The episode of Arkangel in Black Mirror stood out as a tall and loud archetype to arrest my attention when it comes to privacy violation.
Coming from a generation where parents tend to participate in their kids’ life quite enthusiastically, there are some that go overboard. So when technology gives them a way to exercise that intent without much thought to the repercussions, the world turns ugly.
The episode takes us to a time where a mere chip implant into a child’s body can allow his/her parents to have a full access to the child’s visual and other physiological insights (not to mention the process can be carried out when the child in question is immature and consequently ignorant of what’s being done to them, so the issue of consent is highly debatable).
The parent can keep a track of the child’s visuals he is subjected to throughout the day in absence of the former, censor them to their will if they happen to excite the child’s adrenaline rush, alert them of a potentially emergent situation. All of this might come across protective parenting at first glance, but there’s a lot to unfurl. And it’s equally important to grasp the complimentary hazardous aspects of it that otherwise are seemingly innocuous.
It fosters voyeurism in parents, that gets irrevocable after a point. That in turn intensifies their urge to take absolute control over their kids’ lives. All of this come without any baggage of guilt since their parental pedestal makes them believe they’re doing no wrong in saving their children from the big bad world.
Their is no straight up communication between the parent and the child to eradicate the core issues the latter’s been dealing with, since the parent employs his/her supervision through an unfair and a prodding method which in turn can’t be revealed to the kid who might turn violent with the knowledge about his privacy being violated. So there is a deep seated recognition of the flawed working.
The blurring out of certain hazardous visuals snatch away from the child real life experiences that is necessary at some point to shape out moral perspectives.
Since they are deprived of chalking out wrong from the right through corrective supervision, the kid develops psychological issues that lead them to invent even more dangerous methods to unravel the reality (i.e. self harm to see oozing blood ).
It’s a known fact that some things are better left unheard and unseen so when a parent has an access to every detail of their child’s life, the knowledge sometimes can go down the wrong foot. It induces immense amount of unhealthy obsession in the parent from the knowledge of the kid’s activities.
The final disability of the power to supervise over leads to an inevitable destruction, or insanity in some cases.
It is therefore imperative that we be aware of the crossroads, if at any point, that’s likely enough, technology introduces us to such authority. What’s worrying is despite all the drawbacks that shout to us on our faces, we have an innate adaptive nature where we tend to accept and adapt to every change that comes our way. For instance, till two decades ago, a Black Mirror episode on smartphones would have induced the same amount of fear in the people that we have today about chip implants, but the same people today are our parents and grandparents and they do use smartphones, thereby accommodating to the hitches smartphones bring along. Chip implants might have the same execution, only this time the consequences would be more deep rooted and with compounded ill consequences.
Sonia Singh 