I just finished watching an episode of the British show “Black Mirror” and it was so thought provoking that I thought I would share some of those thoughts with you nice people.
I will try to be brief. The episode takes place in a future where everyone has a “grain”, which is a little chip implant behind your right ear that stores all your memories and lets you review them or delete them whenever you like.
The plot revolves about a man who, after seeing how his wife interacts with a fellow named Jonas at a (godawful) cocktail party becomes consumed with jealousy and suspicion and goes down a fairly typical path of drinking, getting angrier and angrier, and finally confronts Jonas in a drunken rage and makes Jonas delete all the grain memories he has of his wife under threat of violence.
The twist is that it turns out the guy’s suspicions were well founded. Turns out that not only did his wife fuck Jonas back in the days before our protagonist met her, but she fucked him again, in the marital bed our hero sleeps in with his wife, and they didn’t even use a condom, and whoops, turns out Jonas is the real father of their 18 month old baby.
It’s an effective twist because I totally did not see that coming. I thought this was all going to end with him murdering his wife out of the bitter male jealousy that kills a lot of women every year. I had nothing but contempt for this guy up until that point.
But after that, while I don’t share straight people’s rather extreme attitudes towards monogamy, I certainly could understand how our hero might feel a tad betrayed.
That’s no mere cuckolding. That’s cuckooing. [1]
And along the way, the episode touches on some interesting aspects of the technology. There’s a character who had her grain stolen, gouged right out of her head, to presumably be sold to some rich pervert who wanted her sexual memories. In order to get on a plane, the protagonist must have the last 24 hours of his memories scanned to make sure he hasn’t stuck a bomb in his suitcase or whatever. In order to keep his job at a big law firm, the protagonist has to subject his memories to a two year review.
They even mention handling cases where adult children sue their parents over emotional neglect and so on during their childhoods, which presumably they can prove by showing the memories in court.
That is a concept I find equally horrifying (what a fucked up self-devouring way that would be to try to live a life!) and exultantly just (hey guess what? ACCOUNTABILITY!).
But I would not want a grain of my own. Sure, if I had one, I might be less absentminded, but probably not. After all, you still have to remember you have something to remember, and the technology wouldn’t help with that. It’s pretty much just video.
More than that, though, I simply don’t want that much memory at my disposal. I already feel like I remember too much of my past hurts and traumas. That high powered, high def memory of mine keeps them crisp and fresh in Ultra HD in my mind.
With every second of my life at my disposal, I would never be able to get over anything. I have mentioned before how I think high def memory makes it hard to fully process traumatic events because to even tangentially think about them is to bring them back in such vivid detail it’s almost like they are happening again.
I am grateful that in my case, that’s as far as it goes. I have never had a full on flashback and I hope I never do, My sense of reality in the here and now is shaky enough without having memories recur.
So no grain for me, please. That would only make things worse.
I wonder what teaching would be like in such a world. I can only imagine that it would be deeply unrewarding because the students would know they only had to pay a minimal amount of attention in order to have the whole lecture available to them at a moment’s notice. That would not be the same as learning it – any more than having a series of lectures on DVD teaches you. You would have to go through and pay attention and take notes at some point to actually learn it.
That’s the advantage, in science fiction writing, of a technology that merely records the sensory inputs from the person. That’s a big enough kettle of fish to deal with without dealing with the recording of emotions, thoughts, associations, ideas, and so on.
But the fact that these memories are stored in a file-like form that can be access by others in some form (even if it’s just on a screen), brings up the intriguing possibility of truly seeing the world through someone else’s eyes. And ears, and skin, and so on.
And yup, the episode made it clear that this includes sexual feelings too. So right there you have a huge amount of demand built in.
And what about fictional scenarios? If you can load memories that aren’t your own, who says those memories can’t be created artificially so that you can experience doing things that aren’t even physically possible in the real world.
Surf marshmallow clouds over a valley filled with unicorns and manticores. Give a stirring and passionate speech about human rights to assembled heads of state. Punch Cthulhu in the taint. Anything is possible!
And of course, it need not be passive either. It could be fully interactive, like those old CD-ROM games, or even like modern video games.
And all realer than real, baby!
Actually, maybe we’re better off without that, says the guy who spend 10 of the last 24 hours playing video games.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.
- For those of you who do not know, the cuckoo lays its eggs in the nests of other birds, who then do all the work of incubating and hatching the thing, and most of the time even raise it as one of their own until it leaves the nest and finds the other cuckoos. In other words, that bird is a fucking asshole.↵