"Arkangel"

Warning: This blog contains minor spoilers.

The new season of Black Mirror had me giddy with excitement - so much so, that I wrote my entire first paper of this semester on Charlie Brooker’s genius. While all episodes of Season 4 were both thrilling and haunting, Arkangel struck a chord in me which I was not expecting. As mentioned in my other blog posts, my family household was always relatively liberal. My parents gave us freedom which was relative to our maturity. Obviously they attempted to keep us innocent and undamaged, but by the time Reuben was 7, we had been exposed to swearing and inappropriate media via his discovery of Google, random internet searches, and the older playground crowd. Arkangel highlights the pros and cons of censorship, the protection of young children from the ugly sights of the world until old enough to handle them.

The episode is about a young mother, Marie, and her relationship with her daughter, Sara. After losing Sara in a park, Marie decides to use a new form of technology to track her. Arkangel is a system which monitors location, medical statistics, visual and auditory stimulus of a human. It allows for the censorship of this material as a way to protect the child from “harm”. However, as the episode plays out, it is clear how this technology both prevent and destroy the “protection” it sets out to provide. The question that Brooker asks his audience is how far should we protect our children?

The terrifying thing about the Arkangel technology is first, its existence in today’s society and second, the horrifying consequences that Brooker plots in this episode. We are so close to using similar technology on children, and all it would take is a few “helicopter parents” to put it into full use. Think of Snapchat, our beloved app which was originally used for sending pictures which would last ten seconds before disappearing into non-existence. Now think about its evolution since its creation: videos, the “best friends” feature, stories, replay, geofilters, live-feeds, money wiring, location sharing. This app you used to use to send ugly selfies to your friends or nudes to your significant other(s) is now able to track your every move. Many of the updates Snapchat has introduced have not been optional, and in order to continue using the app, have to have been downloaded. This has us asking the question, if something as simple as Snapchat can infringe on so many privacy rights without us raising too many questions, how quickly could something a lot more powerful come to control our lives?

As well as protecting its main character from exposure to the ugly sights of the world, Arkangel plays out a teenager’s worst nightmare as it strips Sara of her privacy. Imagine how you would feel if you knew that your parents were watching you drink, do drugs, have sex, or talk about them? Sure, these are common things for a teenager to do, but not things that we want our parents to see, or that our parents necessarily want to see. This begs the question, why would they continue to watch? I believe that this can be answered by a combination of factors: concern for safety, general nosiness about cultural shifts, and finally the desire to be at one with and understand one’s own child. We watch as Marie becomes addicted to watching her daughter’s every move, and like a train crash you cannot look away from, as she destroys her relationship with Sara.

To what extent should children be subjected to censorship and parental controls? In my opinion, they shouldn’t. Protection in this way is like depriving them of an emotional immune system, so that by the time they are 18, they cannot protect themselves. The cliche laissez-faire saying that “rules were made to be broken” rings loud and true throughout this episode of Black Mirror. So we should be able to break them, without breaking our parents’ hearts.