I don’t need to tell anyone just how terrifying the realities in these two Black Mirror episodes are. The concept of eternity in these episodes spooks me the most. In San Junipero, your entire life is eternal once you pass over. Eternal life is a concept that is riddled with philosophical dilemmas like how to feel fulfilled with your daily life after 1000 years or just about any aspect off life that you can think of. Everything we do is motivated by our fear of death, so what would people in San Junepiro REALLY be doing? I think they would all be psychotic eventually.

This is just an example of an extreme feat that technology presents to the human identity and condition. Both San Junepiro and The Grain rewrite what the expectation of being human in normal society is. For example, forgetting the right things is how our brains make abstract thoughts, but with a Grain, that is not possible, so you will get obsessed over all the wrong details, like in the episode. Another example, Hallam gets ignored by the police when she is reporting the assault because she doesn’t have a grain feed to show them. They obviously make some kind of personal judgement, and chose to ignore her. They now don’t know how to trust people because they have outdated the need with technology. This is the kind of danger that many different technologies present. They irreversibly change the way we interact and in doing so atrophy the parts of ourselves that we have subjugated to a technology outside.

It seems to me that the debate is one of self-confidence. Do we really need to replace our humanity with advanced technology at such an alarmingly fast pace? Maybe it is wiser to look inward and try to bring ourselves as a species upward along side the tools we use? Only time will tell I guess. Maybe it will be awesome when we are all robots 😛