[NOTE: This is the another installment in my series of reviews of Black Mirror. These posts DO include spoilers. Stop reading now if you don’t want to know!]
When I originally posted my ranking of Black Mirror episodes at the beginning of this year, I didn’t include “White Christmas” in part because, in the grand architecture of the series, “White Christmas” is a bit of an oddity. It wasn’t originally released as a part of any season, but rather as a one-off “holiday special” episode. (On Netflix, it is included as Episode 4 of Season 2, but that’s an ad-hoc accomodation of it.) However, the reason I gave for omitting it from my list was that I considered “White Christmas” to be more or less a remake of (S2E2) “White Bear.” Admittedly, I had only watched the episode once when I originally composed my rankings, but this seemed (to me, anyway) like a relatively non-objectionable claim. And then the protests began.
Lordy bagordy.
I really can’t exaggerate how many people have written or spoken to me about HOW WRONG I WAS for omitting “White Christmas.” And so, after suffering through a number of these more or less aggressive protests, I decided that, yeah, okay, I should reconsider my evaluation. The main credit goes to Shannon Mussett (a frequent guest contributor to Black Mirror reviews on this blog) for finally convincing me to give “White Christmas” another viewing, but I also want to shout-out my colleague and Departmental Chair, Bru Wallace, who ultimately served as the tipping-point for my reappraisal of the episode. In the hallway one afternoon several months ago, Wallace gave me pause with his compelling argument that “White Christmas” isn’t really about near-future tech at all– not “cookies,” or VR, or super-scary super- surveillance techniques, or brains-in vats— but, rather, the episode is about how desperately, inescapably, and existentially devastating loneliness can be. In the episode, loneliness is the consequential affect of being “blocked” (more on that below), which is something that I found interesting when I watched it the first time, but not something that I had taken to be the center of the episode.
I stand corrected.
Before getting to the really interesting stuff, though, we need to do a bit of plot(s) summary first. Here’s what you need to know about “White Christmas”: there are basically three and a half concurrently running storylines, mostly revealed through flashbacks, which merge together in either tragedy or justice (depending on your disposition and commitments) near the end.
I’ll try to keep this part brief, but if you’ve already seen “White Christmas” and want to skip the summary, just jump to the end of the section marked by “—-” below.
Meta Plot: The episode opens with a glimpse into what I’ll call the Meta Plot, which introduces us the two main characters, Matt (Jon Hamm) and Potter (Rafe Spall) and establishes the mise en scène for everything that follows. Matt and Potter appear to be trapped in a remote cabin where they have been for some indeterminate but considerable amount of time and from which they do not appear to have the option to leave. They are not friends; Potter has not spoken to Matt for their entire time together in the cabin. It is Christmas.
Matt attempts to encourage Potter to “open up” by asking Potter about his pre-cabin life. Potter insists that Matt go first. So, Matt begins to tell his story.
Plot 1: The first sub-plot storyline involves a flashback slow-reveal of the character Matt, who worked in his “previous life” as a kind of Tinder remote-assistant, coaching poor ne’er-do-wells through their IRL dates in real-time (via a combo-eyepiece/earpiece) and helping them to overcome their social awkwardness and get laid. During one of these coaching sessions, Matt’s “student” Harry (Rasmus Hardiker) gets involved with a suicidal paramour, and they (Harry and his paramour) both die in the end. Subsequently, Matt’s wife finds out about his secret professional life, though not about his complicity in the murder/suicide. She is pissed, they have an argument, and Matt’s wife “blocks” him.
This is the first time that we see what “blocking” means in the near-future Black Mirror world. It is creepily like an IRL phenomenal instantiation of what happens when we (today, in 2018) “block” someone on the internet, only the “you cannot see this person” or “you cannot interact with this person” effects are manifest in real meatspace. Matt’s wife blocks him and then, where her bodily schema once appeared available for reception by Matt’s sensory perceptions, there is now only a void. Matt cannot no longer hear her words. (They are garbled, muted, noise-without-signal.). He cannot see her. (She appears as a white-washed, crudely pixelated, and null silhouette.) Moreover, Matt has become invisible and imperceptible to her, as she is to him.
