Vikram Johri: Reality or fiction?

In “San Junipero”, an episode of the currently running third season of Black Mirror on Netflix, a young woman wanders the titular American town that, going by the music played in its discos and the dresses worn by the patrons, seems directly plucked from the ‘80s. (It is not — the town “adopts” different decades.) To the viewer, this creates a cognitive dissonance because the series, an anthology of unconnected stories, is normally set in the future due to its remit: The scale to which technology has come to shape our lives.

At the dance club, the hesitant Yorkie meets her spunky complement in Kelly, who, like Yorkie, is a “tourist” in San Junipero. The two immediately hit it off, but their romance has the Cinderella-like quality of rushing against time, as some unspoken of event, revealed much later, occurs at midnight and separates the two budding lovers.

 

We subsequently learn that San Junipero is an immersive nostalgia experience where people on the verge of dying can relive their youth for a few hours every week. More, it is where people go after they “pass over” (a euphemism for dying) — a heaven right here on earth where those who sign up can upload their minds, and in effect their bodies and souls, to the cloud. Here, as with all of Black Mirror, technology provides the awe-inspiring foundation for an edifice of deeply human questions. “San Junipero” brilliantly situates the desire for immortality not in narcissism but in the longing to prolong the connections that make life worth living.

With its sweetly happy ending, “San Junipero” is an outlier in a series that is more given to capturing the depredations of the rapid adoption of technology. “Nosedive” showcases a time — hardly fictional in our age of social media intrusion — where a person’s worth is directly proportional to the grade they earn on a five-point scale whose sole basis is likeability. Random interactions, such as riding a bus, offer opportunities for ratings by strangers. Special discounts and job opportunities are up for grabs, but only by those north of four.

Inevitably, this state of affairs engenders a new kind of class hierarchy where the high-pointers lord over the score-challenged. The story is distilled through the eyes of a woman who is eager to get into the top bracket and the lengths to which she will go to achieve her goal. It’s a cautionary tale that does not end well, yet there is an uplifting lesson in her final realisation that she is truly free only when she gives up the race to be stiffly proper. 

While Black Mirror is primarily focused on the social effects of technology, the show is also interested in its more immediately physical ramifications. In “Playtest”, a volunteer signs up for a virtual reality game that manipulates neural signals in the brain to create all-consuming 3D horror simulations. Trouble begins when the game is unable to distinguish between its own program and the memory manipulations it inflicts on the volunteer. Past traumas mix with shocking imagery to yield a potent, and ultimately fatal, mix.

Beyond technology, the world of Black Mirror seems deeply familiar also because its ambience, while not entirely relatable, is not as outlandish as that of similar shows in the past. From 1959 to 1964, The Twilight Zone examined race, gender and scientific progress in episodes whose appeal lay in their convoluted storylines and inexplicable plot twists. In contrast, Black Mirror, with its souped-up internet romances and survival on the cloud, is positively cute.

And yet, the show points to an era that may be as chaotic as any that scientific advancement has wrought. Already, leading lights such as Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk have spoken of the dangers of artificial intelligence. Programs such as IBM’s Watson rely on humongous quantities of data to come up with solutions in medicine and industry that are far superior to anything dreamt up by humans. Mr Musk has even said that we might be living in a simulation run by a super-intelligent alien species. 

The chief contention of these naysayers is the unknowability of the point where a sophisticated program will harvest its own “intelligence” to turn anti-human. HBO’s new show Westworld is built on this premise — although it seeks to earn viewer’s sympathy for the humanoid robots who populate the theme park after which the show is named. Humans, mostly of the despicable kind, come to the park to do what they wish with these robots whose “memories” of the brutalities are erased at the end of each day. When the robots rise in unison against the injustices inflicted on them in the coming episodes, the viewer will cheer them on. Technology is great but when it comes into conflict with humanity (in both senses of the term), the latter must win. 

If Mr Musk’s simulation is indeed true, we may be no better off knowing about it. In “San Junipero”, two women build a life together after their earthly demise. Witnessing their happiness is akin to saying a prayer — an invocation to a master simulator all humans have felt keenly since the dawn of time.