Robert Sinnerbrink: "Through a Screen Darkly: Black Mirror, Thought Experiments, and Televisual Philosophy"
Robert Sunnerbrink (Macquarie University, Sydney and Visiting Fellow Freie Universität, Berlin)
"Through a Screen Darkly: Black Mirror, Thought Experiments, and Televisual Philosophy"
The award-winning television show Black Mirror (Brooker, 2011-2019) has attracted widespread praise and critical acclaim. Recalling the episodic anthology format of The Twilight Zone, Black Mirror presents compelling depictions of near future scenarios exploring the dark side of contemporary digital technology and audiovisual culture. Although most belong to the genre of dystopian science fiction, the episodes of Black Mirror could also be described as works of speculative televisual fiction, deploying a variety of genres such as psychological horror, science fantasy, and the socio-political thriller. The standalone episodes of the five series of Black Mirror explore the uncanny, the fantastic, and the marvellous, but always with specific reference to our technologically mediated sense of social reality. There are several thematic clusters that the series examines from different perspectives across its five seasons and twenty two episodes, including digital media thought experiments, ‘gamification’ threats, social media and social-political security threats, the dangers of surveillance capitalism/data harvesting culture, the distortion of personal identity and digitization of consciousness, the militarization of everyday life / weaponizing biotechnology / technoterrorism, and the ethics of VR/AI entities. With their focus on the ethical implications of current and future technological possibilities, Black Mirror offers a compelling case for the idea of ‘televisual philosophy’. I shall develop this thesis by exploring three related ways of approaching it: 1) Black Mirror as thought experiment; 2) as reflecting a critique of modern technology; 3) as engaged in critical self-reflection on audiovisual media and on its own status as episodic television.