Black Mirror S4 E1 USS Callister Part Two (Netflix)
In Black Mirror S2 E4 “White Christmas” we learned about a company called Smart-Telligence which allows consumers to create fully-aware digital cookies of themselves to act as personal assistants (SIRI as both subject and object).
Unfortunately for these Smart-Telligence “cookies” they, like USS Callister’s crew, are fully aware of themselves and their lives in their previous human forms (they retain the awareness and memories of the person they are a digital representation/recreation of).
As fully-formed copies of actual living people these “cookies” and “clones” have all the same desires and hopes as the person they are copied from but with none of the legal protections or standing.
As a result of this lack of legal personhood, the overlords of these cookies and clones can torture them into submission in particularly brutal ways (some of the cookies, for instance, are left in an empty white digital room for hundreds and thousands of years with no human contact or entertainment).
<As if Roy Batty had been left with ONLY the view of an attack ship on fire for over one thousand years>
In White Christmas, these cookies are entirely helpless and comply because the alternative is torture beyond imagining and often the maintenance of sanity (left totally alone for an eternity in a confined space).
In USS Callister, Captain Daley threatens digital Nannette Cole with a similar fate (desiring to take a breath but being eternally prevented from breathing) and it seems like we are headed in a similar sad dystopian direction.
Luckily, however, digital Nannette Cole is a digital and aware copy of a programmer and she understands that universes created be people always contain backdoors. Like any good hacker, she immediately starts to capitalize on the systems that real-life Daley created to make his journeys to and from his USS Callister world easier and more convenient.
Ultimately she takes advantage of a pending system upgrade, his in-game real-world interface, and his own narcissism in order to turn the tables and leave him eternally trapped all alone in a dead room (the game was destroyed by the update) while the digital clones of the USS Callister escape into the larger universe of Daley’s Infinity game where they can interact with millions of people playing in real time.
What Charlie Brooker has done here is craft “the Revenge of the Greta Cookie,” a statement against both the toxic masculinity of Matt Trent and Robert Daley (both could easily be seen as stand-ins for misogyny in dominant tech-industry culture) and the idea of creating thinking beings that have no legal rights or recourse.
If anyone is familiar with the Marvel Universe, I think they could have used something like this as a much better motivation for Ultron’s decision to attack humanity. And the comic book version of Ultron might be exactly what we should be concerned with (a pissed off singularity with all of the ingenuity necessary to replace us).
One doesn’t need to watch Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (a movie about the destruction that is unleased when a Mother doesn’t get justice for her murdered daughter) to understand the incredible amount of destruction that can be borne from a deep-seated feeling of justified anger (but it is a great movie and you should certainly see it).
USS Callister is not just a revenge fantasy, it is also a celebration of its protagonist Nannette.
Nannette fought back successfully against the Toxic Masculinity of Captain Daley, freed herself and her crew from certain destruction and torture using only her wits, and procured the release of their ship into a larger populated universe.
Clone Nannette ends up the Captain of a motley crew of artificially-created pirates freed from the rigid requirements of a cruel God and now able to sail the infinite seas of a digitally-created universe.
Bon Voyage!
Next up: Black Mirror S4 E1 USS Callister Part Three
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Portions originally published at onpiratesatellite.com.
