I have recently finished reading a book called The Punch Escrow, which is… fine. It’s a decent enough book, by which I mean it’s successful enough that it bothers me when it fails. I don’t find the central dilemmas engaging, and I don’t find the characters expressive or interesting. I think the worldbuilding it proposes, and the science such concepts require, are worthy of investigation. In fact, I think they’re outlined well, though in broad, sometimes irrelevant strokes.
I appreciate the general thrust of the structure, if not its execution. Throughout the book, as I read, I was thinking about what it could have been in better hands. I don’t tend to continue works of fiction which I don’t like, insofar as I have the power to. I finished The Punch Escrow mostly to confirm my issues with the book— but I was looking for them, rather than turning away. It was a vision of the future which left me identifying the missteps.
—
I don’t like the television program Black Mirror. I’ve seen fourteen of the twenty-two episodes, though they blend together; before checking the Wikipedia synopses, this draft read “a handful.” My distaste for the show stands apart from the writing, acting, or anything else which makes up the execution. Those, as far as I can tell, are competently carried out.
In the episodes I have seen, there is a serviceable sense of dread and progression. There is a play of cause and effect which serves to illustrate the negative consequences of such-and-such implementation of the week’s technology. The clear consequences and tight focus ground the episode’s premise firmly in the realm of the serious. The performances, when the gizmo goes bad, are appropriately horrified. I have no particular opinion on the music, thinking back, from which I can assume that it’s downplayed enough to avoid undercutting the show’s emotion.
I use the singular, because the show employs approximately one emotion, and it is this: a grim, resigned, lecturing moralization. It doesn’t have the grit or confidence to raise a middle finger towards its technologies. Instead, it settles for an index finger, wagging its halfhearted disapproval at cell phones, cameras, television, and the Internet.
This, as far as I can tell, is all it musters. Were it groundbreaking, I could excuse this flaw, but it’s not new. It’s not imaginative, and it is gleeful in its assertions against an army of purpose-built strawmen.
I had a conversation about this show, recently, which has stuck in my mind somewhat. I (again, to my demerit) expressed the above points, with substantial emphasis towards the negative. One participant, to Black Mirror’s defense, contributed the existence of the book Nineteen Eighty-Four. In essentials, as I understand it, George Orwell’s book is a tract against the overreach of government and surveillance.
The argument implied by a straightforward citation of this book is that straightforward attacks against the overreach of technology can have value. Setting aside any literary merit, or any objective worth as a product, the name-drop in a positive light would ask you to infer: such clear fables can be enjoyable on their own terms, serve an extratextual purpose of societal change, achieve Importance, and so forth. I have not read this book.
Still, the line of logic offered by such a connection dissembles when faced with the idea that two entirely separate works of fiction, in different media and with little object-level overlap, hold any weight when compared to each other. Of course, Black Mirror could be good, if it wanted to. Of course, were the execution different, I might sing its praises. A conceptually related artwork, which holds widespread critical appeal, does nothing for the examination of the show under discussion.
The distinction here is as above; Black Mirror is being compared, unfavorably, to a novel published over seventy years ago. I shouldn’t have to point to The Lord of the Rings to defend an unrelated fantasy novel in the modern day— such a book should stand on its own merits, no matter the stoutness of its protagonist or the hairiness of his feet. Black Mirror is not only recognizably, immediately derivative of such more proficient pieces as Nineteen Eighty-Four, but it fails to progress the genre.
The show is bleak, and it is nihilist, but it doesn’t bring forth anything new. There’s nothing in the twenty-two episodes which is a legitimate reinterpretation of an existing technology, only bland extrapolations of the worst possible trendlines. It’s junk food that mocks you for eating it, because you’re only contributing to the inexorable rise of the fast food corporation which produced your meal.
It is a show which thinks it knows better, and every inch of that supposed knowledge is informed. The viewer is meant to intuit the reasons for its superiority, evidently, from the premise— that this is a show which knows the future, and will show you the worst of it. It is not difficult to extrapolate bad futures. Porting them onto film, in workmanlike exactitude, isn’t creative when there’s no contribution beyond the baseline ‘this exists.’
Nineteen Eighty-Four may have covered similar topics, but it was legitimately groundbreaking, as far as I can tell. The book shaped the very words we use to discuss events of its kind, with efficiency of coinage it seems fair to liken to Shakespearean. It drew from social ideologies which existed, and it introduced technologies with which they could be heightened. The terms were apt, the world thorough, and the themes carried through with precision. It was a work against something specific, and the nebulous fears it introduced were accidental.
Black Mirror asks you to imagine a world where the screens are slightly larger. It’s ugly, and it’s inartful. It’s a set of worlds deliberately constructed to put the worst of the present and (theoretically possible) near future on display, and it gives that game away instantly. The stories it tells aren’t a representative product of the setting, they’re a product of one-note, disastrous individuals in the setting’s worst possible timeline. Events don’t follow from circumstances, as the viewer observes, they follow from the deliberate choice to tell a story where things go poorly. There’s no natural progression, on a level one step removed from the self-contained episode.
Showing the audience the strings behind the story isn’t necessarily bad, though it’s clumsy at best when it’s not done intentionally. That’s the point, of the show, after all— but the show’s clearly articulated premise is that these things could happen without a storyteller’s intervention. That’s the hook, the interest, the marketing scheme. That’s what the show relies upon.
