TV show Tuesdays: Black Mirror's Consciousnesses
Technology is nothing. What's important is that you have a faith in people, that they're basically good and smart, and if you give them tools, they'll do wonderful things with them.
-Steve Jobs
I cannot help but agree with that. Our world is definitely divided into two groups where one group believes that technology will be the end of us and the other group believes that it is our salvation. I personally believe that it can become whatever it is that you want it to become. I hope you all have heard of the science fiction show called 'Black Mirror', it is on Netflix. If you click on the name itself you will learn about it in length but to be brief, it somehow shows a future where technology has a huge dark side, but at the same time sometimes it also shows the convinience that can technology can bring us.
To demonstrate the significance of the quote above, I have decided to take the example of two different episodes which focus on basically the same technology but shows entirely different outcomes.
San Junipero
This was the fourth episode of the third season of Black Mirror. The underlying technology is "Consciousness transfer/Uploading". In this age we can upload basically on to the cloud, it backs everything up, but what if you could upload yourself on to the cloud and live forever? The idea sounds tempting, of course it is one of the biggest challenges in the ongoing research to correctly map someone's consciousness and replicate it onto a system, say a drive. It is difficult because consciousness of a person is a mixture of several million complex responses. What you are going to do if you were put under a certain set of situation can never be accuartely mapped. These questions led to what is now called the Hard Problem of Consciousness, it is this and I quote Oliver Burkeman's article - Why can’t the world’s greatest minds solve the mystery of consciousness?: "why on earth should all those complicated brain processes feel like anything from the inside? Why aren’t we just brilliant robots, capable of retaining information, of responding to noises and smells and hot saucepans, but dark inside, lacking an inner life? And how does the brain manage it? How could the 1.4kg lump of moist, pinkish-beige tissue inside your skull give rise to something as mysterious as the experience of being that pinkish-beige lump, and the body to which it is attached?"
The episode revolves around two women who meet on a beach resort town called San Junipero. Only thing is that San Junipero is actually a place on the cloud as in the drive, the virtual place where all her backed up data goes, well if you are an Apple user.. A place where your consciousness is permanently transferred once you die. Before they do that, in your old age you get to try this town out once every week for about 12 hours. Everyone is a younger version of themselves and there is no limitation to fun out here. There are different time zones too in this place. You can go to the 1920s or 1996 or 2002 whatever suits you the best. You just live forever. Of course a choice was given to everyone if they would like to be uploaded or not. Imagine if such a technology existed, it could give patients in coma a second chance to experience life, dying or sickness does not seem as scary as it does now. An afterlife everyone secretly hopes for. Two such women meet in the town of San Junipero, one, who lost her husband and her child and was on the door of death. Other, a woman who never experienced the kind of love she had hoped for. They find in each other what they could not find in their real lives. Who likes withering away with time anyways.
Black Museum
This by far was the finest work of this series, I expected no less out of a finale episode. It gave me the chills I have never experienced before and I went through a mental torment of an hour but the ending just encapsulated all that torture and gave salvation to it. It was satisfying as hell. The episode begins with a British Tourist named Nish who stops near a charging station to charge her car, as she waits she comes across a museum named "Black Museum". The place looked relatively abandoned, but she decides to give it a shot, being a tourist and all. This museum housed “authentic criminological artifacts,” and was owned by a man named Haynes who formerly worked in recruitment of people for a cutting edge neuro-tech company.
Haynes to give Nish a tour of the place showing her certain artifacts and giving backstories which believe me will haunt your dreams forever. One of the stories was about a woman who was in a coma. She had a husband and a little boy. Haynes tells her husband about a new technology in which the can take the consciousness of his wife and put it in the unused part of his brain. It is like giving someone a mental piggy back ride. She would feel everything he feels, see everything he sees and he would be able to communicate with her because she is literally a voice in his head. Interesting thing he could shut her out whenever he wanted. While everything was going smoothly in the beginning, problems start arising when this man falls for his neighbor and well obviously no wife would want to see her husband eyeing another woman, let alone falling for someone else.She practically had the front seat to everything went down, but thinking of her husband, he too was lonely and needed the love or warmth of another person, nobody enjoys a constant nagging voice in their heads. It would drive anyone crazy. So, he starts to shut out his wife months at a time but he realizes that their son needed his mother after all. They contact Haynes for a solution and Haynes being a monster that he is, takes out the wife's consciousness out of her husband's brain and plants it into a stuffed where she could see everything through the eyes of the toy, feel the hugs of her son as he hugged the toy, but in name of communication she could only say two phrases, "Monkey loves you" and "Monkey needs a hug".
Imagine being stuck in a stagnant inanimate object for forever, you see everything but you cannot say anything ever nor can you move. The son obviously grows up and eventually abandons the toy and this stuffed monkey ends up in the museum where this woman is stuck for an eternity never being able to escape. This particular story broke my heart.
So you see, it is the same damn technology but when in good hands it brought a light of hope, it brought freedom whereas in wrong hands it destroyed lives and led to endless torment on innocent people. Mankind needs to take a breather perhaps and really think before it starts exploiting any technology that comes it's way in ways it is not meant.
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Written by @things, 2018. All rights reserved.
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Really really want to read your post in full. I love Black Mirror, but I haven't got as far as watching the two episodes you mention yet and don't want any spoilers, so I'll have to come back and comment later on. Just to say I also love the show and I find the different ways it makes us look at the effects of technology on our lives to be intriguing. I know the first episode of season 1 (The National Anthem) isn't always everyone's favourite but I love the way that it shows how technology has undermined traditional centralised power structures. Even the government was powerless to control a video that went viral on Youtube and all following events in the episode were driven directly or indirectly by communications technology.
That first episode disturbed me to my core. After that I didn’t watch the show for three months at least because what they showed was just so damn true. Implications of social media can be drastic and people do not really get that these days. How far along are you in the seasons. I have a couple of favorites, there is one episode called play test. Nothing special but that episode pretty much made me die a little on the inside, there is one episode where everyone’s status and jobs and pretty much everything is decided by their social media rating. Though my favorite so far is the finale episode called black museum that I wrote briefly about in this post. Man that episode will make you question everything and you just feel so god damn hurt. The torment is unbelievable but the ending just makes it all so worth it. Beyond satisfying.
Yeah exactly, it was profoundly disturbing but I couldn't stop thinking about it and felt affected by that dark reality for weeks after. And I know when that happens that I've seen a truly great piece of art - reading Orwell's 1984 was a similar experience.
Haven't seen playtest, but I know the one you mean with the social media ratings (I think I have watched the episodes a bit out of order). I liked that one too, although I felt that the girl's hysteria at the end was a little overdone, but the idea so accurately reflects how we chase upvotes and likes these days, and how well-respected the highest rated users on social platforms are. It's conceivable that it could spill over into real life at some point. I found the one called White Bear - where the woman is forced to re-live an ordeal over and over as a punishment - to be really disturbing. Partly because of what happens in the episode itself, but also because it's like the ultimate destination of reality TV - all those people were watching what was happening to her without any sympathy or compassion.
It was a bit overdone yes. That episode inspired me to write about my post called steemit chivalry and also once before I wrote an article on black mirror taking this episode as an example. Sometimes I feel that mankind itself will be the end of itself before any natural calamity even touches us.
I think I am gonna watch this particular series soon. It's a topic of interest for me too and I too wonder about it often. This one seems to give an insight :)
You should really really watch this show. I mean it’s goinh to be tough in the beginning because it’s a very brutal show in general. It shows the ugliest side of mankind and what mankind is capable of when it comes to technology and it’s misuse.
And this makes it even more interesting !!
I am surely watching this .