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The point of "The entire history of you" was not to be wary of people who lie or cheat. It was to show how different people might react to the power of this kind of technology. Some people would use it benignly, some people would choose to go without it, some people would choose to use it to live in their past while shutting out the present, others, I.e. the cheated on man would choose to use it to blackmail, torture and destroy others around them. It's not a story about the perils of cheating on a partner, but falling under the influence of powerful technology either directly or indirectly via those around you.

> the ultimate conclusion is that those in control just enjoy the exercise of power. (See: the humiliation of Abi Khan)

I think the people selling the 'adult channels' in that episode mainly want money, which they know the masses will provide. It's not so much a criticism of those in power as the whole system, including those who watch all the humiliation (the x-factor show and the rough sex show) and make these things financially viable.

Random other Black Mirror trivia: the guy who rallies against the system and then becomes part of it seems to be Charlie Brooker reflecting on himself. People tuned in to Black Mirror to see a David Cameron clone fuck a pig (yes that was actually the plot) in much the same way they tune in to the humiliation channels in 15 Million Merits.

Part of the humiliation voyeur effect is that notion that, "my life sucks, but they have it worse than I do". One thing in 15 Million Merits that I found interesting too is that in the first-person shooter game, the player is killing the 'lower class' annoyances versus aliens, other factions/countries, enemies - it actually creates an even greater sense of claustrophobia in this world and emphasizes that whoever is in power is not even part of the consideration set for "revolution".

In White Christmas, the most disturbing and bizarre thing about the end is that it's not the criminal, but a copied consciousness that did nothing wrong because it didn't exist when the crime occurred, the one created for the interrogation, who suffers in the "1000 years per minute" auto-hell. The actual criminal just spends Christmas in jail.

I'll disagree with you on this one point. The copy didn't exist at the time the crime was committed - crimes don't 'occur,' by definition someone carries them out - but it was a copy of the criminal's guilty consciousness as opposed to some dormant passenger.

So if you kill me for no good reason, and then you stumble into a booth and get cloned, both you and your clone are guilty, notwithstanding the nonexistence of your clone at the time of my death. By definition, the clone's identity originates with you, as opposed to being someone that looks exactly like you but has no idea who he is or where he came from, or even the ability to walk and talk. To see why, imagine again that you've murdered me and are running away with a guilty conscience. Instead of stumbling into a cloning booth, you stumble into a dark Y-shaped corridor (with an instant cloning machine in the middle - a Y decombinator?) and you and your clone emerge from different exits, unaware of each others' existence. Both of you would still be on the run and worrying about being fingered for the crime.

Mind you I agree that the proposed outcome is considerably more unjust, but sadly it reflects all too well our hamfisted social approach to punishment.

I agree with you on this. By nature of being a clone, it would have the explicit memory of committing the crime due to the crime having been committed before the clone existed which makes it just as responsible and punishable as the original. The clone was a copied consciousness but it was not one that did nothing wrong.

To clarify, the clone did not commit the murder but the clone is a copy of an original that did so the clone committed the murder by proxy. If you make a copy of a counterfeit bill then does that make the copy any less illegal than the original counterfeit?

Furthermore, I'd argue that the opposite is true regarding the clone. If the clone existed before the commission of the crime then it would have not been the clone that committed the crime but just a being that happens to share all traits and links to the original, however, still capable of its own free will and thus not punishable for the crime of the original.

I really like those reviews micheal, but I wanted to comment on a point you made - about White Bear and White Christmas, there is a lot of very deep and interesting philosophy about what it means to be alive, and what it means to be someone. Parfit (there is an excellent profile of him in the New Yorker here: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/09/05/how-to-be-good) was a philosopher who tackled this issue and had some incredibly interesting thought experiments. You might enjoy it.

> "Entire History of You" kinda defeated its own point, if you ask me. His wife actually was unfaithful and he figured it out...The moral was, "Don't marry a cheating harlot", but that one's over 9000 years old.

I hear this point of view often from those who don't realize that people (even women!) are human and make mistakes. Sometimes everybody is better off when we can forget momentary transgressions, or perhaps even if the one partner never learns about the past mistakes of the other. The theme of the episode being that this can never happen due to this new technology.

The technology allowed him to confirm all of his already-existing suspicions. He'd already noticed that his wife was fawning all over the man that she was apparently really sorry about having slept with - a man who also had dumped her hard in the past and didn't really give much of a shit about her, going so far as to make a joke about their affair in front of her husband. I agree with Michael that following the logic of the episode the technology just sped up what was probably going to happen anyways. (There's also the fact that the main character probably gets obsessed for reasons involving his murky career failure.)

