Not Black Mirror: Biotech Could Force 1,000-Year Prison Sentence Into 8 Hours
Buckle up and stay on your best behavior because that Black Mirror episode involving a seemingly infinite prison sentence might not be too far off.
For the most part, I love Black Mirror. I’m a big fan of horror movies, but they usually aren’t actually frightening. Black Mirror, on the other hand, is terrifying. During or after each episode, I often catch myself Googling or researching the technology. I know most of the stuff is pretty far-fetched, but I need to make sure none of these episodes become a reality in my lifetime.
Don’t get me wrong, some of the episodes are pretty f*cked up in general. But nothing got under my skin quite like the episode that highlighted time distortion — specifically the part involving incarceration. You can imagine my concern when I discovered that technology isn’t entirely far off from making that episode a reality.
**This episode aired over three years ago. But I’m not an a**hole (most of the time) so here’s your spoiler warning.**
The Bleak Time Distortion in Black Mirror
I won’t get into the details of the episode (called “White Christmas”) because it includes a lot of subplots and different pieces. Basically, the episode revolves around a device called a cookie. These cookies contain exact copies of a person’s consciousness which you can place inside an egg-shaped device and replicate different settings.
So you and a friend could say, go to Hawai’i for an infinite amount of time inside one of these eggs. Well, not you and your friend exactly: copies of your consciousness.
Are you with me so far?
As part of the broader plot, you watch two men in a cabin talking to each other. For some reason, they’ve been isolated in this cabin for five years, but no one seems to know why. One man — Matt — is fairly talkative while the other — Joe — is quiet and reserved.
At the end of the episode, you find out that Matt is actually an interrogator working for the cops. Joe had murdered two people. By hanging out with Joe inside the egg — for what seemed like five years — Matt was able to get a confession. Remember, the copy of Joe’s consciousness had no idea who Matt was or why they were alone in this cabin for so long.
It’s not the copies of consciousness and the confession that scared me so much, it’s what happened next.
As Matt leaves work for the night (in real life), he sets the time on Joe’s egg to 1,000 years per second. This is part of Joe’s punishment for murdering a child and old man.
It’s an irreprehensible crime for sure. But if God exists, I’m not sure he’d think subjecting someone to essentially infinite solitary confinement is totally cool, either.
Read More: Here’s Why Solitary Confinement Needs to Go
Experiencing 1,000 Years in 8.5 Hours Isn’t Entirely Far Off
It turns out, this episode of Black Mirror is much closer to a potential reality than I’m comfortable with.
In 2014, neuroscientists identified a neurotransmitter called GABA that contributes to our perception of time. The paper states, “These results demonstrate anatomical, neurochemical, and task specificity and suggest that visual cortex GABA contributes to individual differences in time perception.”
Other researchers believe that identifying the neurotransmitter was the hard part. Developing a drug to target that neurotransmitter? Not completely outrageous.
Aeon interviewed philosopher Rebecca Roache to discuss what the future of incarceration could look like. Roache isn’t just any philosopher, she leads a team of scholars at the University of Oxford.
Here’s what she said, “a number of psychoactive drugs distort people’s sense of time, so you could imagine developing a pill or a liquid that made someone feel like they were serving a 1,000-year sentence.”
A terrifying thought, indeed.
Could This Actually Happen?
It depends. On what, you ask?
$$$
The prison-industrial complex is just that — an industry.
In the United States, we have the largest prison population per capita in the entire world. We arrest so many prisoners we don’t even have enough places to put them all. Jails and prisons are notoriously overcrowded and I can think of at least two locations near my house where cities are trying to build even more of them.
While the overlords definitely like subjecting us to cruel and unusual punishment, it might not be financially beneficial to distort our time and put us back out on the street within an afternoon.
Even beyond for-profit prisons, incarceration is a huge industry. You have phone calls, food, clothing, transportation, paper products, and other items. Not to mention, a lot of companies rely on prisoners for labor because they don’t have to pay minimum wage. If you think that sounds like slavery you’re right. (If you live in California, you can thank the local prisoners for putting out the wildfires.)
I suppose if they could inject the drug to make prison time seem longer while not actually shortening the sentence itself they would do that.
Plus, they already distort time — that’s exactly what solitary confinement is.
Prolonged solitary confinement does significant mental health damage including uncontrollable fear and rage, hypersensitivity to touch, hallucinations, general distortion of time and space, and PTSD.
Hopefully, we can get some genuine prison reforms running before our real life turns into a Black Mirror episode.
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Randi Nord lives in Pontiac, Michigan. She is the co-founder of Geopolitics Alert Independent World News.