said that "Black Mirror" EP2 "Fifth Million Merits" is a prophecy or fable about human society, I am afraid it is not an exaggeration. The social picture it presents is exactly the logical extension or deduction of our current popular culture. Walls and mirrors have become screens, and various images form the basic living environment space for humans. Humans have gone through the era of image reading and entered the era of interactive imaging. Of course, you still need to work-on a bike-earn points (virtual currency) to buy necessities and leisure (various TV entertainment programs), or, admission tickets to the talent show.
This is a tedious, colorful and colorful era. You have many choices, but the only choice is the video channel. In such a beautiful new world, human beings are happy and orderly, but everyone is an atomized one-dimensional person. People rarely communicate. They are keen to interact with various entertainment programs. "We have become a world of entertainment. Dead species". Interactive entertainment shows become the new totalitarian ruler. Commodity fetishism evolved into entertainment image fetishism.
Ardorno had long been worried about such a technological utopia. He went upstream and traced back a long way. In the book "The Dialectics of Enlightenment" (co-authored with Horkheimer), he believes that with the realization of enlightenment, mankind has become increasingly Realization, deepening the control of the external nature, but also destroying the internal nature that controls the rational subject itself to the same extent, and the true content of human beings in accordance with the human nature has also been lost with the development of high industrialization. It can be seen that while enlightenment liberates people from the oppression of external nature, it also makes people's internal nature enslaved by rationality, technological settings, and organizational management. Material life and spiritual life have been assimilated into the existing system. The society's manipulation of individual consciousness and subconsciousness is far greater than in previous times. This kind of control is mainly achieved not through violence, but by ideology, that is, through the cultural industry (or popular culture) constituted by technology, instrumental rationality and the principle of consumerism. The cultural industry, as an entertainment industry that relies on modern technology to replicate and disseminate cultural products on a large scale, manipulates non-spontaneous and materialized false culture, becomes a tool to restrain consciousness and an accomplice of authoritarianism, and deceives in a more subtle and concealed manner than before. And enslaving the masses has entered the stage of mass ignorance-Enlightenment has gone to its opposite side today.
Obviously Aldono believes that since mankind opened the door to reason, it has laid the groundwork for technology to enslave mankind in turn.
Marcuse, another heavyweight theorist in West Malaysia, holds basically the same position.
He pointed out that in modern society, people follow the media and public propaganda to relax, entertain, act and consume, and love or hate what others love or hate. These are all false demands. However, people's real needs for freedom, liberation, and love have been alienated, diluted, suppressed and eliminated. Human individuality has been involuntarily identified by society, domesticated and manipulated by society. The development of the media dominates the psychological consciousness of the masses. People lose the ability to judge independently, lose the ability to deny criticism, lose the ability to face their real needs soberly, and lose the ability to stick to their true personality. The advanced industrial society has successfully suppressed the negative, critical, and transcendental dimensions in people’s hearts, making this society a one-dimensional society, and the people living in it have become one-dimensional people. Lost freedom and creativity, and no longer imagine or pursue another life different from real life.
French scholar Althusser put forward the concept of ideological state apparatus in his famous article "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatus". And made such a judgment: ideology is a kind of appearance, in this kind of appearance, the relationship between the individual and his actual living condition is an imaginary relationship.
We can find that entertainment is actually the ideological code of the new era. Of course, it can also be said that instrumental rationality and popular culture have given birth to such ideology. It is an ideology without words, and it is more powerful because it has no words. It replaces concepts with images, expels logic and meaning, and dwarfs everyone. TV has become the soma in "Brave New World". The audience is treated with wonderful entertainment programs and smiles and forgets their worries. It is like a king on the sofa who has been given a happy magic, but at the same time, it is also in this imaginary relationship. Enslaved in an orderly manner. And "existence is reasonable" and "belief without faith" in reality is regarded as Zhengshuo. It is the ideological state machine of the entertainment industry that reproduces the relations of production-entertainment allows you to ride a bicycle willingly and entertain you to death in a beautiful new world.
"What people should feel painful is not that they use laughter instead of thinking, but that they don't know why they laugh and why they no longer think." This is the portrayal of the cyclists next to Bing.
Althusser also proposed the concept of "inquiry": ideology recruits subjects from individuals (it recruits all individuals), or transforms individuals into subjects (it transforms all individuals). The "are you ready?" commonly used by entertainment show hosts can be understood to some extent as such an inquiry. It allows you to join in and automatically find your own coordinates.
In his angry youth work "Entertainment to Death", American Bozeman analyzed the current mass culture (mainly entertainment) and its communication effects, and came to his famous conclusion: There are two ways to wither culture. One is Orwellian—culture becomes a prison, and the other is Huxley—culture becomes a comical.
