[spoilers for the Black Mirror episode 'The Entire History of You' below]
I recently started watching Black Mirror on Netflix (it first appeared on Channel 4 in December 2011, so I'm a little late to the party). If you haven't seen/heard of it, I recommend you go check it out. I have only watched the first series (three episodes) so far, but what I have seen has made for compelling viewing. Every episode of Charlie Brooker's marvellous creation is a self-contained story, each with its own individual cast, featuring some technological advance or another and how its abuse is impacting society. The format of the show is reason enough to give it a try as you can watch one episode without taking on an obligation to watch the entire series.
The third episode of the first series is my favourite. It is titled 'The Entire History of You' and explores the concept I outlined at the beginning of this post: being able to watch your memories over again with perfect clarity. In Black Mirror, the technology which enables this is called a 'grain', a small memory chip located behind a person's ear which hooks up to the brain and the eyes. This enables the characters of the story to playback their memories in front of their own eyes or on any screen in their homes, a process they call a "re-do."
The plot which displays the technology is a very straight forward one: a jealous lover, under work-related stress, becomes obsessed with his partner's ex because he thinks something is still going on between them. The difference is that the main protagonist, Liam, is able to use his re-dos throughout the episode to highlight to his wife, Ffion, why he has his suspicions regarding her relationship with her old flame, Jonas.
The technology has some really interesting features. Liam gets into his car drunk at one point and his grain actually intervenes, warning him that he is not in the right physical state to drive (a warning he duly ignores). Everything is automatically recorded, but people can delete any re-do they choose to prevent it from being played back, though the memory itself remains. Getting blind drunk also doesn't impinge on the grain's performance, handy for whenever you need to remember that embarrassing moment from the night before. Liam and Jonas have a confrontation which Liam needs to watch as a re-do - after he wakes up inside his crashed car - because he can't remember exactly what happened.
Liam using his grain in Black Mirror to cycle through his memories. Source: radiotimes.com.
At one point, Liam even utilizes a lip reading reconstruction tool to make out what Ffion and Jonas are saying to each other from across a a friend's living room (they had yet to realise that Liam had arrived at the party). So even though he couldn't have possibly known what they said to each other from where he was - with his initial re-do earlier in the episode confirming this - he is able to figure it out thanks to a zoom in function and probably the greatest fictional lip reading reconstruction tool known to man (neither of them were even facing him, it was crazy).
Being able to playback one's memory on a screen to another person isn't as strange as it first sounds considering that's what people generally do everyday on social media when they post stories or share videos and photographs of their daily lives. Using these re-dos to solve disagreements and misunderstandings would take things a step further, and the existence of such technology in reality would open up several questions as to how it could be applied ethically in society, for example in law enforcement.
A person's memory alone wouldn't be considered a defining piece of evidence in a courtroom. Their account of events would be taken into consideration, but what if it was backed up by a visual recording provided by a grain? And if re-dos were considered admissible in a court of law, where would evidence gathering stop and the arresting of a suspect begin? Would it be okay, for example, for a police officer to arrest any John Doe they thought could have committed the crime and force them to playback their memories in order to prove their innocence?
Then, there is the fact that mankind tends to become reliant upon any new major technology it comes up with. Like the way we depend almost entirely on the internet and our mobile phones to conduct day-to-day business, it is worth noting how people in this episode rely heavily on their grains. One character in the show tells the story of how she had her grain violently removed and that she now prefers to remain "grain-less." Another responded with, "I'm sorry, it's just...I couldn't do it," much in the same way a regular drinker might respond to a teetotaller they've bumped into on a Saturday night.
Questions of trust would also find themselves being tested with requests for re-do evidence to back them up. This occurred in the climax of 'The Entire History of You' as Liam caught Ffion altering the truth about her relationship with Jonas on two occasions. Even if one deletes their potentially incriminating re-do, the blank gap shows up in their timeline, which would only invite more questions from an already suspicious mind.
Robert Downey Jr. won the 'The Entire History of You' film rights in 2013 but nothing has been heard about the project since. Source: independent.co.uk/thefilmstage.com.
In a world where secrets are harder to keep, where everything is loud and one's mind perhaps offers a rare form of refuge and quiet, the idea of such a technology existing is, frankly, terrifying. For somebody like me, who can sometimes be unnecessarily over analytical in the aftermath of a conversation, it would be a nightmare: I could easily imagine myself spending hours pouring over re-dos of some insignificant interaction with a person I will never see again because of the twitch of an eyebrow.
We could take this argument the other way and say that too much time inside one's own mind can be a dangerous thing when a person's mental health isn't at its best. Take Liam. While he may have ultimately been right about his wife's infidelity, he seemed to be a person of a paranoid, jealous disposition to begin with.
Ffion had last slept with Jonas during a period where Liam disappeared for five days because he was struggling to come to terms with another of his wife's past dalliances. Even if the whole thing had just been going on inside Liam's head, if she had never slept with Jonas, he would have dwelled on it anyway and made it into something it wasn't because of the technology at his disposal. He might even have done it without the technology.
For all the negatives, there are undeniably some positives to the concept. For example, if I had the power to choose any memory of mine to revisit, I know exactly which one I would select: Glasgow, October 2001, the one and only time my dad and I visited Parkhead together to watch Celtic play. Or maybe I would go back to the one time I know he saw me play football, some random training session with my first team, Grange Abbey, in Donaghmede Park when I was a kid.
I always find it's the memories you want to keep that are the hardest to hold onto, so a grain would be useful in that sense. On the whole, the idea of this grain technology as science fiction is fantastic, but in reality, I'm glad it doesn't exist, despite its potential benefits. People should live life now, not stuck in some infinite loop inside their own minds (or on their phones, as the case often seems to be in real life).
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