrected

aspects of the Star Trek universe are problems we are already familiar with today

and wish we knew how to solve, e.g., most of the galaxy is at peace, poverty is

eliminated, and races and sexes are (allegedly) treated as equal. Whereas in

Black Mirror the technology featured in an episode facilitates a negative social

dynamic, the Star Trek universe is mostly stable ethically, socially, politically, et c.,

suggesting a healthy way humans might choose to interpret powerful new

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technologies. The technological elements are then analyzed within the frame of

this persistent and stable social context.

For example, in Star Trek: The Next Generation S2:E9 The Measure of a

Man a number of important advanced technological elements are present, yet

none of them really shape or directly inform the entire social structure of the

episodes universe. In The Measure of a Man, Commander Maddox, a

government cyberneticist, seeks to disassemble and study Lt. Commander Data,

an android crewmember on the U.S.S. Enterprise. Data does not wish to undergo

the risky procedure, but Maddox obtains an order designating him as equipment,

due to his robotic nature, rather than as a being. A formal legal hearing ensues,

wherein Captain Picard and his First Officer Commander Riker are forced to argue

for and against Datas classification as a sentient being (The Measure of a Man).

In the process, the crew are forced to confront extremely difficult issues

surrounding personhood, philosophy of mind, and the origin of rights. These are

of course deeply important and controversial questions to our society today, but

this treatment of social trends differs from Black Mirror-esque Science Fiction in

that the question at hand does not negatively shape the structure of society in

the episode. The subject of android sentience is unfamiliar territory both to the

audience and to the characters they need to hold a court hearing untangle the

problem! but the episode seems to argue that it is possible for our current

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social system to healthily absorb radically new technologies. We draw

conclusions about the social implications of the plot element along with the

characters, and hope for a more positive outcome than Black Mirror warns of.

Black Mirror envisions some of the worst parts of our natures and societies

dictating technological use; Star Trek imagines our best selves in control. Both are

possible, but we will have to confront Black Mirrors more pressing dystopia

before we can reach the society Roddenberry thought we could be. Black Mirror

showrunner Charlie Brooker points out that of all the technological traps we have

found ourselves in, none of these things have been foisted upon humankind

we've merrily embraced them (Brooker). With luck, however, and perhaps some

careful viewing of Black Mirror, we can find our way out before the traps are

closed for good.

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