Smithereens - S5 E2 (Without pictures)

 Could Social Media Smash our Lives into Smithereens?

We have chosen to analyse the Black Mirror episode "Smithereens". We have chosen to take a closer look at this episode because it touches upon the risks of social media.

Chris Gillhaney (Andrew Scott), is a driver for an Uber-like service called Hitcher. He attends group therapy, where he apparently is grieving the loss of someone very close to him. Here he meets a woman called Hayley (Amanda Drew), who he sleeps with. Hayley has been unsuccessfully trying to log into her dead daughter's Persona-account. Every day Chris tries to pick up anyone who works for the social-media giant Smithereen. When he eventually does it’s Jaden Tommins (Damson Idris). Chris goes on to kidnap Jaden at gunpoint, demanding to speak with Smithereen-founder, Billy Bauer (Topher Grace). The police are alerted to the kidnapping, and force Chris into a standoff on a field. While Chris is held in the field by the police,
people at Smithereen are trying to figure out who Chris is, and why he wants to speak with Bauer. Chris apparently was a very active Smithereen-user some time ago, but suddenly all usage of the app stopped. When Chris eventually gets on a call with Bauer, he explains that he caused an accident that killed his fiancé by looking at Smithereen while driving. Jaden discovers during this phone call that Chris plans to kill himself when the call is over, and that he always planned to release him. This causes a struggle for the gun, which leads to a police sniper taking a shot at Chris, potentially killing him. The moral of the story is that even the best most well meant ideas can be corrupted and when this happens we shouldn’t blame the original creator but the ones who corrupted it.

The setting of the story is an altered version of London in 2018. The only physical difference separating this London from the real London is the Smithereen-building. And the other thing separating the world presented by Black Mirror and the real world is that a lot of presumably copyrighted app names are changed to other non-copyrighted app names.

Christopher Michael “Chris” Gillhaney is the main character of the episode. We start off the episode by seeing him, and we follow him throughout the episode, although we get glimpses into other parts of the world, getting information Chris doesn’t have yet. Every other character, be it Smithereen-COO Pernelope Wu, or police negotiator, Linda Grace, is purely there to act around Chris. The only two characters whom we get an insight into, besides Chris, are Billy Bauer and Jaden. Jaden is mostly nervous and panicking throughout the episode, though at the end of the standoff he has become empathetic to Chris after finding out his story. Billy Bauer is portrayed as scary and stoic by his employees, trying to prevent Chris from getting to him in fear of him being angry, but as soon as we meet Billy, he’s nothing but nice and empathetic, and really wants to help Chris.

Chris himself is a highly unstable individual, but he’s at least somewhat aware of that. He meditates, goes to grief counselling and is seen to be working on his mental health. Despite this awareness, he has made up a plot most would call insane, and he’s rehearsed it in his mind a million times, even preparing a speech for Billy Bauer. Throughout the episode we see a decline in Chris’s mental state, taking him from his calm and composed self in the beginning of the plot, to a crying mess repeating “This is my last day” [32:22]. When he finally speaks with Billy, he barely gets out the speech he has prepared. In the end, Chris’s wish to kill himself leads to a struggle for the gun, which in turn, may have gotten him killed. 

In the episode there is actually not a lot of unrealistic technology, if any. We see social networks that work very similarly to the Twitter and Facebook of our world. In fact, Smithereen seems to be based entirely on Twitter, as we see they share a lot of functionality, like the “Trending” tags that Chris uses to find out that the police think his gun is a fake. Billy Bauer seems to be a fictional version of Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, who famously keeps his technology at minimum. Twitter and Facebook both use the same tactics of providing users with dopamine-hits as we see Smithereen doing, to keep their users engaged.

The technology seems to be extremely addictive. It is revealed that they have a whole department, in the smithereens company, solely determined to make the app hard to quit and keep users engaged. In the ending we see a lot of strangers checking their phones, presumably reading about the outcome of the hostage situation, but none of them takes a second look. It seems that the news of the tragic event has just blended into their daily intake on the app and they just continue their day as usual. This could indicate that people have become so desensitized to violence and real life news that a presumably fatal police shootout is not enough for them to become interested. In the final scene we also see the CEO Bill Bauer sit down and continue his silent retreat as usual, as if nothing has changed. 

The central technology in the episode, we’d argue, is Smithereens incredible ability to collect data. During the entire episode they have the same as, or more information than law enforcement. By looking at Chris’s old inactive profile, they get access to things like Chris’s full name, his occupation, his age and even his intellect and income. This mirrors what we have seen with the Facebook-cambridge-analytica-scandal, where Facebook had been collecting and selling the personal data of millions of users to british ad-firm called Cambridge Analytica. This was a scandal that revealed to many people just how intrusive Facebook can be in their data collection. We would imagine that the events of the episode would have similar consequences for the Smithereen-company, as this might reveal the scope of their data-collection to the general public. Something that could be similarly mirrored would be Edward Snowden's reveal of the back-doors built into Google and Facebook by the NSA. The similarities here, is how eager tech-firms seem to be to share their information with law-enforcement. Both Google and Smithereen seem to provide the government with any and all data they ask for without even a warrant. 

In our view, nothing about the situation we see in Smithereens is unbelievable, or even futuristic. The technology is already there, to the point of most of the tech being blatant rip-offs of real-world-tech. The episode is driven by characters and in fact a single person questioning a system that brought him a lot of pain. The episode works, because we barely have to suspend our disbelief, which, in turn, is what makes it eerie.

So in conclusion it is very possible that something like this could happen or has already happend, seeing as we already have the necessary technologies.