Thinking through High-Tech Hell

The research required for this book was realized as part of a research contract with the English Department of the University of Salamanca, granted and co-funded by the Junta de Castilla y León and the European Social Fund (ORDEN EDU/601/2020) within the framework of the research project El Quijote Transnacional (Ref. PGC2018-093792-B-C21, <https://quijotetransnacional.es>). Were it not for that contract, obtained in mid-2020 after a year of juggling with part-time jobs, I might have joined the ranks of aspiring researchers who are frustrated (or directly excluded) by the structures of neoliberal academia. So let this be a thank you note to all those who fought for a more inclusive academia and to those who fought for the existence of funding opportunities like the ones I have enjoyed. Without them, the offspring of the working classes wouldn’t stand a chance—even if, of course, grants and scholarships alone may be nothing but tiny band-aids on deeper social wounds. For this reason, let this also be a reminder—for those in a condition to do so—to keep on working towards democratizing access to higher education, towards democratizing the learning process itself and—more generally—to keep on resisting fighting against the commodification of everything and everyone, in academia and beyond. Things may look rather dystopian—as they indeed do from a book like this one—but even so, the simple but radical ideal of public education is still worth fighting for and worth pursuing in deeper ways.

As a young researcher under the infamous “publish or perish” imperative, I also want to express my gratitude for the anonymous work of those reviewers and editors who helped me to pursue and polish my ideas. This book is inseparable from the careful feedback that I received in the journals Science Fiction Studies, Utopian Studies and Science Fiction Film and Television, as well as in the Spanish journals Hélice and 452ºF. Even when these and other journal articles and conference papers were—initially, partly, undeniably—written out of the necessity to get practice on the field, throughout these many experiences I have learnt to value even more the importance of sharing ideas and criticisms in constructive and respectful ways. For if anything is contained in blind review processes and open conferences, it is the utopian potential of an academia constructed upon open dialogue—a place where one can grow and learn from and with a plurality of voices. Because of this, I can only hope to contribute towards working conditions where we all have more quality time for dialoguing and thinking collectively and I can only thank and celebrate all those people who, in their daily practices, favor a slower, collectively-minded academia: one where publishing and conferencing are not done compulsively or just out of necessity, but for the sake of having some meaningful dialog, some stimulating exchange of ideas which might contribute to collective human knowledge.

More personally, this book is also the long-term product of ongoing conversations with many teachers and colleagues and I should thank them all here for being part of the journey. Firstly, Javier Pardo, my doctoral supervisor at Salamanca, who a long time ago introduced me to the field of SF studies and who has since then supervised much of my work, from undergraduate to doctoral. Thank you for inspiring this academic project and for accompanying me to its completion. Thank you too to the admired colleagues, teachers and researchers who evaluated this book when it was still a PhD thesis: Alfredo Moro, Paula Barba and Maite Conde, in person, as well as Jesse J. Ramírez and Liz W. Faber, remotely. Thank you all for your kind appreciation and your useful suggestions. Another thank you goes to all the colleagues-turned-friends who accompanied me in the years of researching and writing and often read my work, encouraging me and commenting on my ideas. Specifically, thank you, Lucía Bausela, Lucía López and Marta Bernabéu, for being that odd, more-than-academic group of colleagues. Thank you, too, teachers of the English Department at Salamanca and teachers of the Centre for Film and Screen at Cambridge, for being part of the most formative and intellectually stimulating periods of my life. Thank you, too, mamá, papá, for the political common sense and the sense of humor that I inherited from you both, because that too is visible in this work and has helped me live and laugh through it. And thank you too, Sara, above everyone else, for being my first and most critical reader, my most patient supporter and the best life companion.

It has become a cliché to say that reality has become dystopian, to say that we live in science-fictional times, or that “it’s all gone a bit ‘Black Mirror’,” as Black Mirror’s co-creator Charlie Brooker ironically puts it.¹ Taking this logic to a caricaturized extreme, one anonymous meme proposes that You Are Here, at the center of a Venn diagram, in the very worst place of all, where several famous dystopias overlap and converge (Figure 1). Even in our everyday life, many of us have surely heard complaints about new technologies or the media which evoke—or even explicitly refer to—dystopian narratives and imagery. Whether we are talking about the numberless amount of conspiracy theories online, or about the occasional witticisms of some acquaintance of ours, it seems that we now live in what could be called a new media dystopia—a world in which new media technologies appear as one of the most popular scapegoats for broader socio-political problems.² With this popular imaginary in mind, my proposition here is the following: what if we took this collective feeling as the point of departure for a critical theory of the present? What if, more specifically, we proceeded by examining fictional new media dystopias such as Brooker’s Black Mirror and, through them, we tried to arrive at a better understanding of the high-tech hell that we supposedly inhabit?