I’m re-posting two items from another blog of mine, Read the Writing on the Wall, that I’m letting expire. The “subtitle” of the blog was “cultural and other warnings and heads-ups…Be(A)ware…” and it was headed by this picture:

Here’s the first post, dated 1-31-15, on our relationship with technology:

The New York Times just published an article about “Black Mirror,” a fascinating, if dark, British TV series you can watch on Netflix about our individual and societal relationship with technology. As the article, by Jenna Wortham, says, “Each episode of ‘Black Mirror’ — named for the way our screens look while powered down — paints a different nightmarescape of a future gone technologically awry.” Or, I would say, of a society not so far in the future that’s allowed technology via capitalism to twist it morally and emotionally. It’s already happening, of course — just not in exactly the same ways depicted on the show.

“When it comes to weaving technology into its story lines,” the article continues, “Hollywood tends to take an unimaginative path of least resistance. Some films imagine a world so fallen and far gone, as a result of technological excess, that it’s rendered unrecognizable, as in ‘Elysium,’ ‘Gattaca,’ ‘The Final Cut,’ or ‘Wall-E.’ Others rely on technology only as a backdrop or as a means of dazzling audiences with new gadgetry: ‘Interstellar’ (space travel), ‘Looper’ (time travel), and ‘Lucy’ (telekinesis and teleportation). Hollywood offers little between the horror of dystopia and the wonder of a trip to Q’s laboratory.

This problem persists in movies that are set on a more human scale and that actually imagine the near future of consumer technologies. ‘Her,’ for example, the sweet romantic comedy about a lonely man falling in love with his operating system, focuses more on the male protagonist’s inability to connect with other humans than the implications of unleashing such powerful programs on the world. Similarly, ‘Silicon Valley,’ Mike Judge’s comedy series on HBO, makes caricatures out of entrepreneurs and venture capitalists but not their comically arcane creation, a video-compression algorithm.

Occasionally, of course, Hollywood does dig deeper. ‘Blade Runner,’ ‘Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,’ ‘The Matrix,’ and ‘Battlestar Galactica’ all stand out as excellent cautionary tales about the way humans can lose control over their inventions. But each is at least a decade old. It’s as if film producers caught a prophetic glimpse of the rise of Facebook and Snapchat and iDevices and realized that lecturing audiences about the perils of wasting time online wouldn’t be huge box-office draws.” An exception, which I’m adding today (9-7-15) would be “Ex Machina,” a more recent film, which suggests that android robots, created to serve us, sexually and otherwise, could make a break for freedom and take over “our” world.

The Times article concludes: “‘Black Mirror,’ equal parts horror and wonder, looks like a future we might actually inhabit, making the show a lot more effective as a critique of the tech industry’s trajectory — one that might make you think twice about which devices you buy and which services you use.” As in the ‘real’ world, “the gadgets shown look sleek enough to want, even as we see them used in horrifying ways.”