"Black mirror" and covid 19: biotechnological challenges for intercultural thinking

Abstract

Ten years ago, the British journalist and screen-writer Charlie Brooker began creating the “Black Mirror” TV series as a form of contemporary dystopia. Its characteristic is a special focus on biotechnological instruments that increase the ability to monitor, manipulate and experiment on human beings. The criticism of eugenics, trans-humanist class differentiation, media totalitarian-ism, enslavement to social networks is also fea-tured in the series. Nowadays many of those visions began to appear in reality. The corona-virus pandemic has opened up the space for massive use of new technologies such as 5G face recognition cameras, smart¬phone applica-tions, or the use of artificial intelligence whose algorithms determine an individual’s health sta-tus and degree of freedom of movement. Offic-ers with thermal visors who have appeared on the streets of Chinese cities to identify and iso-late people with a high temperature seem as if they have just emerged from Brooker’s show. With the addition of previously known social credit experiments in some Chinese cities, we have become aware that the civilization faces one of its greatest possible challenges. In this contribution, the author seeks to demonstrate, on the basis of Brooker’s methodology, the fundamen-tal challenges to freedom, independence, diversi-ty and privacy as fundamental phenomena of human survival. Also, in the light of the actualization of these visions in the time of the Covid 19 pandemic, he strives to re-examine the space that contemporary thinking, of various fields and traditions, gains or conquers in the facing and reflecting on reality. He offers some insights into traditional Orthodox views on technology which might contribute to the defence of human dignity from experiments and transhumanistic danger.