Christmas Wishes From A Grinch

In his sci-fi series Black Mirror, the great Brit Charlie Brooker uses his mordant wit to send up technologically-dependent modern life. The series’ newest episode, White Christmas, is a holiday special critics are hailing as “about as festive as being bludgeoned to death by a stocking full of coal, but … also an unerringly brilliant piece of lo-fi sci-fi.” Louisa Mellor sums up the episode’s central conceit:

Taking Google Glass to its logical conclusion, the world of White Christmas is populated by augmented humans whose Z-Eye implants let them control and share what they see. It’s in this kind of technological advance – one that doesn’t seem far off in the realm of possibility but that has the potential to shatter human relationships – that Black Mirror specialises.

The episode features John Hamm as Matt, who makes a living off such advanced tech. Sam Wollaston thinks Brooker’s “dystopia isn’t outrageous, it’s plausible, and all the more terrifying for it. Less sci-fi, more like now after a couple of software updates”:

Matt’s day job … – working for Smartintelligence, a company that, accompanied by Rossini’s Thieving Magpie overture, extracts “code” from people under anaesthetic, stores it in a widget called a cookie before implanting it into a simulated body, which is what happens to Greta (Oona Chaplin) – well, that’s basically human cloning. There’s probably a company in South Korea that’s about five minutes away from doing that. There’s a company in South Korea that thinks it can clone a woolly mammoth from a piece of 40,000-year-old frozen mammoth meat; putting people’s code inside plastic eggs like this, before turning them into slaves, has got to be easier.

Yes slaves. Because this isn’t just about the technology, it’s about the issues – very real world ethical issues – surrounding the technology. It’s about slavery and morality and torture and separation and access to children as well as the technology, and what the technology does to us. It’s about people, which is its real beauty. Along with all the razor-sharp wit, the nods and the winks, it manages to be a very human story.

Willa Paskin also finds the episode eerily relevant:

In “White Christmas,” wearable tech has advanced beyond the rudimentary stages of Google glass and become Z-eyes, irremovable implants that let you take pictures and record things and, if you must, “block” other people. As used in “White Christmas,” blocking makes the person who is blocked and the person who has done the blocking look like grey, fuzzy outlines to one another. They can’t hear each other or communicate, and the blocked party has no recourse.

The terminology suggests a lineage with blocking someone on Facebook or Twitter.  But here in 2014 we tend to understand blocking as essentially protective: It insulates people from unwanted attention and (often misogynistic) threats—though of course it also keep ex-friends and other irritants out of your feed. While Black Mirror understands the protective quality of blocking—the episode expressly deals with some messy, vile misogyny—it is more concerned with the ways blocking can be abused. In “White Christmas,” blocking is largely something women do to men in lieu of communicating with them. It’s the technological equivalent of sticking one’s fingers in one’s ears, an all-powerful silent treatment that can, sometimes, take on draconian legal backing.

If that sounds a bit wrong-headed, “White Christmas,” like the most disturbing episode of Black Mirror that exists, the similarly titled “White Bear,” asks questions about what we are willing to do to the least worthy amongst us: the convicted, the guilty, the criminal. When technology makes it easy to ignore, ostracize, manipulate, and torture the worst of us, might not the rest of us comply?

Merry Christmas.