BLACK MIRROR REFLECTIONS, Ep 16: “Arkangel” with Shannon Mussett

Regular BMR listeners will fondly remember Dr. Shannon M. Mussett as the MOST special guest for our very first BMR podcast episode on “15 Million Merits.”  Mussett is Professor of Philosophy at Utah Valley University, where she researches and teaches on Simone de Beauvoir, French Existentialism, and Hegelian philosophy. She is the co-editor of Beauvoir and Western Thought from Plato to Butler (SUNY Press, 2012) and The Contradictions of Freedom: Essays on Simone de Beauvoir’s Les Madarins (SUNY Press, 2006). She is currently completing a manuscript on entropic philosophy.

For what it’s worth, Shannon is also in the running for potential co-hosts of whatever podcast I do following BMR, so please do comment below with your endorsements of her!

You can listen to Shannon and my full conversation about “Arkangel” here:

Here at BLACK MIRROR REFLECTIONS, we assume that everyone is already committed to read more, write more, think more, and be more… so here’s a helpful list of links to thinkers, technologies, books, and articles referenced in this episode:

• Shannon M. Mussett, “Parental Control: On Black Mirror‘s ‘Arkangel'” (April, 2018)
• Cory Steig, “Study: kids who have ‘helicopter parents’ more likely to burn out, have a harder time transitioning to the ‘real world'” (CNBC, 2019) 
• Darlene Cunha, “Parenting (and shaming) teens online in the age of social media,” (Washington Post, 2016)
• Elizabeth Small, “Technology allows us to monitor our kids aound the clock. But should we?” (Washington Post, 2017)
• Amy Joyce, “How to protect kids online: Apps and tactics used by experts– and real parents,” (Washington Post, 2016)
• Thomas Horigold, “Algorithms Are Designed to Addict Us, and The Consequences Go Beyond Wasted Time” (Singularity Hub, 2019)
• Richard Seymour, “The machine always wins: what drives our addiction to social media” (The Guardian, 2019)
• Donna Frietas, The Happiness Effect: How Social Media is Driving a Generation to Appear Perfect at Any Cost (Oxford UP, 2017)
• Michel Foucault, Techniques of the Self : A Seminar with Michel Foucault 
• Simone de Bauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity
• Jathan Sadowski, “The Authoritarian Trad-Off” (Real Life, 2020)
• Valerie Strauss, “School districts, including New York City’s, start banning Zoom because of privacy issues” (Washington Post, 2020)
• Sophocles, Oedipus Rex (full text)
• Jodie Foster biography
• Jodie Foster’s stalker John Hinkley, Jr. 
• Sociopathy (Psychology Today)
• Nir Kshetri and Joanna F. DeFranco, “Is Privacy Dead?” (IEEE, 2020)