Black Mirror’s Nosedive as a new Panopticon: Interveillance and Digital Parrhesia in Alternative Realities

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The British series Black Mirror stirs much debate around its representation of dystopian futures of Western societies. Often grim, pessimistic and technologically-led, these representations confront the viewers with alternative societies deriving from the current use of new technologies. In Nosedive, the first episode of show’s third season, the action takes place in a world where people rate each other with their phones, each rating impacting people’s lives (their job, their housing, their friends). It follows the nosedive of Lacie Pound, a woman obsessed by her ratings who sees her life drifting apart after one bad rating. The society depicted in Nosedive clearly calls upon our knowledge of technology and the customers’ behavior of product and brand rating, translating it from a professional setting to a personal one.This chapter aims at analyzing this episode of Black Mirror as the representation of a new panopticon, as crafted by Bentham and reused by Foucault. In this panopticon, mobile devices and social media serve as “disciplinary” tools to normalize people’s behavior and fully depict Foucault’s foreseen society, where “everybody is seen by an immediate, collective and anonymous eye” (1975). Citizens experience a new relationship with the media and the ensuing social order, theorized by Jansson in its concept of “interveillance” (2015), which is a form of horizontal surveillance through social media. More than a panopticon, this episode shows an era of digital parrhesia, as defined by Allard-Huver and Gilewicz (2013, 2015): a model for truth-telling in the digital public sphere that redefines our digital ethos. Nosedive thus questions the balance between our right to anonymity, a growing need for more transparency and, paradoxically, one for more visibility.