I’m sooooo excited to announce the release of our first episode of BLACK MIRROR REFLECTIONS podcast! As you may have heard– from my endless self-promoting on FB and Twitter– this podcast will be structured as a series of conversations between myself and some very smart people as we talk/think through the technology, philosophy, morality, and politics of the Black Mirror television series.
Although each BLACK MIRROR REFLECTIONS podcast episode will only address a single Black Mirror episode, we won’t be doing BMR in the same order as BM. So, our first BLACK MIRROR REFLECTIONS episode is actually a conversation about “15 Million Merits,” which is Episode 2 of Season 1 of Black Mirror.
My special guest in this episode is Dr. Shannon M. Mussett, Professor of Philosophy at Utah Valley University, specializing in French Existentialism, German Idealism, Feminist Theory, and Aesthetics. She publishes widely on Simone de Beauvoir, French Existentialism, and Hegelian philosophy. She is co-editor of Beauvoir and the History of Philosophy from Plato to Butler (SUNY Press, 2012) and The Contradictions of Freedom: Philosophical Essays on Simone de Beauvoir’s Les Mandarins (SUNY Press, 2006) and is currently completing her manuscript on Entropic Philosophy.In this episode Dr, Mussett and I chop it up about the value (or danger) of our increasingly unavoidable screen-time, what might be lost in the elevation of the “virtual” over the “real,” and what (if anything) might be left of “authenticity” once we’ve abandoned our age-old definition of The Real.
Dr. Mussett and Dr. J are not on the same side of any of these questions, which raises the stakes of the conversation and gives both of them reason to pause, briefly… and then fight again!
Listen to the full episode below:
- Shannon M. Mussett, “What You Didn’t See in Black Mirror ’15 Million Merits'”
- Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness
- Pop-up technology: “What are pop-ups and how do I stop them?”
- Reality TV: “The surprising origins of reality TV”
- Barbara Ehrenreich, Natural Causes: An Epidemic of Wellness, the Certainty of Dying, and Killing Ourselves to Live Longer
- Leigh M. Johnson, “15 Million Mehs”