Charlie Brooker's Black Mirror asks: if the drug of modern technology has us hooked, then surely there must be side effects? Side-effects, of course, that we are yet to find out.
Tonight, his thought-provoking series returns with Be Right Back, an episode in which internet presence such as social media can be used to replicate the dead -- tragic in the hands of a grieving partner. Following on from that is political-satire,
The Waldo Moment, and White Bear, which takes aim at camera phone voyeurism.
Here, the man himself takes us through the looking glass.
Wired.co.uk: Hello, Charlie. So, from watching Black Mirror in the past, you would assume that you were quite cynical about the future of technology, but is that true?
Charlie Brooker: I like technology, but Black Mirror is more what the consequences are, and it doesn't tend to be about technology itself, it tends to be how we use or misuse it. We've not really thought through the consequences of it. You know, it may all be good, but we're not quite prepared for them
I spend an inordinate amount of time going from one black rectangle to the next -- whether it's a smart phone or a TV screen or a laptop -- and it kinda wasn't the case six years ago. The way you spend a lot of your time, the way you connect with other people, the way you communicate with other people, that's fundamentally changed in a short period of time.
One of our models of our shows was the original Twilight Zone. It came out at a time of uncertainty, and so I just think were trying to do something similar what's affecting us now.
What I enjoy is doing dark "what if?" stories, you know. Obviously the way my brain works, I'm quite paranoid and I worry a lot. It usually comes from ideas I find amusing -- and it's sort of more fun to play them out in a bleak way. I kind of felt like this technological uncertainty wasn't being studied in other drama serials. It felt like an untapped massive resource for creepy, dark stories.
But generally, you know, I think technology is a force for good.
Wired.co.uk: When you say that technology has changed in such a short space of time, what's your personal experience of that?
CB: Well, when I got my first TV writing job, which is like 1999 or so, I was sort of the nerd of the office. I remember I had an MP3 player, and I remember kind of explaining to people about how amazing this was, and no-one gave a shit. And then it cut to a few years later and everyone's raving about iPods and I felt slightly... aggrieved.
And I think that's a massive thing that's changed over the last decade or so. Probably just over a decade, probably from the Millennium onwards. When the Millenium Bug was kicking around people would bemoan the fact that we were relying on computers and now nobody thinks twice about sharing everything they've got online. If you bothered scanning in your photos digitally, you would've been a bit of a hobbyist -- whereas now, all of that is the norm. People quite quickly get to grips with concepts like the "cloud", which you'd have had to spend two hours explaining to somebody years ago, where it felt like absolute science fiction, and now some thing's introduced and two weeks later we're used to it.
I was thinking the other day about when we did Nathan Barley. We did that in 2005. I remember at the time when we were doing it, Chris [Morris] was saying: "give him a video diary on his website..." And I initially resisted this because I was saying: "videos on the internet are too slow and stuttery, nobody watches videos on the internet", and then we got YouTube. This was 2005.
It's not like that long ago that YouTube didn't exist. I mean, Google's relatively new... It's a remarkable pace of which things change and adapt and it's hard for us to keep up with as a species.
Wired.co.uk: What with Be Right Back, I take it that applies to social media too? What inspired that idea?
CB: There were two inspirations. One was a thought earlier this year when I had a baby and I spent a lot of time not going out. Not that I really spent much time going out before -- just even less, you know... A lot of your social contact comes through social media, seeing tweets and what-have-you. And I was just struck by the thought: "what if all these people had died?"
I tend to lurk a lot. I tend to listen more than I say. So I just thought: "what if all these people were dead and they were replaced by artificial intelligence software that had all their previous tweets and was emulating them?"
The second was the first time that I had somebody who had died, but whose contact details were still in my phone. And there was something creepy about that. I remember I was changing to one phone from another, and going through my old contact details, and so I was having to delete duplicate numbers to make room, and up came the name of someone who died, and... it felt hard to delete the name. Do you feel like you're being disrespectful in some way? And there's something quite interesting about that.
So yeah, it came about through a collision of those two thoughts really. And then, as I thought more about it I realised that if you had the software to emulate someone's personality, you would... For grieving people, I think it would be very hard to resist temptation to communicate with it just how people see psychics. I wonder when people go to see psychics, do they really believe that they're being put in touch with their relatives, or do they know on some level that it's not, and that they find it a comfort...? I don't know.
Wired.co.uk: The episode touches heavily upon the differences between online and real-life personalities. Is this your comment on who we are online?
CB: Yes. I think most people are different with certain groups of people -- you have one way you behave with people you know from school, a different way in front of parents, at work and so on. And I think there's a way you behave online that's slightly different than the way you behave in life.
You get people behaving in a more aggressive or abusive way than they would "real life". And I think that when you look at social media -- when you look at Twitter -- it's a performance. People are treating it as a performance, because people are aware of their follower count and get quite obsessive about it and it's possible to analyse it using Twitter analytics or something like that. You can gauge your "performance" as it were to appeal to a particular group of person if you want. So everyone's performing these little identities and how much really is you? When you're sitting there taking the piss out of the X Factor, to what degree is that who you are and to what degree are you crowd pleasing?
So certainly, in this story, it's an aspect of your personality that's amplified basically, and that's sort of what shows up in this.
