If we learned anything from Black Mirror Season 4,
it’s never let anyone near your temple
with some kind of tech implant.
But another thing that it’s becoming clear is that
creator Charlie Brooker is really interested
in the idea of digital copies --
that is, digitally replicating a human consciousness,
and housing it somewhere else outside our body.
The prevalence of this idea in Black Mirror leads us to wonder --
why is Brooker so interested in sentient digital copies?
Are these sentient copies really people
who deserve the same rights as we do?
"That's slavery."
"A little melodramatic, isn't it?"
"But she thought she was real."
Black Mirror makes a persuasive case that these questions
could be more relevant to our future than we can even imagine.
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Now, back to Black Mirror.
"Right, uh, so you won't remember Xerox machines?
Do you know what a photocopier is?"
"What?"
First let’s look at the range of digital copies
we meet in Black Mirror:
In “White Christmas,” this idea is given the name “cookies.”
"You're a simulated brain full of code,
stored in this little widget we call a cookie."
We meet Greta, a cookie who’s been created to be a slave
doing housework for her original self.
And Joe, a cookie who’s been created
against the original Joe's will
so the police can extract a confession
for the original Joe’s crimes.
The police then proceeds to torture cookie Joe
as retribution for original Joe’s sins.
"Just changing the time settings.
Cranked him up to 1,000 years a minute.
There's a proper sentence."
In San Junipero, we see elderly people uploading
their consciousnesses onto a cloud,
living in new digital bodies.
In Hang the DJ, the copies live inside a dating app,
undergoing a test to calculate romantic compatibility
for their human originals.
In USS Callister, we see Robert Daly making copies
of other people’s consciousnesses to torture them
for perceived wrongs and disrespect.
"Helmsman Packer?"
"Captain."
"Vanilla latte.
Skim milk."
"At once."
Black Museum gives us Carrie whose consciousness
is eventually trapped in a stuffed monkey,
only able to communicate two things.
Monkey loves you.
Monkey needs a hug.
Then we see the convicted murderer Clayton Leigh,
who may be innocent, condemned to be tortured over and over
for the amusement of sadistic visitors.
All of these examples range from bright or harmless
to unrelentingly dark,
but there’s a shared moral throughout --
that we need to take care and be cautious about all this.
A human consciousness needs to have rights
even when it’s disconnected from the human body --
this area is something that could, theoretically,
become a huge problem and a kind of
unregulated Wild Wild West,
at least if the future pans out in any way
like Black Mirror, even if we hope it doesn't.
In addition to some of the Easter Eggs and recurring technologies
that tie the Black Mirror universe together,
cookies are one of the most recurring elements.
We can even track the passage of time between certain episodes
based on how the world is responding to Cookies
and their rights.
"Huh.
Human rights for cookies."
So let’s do a timeline of all the episodes
that have some version of Cookies in them.
Shut Up and Dance mentions “one smart cookie!”
in an ad,
so we see the tech is starting to be developed in that episode.
In White Christmas, we’re introduced to the Cookie,
and it clearly doesn’t have any rights.
"Well, have six months."
"No, no, wait, wait, wait!"
But cookies are held accountable for
the original person’s crimes.
So Joe’s copy can give a confession
that holds up in court as a confession
from the original Joe.
This is interesting because the copy develops
legal responsibility before it develops rights.
Which suggests the the cookie’s legal identity or “personhood”
would first come about not so the cookie
could have positive rights,
but so it could be held liable for crimes.
USS Callister probably takes place after White Christmas
because it seems to be easier to make the cookies --
at least it’s something that a highly talented individual
can do on his own.
We know Hang the DJ and Callister happen
close to each other in time
because Elena the receptionist in Callister
is using the dating app from Hang the DJ.
Neither of these episodes mention the idea
of the cookies having any rights --
Daly could be copying people illegally,
but the copies aren’t aware of having rights
as they don’t try to alert the police.
And in Hang the DJ, it’s presumably still legal in this world
for the app to create lots of copies of your consciousness
and then delete/slash kill them at the end.
In Hated in the Nation the newsfeed on UKN tells us
that “cookies” have been granted human rights
by the European Court.
