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George Orwell's Black Mirror

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Written by English satirist Charlie Brooker, “Black Mirror” is a contemporary British reworking of Rod Serling’s “The Twilight Zone.” Featuring tales of techno-paranoia inspired by our thoroughly technological age, “Black Mirror” taps into a “collective unease with the modern world.” While the Netflix television series, like many works of science fiction, centers on the dangers of technology—the “black mirrors” that are our phone and computer screens—its warnings diverge drastically from those present in canonical mid-20th century works, like George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, man uses technology to oppress others. In “Black Mirror,” man uses technology to enslave himself.
In Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, …show more content…

In George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, oppression is the jail that imprisons man—and technology is its warden. “For Orwell,” writes comparative literature professor John Frodsham, “Nature was essentially good and technology essentially evil. Technology in Nineteen Eighty-Four is used to enslave men, not liberate them. The telescreen, the speakwrite, the helicopter…the book-writing machine on which Julia labors, and all the rest of the technological paraphernalia of the novel exist only to aggrandize the power of the state and violate human nature.”
In a genre whose name ostensibly welcomes innovation—science fiction—resistance towards technology may initially seem counterintuitive. This, however, is where it is essential to delve into the annals of history. Writers, after all, write what they know. In an 1948 essay, George Orwell wrote, “When you are on a sinking ship, your thoughts will be about sinking …show more content…

Barnstorm cites his own struggles with the black mirror that is technology, writing, “[Technology] turned out to be a bargain with the high-tech devil. This technology of writing has destroyed my ability to write, unless I employ its aid in circumventing the damage that it caused. And yet there is an undeniable thrill, a science fiction futurosity, in the fact that despite my disability technology has made it possible for me to be able to speak these words into text. I had become a cyborg, as dependent on the machine with which I danced in electronic symbiosis as a flower to the pollinating

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