What’s up with Brits and technology?
JULY 20TH, 2016 — POST 198
Saturating and leaking through the social fabric at every point of the third millennium so far is technology. Technology has long been embraced as a primary economic force, an engine of social liberation, and the sticky residue of globalisation, binding nations, communities, and individuals ever more tightly. But one nation — one without any real skin in the economic game — has historically been sceptical, suspicious, even paranoid about technology’s place in the world. That nation is Britain.
Variety overnight published a review of a new Off Broadway play Privacy, notably starring Daniel Radcliffe. Radcliffe plays the Writer, a character who slow burns to a realisation that nothing in his life is private anymore, that knowledge of him has been assembled through his interactions with the same devices we all pour countless hours into (there’s probably a good chance you’re doing some pouring right now). We intuitively understand the fear: it’s the same fear that was bestowed to me by my dad and was probably shared in his generation about the possibility of credit card theft. Or of my full name and contact information being used to find me. “People aren’t necessarily who they say they are”, this high school class teaches, with a fittingly detached name like “Staying Safe in Cyberspace” or “World Wide Woah, There!”. Essentially, you’re vulnerable when in interaction with technology.
It shouldn’t come as a surprise that the co-creators of Privacy are Brits: James Graham and Josie Rourke. This shouldn’t come as a surprise when located within the broader body of work the island nation has produced that intersects with technology. And it’s hard to look path the godfather of the genre: George Orwell. To so much as invoke Orwell’s 1984 at this point is beyond trite. To wish that such invocations ought to be banished to Room 101 is borderline meaningless in its cliché. Because, after all, Big Brother is watching and he decries all writers who do so to be as uninspired as they are apparently narrowly read. Born from the totalitarianism of Soviet ruler Stalin, and no doubt given a healthy tech injection after the mechanised war the Brits so recently endured when the book was published in 1948, 1984’s influence runs deep into British creative’s relationship with technology. Technology — in the form of tanks, planes, missiles — is dangerous.
You only have to look at the wildly successful series Black Mirror, in which possible future scenarios, easily digestible “What if…?”s are explored. They all, like 1984, end badly. But these don’t worry about tanks or machines of battle. The first episode of Black Mirror sees a prime minster become caught in a Twitter and social media cyclone. Despite the difference in the technology and their intrinsic status of intention, it’s viewed the same. The prime minister and his staff are crippled as if being threatened by the blitz. These technologies cannot be pulled apart, in simply being technological they collapse in on each other. Every machine is a war machine.
The Brits view organism and inorganism as incompatible. Whether from culturally imprinted with technology’s wicked deployment or from missing the consumer electronics sector’s rise to dominance, Britain has always viewed technology as other, as invasive. The country has been deprived of technologically positivist narratives. Those who aren’t scared (Jeremy Clarkson springs to mind) dismiss it as newfangled and gimmicky. There are also those like Alex Garland, writer and director of Ex Machina, who as much as looks at technology in sublime awe, can’t get too close. It’s unquestionable that the humans in Ex Machina aren’t particularly robust, and Garland has expressed he believes the AI character Ava to be the protagonist. But the lives of these humans are still cut short at the hand of technology.
Sure, technology can astound, but we’re incompatible with it. Or so the Brits tell us.
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