San Junipero seems to take place after there are rights
for a digitally replicated consciousness --
we get the sense there’s more protection in place
as these people make the decision to upload themselves
onto the cloud,
and the episode’s happy ending is possible
because this seems to be a regulated world
where consciousnesses are kept safe.
We also know San Junipero is not that long before Black Museum,
or else the technology in San Junipero is just very enduring,
because Nish mentions it’s still going on --
"Uh, like, when they upload old people to the cloud."
By the present story of Black Museum,
Haynes tells us that cookies now have human rights --
"A couple years back, the UN made it illegal to transfer
human consciousnesses into limited formats like this.
Gotta be able to express at least five emotions
for it to be humane, apparently.
This is why Carrie’s consciousness has to stay trapped
in the stuffed monkey she was put into in the pre-rights stage.
"She's still in there."
"Illegal to delete her too, so..."
Clearly this world is still getting adjusted
to this new personhood for cookies though --
because even in the flashback stories we see
that this wasn’t the case,
and the still living Haynes spent his career
abusing various copies.
We can gather, then, that for most of
the Black Mirror timeline cookies have not enjoyed
any protections --
Black Museum clearly takes place later
than almost all other episodes.
It includes references to and artifacts from Callister,
Arkangel, Crocodile, White Bear, Hated in the Nation,
15 Million Merits, and Shut up and Dance.
"This is Kenny.
This is Hector."
Metalhead is the most future episode in the whole series --
we know this because Black Museum contains
an news announcement of the creation of those
terrifying military dogs.
Metalhead doesn’t explicitly have cookies in it,
but some, like ScreenCrush, have even read Metalhead
as a possible “digital hell” --
the black and white recalls the black and white of
the copy of Clayton in Black Museum.
In the episode, we also see a postcard from San Junipero
as if from one digital world to another.
So this could be a hellish simulation that digital copies
of humans are forced to try to survive in --
even as some kind of game or test of the dog technology,
or again as a punishment.
Or the extended cloud that San Junipero is part of
could have malfunctioned in some way
and degenerated into this hell.
Meanwhile, if we just read Metalhead as a straight future,
the episode is probably the bleakest Black Mirror episode yet,
as a preview of how we could destroy humankind with our machines.
The meaning of the San Junipero postcard could also be
that those copies of consciousnesses in the San Junipero cloud
are the only form of humans that will live on,
now that the dogs have wiped out all human bodies.
Strikingly, two of the main early reasons
we see for creating cookies are very dark --
slavery, and punishment.
The unsettling suggestion that follows is that,
outside of procreation,
our most common motivation for bringing others into being
is either to use them for our own profit,
or to hurt them.
Clayton is made to feel the electric chair
over and over,
and each visitor also gets another sentient copy
of Clayton’s consciousness trapped in perpetual torture.
The copy gets used by vigilantes or others
who feel it’s okay to hurt it because they think
the criminal deserves endless suffering --
but what we witness is too much punishment.
Even if these people were guilty --
we rightly have laws against cruel and unusual punishment.
At the end of Black Museum when Nish gets
her revenge on Haynes,
she’s throwing his same too-terrible punishment back at him.
So she’s continuing the cruel cycle.
USS Callister is also like this,
showing Daly suffering his own cruel punishment.
"Exit game!
Exit game!"
In both Black Museum and Callister,
the episodes seem to be encouraging us
to feel good about the ending
We might initially feel satisfied that these guys
truly deserved it,
and got their just desserts after torturing so many others.
But having seen everything else in Black Museum,
as well as White Christmas, or even White Bear,
which isn't about cookies but still deals with
excessive punishment,
we might have learned by now that it’s not about
whether someone’s done something bad enough
to warrant terrible punishment.
It’s about us being human enough not to treat
any consciousness like that.
Meanwhile, the other reason these terrible abuses
happen in Black Mirror
is that people sign up to technologies way too quickly.
Look at Carrie in Black Museum --
when she's in a coma, her husband says he needs
to think over the question of whether to put her consciousness
as a passenger into his brain,
but she says yes immediately.
