Feb 18 Black Mirror decodes our modern dread of technology Leigh Alexander The English have a coy euphemism

for addiction: moreish. It summons the delightful anxiety in surrendering your control to something else, the ambivalent cocktail of desire and guilt. We feel it flickering in the periphery, and we feel our sm artphones in the middle of a restaurant dinner. We live with the inability to fall asleep without a glassy black object nearby y ou don t need your phone when you re going to bed, exactly, but you take no ease unl ess you know where it is. We lock our phones without a concrete reason besides t he fact that letting someone else pick it up and look feels violating, too-intim ate. It summons a nonspecific anxiety. Game designer and critic Ian Bogost s iOS-centric installation, at the Museum of C ontemporary Art Jacksonville, aims to explore what the designer sees as a relati onship between technology and religion; he likens the iPhone to a rosary, someth ing we thumb automatically, observant. As a journalist on games I once craved th e mainstreaming of designed interaction now I startle to enter a silent subway c ar full of passengers with heads in laps, faces illuminated by screens, tapping. The role of horror media in our culture is to show us our fears, to illuminate u nspoken anxieties. Charlie Brooker s Channel 4 series Black Mirror, something of a spiritual successor to The Twilight Zone, takes up the mantle for the digital a ge. Launched last year and now in its second season, it was inspired by the popu lar satirist and presenter s own ambivalence to the increasing proliferation of th ese dark little screens; he found himself sincerely conversing with Siri ( a servi le asslick with zero self-respect ), routinely performing the thoughtless tug-andpop of Twitter refreshes. Black Mirror's format is one I wish more American series emulated; rather than s pooling shows into endless seasons of quick hits, it s more common in the UK for q uality TV to air robust, brief seasons. Black Mirror s first season consists of th ree hour-long episodes, united by tone and theme instead of recurring characters or settings. The third episode is called The Entire History of You, and it s the one everyone t alks about the most, with a sort of hushed dread (Robert Downey, Jr. reportedly optioned it for a film. Get the Arcade Fire to lend their song to the credits?). You ought not to watch it if you re in a couple, they say, with a stricken look. This show has that kind of power: to rub your face in the viscera of everything about the modern world that you don t want to think about. It is many things, but it is not pleasant viewing. The boyfriend I m in London to visit did not want us to watch The Entire History o f You, which apparently involves a near-future where devices embedded in your bo dy record everything you see, say and do including your past relationships for l ater viewing. In the browsing history of his iPad are several articles offering advice on overcoming jealousy of a partner s past. He doesn t know I ve seen them, and he hasn t told me about them; I know his mind from that black tablet. The recently-aired first episode of season two explores just how much of a perso n can exist in the digital ether. It s called Be Right Back, a play on the "BRB" n otification people leave when exiting chat windows to go do real life. A better title might have been Be Right There.

Are we going to watch the new Black Mirror?

I asked my boyfriend.

Be right there, he said, immersed in a pretend city he was building on the iPad. I picked up my iPhone to kill time on Twitter until he was done. Are we watching it? He asked ten minutes later. Be right there, I said. The irony of negotiating with our devices in order to watch a program about our relationship to our devices was pretty embarrassing. Be Right Back is about a social media widow. Martha and Ash have moved in to a p astoral country house; Ash s constant palming his stark black phone highlights the contrast between his social media use and the couple s tactile life, framed in ne utral tones with touching notes of green and turquoise. As characterization goes , Ash s compulsion is wisely sketched with a light hand; he uses social media a lo t, but not apparently dangerously so. No more than any of us. The story begins in earnest when Ash is killed in an accident. A friend or relat ive it s not clear, as Black Mirror tends to place viewers directly into the flow of an episode without lavishing on background or irrelevant details intrudes upon M artha at Ash s funeral with an unsettling suggestion: There s a new service that let s you talk to the dead. Using the manifold digital fingerprints, photographs, voice recordings and text interactions he s left in the social media space, this tech can serve Martha an in teractive AI of Ash s personality. It knows how he talks, his tastes and his memor ies so long as he has shared them. You can t help but be gripped with the unease of wondering how much the black mirr ors know about you. If it s enough to resurrect you, how much of your essence have you divested onto the infrastructure? Twitter and Facebook obsess us with ideas about sharing and socialization, but is that really your life on there, or a thin, troubling simulacrum? As we watch Martha, who learns she s pregnant, succumb to her own grief-stricken u rges to contact Ash s memory through technology, the AI learns. It gains enough da ta to talk on the phone to her, and she reminds him of certain memories he s meant to have, which he retains. When she nearly breaks her phone and the increasingl y-crucial lifeline, we feel her raw nerves. We understand the ill junction of compulsion and disgust behind the mad, grotesq ue decision she makes next a flickering car dash advertisement for synthetic bod y parts that we see at the episode's outset foreshadows a key clue. The episode s best moment is a lovely exercise in restraint: Martha waiting restlessly in her living room for what she s wrought to leave the upstairs bathroom. The calm, gent le voice of the man she loves pleads urgently with her not to turn the light on. I won't spoil the ending, but I ll tell you it s not the shambling Night of the Livi ng Dead you d expect of typical horror. It is more subtle, more gently terrible, s awing slowly at the heart like a dull knife. Martha s resurrection of Ash ultimately suggests that the parody of authentic-self that we serve to social media is unh oly, a violation. Black Mirror s gift is that it presents a world where anything is possible thanks to technology -- and prickles our skin regarding the inevitable complications of that possibility. We are ever on a quest for advancement, and it s quite likely t hat we ll figure out how to do things we ll end up wishing we never learned how to d o and cannot unlearn. This is a show about our fear that some line may loom in the story of humankind

that we ought not cross, for our own good. Such a line feels tangible, near; may be we ve even crossed it already. It is considered unenlightened and luddite to fe ar technology, but Black Mirror makes it startlingly easy to admit that there is much to be unsettled about these days, quietly, ambivalently. The newest episode airs on Channel 4 on February 18. Brooker s said it s not for the fainthearted. I know, because I follow him on Twitter. Can't wait. Show is moreis h.

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