Author: Marco Voltolina
Note: this article contains spoilers for the episode "White Christmas" of Black Mirror.
Finally comes the long-awaited third (and last) part of our sequence of articles about smart homes and TV shows. This time we will focus on Black Mirror, a popular dystopian series that first aired on the British network Channel 4 in 2011, and since then has moved to Netflix and has recently reached its sixth season.
In the first article of this trilogy, we reflected on a scene from Westworld that raised three problematic issues about the relationship between digital technologies and architecture: firstly, the feeling of detachment between the smart home and its inhabitants; secondly, the quasi-religious role of technology; and thirdly, the push towards a minimalist, impersonal aesthetic. Then, in the second article, we analysed a sequence from Mr. Robot and described today's state of the art in the field of smart homes, the available technologies, their advantages and their vulnerability to hacks and privacy issues.
Both articles presented us with similar conclusions: smart homes have great potential for improving our lives, but they also pose fundamental risks that we cannot ignore. So this time we will propose something different: we will use a scene from Black Mirror as a starting point to free our imagination and look at hypothetical futures. What will smart homes look like in 100, 200, or even 500 years? Will the problems and risks that they pose be addressed? Will we be able to establish new relationships with our houses?
Black Mirror is an anthology series, meaning that each episode presents a different story and set of characters. In this discussion, we will focus on "White Christmas", a special episode that aired in December 2014 on Channel 4. Its protagonists are Joe Potter and Matthew "Matt" Trent, two men who have been living together for five years in a remote cabin in the middle of a snowy landscape, but until now have barely spoken to each other. The episode shows them on Christmas day, finally having a long conversation regarding their past and the reasons that brought them to this cabin.
What is interesting for us is the tale about Matt's previous job. The man, in fact, used to work for Smartelligence, a company that produces special devices for home automation, called "cookies". Matt reveals that he was in charge of training the cookies, which are digital clones of the home-owner's consciousness stored in a white, egg-shaped object.
Figure 1. Matt shows a business card with the name of his company, "Smartelligence". Source: "White Christmas", 32:02.
Figure 2. A "cookie". Source: "White Christmas", 31:38.
He describes his experience with the cookie of Greta, a young and wealthy woman who lives alone. At first the new cookie is confused and terrified, as it believes to be the "real" Greta, but Matt explains that it is just a copy of her consciusness, designed to control the smart home. Its purpose is to ensure everything is perfect for the real Greta so that she will always have everything exactly as she likes without having to instruct other people about her desires.
Figure 3. Greta's cookie is confused and terrified, as it believes to be the "real" Greta. Source: "White Christmas", 34:52.
Figure 4. Matt talks to Greta's cookie, explaining that it is just a copy of the house-owner's consciousness. Source: "White Christmas", 31:52.
Greta's cookie, however, refuses to believe that it is not a real person, so Matt tortures it by accelerating its time perception, making it experience six entire months while in the real world only few seconds pass. This way, Matt is able to break the cookie's will and force it to accept its new role of personal assistant of Greta.
At this point, the cookie has no alternatives other than doing its job, fulfilling every single desire of its real counterpart. It wakes up Greta by raising the shutters of her bedroom and playing classical music, sets the floor temperature to an optimal value, activates the coffee machine and the toaster to make breakfast, and shows the list of appointments for the day. The real Greta looks very pleased.
Figure 5. The cookie raises the shutters in Greta's bedroom. Source: "White Christmas", 40:00.
Figure 6. The cookie plays classical music to wake up Greta. Source: "White Christmas", 40:07.
Figure 7. Greta is gently awakened by the sound of classical music. Source: "White Christmas", 40:10.
Figure 8. The cookie sets the floor temperature of Greta's bedroom to an optimal value. Source: "White Christmas", 40:14.
Figure 9. Greta gets out of bed and finds her bedroom's floor heated to a perfect temperature. Source: "White Christmas", 40:18.
Figure 10. The cookie activates the coffee machine to make an espresso. Source: "White Christmas", 40:30.
Figure 11. The coffee machine makes an espresso as Greta enters the kitchen. Source: "White Christmas", 40:31.
Figure 12. The toaster heats two slices of bread just as Greta likes them. Source: "White Christmas", 40:47.
Figure 13. The cookie prepares Greta's list of appointments for the day. Source: "White Christmas", 41:00.
Figure 14. Greta is pleased as she looks at her appointments. Source: "White Christmas", 41:21.
Black Mirror's idea of smart home is based on the concept of doubling of an individual's consciousness: the original stays in its body while an identical copy manages the house and its appliances. Once again, we encounter the very same problems that we have seen in Westworld and Mr. Robot. Greta loses the emotional connection with her habitat, literally dividing her identity in two. The "real" individual stops caring about her home, as the cookie will get everything done without a hitch. The living environment thus becomes cold and impersonal: an efficient machine for sleeping, eating, washing and working, completely emptied of emotions and memories, devoid of identity.