Not sure what you're implying with the "even women!" comment.

There's a more tragic example in the news today, which I was just discussing with my wife. A woman was shopping in a Walmart with her 2 year old son, and had a loaded handgun in her purse. She had a concealed carry permit and the gun was inside some sort of gun-safety purse which she had received for Christmas, which I presume is designed to prevent fingers accidentally catching in triggers and so on. Unfortunately her toddler reached into the purse, managed somehow to discharge the gun, and it killed the mom.

So we were wondering what do you tell the kid, and how, in a case like that when he gets older, because the psychological burden of having killed your own parent is pretty crushing. I was speculating that a few decades back, everyone might have agreed to bury the exact details and just write it up as an accidental discharge caused by the woman herself that would be just as tragic but not as disturbing for the kid, whereas today that simply isn't possible - at some point in the future the kid will consult a search engine to find out where his birth mother went (or to see what search engines say about him) and come across the facts of the situation, at which point he'll presumably have some sort of psychological crisis if he wasn't fully aware of them.

I'm not sure what the 'right' course is here. On the one hand we tend to assume that having more information is better than being deceived, but on the other Plato may have been right to suggest that society functions better thanks to the existence of a 'noble lie' - if we're constantly beset with evidence about how awful people are then it's hard to avoid falling into cynicism - arguably this is one of the big problems facing Western democracy at the moment. We know the danger in idealizing leaders and institutions and overlooking their actual shortcomings - that is, their capacity for acts which result in socially undesirable outcomes as opposed to some inherent flaw. By facing this, we can identify the circumstances which incentivize such acts and see that they might be emergent from systematic structures within which we operate, rather than being coordinated or planned by a malign central agency or guided by any overarching philosophy. On the other hand, we want out political representatives and institutions to operate effectively on our behalf, and if they keep collectively letting us down then there's a decline in our socioeconomic stability and ultimately our personal safety. We need to believe in the possibility of a higher ideal if we are not going to give up hope for the present. The tension between our rational apprehension of the a flawed social model and our idealistic wish for one within which we would enjoy a reasonable balance of freedom and security is both a strength and a weakness of our current social structures. If we have reached or breached the operational limitations of our democratic/republican (small d/r) models of governance, then what comes next? Proposals for widespread individual digital sovereignty do not sound so different from Hobbes' notion of 'the war of all against all.' I worry that we're headed into an era of craptastic social institutions that don't work well at all, and turbo-charged economic ones that work very well above a certain threshold but which involve an ever-increasing computational security burden to stave off incidental attacks.

/handwave

> "National Anthem" is brilliant but hard to evaluate for plausibility because the U.S. doesn't have the same class system. We have severe inequality, but no one would fault a U.S. President for choosing not to fuck a pig at the risk of Kim Kardashian or Paris Hilton.

In the UK, a member of the royal family would not be viewed as similar to "Kim Kardashian or Paris Hilton". It's better to think of it backwards "Who would have to be kidnapped to make the US President seriously consider fucing a pig for? OK just replace that person there." (e.g. what if the presidents daughter was kidnapped?)

RE: The Waldo Moment

Having seen the show and reading your reviews just made me realize what I do not like about the cartoon South Park. While I realize that Matt and Tre have had excellent resolutions in their show and have occasionally tackled issues in a daring and unique way, I feel as if the net effect was to lower the level of discourse to potty humour and political cynicism.

If you feel the objective is precisely to parody the situation and make fun of how absurd it is so on that note I'd say they've been wildly successful.

If you feel the objective is to create intellectual discourse on a situation then I don't think you're watching the same South Park that we are.

"The Waldo Moment" I found hilarious because I enjoy crass and obnoxious humor as much as anyone. That said, the ending wasn't plausible. People develop an immunity to that shit over time. It could unseat one political candidate, sure, but Waldo would lose its punch and its extortive capabilities. Mockery has power, for sure, but eventually people learn to tune it out. Not plausible to its full extent, but still poignant, and a bit funny for the sheer obnoxiousness ("breaching experiments") and stupidity of the Waldo character.

This is exactly what happened when Waldo defeats Gwendolyn but not Liam. Apparently his impact wasn't sufficient to sway the masses and/or the masses realized how ridiculous and impractical it would be to vote for a blue cartoon bear.