Social Determinism in Black Mirror

Black Mirror has already grown into one of my favorite shows. Every episode is just so spot on with discussing new technology and it's integration in our society, showing both the positive and negative effects. Each story highlights a new area in technology, about a generation into the future from today's time. The stories all have familiar modern qualities to them but they all take these wonderful new technologies and turn them into an absolute worst case scenario horror. 

Very entertaining stuff, folks. 

In Season 3 Episode 1, "Nosedive," we get a firsthand look at social status through Lacie Pound, a red-headed girl in what appears to be her late 20s. Lacie lives in a world where everyone has a smartphone that is used to essentially rate interactions with one another on a scale of 1-5 stars. For instance, when she held an incredibly pretentious conversation with her coworker in an elevator, the two women gave each other a 5 star rating on their departure. 

Lacie Pound

So...what's the incentive?

Well, apparently in this world your ranking is synonymous with your social status, which can obviously be used for gaining popularity but also for exclusive luxuries. At one point in the episode, Lacie goes apartment shopping and finds a beautiful place in a neighborhood called "Pelican Cove." The realtor then tells Lacie the price, which is way out of her budget. After looking defeated, the realtor cheers her up by saying that if she reaches a 4.5 status, there is a discount on the rent. 

So, for the remainder of the episode, Lacie goes on a quest to raise her 4.2 ranking to a 4.5 in order to get that awesome apartment. She attempts to do this by being the maid of honor at her childhood friend Naomi's wedding. Naomi and her fiance are high 4 star folks who live in a world of luxury and perfection, and being at the wedding would be a sure way for her to increase her ranking quickly. 

However, her quest to see Naomi turns into a nightmare as she keeps getting down voted by an array of different people, further propelling her down in the rankings and leaving her eventually hitchhiking to the wedding. Lacie tries to maintain her composure through all of her poor luck but eventually snaps at the end of the episode when Naomi calls her up and tells her she's not allowed at the wedding anymore because of her new low ranking (in the 1s). Lacie argues that they've been friends since they were kids and that her ranking shouldn't matter but Naomi laughs and says that they were both using each other to gain a higher ranking and hangs up the phone. Lacie loses her cool and ends up crashing Naomi's wedding and getting arrested.

Naomi "Nay Nay" Blestow, Lacie's bestfriend

I thought this episode touched on a few different points that I thought were pretty important. My first thought is that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Every person in the episode had a smartphone that they used to rank, from the elite rich wedding goers to the food servers and taxi drivers. The whole premise of introducing the ranking technology in the first place was to have the nicest people in society have a chance to get up voted and work their way to a higher social status -- like Lacie. 

However, the system ended up only being designed to keep the upper class at the top while the middle and lower classes shrunk down to the bottom with a false hope of getting any better. In Kentaro Toyama's Geek Myths Debunked: Dispelling Misguided Beliefs About Technology, Toyama discusses that technology has never actually led to social parity. Humans will act how humans naturally react regardless of the technology introduced. 

Toyama introduces four different types of paradigms on new technology. There are the utopians who essentially believe that all new technology is good. They believe technology will cure us of all our diseases, hunger and war eventually. Then there are the skeptics who believe just the opposite. They believe that new technology will fall under corruption and will bring destruction to our civiliization. Contextualists believe neither utopians nor the skeptics. They believe that technology is a case by case situation. Some technologies prove to be incredibly beneficial. Others can also prove to be costly. 

Lastly, Toyama introduces social determinism, which essentially argues that the technology will be used as well as the people wielding it. In other words, technology is merely a tool. He writes, "Technology is molded and wielded by people. People decide the form of technologies, the purposes of their use, and the outcomes they generate. Social Determinism rests on the plain fact that it is the people who act and make decisions -- technologies do not." (Toyama, 26). 

He then goes on to explain the Law of Amplification, "like a lever, technology amplifies people's capacities in the direction of their intention (Toyama, 29). What he means by this is that our use of technology will only amplify what we secretly want to do. In the instance of Black Mirror, people in Lacie's world only use the ranking system to better themselves and stay afloat. They secretly want to connect with people and become popular and well-liked but that leads to the second problem I think this episode points out: pretentiousness. 

Lacie, a 4.2 star, practicing her laugh

We see a lot of it even now. People on social media always congratulating others or liking their posts when they secretly don't give a damn about what was being posted in the first place. They're all fake interactions, but in Lacie's world, these interactions are mostly in person. A common theme throughout the episode is that she's constantly working on her image -- exercising, putting on lots of makeup, wearing modest clothes, practicing her laugh, practicing her maid of honor speech --  and it's all fake. 

"It's not that technology prevents true connection," Toyama writes. "The problem is that technology also makes it easy to have thin, empty interactions. In the choice between a challenging intimacy and casual fun, some of us choose the latter" (Toyama, 41). 

There is a serious "digital divide" in Lacie's world as well as our own, where the popular are getting more popular, rich and beautiful while the unpopular are getting more unpopular,, ugly and poor. Lacie comes across a few voices of reason in the episode, such as her brother and the old woman trucker who picks her up at the end of the episode. The two explain that they no longer care about the rating system and that it was liberating to let go. 

The notorious "smoothie boy" who Lacie up voted

But Lacie doesn't budge and continues to put on her fake smiles in hopes of reaching the top. She, among all the other middle class people in this world, are suppressed into being overly nice to other people instead of being casual and authentic. Even when Lacie tries to be nice by giving the "smoothie boy" a 5 star rating, her coworkers quickly down vote her as a social punishment. There is an order to this world which leads into almost social slavery. 

Toyama writes, "a country unwilling to address the social underpinnings of inequality won't see an end to inequalities regardless of how much the new low-cost technology it produces. In general, technology results in positive outcomes only where positive, capable human forces are already in place." (Toyama, 54).