Through a brief review of West Malaysia and other theories, we can find that the social picture shown in "Black Mirror" ep2 is exactly the textbook-like illustration of the critical theory of popular culture. Enlightenment rationality-technology supremacy-entertainment domination has become an inevitable historical development. logic. In the end, instrumental rationality expelled reality and value. Mankind has lost the richness and integrity of its own experience, and has become flattened day by day. Memory is just a bunch of discrete image fragments, and life has become the most beautiful nightmare.
We can also notice that all the scene spaces in "Black Mirror" ep2 are closed-people can never see the outside-its metaphor is self-evident. The world is an iron house in which Plato lives The caveman-the caveman sees himself from the shadow cast by the firelight on the rock wall, while the man in "Black Mirror" ep2 locates and plots himself from the corresponding cartoon man in the auditorium of the interactive entertainment program on the screen.
Cycling is the screenwriter’s most ingenious design. Faced with an electronic screen that can be changed autonomously, you can’t tell whether you are playing games, exercising, or working (earning work points). With a superb ideological disguise technique-it smeared itself with a changeable facial makeup, and it is difficult to recognize its true face. If the slogan posted in "Animal Farm" is "Slavery is Freedom", then the ideological explanatory discourse reflected by "cycling" here is "Work is fitness, work is game." The
complete result is an equal world. It does not exist, nor does it conform to the true principle of justice (see Rawls' "A Theory of Justice"). Under the condition of equal opportunity, those who contribute more should get more. The society should allow people to move in a reasonable and orderly manner among all classes, and find a suitable position based on their abilities.
The talent show undoubtedly provides such a public platform. It has been given the functions of traditional social civil service examinations, college entrance examinations or civil service selection examinations. In the new ideological value system, "talent changes destiny" is undoubtedly the slogan and inspirational words recognized by the public. Because the draft is open, fair, and fair.
First, the program was broadcast live, and the public participated widely and democratically selected. Under the condition of equal pay for equal work, it is undoubtedly fair to get admission tickets with the same work points of 15 million. Of course, there are also "accidental factors" that cannot be ruled out after entering the venue-the tastes of the primary candidates and the "type" required by the program (it even favors ethnic minorities and innocent types, achieving political correctness).
Because of this, bing is no exception. When he heard the heroine's singing, he resolutely took out his points to buy her admission tickets for the talent show. In fact, Bing is not completely enamoured of the system. He yearns for nature. When riding a bicycle, the picture on the front electronic screen is a rural road. This implies a certain primitive yearning dormant in his subconscious. When the heroine performed successfully, but was sent to another AV entertainment show by the judges and the audience, Bing was finally extremely angry. He decided to declare war on the system alone, defend his inner truth, and prepare to explode this by broadcasting his own death. Iron House-a happy prison built by human beings to detain themselves.
This anachronistic Don Quixote, with his undiminished personal life experience and independent will, he does not even have armor or a spear, only a piece of glass and a declaration. After a few months of cycling, he earned enough to enter the venue. After the fee, he set off.
On the stage, he vented his resentment madly, denounced the system, and took out the prepared broken glass in an attempt to bloody the stage, using his own life as an egg to smash the wall of the system, but the most sensational. An astonishing thing happened. The judges and the audience were overwhelmed by his "performance", and the judges offered to give him a commentary program of his own! Facing the temptation to break out of the bottom of life, he slumped to give up the confrontation with the system (the defense of righteousness has been in vain, and the gain of profit is in sight), accepted the move in the fierce battle, and bowed his head to the court (of course, converted to another One expression is that "opinion leaders are treated as guests, opened their own critical column, and are given full right to speak).
We can see that the system here is more like a black hole than what Haruki Murakami calls a "wall". Any throw to it will increase its mass, increase its adsorption power, and make it stronger. It absorbs and tolerates everything, including resistance. It does not ban you angrily, but enthusiastically appreciates you, reinterprets and interprets you with the utmost kindness, embraces you with open arms, and treats your blasphemy as a self-confession. You just "played" a rebel ( Performance art), the ink you spilled becomes a work of art to be appreciated, and is framed. In this post-modern context, your struggle can only become a newly added landscape. The resistance was immediately dispelled and reproduced as entertainment products. You are covered in bruises and it is still unbreakable, the system is a beloved father with a nod and a smile, you are just an ignorant boy with an Oedipus complex.
And isn't this ideology and system that "we" chose and realized by ourselves? Moreover, under this system (especially on the draft platform), democracy, freedom, justice, equality, and even fraternity, all of the most beautiful slogans of mankind have been realized, what else?
But something seems to be wrong, what is going on? The last thing left in the series is a deep confusion about the post-democratic era.
And maybe we can start with that little paper origami penguin to find the answer, and it can give us some enlightenment to see what is missing in this new world...
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