Latent Memory, Responsibility and the Architecture of Interaction

Abstract

“You know what I mean, out here in the real world you can genuinely prevent stuff, can’t you?” junior detective Blue Coulson (Faye Marsay) explains when Chief Inspector Karin Parke (Kelly Macdonald) asks her why she switched from the digital forensics department. Yet this episode of Black Mirror—Hated in the Nation, the sixth and final episode of season three—reveals the difficulty of prevention in both the “real world” and the digital realm, as well as the complex entanglements, dependencies and differentiations between them. The episode’s intricate plot revolves around the hashtag #deathto, the use of which online causes deaths executed by bee-size drones in the real world. While Hated in the Nation, in classic Black Mirror style, is set in an eerily recognisable future, the 2018 interactive film Bandersnatch is explicitly temporally situated in the infamous Orwellian year of 1984, and is presented throughout as a period piece, with only minor jumps to a twenty-first century present in some of the story paths. However, like Hated in the Nation, Bandersnatch engages with questions of control and the intricate interlacing of virtual and physical worlds. Here those questions are coupled with issues pertaining to temporality and parallel realities and embedded in a story of trauma and mental health, while also providing a metalevel that draws on the “choose your own adventure” genre as a precursor to interactive storytelling. This chapter brings together these two episodes of Black Mirror in a reading that focuses on conflations of materiality and temporality, and on the consequences of those conflations for notions of agency, responsibility and memory.