"I'd have to think about it."
"Carrie's done her thinking."
Later, Jack’s new girlfriend Emily doesn’t think twice
about moving Carrie’s consciousness into the monkey
to get her out of the way.
"I'd say yes."
"Well, she's done her thinking."
In episodes about other technologies, Arkangel, Playtest,
Entire History of You, Be Right Back --
again people don’t think before signing up
for something that might be irreversible.
Maybe this is because on some level we still think of
the digital world as not quite real,
as something that can always be changed, deleted,
with no real repercussions.
But as technology gets more advanced,
this may not be the case.
The name “cookie” is pretty clever word
for a sentient digital copy,
because it makes us think of the term
for information websites store on your computer
to “remember” your identity or preferences.
People often consent to a website’s “cookie policy”
when they’re browsing without really deeply understanding
what a cookie is --
so Black Mirror takes this yummy yet unimportant-sounding name
to again sneakily talk about something important.
"Jesus Christ, Clay.
It's your soul!"
It comes as a surprise to us when Clayton’s wife
uses the world “soul” here
because the show generally avoids calling these copies that --
it’s just a cookie, or something equally diminutive.
"It's just a computer simulation or something."
"Then why does it need your permission?"
Nish’s mother is the first one to honestly give the concept
the weight it deserves.
If this copy of us is sentient, conscious --
us in every ways except for the body --
then essentially this is the same as a soul.
The more we mix these fundamental parts of ourselves
with flawed, untested technology from creators
or companies with self-serving motives,
the more we could be playing with fire
when it comes to our souls and, effectively,
our immortal afterlife.
San Junipero is a kind of heaven for our consciousness
to go to after we die.
But we could just as easily be signing up for an eternal hell.
How ironic would it be if it turned out there were no
God-given afterlife or hell,
but through our technology and our desires to live forever,
we created a digital hell,
and then trapped our minds in there for all of eternity.
This hell wouldn't be punishment not for any terrible sins,
really, only for leaping without looking,
not thinking it through.
At the same time as we’re talking about consciousnesses
as people,
we should be careful to distinguish between the cookies --
that is, a sentient copy of a consciousness --
and a computer simulation.
A sentient digital copy of our consciousness is different
from a bit of code that only looks and seems a lot like us.
Be Right Back doesn’t really fit into
our discussion of cookies --
because that android is a recreation
of how a deceased person looked and sounded,
which isn’t the consciousness of that person.
"Just get out!
Get out!
You're not enough of him!
You're nothing!
You're nothing!"
As we see in Metalhead, we need to be very wary
of humanizing AI and robotics,
of automatically thinking of robots as people,
when robots don’t necessarily have the same priorities
and values as people.
Google’s robotic dogs might look really cute
for their resemblance to animals --
but to make the mistake of finding the unrelenting killer dog
in Metalhead cute would be very quickly fatal.
So we can't lump together computers or avatars
with consciousness that is somehow able
to be uploaded or transferred.
The souls versus code distinction is getting at
a fundamental mystery at the core of who we are --
if there is some self in us that could be preserved
when separated from our body,
how do we protect it?
How do we distinguish between a digitally replicated soul,
and a string of code that simply imitates human behavior?
So Black Mirror makes us think very hard
about whether we'd ever really want to copy
our own consciousness.
We see terrifying abuse and rights violations
as the society of Black Mirror stuggles to figure out
why these cookies are people.
The way the timeline of Black Mirror plays out suggests
we could be looking at a fate where copying our consciousness
is the only future of our people,
the resting place for our eternal souls,
the only way that humankind will even live on
if we manage to make this world uninhabitable
for our bodies --
which is sadly a lot less far-fetched
than it once sounded.
Our technology could make it possible for our consciousness
to live forever,
but this is not a good thing if we blindly trust in
unregulated technologies and untrustworthy companies
instead of laws and human rights.
Hopefully Black Mirror has taught us by now
that if we do ever acquire this technology
to put our consciousness somewhere else,
we'd better think long and hard about it first,
or we could end up trapped in a hell of our own making.
"Some might say that five years with me
is punishment enough."
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