[Plot 1a: There is a seemingly tangential, but monumentally significant to the overall arc of the episode, sub-plot to Plot 1 that really should merit being called its own storyline, but since it’s couched as a sub-plot in the episode, we’ll respect that editorial decision here. In Plot 1a, we find out that Matt’s digital-Tinder-coach job was just a side hustle, while his real day job involved something even darker. In his day job, Matt was effectively a “coach” for digital clones of IRL people– in the episode, these are known as “cookies”— and Matt’s charge is to help the newly-disembodied-but-still-conscious clones/cookies adapt to their new meatless-space existence and environs. This is perhaps the most interesting tech-y aspect of “White Christmas,” and I hate that I cannot say more about it here, but stay tuned because there are other posts forthcoming that focus on Black Mirror “cookies,” which show up again in episodes I haven’t yet reviewed like “San Junipero” “Hang the DJ.” and “Black Museum.”]
At this point, we still have no idea why Matt is in the cabin with Potter.
Plot 2: In the Potter-centric second storyline, we learn that Potter, in his “previous life,” also had an argument with his girlfriend and was subsequently “blocked” by her, using the same blocking technology that we saw introduced in Plot 1. (SKIPPING A LOT OF DETAILS HERE.) Most important to Potter’s story is the fact that only moments before being blocked by his girlfriend, Potter learned that she was pregnant. Potter assumes that the child-to-come is his, so his inability to actively participate in his girlfriend’s pregnancy and evential childbearing, because he is blocked, intensifies his suffering. He becomes obsessed with stalking the shadow-figures of his former life, who remain pixelated but not invisible to him. There is another important tragic reveal in Potter’s story, but it seems like a spoiler worth keeping under wraps here, so I’ll just note that what you need to know is that it involves Potter killing someone, being arrested for the murder, but refusing to confess to it.
Meta Plot, Revisited: Plots 1, 1a, and 2 all merge near the end of the episode when we learn that Potter is actually a cookie, the cabin he is cohabitating with Matt “exists” only in meatless-space, Matt has been turned state’s witness and is now cooperating with the police (to mitigate punishment for his own complicity in a crime), and Matt has been charged with befriending and coercing a confession from his cabin mate. (Yes, I know, I haven’t given enough details of “White Christmas” for all of that to make sense. You’ll just have to watch the episode.)
What I’m really interested in talking about here is the contemporary phenomenon of blocking, and what it does or does not reveal about how we experience loneliness and social isolation.
I’d like to put aside, for the moment, the many and varied reasons that other human beings may neglect us. Let’s just talk about the lived-experience of loneliness.
Loneliness is a miserable feeling. It is a painful, desolate, forlorn, truly wretched condition. It is heartbreaking. Sometimes, perhaps oftentimes, it feels (or is) unfair. And because we are not designed to be sequestered or quarantined, it is deeply alienating.
Human beings are fundamentally social animals. We may be able to survive for a little while by ourselves, but we are absolutely incapable of thriving alone. Interaction with other people is as necessary for human flourishing as food, air, and water. We starve, we suffocate, we wilt and wither away in isolation. Read, for example, the ACLU’s statement to the UN Human Rights Council arguing that solitary confinement violates the basic human rights of incarcerated persons. It should come as no surprise that existing in such an unnatural state as loneliness has consequences that extend far beyond the “bad feelings” of the afflicted.
There is a kind of tragically ironic reversal of cause and effect that happens when people are shunned. In fact, psychological and sociological studies show that those among us who are socially alienated or isolated frequently end up exhibiting what is clinically diagnosed as “antisocial” behaviors: anger, aggression, resentment, violence, remorselessness, and/or a disregard for the safety of oneself or others. We really must reckon with the fact that, in the same way that contemporary models of punitive incarceration neither safeguard nor strengthen our communities, extra-judicial “social” relegation of individual persons to the “outskirts” of society, even if done with good intentions, neither safeguards nor strengthens our communities.
Rather, punitive isolation does real harm both to the offender and to the web of connections from which the offender has been cut.
Exile– whether from “humanity,” the polis, the society, the friend-group, the family, the strategic coalition, the cause, or any number of other ad-hoc constitutions of a collective — is almost never instructive for the exiled. It is almost always destructive. Moreover, juridical or extra-juridical shunning actually contributes to the proliferation of anti-social behaviors among the isolated, in effect doubling the punishment and saddling the punished with pathologies that prevent their re-entry to the world from which they have been banished. Manufacturing a population of the alone and lonely, by any body, both frays the fabric of and endangers that body.