**Wired.co.uk: So how would you say you are online?
Because obviously you have loads of followers, so it must be like having your own little community following you around.**
CB: I tend to duck out for months at a time, I find it's a sort of, time sponge basically, and also sometimes you can say anything vaguely contentious or that can be misinterpreted and you find yourself having to re-explain yourself again. It can get quite, sort of, tiresome. I don't quite understand as well. I don't quite understand the need to share every waking moment. I don't understand when people tweet something like, "Just had a brilliant evening out with X, Y and Z. Good times!" I just sort of think, "What are you doing?" I just don't get it. Maybe that's an age thing. To me that looks very insecure.
Maybe that's a generation thing. I sort of think: "you cant really be having a good time if you're telling everyone about it".
To what extent are you living your life and to what extent are you performing your life to other people? Pictures on Facebook streams of people looking happy at parties, out in nightclubs... But surely if you're having that good of a time, you're not posing for photos?
I increasingly get the sense that that's why people go to places, to photograph something. I don't understand who people are trying to impress because everyone they're trying to impress are trying to impress other people as well. So it becomes a strange world of exaggerated service. But maybe I'm just talking out my arse.
Wired.co.uk: Moving on the second episode, The Waldo Moment, in which an animated blue bear is entered into a bi-election, where did the idea for that come from?
CB: That came about quite a while ago when Chris Morris and I were doing Nathan Barley and we had the idea of what if someone put up an MP for an election which was like the band, Gorillaz. What if someone put up a sort of animated mascot for election?
And then just thinking through the logistics of that was quite amusing. You know, the fact that actually, suddenly you realise it's got all sorts of advantages over a real person, because it's almost like a robot, it can never be wrong, really. It's like Bugs Bunny, or something. You don't really care whether it's Mel Blanc or whoever took over Bugs Bunny's voice after Mel Blanc, you just like Bugs Bunny. So it's a scandal-proof politician. Then strangely, more recently, you think it's an advantage is it's not human, because politicians don't seem particularly normal -- that's sort of part of the problem I think, isn't it? People don't think of politicians as a regular person. It then follows that you'd be more prepared to vote for someone who wasn't pretending to be a real person, if you see what I mean.
Wired.co.uk: Were there any specific politicians you had in mind?
CB: I was thinking more of Boris Johnson. With Boris Johnson you don't think of him as a politician oddly. You think of him as a media personality, because he's a comic character. He's basically Homer Simpson. That makes him strangely bullet-proof. So when he fucks up, which he seems to do on purpose sometimes, it just makes him more popular.
Wired.co.uk: He manages this image of a buffoon, doesn't he?
CB: Yeah. People don't think about what he represents politically, A lot of people do, but equally a lot of people don't.
They just like him. "Oh, Boris is a legend." It's infuriating if you're posing politically, you know.
Wired.co.uk: Were you inspired by the guy who dressed as a penguin and beat the Lib Dems in Scotland?
CB: Partly. The mayor of Iceland is another one. He's a stand-up comic, and he was on a platform where he said he didn't know anything about politics -- and he won. The penguin thing I think happened... We were already going to do this episode when that happened. That just sort of fed into it, we just thought, "Yep, well, there you go."
Wired.co.uk: Another element of the episode is that the voice behind Waldo is reluctant to get dragged into politics -- he isn't interested. Is that a reflection of yourself?
It's certainly something I can relate to. I wouldn't say I'm very politically astute or motivated. I'm broadly left-ish, but, beyond that, I find it very hard to get very, very, very worked up, and very specifically worked up for a great length of time. I think I'm neither clever or stupid enough to be politically tribal. I find it tiresome very quickly. And I think, because I, sort of, write in the Guardian, people assume I'm very, very right on, and take everything very seriously indeed, and I sort of couldn't be arsed.
**Wired.co.uk: So we would never see you on, say,
Question Time?**
CB: I don't think I have the absolute cast iron certainty to sit there debating a political position for hours and hours and hours on end. I just don't. And equally I think it's moronic to just, you know, clutch hold of your point of view, and not listen to anything else, to the other side. Then you end up with a polarisation you get in American politics. My nightmare, my idea my idea of an absolute nightmare, is finding myself on Question Time.
Wired.co.uk: Details on the third episode, White Bear, are pretty sketchy. Could you explain the concept behind that?
CB: It starts out with a woman waking up and 90 percent of the population are just filming stuff and not intervening. The remaining 10 percent are divided between victims and those that have decided they can do what they like and go around causing sadistic havoc -- which everyone else just films."
Wired.co.uk: And what informed that idea?
CB: A few things. The footage coming out of Libya this year was the first times I've seen tourists in a war zone. From the news reports, you'd see burnt out tanks and then someone filming it on an iPhone or something. And then when Gadaffi's body was put on display, people were turning up and there's a particularly ghoulish shot I saw in one report where the camera man put his camera down so you got the dead corpse's POV and it was all people leaning in with phones for a souvenir snap. It was like something from
Dawn of the Dead except they're not feasting on the body, they're snapping images of it.
It got me thinking: if you were making the Wicker Man now, they'd all be filming it on the phone, wouldn't they? They'd all be standing around at the end with their iPhones out while the pyre goes up. It's creepy.
Black Mirror airs on Channel 4 at 10pm tonight.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
