by Henning Lindhoff
The British television series "Black Mirror" caused a sensation. The upheavals within Western society, caused by the digitization and networking of all facets of everyday life, are cleverly spun on and unleash a partly frightening prophecy.
The series, which was launched in 2011, is strongly reminiscent of the TV phenomenon Twilight Zone from the 1960s. Each episode tells its own story. Dystopian elements stand in the foreground, slowly breaking course as the story progresses, without letting the viewer disappear from his own reality. The protagonists' worlds and living environments do not appear to be any more unreal than the reality of 2018.
But it is the small things that make life so surprisingly different, so threatening. It is small technical developments that seem to turn life upside down and radically change people's behaviour.
In the current season 4, for example, it is a small chip in the daughter's brain that allows her mother to climb to heights that no helicopter parent can reach today. And which makes the relationship between them inhuman.
This does not always require new revolutionary machines. Even today, we seem to have all the tools at our disposal to thoroughly spoil our social life.
We also see this in Lacie, a protagonist in season 3 of the series.
She only eats her joyful life in an environment that could have sprung directly from a catalogue for Barbie dolls: Pastel colours, beautiful people, mild smiles everywhere. The basic gesture of everyone here is wiping. Wiping over his smartphone with the aim of evaluating his or her counterpart. Lacie orders a drink, the salesman smiles and gets 5 stars. The popularity level becomes the most important status symbol.
Today we already know this evaluation system from online shops. In Lacie's world, it is pushed to the top. The social elite is only accessible to those who have enough stars. He has better chances on the housing market, gets the most modern rental cars, is promoted professionally. But the fall height is large.
Lacie also wants to be part of the Prime Influencers elite and is committed to spreading positive opinions in the hope of being returned and promoted in society. Prestige through pretended authenticity. It is not difficult to understand where this constant stress leads.
Not only in this point does Black Mirror apply close to today's as-is state. The postmodern caste system is the logical next step and at the same time a relapse into pre-bourgeois times.
At the same time, there are no retreat possibilities in this dystopia. A new Biedermeier seems unthinkable. Everything can become public at any time, even your own intimate world of thought. The so-called "memory excavator" of the ambitious insurance saleswoman Shazia shovels every memory in the 4th season of the series. With the help of a small sensor and a small grey box that looks like a portable television set, she receives broadcasts directly from the brain of eyewitnesses and earwitnesses. This is not only useful for clarifying insurance issues, but also why an architect goes to the extreme to sweep a serious youthful sin under the carpet forever.
In the same season "Hang the DJ" is the first episode with a very extended technical framework - a story for nerds rather than for socio-politically committed technology skeptics. Physicist Nick Bostrom's simulation theory laid the foundation for this story, in which a dating app seems to drive the two disappointed protagonists into a melancholic loneliness. But the dystopia is too vague to be real.
Direct reference to the military developments from Boston Dynamics takes the episode "Metalhead". The robot SpotMini, the real model of this story, is described by its developers as a "maneuverable robot" that "handles objects, climbs stairs and operates in offices, apartments and outdoors". A video on the company's website shows how SpotMini runs around, does household chores and even fixes itself after a fall. In contrast to his deadly twin in "Metalhead", the robot appears helpful and even friendly in Boston Dynamics' advertising videos.
We are only too happy to imagine a future where robots like the SpotMini are used to help us in the household instead of hunting and killing our fellow human beings. But in the nightmarish future that Black Mirror plays before us, the mechanical being operates autonomously on four legs. In the course of this episode it chases a woman desperately trying to avoid the sensors of the machine.
Avoiding the sensors of a rapidly growing machinery... Will we still be able to do this in 2018? We have already sacrificed a large part of our personal autonomy to selected technologies whose history of ideas is unclear. Even former executives from Silicon Valley, now disillusioned, talk about the negative social side effects of the very programs they helped develop. Many of them protect their children from smartphones and tablets. The Waldorf School of the Peninsula, 20 minutes by car from the Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park, has been growing in popularity for years.
Already in 1992, shortly before the Interet began its major leap forward, the American cultural critic Neil Postman wrote a book entitled "Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology". Postmann argues here that our modern idea of technology is dangerously distorted. Technological progress is seen as an end in itself. Without a strong organically grown culture, which can also influence technical developments, we risked, according to Postman, undermining our bourgeois values in the face of powerful new technologies operating according to their own logic. Instead of creating inventions that meet our needs, we human beings are beginning to adapt to the needs of our inventions.
Black Mirror shows what happens when people adapt to the machine.
New technologies such as virtual reality and social network rankings - blindly used in the belief that they made our lives better - are gradually becoming vehicles of authoritarian social control. The enslavement of the users happens step by step.
These ideas are not new. Already after the first atomic bombs were detonated, authors and artists, politicians and activists warned of the dangers of the technologies, whose radius of action their developers could not - or did not want to - overlook. Humanity has since then been powerful enough to destroy itself within a few hours.
The technologies presented in Black Mirror are more subtle than nuclear weapons. In any case, however, it is worth considering how we came to this point. And about how we find our way back into a healthy life, embedded in a helpful and supportive technological environment.