The General Social Survey (published in American Sociological Review) found that the number of Americans with no close friends has tripled since 1985. TRIPLED! And that trend shows no sign of abating. In fact, loneliness appears to be most prevalent among Millennials, the so-called “connected” generation.
No surprise, then, that Black Mirror elected to serve up in “White Christmas” a painfully poignant cinematic rendering of something that is, IRL, an epidemic. The series creator, Charlie Brooker, once said that Black Mirror is “about the way we live now– and the way we might be living in 10 minutes’ time if we’re clumsy.”
Those 10 minutes may already be up.
Social media blocking is more or less the contemporary, digital version of shunning. Literally speaking, to “block” someone on social media is just to deny that person access to your information. Metaphorically, though, it is an act of social rejection.
Blocking has its virtues and vices and, like all things on the internet, it can be employed responsibly or irresponsibly. I can certainly understand the decision of people who are the victims of online harassment to block their harassers. I understand the motivations of people who block friends, family, or coworkers to whom (for whatever reason) they have a vested interest in presenting an “edited” version of themselves. Some people block their exes because constant reminders of a relationship-turned-sour in their TLs is painful. Some people block racists, sexists, homophobes, or other loudmouth proponents of deplorable demagoguery because, well, ain’t nobody got time for that. Especially on Facebook, some people block friend-of-friends because, as we all know, friendship is not a transitive property. All these acts of social rejection seem reasonable to me, even if unfortunate, and I think many of them can be reasonably justified.
On the other hand, there is also a (very) dark side to blocking. For as many people who use blocking as a defense, there are people who use blocking as a weapon. Bullies and cowards regularly “block” so that they can subtweet with impunity, or shield themselves from sight of criticism, or gossip, or catfish, or engage any number of other morally suspect and fundamentally antisocial behaviors. It is, of course, every internet user’s right– so far, at least, but watch out for Ajit Pai— to draw the borders of his or her digital-social world and to determine who is allowed in and who is not. But there are a whole lot of people who have abused that right (including the President of the United States).
[A VERY IMPORTANT ASIDE: Currently, I have zero people “blocked” on any of my social media profiles, even and in spite of repeated incidents of direct online harassment. Everything I post on the internet– on Facebook page, on my Twitter page, on my Instagram page, on my YouTube page, on my Vimeo page, on my LinkedIn page, on my Google+ page and, yes, even right here on Blogger— is entirely and unrestrictedly public, and has been for almost two decades now. I get it that my “full disclosure” approach to online identity is not for everyone, but it has been and continues to be important to me for three reasons: (1) I want to be able to affirm, to whatever extent such a claim even makes sense, that there is basically zero space between the real or true “IRL” me and the “digital” me, (2) I want to model for my students, as an avowed and enthusiastic technophile, the manner in which we ought to treat the digital agora exactly like we treat IRL socio-political space, and (3) I want to secure my bona fides when it comes time for me to mercilessly criticize the bullies and cowards who hide behind anonymity, pseudonymity, and/or “blocking” to do the damage that they do.]
The internet debate du jour is primarily focused on whether or not it is the responsibility of social media sites like Facebook and Twitter to consistently enforce their users’ agreements and block or ban accounts like the one (previously) used by Alex Jones (of Infowars infamy, now blocked .. and no, I will absolutely NOT link to that excremental site). Earlier this year, a federal court decided that our current President Donald Trump’s “blocking” of U.S. citizens on Twitter is unconstitutional, both under his seldom-used @POTUS handle and his frequently-used @realDonaldTrump handle. In my anecdotal experience, it appears that the number of people sentenced to Facebook jail or Twitter jail dramatically increased in the weeks leading up to the 2018 midterm elections. (Shoutout to sociologists: can someone please get us some real data that tracks the trends in digital-jail sentences?!) Exactly what role privately-owned corporations like Facebook and Twitter should assume in the determination of “public” speech regulations is a sticky and complicated issue, especially given the utter neglect on the part of the FCC and the U.S. Congress to get our ahead of this issue and determine, as a matter of policy and/or law, exactly what the status of the internet qua “public space” is.
[Aside: We are, at present, in a bona fide quagmire with regard to what we think the internet is, what we think it does, what we want to do with it, and how we ought to regulate those who build it, participate in it, or profit off of it. Also, not for nothing, we have exactly (less than) zero time to make these determinations.]
