Professor: Jorge Martínez Lucena

Black Mirror 2.3 : “The Waldo Moment”

Jamie Slater is a former comedian who is now providing the voice to Waldo, a cartoon that interviews and humiliates people in a satiric TV program. Jack Napier is the producer of the program and decide to convert Waldo into a candidate for local MP in order to get a larger audience. The experiment becomes devastating for Jamie Slater but reveals a huge potential in the political field. Thereby, we see how media, technology, satire and entertainment can become tools of social and political manipulation.

Synopsis

To reduce politics to TV and spectacle implies adopting the logic of entertainment and therefore, falling into trivialization.

“I do not mean to imply that television news deliberately aims to deprive Americans of a coherent, contextual understanding of their world. I mean to say that when news is packaged as entertainment, that is the inevitable result. And in saying that the television news show entertains but does not inform, I am saying something far more serious than that we are being deprived of authentic information. I am saying we are losing our sense of what it means to be well informed.” (Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, 2006 : 107-108)

Politics and Entertainment

• True democratic politics are the anti-politics, which consist of criticizing politicians without making a constructive proposal, converting politicians and bankers into the scapegoats whose spectacular satire or imaginary sacrifice provide the audience with the cathartic feeling of doing the fair thing (Indignados, Wall Street Occupy, etc.)

• Indignation fades away into laughter and doesn’t find any constructive chance to engage. Thereby, the protest seems to remain sterile.

Politics and Its Critiques

The internet and the social networks favor a higher civic participation in political life.

BUT, at the same time, they also favor an entertaining, outraged and trivialized perspective on politics, which blurs the borders between public (rational) and private (affective), making room for sentimental discourse in the heart of politics.

Therefore, this higher technological participation can also result in a more or less unaware lower realism and the use of reasoning in the political sphere.

Democracy and Technology

Technology seems to spread the contrary of what it is promising:

“To be unaware that a technology comes equipped with a program for social change, to maintain that technology is neutral, to make the assumption that technology is always a friend to culture is, at this late hour, stupidity plain and simple.” (Postman, 2006: 157)

Total information associated with our new technologies doesn’t seem to be more than a myth (the myth of progress) that wouldn’t survive our rational inspection.

Nihilism and Technology

• New technologies seem to be a fitting tool for democracy. However, they attack democracy as well, because they trivializs politics (supposed transparency, entertainment and indignation) and spread nihilism (the idea according to which there is nothing beyond appearance) through entertainment and satire.

• If the public square is torn apart and amusing nihilism spreads, democracy converts into a mere method of government which is managed by those who dominate media. The question here is: who is the real Waldo’s stagehand?

• Therefore technology, when is managed by the before mentioned logics (transparency, entertainment and indignation), can be a lens through which the public can see anti-democratic facts as democratic ones and vice versa.

Power and Technology

• Question 1: In a democracy 2.0, i.e. in a world where people could vote directly on every political decision without the intervention of politicians thank to technological resources like the internet, would there be real democracy?

• Question 2: We tend to associate democracy with new technologies, transparency, progress, the freedom to criticize, etc. After what we have learnt watching this episode, does it still seem obvious that we can solve the political problems inherent to democracy using this same democracy?

Overdemocratization?