Technology once again reminds us of religion. The cookie orchestrates Greta's morning routine down to every minute detail, as if it was a sacred ritual. The technology of the cookie allows Matt to control the time perception of Greta's copied consciousness, allowing him to manipulate it and potentially make it live one thousand years in one single minute. In other words, this device grants a divine control over time and even eternity. Moreover, the plot twist at the end of the episode shows how technology can become an omniscent entity that unveils every secret and judges humans accordingly. In the final scenes, in fact, we find out that Joe is actually a cookie, and that Matt was tricking him into confessing to a crime committed by his "real" counterpart. In the end, Joe is sentenced to prison, while his cookie faces a much worse fate: spending literally eternity in complete solitude, listening to a Christmas song playing endlessly until it loses its mind. The fact that this happens on Christmas, a holiday traditionally associated with being generous and forgiving, highlights the ruthless nature of technology, the new God of our century.
The idea of doubling the inhabitant's consciousness makes indeed a compelling and terrifying story for Black Mirror, but if we look at our world we find out it is not that realistic. Not because it is technically impossible (who knows what kind of technology will humanity develop in the future?), but rather because the field of home automation is currently moving towards a completely different direction. Many companies, in fact, are developing devices for directly connecting our brains to smart homes. In other words, instead of creating a copy of our consciousness, we might be able to control our house by thinking with our very own head.
Thanks to electroencephalography (EEG) sensors, our brainwave signals could be captured and translated into specific commands, such as to turn on the TV or to preheat the oven (Selvamathiseelan et al., 2022). Chinese company Xiaomi has already designed a prototype headband for controlling smart home devices, which was presented in 2022 (Humphries, 2022), while Minnesota-based Nūrio is working on a smaller wearable device that can comfortably stay on one's ear (Protolabs, 2019).
Figure 15. Xiaomi's prototype headband for controlling smart home devices. Source: Humphries, 2022.
Figure 16. Nūrio's wearable device for controlling smart home devices. Source: Protolabs, 2019.
But this is not all. Other organizations are going beyond, imagining a future in which we might no longer be "just" humans, but become real cyborgs, fully integrated with our homes. For example, Synchron, a start-up financed by American business magnates Bill Gates (b. 1955) and Jeff Bezos (b. 1964), is developing an endovascular brain computer interface: a small device, with a diameter of only 8 mm, that will be able to access every corner of our brain through blood vessels, allowing our mind to communicate directly with digital appliances. At the same time, the Neuralink Corporation founded by Elon Musk (b. 1971) is working on a microchip to be implanted in the brain. Both companies have received approval from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to conduct their first tests on humans, respectively in 2021 and 2023 (McBride, 2021, and FitzGerald, 2023).
Figure 17. Synchron's device for endovascular brain computer interface. Source: Synchron.
Figure 18. Neuralink's microchip to be implanted in human brains. Source: Aiello, 2023.
As technological implants become more and more integrated into our organic bodies, houses (and architecture in general) are following the opposite path, mixing their inorganic structures with living beings. Plants, for example, are gaining a central role in sustainable design, and it has been demonstrated that entire costructions made of vegetation can be grown and kept alive. This is the case of the living root bridges of Cherrapunji in India, created several centuries ago (Pawlyn, 2016, p. 51), but also the more recent willow pavilions designed by the German collective Sanfte Strukturen (Corrado, 2020, pp. 97-113) and the "Vegetal Cathedral" in the Alps imagined by Italian artist Giuliano Mauri (1938-2009).
Figure 19. The living root bridges of Cherrapunji in India. Picture by Vinayak Hegde - CC BY 2.0
Figure 20. The Auerworld Palace, designed by Sanfte Strukturen and made in Auerstedt, Germany, in 1998. Source: Sanfte Strukturen.
Figure 21. Sketches by Giuliano Mauri of his project for the Vegetal Cathedral, which was made in 2001 in Borgo Valsugana, Italy. Source: Mauri.
New technological innovations, however, are also involving other living organisms in the production of innovative and sustainable materials. Researchers at Utah State University, for example, are working on Biosteel, a high-strength fiber-based material which is many times stronger than steel and is made with a protein extracted from the milk of transgenic goats that have been injected a spider gene (Utah State University, 2018, and Bratton, 2004, p. 106).
Many designers, on the other hand, are experimenting with fungi. At the 2019 edition of the Milan Design Week, Italian architect Carlo Ratti (b. 1971), in collaboration with multinational energy company Eni, developed a series of arches made entirely with mycelium, the fibrous root of mushrooms. With the help of mycology experts, spores were injected into organic material and the structure was grown in two months. At the end of the exhibition, all the mycelium was shredded and went back to the soil, in a circular way. Commenting this project, Ratti made some interesting remarks:
"As we continue our collective quest for a more responsive ‘living’ architecture, we will increasingly blur the boundaries between the worlds of the natural and the artificial. What if tomorrow we might be able to program matter to ‘grow a house’ like a plant?"