All of that is just to draw attention to the fact that who gets to block whom and why, not to mention also who gets to regulate who blocks whom, are massively important conversations we need to have right now, especially given the lightning speed with which the digital agora is replacing the IRL agora. The singularity is near, y’all.
But let’s get back to “White Christmas.”
One of the most compelling things about “White Christmas,” in my estimation, is that it manages to represent in images something that we ought to have been able to imagine as a possibility before now, and we ought to have been able to make arguments in words about before now, though precious few (if any) of us have. “Blocking” is an utterly mundane activity in most people’s lives today, but it has very real consequences– psychological, emotional, social, and political. What is more, it is an activity that harbors within it very real potentialities for, to borrow Boooker’s words, “how we might be living in 10 minutes time if we’re clumsy.”
I shouldn’t be surprised anymore, especially as an avowed Derridean, but I nevertheless remain astonished by how THE most ingenious invention of human history– namely, the internet– manages to consistently, unrelentingly, and (I’ve gotta admit) brilliantly autodeconstruct. The internet contains practically limitless potential for promoting global unity, for enabling liberation, for expanding rather than restricting borders, for binding rather than severing communities, for confirming rather than dissimulating truth, for enjoining rather than segregating peoples, for making us all feel more connected and less lonely.
Instead, what the internet has done, in the hands of those beholden to state- and corporate- interests, is generate in its own name— an “inter-net,” a “web of connections,” an organic communal body independent of the restrictions of space or time– ever more duplicitous, auto-generated antibodies, and mechanisms for cutting ties, for fraying connections, for suborning, for perjuring, for uncoupling, for disengaging and, perhaps most disturbingly, for shunning and dehumanizing.
In spite of the techno-optimistic hope to which I cling, I fear we are too many years past needing to deal with the tragic fact that (a) we are lonely, (b) we have at our disposal an avenue for ameliorating that societal symptom, and (c) we are insufficiently protecting our last remaining avenue of governance over the fundamental health of our shared society.
Here is the state of the majority of the U.S. population today: we are sick, we are indebted, we are lonely and, therefore, we are demoralized and afraid. The easy and too-readily-available technique of dis-connection offered by social media through “blocking” is just one– not the only one, but a massively important one– of the myriad factors that contributes to our collectively wretched state.
That is not the fault of “technology,” even less of the particular technologies of the internet or social media. That is the fault of a certain neoliberal strain of capitalist ideology.
This has been a long post already, I know, but please take 4 minutes more to listen to former MP Tony Benn:
From Benn: “I think there are two ways in which to control: first of all, frighten people, and secondly demoralize them. An educated, healthy, and confident nation is harder to govern.”
The people who are actually controlling us like to tell us that “the internet” is controlling us, but that involves a gross and duplicitous misrepresentation of what the internet is. (Please read Adriel Trott’s excellent post on being represented versus being ruled!) You are not lonely because of the internet. You are not frightened or demoralized or sick or uninformed because of the internet, and neither are any of the other sick, demoralized, frightened, and uninformed people with which you share a world, a society, and a polis.
The corporate interests that (increasingly) control the internet (increasingly) exercise their control over you by co-opting you into complicity with their strategies of social division, i.e., by providing you the easy option of severing your connections– with your neighbors, your world, your society, and your polis— via “blocking.”
Blocking is not a protection. It is a symptom. And it is a threat to the ties that might otherwise bind.
2020 CORONAVIRUS PANDAMIC UPDATE:
I originally wrote (and posted) this essay in 2018. As I write this update on March 24, 2020, the world is in the midst of the coronavirus/COVID-19 pandemic. China, Italy, and Spain have already had their populations decimated. The United States’ is currently implementing– too late and too slowly– “social distancing” mandates, which require citizens to stay at home and to maintain at least 10 feet of distance from one another outside. Only “essential” businesses remain open. All schools– from pre-K to university– are operating online. (We’re calling it “remote learning.”) Some people, like me, are lucky enough to be able to work from home… but millions have become suddenly unemployed.
We’re only just over a week into this new life and already people are beginning to feel the loneliness an isolation. It is boring. It is maddening. It feels unnatural. And we have no idea when, or if, it will end.
As I look out my window now, I can see my neighbors walking their dog down the street outside. Much like in “White Christmas,” it is as if I have been “blocked” from the interacting with that world where they are. I can see it, I know it is really there, but I am prevented from taking part in it.
We humans are social animals and this is not how we are meant to live.