Professor: Jorge Martínez Lucena

Black Mirror 1.3: “The Entire History of You”

Transhumanism “is an international, cultural and intellectual movement with an eventual goal of fundamentally transforming the human condition by developing and making widely available technologies to greatly enhance human intellectual, physical, and psychological capacities. (…) They predict that human beings may eventually be able to transform themselves into beings with such greatly expanded abilities as to merit the label "posthuman".” (Wikipedia)

Transhumanism & Human Enhancement

Technology is closely related to very popular and positive imaginaries (Progress, Modernity, Science). This is why we tend to consider technology a good thing or, at least, a neutral thing.

Technology and Modernity

Nevertheless, there have been numerous critiques of technology in several fields:

• During the Industrial Revolution, there were the luddites, a group of British workers who, between 1811 and 1816, rioted and destroyed textile machinery in the belief that such machines would impoverish workers.

Technology and Some Critiques

• In literature and cinema, we can detect some sci-fi and horror myths which reflect the unconscious fears of modern people. Frankenstein, Terminator and The Matrix are just three simple and well-know examples of how we imagine futures where machines have become a huge problem. Skynet and the Matrix are more powerful and intelligent than humanity. Frankenstein proves that humanhood can be reduced to a machine, to assembled limbs, according to one naïve naturalistic point of view.

Technology and Some Critiques

• In Communicology, we find certain epistemological critiques of the fact that technology is something neutral. Here we can cite Marshal MacLuhan when he famously said “the medium is the message” or Neil Postman when he said his “embedded in every tool is an ideological bias, a predisposition to construct the world as one thing rather than another“ (Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology, 1993: 13)

• Neil Postman goes on to write, “new technologies alter the structure of our interests: the things we think about. They alter the character of our symbols: the things we thing with. And they alter the nature of community: the arena in which thoughts develop” (Postman, 1993: 20)

Technology and Some Critiques

“The Entire History of you” is framed in a world which is very similar to ours. There, the grain technology is widely used. It consists of a kind of chip that people install behind their right ear and that allows them to register every moment of their lives. What they see with their own eyes is automatically saved in this artificial hidden mini-hard-disk whose information they can revise, screen and share at any time.

The plot of BM 1.3 shows how this technology could have a big impact on love relationships.

Technology and Humanhood in BM 1.3

The Grain allows people to have an extremely precise memory of what they have lived. This seems to be roughly realistic.

So, in this regard, Liam, with his grain, becomes the witness of the truth, because he investigates Fi and finds out about her undeniable unfaithfulness thank to this device.

Realism or the Ideology of the Grain

Nevertheless, it could be argued that Liam neglects certain data regarding his relationship with and the nature of his wife, that cannot be screened as easily as the proof of her cheating.

When he is watching past videos of Fi at the end of the episode, perhaps he is trying to discover blatant images of her real love for him. He is only looking in the past for something that could also be in the present.

Realism or the Ideology of the Grain

Does the inconsistency of her love for him mean that her love is necessarily false?

In any case, the technology of the Grain seems to focus Liam’s attention on what can be viewed (irrational impulse to watch) and on the narrative inconsistency of her faithfulness. There doesn’t seem to be room for the present or the future of the relationship. The whole of the relationship is charged with the unbearable weight of the past moral narrative inconsistency.

Technology, Memory and the Past

However, maybe there is a possibility of narrative consistency for this love relationship if we assume that the inconsistency of Fi is perfectly compatible with a true love for Liam, and that Liam loves Fi as she is.

It would mean that our self is more than the sum of our past actions. The self is always a novel event irreducible to our own actions, traits, or our submission to ubiquitous lines of powers.

More Than a Narrative Self

In this sense, forgiveness, for example, is erased as a possibility. The addictive search of visual evidences restricts the gaze, and doesn’t allow Liam to forgive in a present unavoidably marked by the past which cannot take into account this “novel” and “eventual” self that happens, that we all are, and that is always a possibility of unpredictability in our narrative.

In other words, if we experience our lives as dramatic, it is because there is something invariably new in us that exceeds any possible discourse solely based on our past narratives.

Openess to Impossible

• Google Glasses? (More future than present)

• Smart-phones? (Selfies, Impulse to photograph differents moments of our lives)

• Social Networks? (Historical profile)

• Reality TV? (Irrational impulse to watch)

In any case, we use lots of technologies which invite us to measure others as the result of their own visible actions, without paying attention to the fact that they are happening now as impossible selves, because any discourse that attempts to reduce us to a completely enlightened explanation (naturalism, nietzschean or moralist accounts) fails and reveals us as impossible selves.

Have We Got Grains?

Transhumanism has two pretentions:

1) Human Enhancement: Nobody can deny that there are illnesses or disabilities which can be removed or alleviated by technologies.

2) Post-Humanity: If we cannot delimit perfectly what humanhood is, to say that we are going to go beyond the boundaries of what a human being currently is, seems to be ideologically adventurous, at the very least.

Are We Going to Be Post-Humans?

According to what we have watched in BM 1.3 we should take into account that not every technology leads us to human progress in the sense of an integral human enhancement.

In this regard, we should warn that technology can help us in certain ways and, at the same, can close our eyes to certain aspects that machines cannot see, assess, or measure as the human condition itself.

Real Human Enhancement

• If we want to enhance ourselves, we should realize that Skynet is just a fictive computer which conveys a fear we have always had since the beginning of Modernity.

• We tend to associate technology with the future but, paradoxically, it can isolate us in the past.

• The best way to face a fear is to try to shed light on the thing that frightens us. We should do that in a enlightening and wide way, without hiding the traits of humanhood (as this perpetual and mysterious novelty) that our most popular discourses cannot explain thoroughly, but which are stubbornly present in our experience.

A Path to Walk