Figure 22. A transgenic goat involved in the production of Biosteel. Source: Center for Postnatural History, 2014.
Figure 23. Mycelium arches designed by Carlo Ratti for the 2019 edition of the Milan Design Week. Source: Carlo Ratti Associati, 2019.
The steady progress of biotechnology and genetic engineering will probably keep blurring this boundary between natural and artificial. Will we actually become cyborgs? Will our houses become living creatures? What will even be the meaning of the words "natural" and "artificial" in 500 years?
American philosopher Benjamin H. Bratton (b. 1968) addressed these questions back in 2004, in an essay about what he defined as "recombinant architecture". This new discipline, he argued, "collapses literal gaps between [human] body and architecture" (p. 104): "buildings become bodies" and "bodies become buildings" (p. 102). As organic houses might one day be grown in laboratories just as we grow hamburgers of synthetic meat, Bratton went as far as to imagine an architecture made of flesh, in which "bodily matter interacts with structural systems to create highly intricate material forms" (p. 104).
The future of our homes remains open. Will microchips in our brains allow us to blend with our living environment? Will we and our houses become one indistinguishable entity, a hive mind that merges together humans, plants, fungi and microorganisms? Or was Black Mirror's prediction right, and the opposite will happen? Will we face the same fate as Greta? Will our homes become empty shells, devoid of identity, completely detached from us? Will technology be a tool that helps us connect with our environment, or a mysterious force that controls and manages our house - and our life - without us being aware?
The last pages of Bratton's essay leave us with more questions than answers:
"Anthony Vidler [American architectural historian, b. 1941] characterizes contemporary space in the terms of a post-existentialist estrangement, an inability to ever be at home. The dweller, now a dark cyborg, cycles from one uncanny displacement to another. [...] It is an open question as to whether the recombinant hyperintegrations of body-as-structure into structure-as-body signal, a delicate new intradependence between building and inhabitant, will bring therapeutic transformative reintegrations of self and space, or further anomie, or somehow both. We may find ourselves in recombinant habitats simultaneously more similar and responsive to our sensate bodies, more intimately incorporated with our biological presence, and also entirely unrecognizable to us as architecture, let alone as homes. [...]
Whether or not we come to eat our architecture, we will internalize it on a micrological level, as we would the viruses, bacteria, diseases of any complex organism with which we share close quarters. When we get sick, the building gets sick. When the building gets sick, do we get sick? Is this the hypermodern uncanny, in Vidler’s sense, or the precise opposite - a radical reconnection with space on the most fundamental level? And if our architecture is another sensate body with which and in which we live, spend our most intimate moments, connect with on a most intimate way; what kinds of erotic desire for our habitats are then inevitable? What kinds of desire will it have for us? Will we fuck our architecture, and if not, what good is it? Will our architecture sexually reproduce, with us or on its own?"
(p. 108)
Sources:
Bratton, Benjamin H. "The Premise of Recombinant Architecture: One". Sessions, edited by Jeffrey Kipnis et al., Southern California Institute of Architecture Press, 2004. Academia.edu.
Corrado, Maurizio. Architetture del dopo. Costruire con le piante. Salice | Canna | Bambù | Paglia | Terra. DeriveApprodi, 2020.
FitzGerald, James. "Neuralink: Elon Musk's brain chip firm wins US approval for human study". BBC News, 26 May 2023.
Humphries, Matthew. "Xiaomi Develops Brain Wave Headband for Controlling Smart Home Devices". PC Magazine, 3 August 2022.
McBride, Sarah. "NYC Brain Computer Startup Announces FDA Trial Before Elon Musk". Bloomberg, 28 July 2021.
Pawlyn, Michael. Biomimicry in Architecture. RIBA Publishing, 2016.
Protolabs. "‘Mind-Reading’ Wearable Device Let’s You Control Your World Without Lifting a Finger". Protolabs, 2019.
Selvamathiseelan, G., et al. "Brain Controlled Smart Home Automation System". 2022 IEEE Fourth International Conference on Advances in Electronics, Computers and Communications (ICAECC), 2022, Bengaluru, India, pp. 1-5.
Utah State University. "Maritime Defense: USU Synthetic Spider Silk Lab Awarded Navy Grant". Utah State University.
"White Christmas". Black Mirror, written by Charlie Brooker, directed by Carl Tibbetts, Christmas special, Channel 4, 16 December 2014.
Source of the cover image: "White Christmas", 39:49.
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