Modern life challenges us all in ways we never even considered when we were kids.

For instance, I remember my parents allowing me to ride the bus around New York City by myself when I was just a young kid.

These days, if I had been on sent by my parents alone to ride the bus and anything had happened to me, my parents would have been arrested for neglect (or after just one high profile televised incident, legislators would be tripping over each other to propose new legislation criminalizing this terrible permissiveness).

But, I remember at the time feeling a great sense of happiness and independence at the time.

A common mistake people make when watching Black Mirror is assuming that it is intended as a cautionary tale about a likely technology-driven dystopian future when the show almost always about the choices we are making now (the technology helps to create the illusion of distance).

The ArkAngel episode of Black Mirror is really about America’s embrace and Faustian bargains with the politics of fear.

In short, ArkAngel is about the perverse consequences of our societal obsession with safety at all costs and this is certainly true of American parenting.

GPS devices are being used to constantly monitor our kids, If you type “GPS Tracker for Kids” into Google you will see what I mean and it won’t be long at all before parents agree to implant GPS devices to ensure 24/7 surveillance is possible.

Don’t believe me? Read this:

“At least twice a day, a parent calls BrickHouse Security, a Midtown salon of surveillance, with the same question: Is it possible to implant a tracking microchip in their kids? “If we don’t get a call a day,” the company’s CEO Todd Morris told the Observer with a chuckle, “I’ll probably think our phone system’s broken.”

I am sure I am not the template of how a kid should be raised, but I do know that the good things about me were learned through experimentation and experience.

But, as I will talk more about later, I don’t think ArkAngel is really just about kids. This call to technology to protect and monitor us isn’t limited to kids.

In fact, as Professor Rosalyn Bern has suggested, we are currently in a process of redefining humanity in relationship to how much technology is part of who we literally are:

“Technology is challenging our notions of being human. Indeed; we are living in the midst of another biotechnology revolution, where humans and technology are beginning to merge at the bodily level. Given the transformative and rapidly evolving nature of this revolution, our socio-cultural reality is in flux. As technologies increasingly become more deeply a part of our lives and bodies, there’s a lot at stake in having to determine what is, and what it means to be, a human being.”

Cyborgs R Us

