‘Black Mirror’ and the Horrors and Delights of Technology

One of the most disturbing moments in the British TV series “Black Mirror” is what appears to be a passionate love scene. The episode takes place in a version of the future where most people have had small devices, called “grains,” surgically implanted in their heads that can record and replay their memories on demand. As the encounter progresses, it is revealed that the couple are actually having dull and mechanical sex, their eyes grayed out as they both tune into their grains to watch memories of their previous trysts, from an earlier, steamier time in their relationship.

Each episode of “Black Mirror” — named for the way our screens look while powered down — paints a different nightmarescape of a future gone technologically awry. In one episode, for example, a woman uses a mail-order kit to create a golem of her deceased boyfriend using his social-media profiles. Another follows an obnoxious cartoon character as he becomes a powerful political figure after performing a series of public stunts. Still another imagines a post-peak-oil future, wherein people generate energy and currency by pedaling on stationary bikes, and the only escape from the drudgery is reality-show fame. The show feels like required viewing for our always connected, device-augmented lives.

Despite all the recent hype, “Black Mirror” isn’t a new show at all. Its first season was broadcast in Britain in 2011, but it’s enjoying a new surge of interest in the United States since it began streaming on Netflix in December. It wasn’t widely advertised; its growing popularity is fueled by references to it on Twitter and Facebook, screenshots posted to Tumblr and the like.

That the show probably owes its American stature to social media is perfectly appropriate, because the series fixates on our codependent and contradictory relationship with technology and media. We love being able to share our inner monologues and the minutia of our lives with one another, until, that is, it all goes horribly wrong in ways previously unimaginable. Or even if it doesn’t, we still find ourselves annoyed, jealous, infuriated and even depressed by the behavior of others (and occasionally ourselves) online. And yet we keep logging on.

The show quickly went from crossover hit to something America seems keen to co-opt. Robert Downey Jr. purchased the rights to the episode described above, in which people use implants to tape their memories, called “The Entire History of You.” Jon Hamm sought out the show’s creators for a meeting and eventually guest-starred on a special holiday episode called “White Christmas.” It’s hard to say exactly how many people have watched the show, because Netflix declined to share that data, but Charlie Brooker, one of the creators, said the uptick was noticeable, even from London. “It had made some kind of impact,” he said in a recent phone interview. It was as if “suddenly, America got it.”

In a sense, “Black Mirror” is just the latest in a long line of British exports, right alongside One Direction and Benedict Cumberbatch, that captivate the American public by scratching an itch we didn’t know we had. The show’s appeal is, on the surface, completely obvious, but it is so obvious that you have to wonder why we didn’t come up with the premise ourselves.

When it comes to weaving technology into its story lines, Hollywood tends to take an unimaginative path of least resistance. Some films imagine a world so fallen and far gone, as a result of technological excess, that it is rendered unrecognizable, as in “Elysium,” “Gattaca,” “The Final Cut” or even “Wall-E.” Others rely on technology only as a backdrop or as a means of dazzling audiences with new gadgetry: Think “Interstellar” (space travel), “Looper” (time travel) and “Lucy” (telekinesis and teleportation). Hollywood offers little between the horror of dystopia and the wonder of a trip to Q’s laboratory.

This problem persists in movies that are set on a more human scale and that actually imagine the near future of consumer technologies. “Her,” for example, the sweet romantic comedy about a lonely man falling in love with his operating system, focuses more on the male protagonist’s inability to connect with other humans than the implications of unleashing such powerful programs on the world. Similarly, “Silicon Valley,” Mike Judge’s comedy series on HBO, prefers to make caricatures out of entrepreneurs and venture capitalists but not their creation, which is comically arcane: a video-compression algorithm.

Occasionally, of course, Hollywood does dig deeper. “Blade Runner,” “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” “The Matrix” and “Battlestar Galactica” all stand out as excellent cautionary tales about the way humans can lose control over their inventions. But each is at least a decade old. It’s as if film producers caught a prophetic glimpse of the rise of Facebook and Snapchat and iDevices and realized that lecturing audiences about the perils of wasting time online wouldn’t be huge box-office draws. (They were probably right.)

“Black Mirror” falls somewhere in between its predecessors, equal parts horror and wonder, somewhere in the uncanny valley between our world and one dominated by Skynet. It looks like a future we might actually inhabit, making the show a lot more effective as a critique of the tech industry’s trajectory — one that might make you think twice about which devices you buy and which services you use.

In this way, it makes sense that “Black Mirror” came from outside our borders. Europe and Britain have a richer tradition of lashing back at emerging technologies, especially those they (rightly) view as American technocultural imperialism. Germany, for example, has long warred with Google, Amazon and Uber over business practices, data-collection habits and freewheeling growth tactics that often circumvent regulation and longstanding rules. Technology is one of America’s most important exports, and, as the Snowden disclosures revealed, the widespread adoption of Silicon Valley products allowed our government to surveil the world’s communications. In the aftermath of the exposure of the National Security Agency’s extensive spying network, lawmakers in Brazil, Japan, India and Russia pushed for new laws and cyber infrastructure intended to thwart American snooping.

In America, we treat the release of each new Apple product with the reverence usually reserved for pop icons. The sly ingenuity of “Black Mirror” is that it nails down our love for the same devices we blame for our psychological torment. Brooker understands that even as we swear off tweeting and promise to stop Googling our exes, our phones are still the last things we see before falling asleep and the first things we reach for when we awaken.

To that end, the gadgets in “Black Mirror,” including the creepy memory-recording devices, look sleek enough to want, which is perhaps the show’s cleverest trick. It is impossible to watch the show and not idly fantasize about having access to some of the services and systems they use, even as you see them used in horrifying ways. (You might not feel this way about, say, “The Terminator.”) Most television shows and movies can’t even correctly portray the standard interfaces that we use to browse the Web, send a text message or make a voice call, let alone design them in a desirable way.

“Black Mirror” resonates because the show manages to exhibit caution about the role of technology without diminishing its importance and novelty, functioning as a twisted View-Master of many different future universes where things have strayed horribly off-course. (This is an advantage it has over the movies: a blockbuster must settle on one convincing outcome and stick with it.)

But those futures, or ones like it, loom on our own horizon. Real-world events like the Snowden leaks and even the Sony email hacks may give us the chills, but they weren’t enough to persuade us to change our behavior or demand more from the companies we rely on to send risqué photos and store our personal communications. And perhaps that’s the true appeal of the series: It does more than blame technology for our woes. It deals with the reality that, no matter what gadgetry we may possess, our problems remain human. It reminds us that technology probably won’t enslave us, but it definitely will change us.