Black Mirror - dependence on technology

Charlie Brooker’s exceptional ‘Be Right Back’, the first episode in the new ‘Black Mirror’ series, aired last night. If you haven’t watched it yet, I suggest you do.

Ash and Martha are a normal couple; one minute laughing, next minute arguing, rounding off with some below average sex. She is an illustrator working on a large interactive touch screen, and his head is always in his phone; tweeting, posting videos, updating statuses – nothing unusual there.

When Ash dies, Martha is beyond devastated, and worsens when she finds out she is pregnant. Her friend signs her up for some sort of online grievance programme which collects all social media and online interaction of the deceased and combines it to mimic that person via instant messenger. ‘Hi it’s Ash’, is the first pop up message on Martha’s screen, and quite rightly she freaks the fuck out. Her overwhelming grief makes it too hard to resist; she talks back to him. It's therapeutic, but she wants more.
"The more it has, the more it's him."
She uploads all videos of him and gives the programme access to his email and accounts so it’s more like him. The programme puts together his voice and they can speak on the phone. Obviously this is where you realise that they are not in 2013 but at the same time, eerily, it doesn’t seem that far into the future.
Martha locks herself away, cancelling calls from family and friends, living this secret life and becoming completely dependant on iAsh.

All of this was making me feel weird and sad. The story so far was realistic, this could happen. As I tweeted about the programme during the break, I thought how I hope we don't become so emotionally reliant on technology (how’s that for an ironic sentence?). Life says that we can't always get what we want, but science and technology are telling us otherwise, giving us answers that should finally make us happy. In this greedy generation, we are vulnerably open to these answers because we don't want 'c'est la vie' anymore, we want 'this can be fixed'.

Obviously craving more, the next step was a real life replica of Ash. All she needed was a rubber mannequin marinated in nutrient gel, with a sprinkle of electrolytes, leave to simmer for a few hours in the dark and voilà! Her very own walking, talking, sexually active human doll. At this point I found it hard to imagine this would work, but the constant heartfelt moments and an understanding of grief stopped me detaching from the story.

At first, iAsh was enough because he was there. But when cracks start appearing and he doesn’t act the same way that the real Ash would have in certain situations, she loses it. Every day it hits her more that he is not the real thing and that he never will be, but the desperation is palpable; if she lets him go, she’d eventually have to face her grief.

When technology offers you a solution where you don’t have to face your grief, why would you choose the sadder option? Would you prefer to hold on to something that wasn’t real just because it meant you didn't have to deal with a more painful truth? Is ignorance really bliss?

I felt that the final scene was ominous - a big gaping hole of helplessness and submission to a system that had been her crutch for too long.

Perhaps this ‘machines taking over the world’ prediction that is depicted dramatically in films may not consist of ginger robots exterminating us all, but that we will end up depending so heavily on technology, to the point where we are unable to cope without it and the way it makes us feel.