What is Black Mirror, without the purportment that this cautionary tale describes, if not reality, then the legitimate, unaltered facts of some amorphous real-world-adjacence? The reason the audience cannot be shown the deliberate artifice of plot is because they are told this could happen. The internal logic is fine, but the external logic simply doesn’t exist.
It’s fine not to care about this lack of pretense —many don’t— but the show isn’t trying to tell stories, then; it’s trying to fearmonger, using fiction as a cover. In the more interesting moments of Black Mirror, it will parody reality, so I’m told: this isn’t proof, to me, that the show is good. If a morality play is broad enough to repeatedly exaggerate things that already exist, without elaboration or debate, and condemn them, it’s not the kind of satire that changes anything— and what other kind is worth being?
The show features self-driving cars, social credit, and reality television. It drives into the lurid and shocking, in attempts to demonstrate the extremes of such ideas. When it does explore the more fantastical, it shies away. It’s afraid to explore the implications of the shreds of newness it provides. It rarely examines what holds up the stranger worlds we’re shown— they simply exist for the duration of a tragedy.
In the world of Black Mirror, there are no dilemmas. There are no conundrums. You’re never meant to choose for yourself; instead, you’re meant to feel sick. You’re not meant to be an active participant in the process; you’re meant to sit by as Bad Things happen, not to propose solutions. You’re not driven to invent, you’re driven to brood.
This is not a bad thing, again, inherently— it’s just lazy. The show doesn’t want you to decide to ponder the negatives; the show wants to bludgeon you with them. You don’t make up your own mind, watching. You just observe, because that’s all the show wants you to do. This is difficult to swallow, for a show expressly denouncing the black screen which follows its credits (or, more likely, a countdown to the automated play of the next episode.) It’s as if A Modest Proposal were scribed on vellum harvested from the source the selfsame satire advocates.
Too much focus there, yes, on this one example, but I mean to illustrate this:
There is a deep, thorough cowardice towards invention and development in our society
This caution is reflected in fiction narrowly, expressing caveats and drawbacks in plot presentation without the accompanying benefits
The above two points —especially the more tractable expressions in fiction— are legitimate issues
I think it fair to say, accompanying these bullets, that (some) fiction wields a fair bit of influence on thought and attitude of its consumers. Together, I think that (again, for instance,) Black Mirror causes legitimate harm. It is deliberately disingenuous, and its contents have been used as a whipping-stick by at least one member of Congress.
I want science fiction, this genre which allows for nearly unlimited imagination, to be imaginative. When it discusses its moral concerns, it can and should do so in depth. Forty-plus minutes can contain the costs and benefits of a technology, its possibilities and foibles. There can be more, here, than fables, ghost stories, and propaganda. If you’re going to show why something is bad, prove the case instead of taking it for granted. If you’re making a moral argument, actually make the argument.
—
The show The Dragon Prince is an animated cartoon for children. In it, there is a brand of magic known as Dark Magic, used by humans. It requires parts of living things, as I understand it, and generally their lives. One Dark Mage, who practices this magic, is repeatedly condemned, implicitly and explicitly, by the show and by its characters, even when he does good.
This mage suggests that a kingdom hunt down a monster, the energy of which can save the harvest, prevent famine, and rescue a hundred thousand lives. They do it, and the kingdom is fed amidst a handful of personal tragedies.
In this moment, the Dark Mage is in the right, no matter his power-hungry proclivities towards pre-emptive strikes. He is the villain, of course, and many of his later actions prove so, but in that instance he is inarguably correct. The show’s tone disagrees: at best, the events are framed as regrettable, if necessary sins rather than a triumph over nature’s folly.
Another mage sacrifices a deer and completely cures a man’s thought-permanent paralysis. This is a medical miracle, healed in for the cost of a common woodland animal’s lifespan. Similarly, this is depicted by the show as a continuation of slow-burning descent into evil. It’s an unfortunate incident, surely; it’s also a necessary trade, and one with a pretty good exchange rate.
This is what Black Mirror feels like to me, in some ways: it’s the presumption that the technologies introduced (and, by extension, all technologies) will have negative consequences. It’s not quite as bad as The Dragon Prince’s Dark Magic, because the show isn’t entirely wrong, necessarily, but there’s no effort to actually explain why it’s right.
I wish it did. I wish that it occasionally succeeded, and that I was persuaded. We need voices which rise up against history’s trends in some number, though I might criticize that number, or their timbre. But it’s not a show that tries to be persuasive, to reach out to those on the fence. And so, for me, it fails, regardless of the things which it does right.
The Punch Escrow had the same object-level problem, for me. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with teleportation via deconstruction and reconstruction. It had the same problem on a level above, too: the book spent too much time on the interpersonal drama, leaving its discussions of wide-scale effects to paragraphs of quantum babble. (Not clear enough to be interesting for the science’s sake, in my view, nor entertaining otherwise.)
On the level above that, however, the book at least gestured at the implied quandaries of duplication. It made an effort to be a dialogue rather than a diatribe, and I appreciated that. It wasn’t a good book. I disagreed with it, and I disliked it. And even then, I am able to identify the author’s hand outstretched towards truth instead of validation.
There are many dystopias that, at a minimum, make an attempt. They are earnest, or artfully and explicitly cynical. They introduce their moral questions straightforwardly, in the open. I would like more of these fictions. I would like less of those which hand you answers and expect you not to check their work.
All the best,
Orion