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binging on darkness
Sunday, November 20 2016
I was down in the brownhouse this morning taking care of basic eukaryotic business and checking things on my Chromebook when I Facebook forced me to log in to my main (non-troll) account. That's always a sign that Facebook is about to mete out some form of punishment. And so it was; something I'd posted had been "deleted," though, as far as I could tell, there was no way to find out what that was. I'd posted a lot yesterday, some of it mocking racist Trumpers with the implications of their calls for Muslim registries and bans. Some of that stuff might've been objectively racist, but that's how trolling works. In any case, now I was blocked from contributing to Facebook on my main account. When one company with a monopoly on an important form of communication can dictate the rules, react to unspecified offences, and then dispense unappealable justice, it feels like a nascent form of the sort of dystopia portrayed in episodes of Black Mirror. Coupled with a Trumpian near-future (a near-future brought about, in part, by a proliferating fake-news data fog for which Facebook itself is chiefly responsible), being temporarily silenced on Facebook feels more ominous than it otherwise might.
A cold drizzle fell for much of the morning, though it had been possible to take the dogs for a walk. One advantage to unpleasant weather at this time of year is that hunters don't want to spend time sitting around in the outdoors. Thankfully we're not yet in an age of widespread telepresence hunting robots, though hopefully the unforseen consequences of those will be explored in the next season of Black Mirror.
Gretchen would be dining with friends tonight, so she took Neville with her for the first part of her shift at the Golden Notebook (the Woodstock bookstore). Meanwhile I sat at my computer watching "San Junipero," a moving (and surprisingly non-dystopian) third-season Black Mirror episode about (spoilers ahead!) a future where the elderly can immerse themselves in a nostalgic recreation of the past, a place they can also choose to spend all "eternity" (or until whenever TCKR Systems goes bankrupt) as disembodied emulations. (This article in the Washington Post suggests the author didn't absorb the crucial essence of the technology being described: that, with it, there is no choice between being dead and buried and going to the "heaven" of a data center. As with Christianity, you can do both.)
In the mid-afternoon, I loaded Ramona into the Subaru and went on my weekly drive to Woodstock. On the way there, I stopped at the Tibetan Center thrift store, where (unusually) I found nothing I wanted. Then went to Hurley Ridge and bought 200 Red Rose tea bags, a tray of vegetarian sushi, and a 64 ounce jar of grapefruit pieces in light syrup. As I approached Woodstock, I saw the mountains to the north appeared to be piled ominously high with snow, as did a significant number of vehicles on the road. The snow had never actually reached as low as Woodstock, though it had reached elevations only a couple hundred feet above it on Overlook and even Ohayo Mountain.
At the Golden Notebook, Neville dissolved into a bundle of wiggles when he saw me and Ramona come through the door. He doesn't actually like being at the bookstore all that much and would much prefer snuggling with Ramona on a couch or bed. But Gretchen doesn't want to spend a whole seven hour shift away from him.
Back at the house, I quickly determined that my "California roll" sushi contained cream cheese, the kind produced from a miserable cow. I identify as vegan, but if I were to take this opened tray of sushi back to Hurley Ridge several days from now, it would just get thrown out. So I poured on the soy sauce, applied the wasabi and raw ginger, and ate it. As a vegan, I find it's useful every now and then to eat a little dairy to remind myself that I don't miss it at all. In the context of sushi, cheese of any sort, even something so bland as cream cheese, seemed completely inappropriate to my veganized expectations. It tasted fatty in an unnecessarily gross, cloying way, and I didn't like the feeling it left lingering in my mouth. I've had this experience before, most recently in 2013, when I ate from a cheese and cracker plate to be polite.
I spent the afternoon and much of the evening binge-watching most of the third season of Black Mirror. This season, which contains twice the episodes of previous seasons, somehow managed to be even better than the second season, though there were no episodes quite as haunting as "Be Right Back." I started with "Nosedive," a delightfully-harrowing view of a sunny pastel-hued (and kind of 1950s-esque) dystopia where all life's goals are aimed at achieving a high aggregate rating in a web app that has been integrated into government, commerce, and the eye implants we've learned to expect in Black Mirror episodes. In addition to the delicious horror of watching where mutually-assured pleasantness can lead, we see other aspects of dystopia, such as endless suburbs connected by a dense array of highways and ramps, some of them held aloft on concrete piers running right through neighborhoods featuring big cheaply-made houses with tiny windows.
Next up was "Playtest," where we get a spooky view into the early years of the sorts of brain implants that the plots of other Black Mirror episodes have depended on. Then there was "Shut Up and Dance," a terrifying and deeply-unsettling depiction of the kinds of blackmail and manipulation that can be achieved with current technology.
The last episode I watched tonight was "Men Against Fire," which depicted a direct brain-computer interface in a military context, showing how the manipulation of the senses can be used to further a nation's ability to get its soldiers to willingly commit war crimes. That all left me a lot to process in my dreams; indeed, another article in the the Washington Post suggests that binging on Black Mirror is ill-advised for this (and a number of other) reasons.
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