Abstract
With a plot structured around an inquest into the deaths of thousands of people after attacks from hacked surveillance drones driven by social media campaigns, Black Mirror’s (2011–) “Hated in the Nation” interrogates an urgent intersection of current technological and social issues that are emerging into the realm of contemporary public debate. This chapter looks at the ways “Hated in the Nation” grapples with the use of increasingly ubiquitous drone technology for covert government programs, the vulnerability of digital infrastructure to hacking and backdoor hijacks by hostile actors, the role of social media in inflaming mob mentalities and trolling campaigns and the dangerous illusions of online anonymity. In doing so, this chapter also addresses the ways in which “Hated in the Nation” ironically frames these debates through a fusion of its science-fiction premise with other genre forms, particularly its combination of the contemporary “Nordic Noir” police procedural format with the tropes of 1970s B-grade “Killer Bee” horror films.
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Notes
- 1.
PRISM was detailed in Snowden’s leaked material. One of these slides, dotted with corporate logos from many technology giants, starkly evidenced the extent to which state surveillance depends on corporate backdoor feeds: in one column headed “Current Providers,” the corporations included “Microsoft (Hotmail, etc.), Google, Yahoo!, Facebook, PalTalk, YouTube, Skype, AOL, Apple.” In the other column, headed “What Will You Receive in Collection,” material gained from these companies included “E-mail, Chat—video, voice, Videos, Photos, Stored data, VoIP, File transfers, Video Conferencing, Notifications of target activity—logins etc., Online Social Networking details, Special Requests.” For overview of PRISM and other programs, see Greenwald (2014).
- 2.
Research by Cheng et al. (2017), for example, challenged the image of the troll as a “vocal or antisocial minority,” showing how the growth of negative moods and contexts in online communities can escalate and cause otherwise “ordinary” users to engage in troll-like posting.
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Smith, J. (2019). On Killer Bees and GCHQ: “Hated in the Nation”. In: McSweeney, T., Joy, S. (eds) Through the Black Mirror. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19458-1_14
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