USS Callister

[psocoptera]

Watched the Hugo Dramatic Short-nominated Black Mirror episode USS Callister. Good stuff, tense and clever. Got me thinking about [spoilers] other similar stories, and whether you can say anything about their variations. Like, way back in "I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream" (which USS Callister is referencing with the facelessness torture, and, btw, won the Short Story Hugo in 1968), we don't exactly have the virtuality aspect yet (as I recall); the humans are real live embodied people living inside the giant computer that's torturing them. In Vernor Vinge's "The Cookie Monster" (which won the Novella Hugo in 2004), the scanned/uploaded humans are being exploited for profit but not tortured. In the 1990 TNG episode "Hollow Pursuits", Barclay's power fantasies mostly operate by altering nonsentient copies of people (although we've already seen the Holodeck create a sentient virtual character, as I recall it's pretty clear in the episode that these ones aren't). So in 2017 we get a story where it is torture after all, but it's not computers who want to do that, it's the Barclays, and they're more interested in torture than profit. (You could imagine the episode going in the "Cookie Monster" direction, where after she gushes about how brilliant his code is, she wakes up in a little virtual sweatshop where every good coder he's ever come across is working for him, but in fact he doesn't seem to care about such things at all.) Which, like... I don't remember what I thought about people's appetite for cruelty back in 1990 or 2004, and I don't know what the culture in general was thinking about it then either. But to go back to those two late-60s stories, Star Trek and I Have No Mouth, and to say, no, look, this is not going to be heroic humans vs evil computers, the cruelty is coming from inside the house... feels timely, is all. And yet there's something about the inability to *alter* them that I think goes beyond just the demands of the plot... like in 2004 or 2017 we think of identities as less malleable than we did in 1968 or 1990, things can be done *to* copies but their selves can't just be trivially changed.

Comments

[glynhogen]

Since I am kind of in a mood to hack at fiction with archival theory...one niche reading of the inability to alter the copies could reflect the concept that there is no such thing as a digital "original" and all copies are equally true and valid. (Which, obviously, does not address the fact that the characters are not, in fact, born digital, but have been digitized; but it does come down on the side of authenticity deriving firmly from provenance, with migration/alteration/corruption a side issue, e.g. nobody doubts that the women transformed into monsters are still themselves.)