Hate and responsibility

The best science fiction in my opinion is the fiction that extrapolates the science in a future that is maybe 5 years or 10 years away. Science fiction that takes the world of today and speculates how a certain technology would change the world without getting to futuristic.

A few months ago i found a really good piece of such a science fiction series. It’s called Black Mirror and i was able to watch it via Netflix. It seems i started with the best episode as i started with the last one. I would really like to recommend you the episode: “Hated in the Nation”. Robotic bees that do the job instead of the extinct insects (essentially the science fiction part, everything else is there except the super cool self driving van), shitstorms and twitter combined in to a really excellent crime thriller with a nice final twist. If you really want, you can read more about it at Wikipedia, but the plot section is a spoiler, so don’t read it.

The whole episode is a wonderful example why i prefer the story and atmosphere of european crime thrillers (especially the british and scandinavian ones, where as this Black Mirror episode is a good combination of both) to the ones from the US.

The “nice” part of the just 5 years away is: The story is somewhat feasible. When ever you are looking into comment section of a newspaper, into the social networks, you see this blind hate of the masses that expresses itself without bounds due to the anonymity of the masses and is accelerated by the anonymity of the masses because every comment stretches the borders that were the borders of civilized society. But by the masses of violations of this borders you find yourself suddenly at the point where you don’t like where we have got. I think i’ve seen quite a lot of shitstorms since i started to use the internet 1992 and quite often it was just awful to see how the angstrom thick layer of civilization is washed away by the membership in the raging mob hitting someone.

The interesting premise of the crime thriller that someone starts to use technology to bring back responsibility into the anonymity. You don’t have to go as far as the thriller, but i think you don’t need much imagination that other means of enforcing responsibility will be found, perhaps as simple as by removing the the veil of anonymity en masse.

That said: I can really recommend that you spend some time at looking this episode of Black Mirror. I would like to write more about it but then i would spoil the end for you.