Abstract
Black Mirror seemingly presents viewers with relentless condemnation of both technology and viewer complicity in allowing technology to gradually consume every facet of their lives. This is probably how the majority of people who watch – or have just heard about – the show view it, and it is easy to see why. But this is not the only way to understand the themes at play under the hood of the series. Another possibility is that Black Mirror is less a show about the dangers of technology and more an exploration of the darker side of human nature: the awful traits, behaviors, and dispositions that the prism of technology reveals and maybe even invites out of people. In this chapter, both options will be considered. The positions of various philosophers who have dealt meaningfully with technology will be used to tease out the degree to which Black Mirror’s target is technology or its human users. These thinkers and topics range from contemporary notions about existential risk and transhumanism, to Frankfurt School social theorists and distinctions in ancient philosophy between the natural and artificial.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Adorno, Theodore, and Max Horkheimer. (1947) 2007. The dialectic of enlightenment: Philosophical fragments. Edited by Gunzelin Schmid Noerr. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Aristotle. 1991. Physics. In The complete works of Aristotle, vol. 1. The revised Oxford translation. Edited by Jonathan Barnes. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Benjamin, Walter. (1935) 2008. The work of art in the age of its technological reproducibility, and other writings on media. Edited by Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin. Trans. Edmund Jephcott, Rodney Livingstone, Howard Eiland, et al. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Bostrom, Nick. 2002. Existential risks: Analyzing human extinction scenarios and related hazards. Journal of Evolution and Technology 9 (1): 1–37.
———. 2016. Superintelligence: Paths, dangers, strategies. Reprint edition. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Butler, Samuel. 1863. Darwin among the machines. The Press, June 13. http://nzetc.victoria.ac.nz/tm/scholarly/tei-ButFir-t1-g1-t1-g1-t4-body.html
———. 1872. Erewhon. London: Trubner & Co.
Clark, Andy. 2003. Natural born cyborgs. New York: Oxford University Press.
Clark, Andy and David Chalmers. 1998. The extended mind. Analysis 58 (1): 7–19.
Foot, Philippa. 1967. The problem of abortion and the doctrine of the double effect. Oxford Review 5: 1–7.
Fromm, Erich. (1941) 1994. Escape from freedom. New York: Holt Paperbacks.
Garcia, Patricia. 2016. Black Mirror creator Charlie Brooker on what really happened at the end of “San Junipero”. Vogue, October 27. https://www.vogue.com/article/black-mirror-creator-charlie-brooker-san-junipero
Harris, Tristan. 2016. How technology is hijacking your mind – From a magician and Google design ethicist. Medium, May 18. https://medium.com/thrive-global/how-technology-hijacks-peoples-minds-from-a-magician-and-google-s-design-ethicist-56d62ef5edf3
Marcuse, Herbert. (1964) 1991. One dimensional man, 2nd ed. Boston: Beacon Press.
Marx, Karl. (1867) 1993. Capital: Vol. III. London: Penguin Classics.
Michaelian, Kourken. 2016. Mental time travel: Episodic memory and our knowledge of the personal past. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Parfit, Derek. 1984. Reasons and persons. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Plato. 1992. Republic. Trans. G. M. A. Grube. Revised by C. D. C. Reeve. Indianapolis: Hackett.
———. 2016. Laws. Edited by Malcolm Schofield. Trans. Tom Griffith. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Postman, Neil. 1993. Technopoly: The surrender of culture to technology. New York: Vintage.
Thompson, Nicholas. 2019. Tristan Harris: Tech is “downgrading” humans. It’s time to fight back. Wired Magazine, April 23. https://www.wired.com/story/tristan-harris-tech-is-downgrading-humans-time-to-fight-back/
Ulam, Stanislaw. 1958. Tribute to John Von Neumann. Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society 64 (3): 1–49.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2021 The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this entry
Cite this entry
Lay, C. (2021). Black Mirror as Philosophy: A Dark Reflection of Human Nature. In: The Palgrave Handbook of Popular Culture as Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97134-6_71-1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97134-6_71-1
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-97134-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-97134-6
eBook Packages: Springer Reference Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesReference Module Humanities and Social SciencesReference Module Humanities
Publish with us
Chapter history
-
Latest
as Philosophy: A Dark Reflection of Human Nature- Published:
- 19 October 2023
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97134-6_71-2
-
Original
as Philosophy: A Dark Reflection of Human Nature- Published:
- 09 March 2021
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97134-6_71-1