I never followed the television series Cuéntame. I wasn’t that interested in being told in Spanish what had happened in a past that I had actually lived through. Reliving the past is to create it, and even more so in televised fiction about a reality that in reality was fiction. The version that TVE gave of our recent past suffered from the same syndrome as military service: no matter how bad an experience was we only hang on to the good memories. It is something that happens whenever we revisit the past and must have something to do with our survival instinct.
However, I have seen Black Mirror, and some episodes more than once. The series is now on Netflix but the first two seasons were shown on the UK’s Channel 4. I have always been drawn more to British television than Spanish TV. And the future has always attracted me more than the past, mostly because it is where I will have to spend the rest of my life. Imagining the future serves two completely opposite purposes: to make it happen or to avoid it happening. Black Mirror falls into the latter category. The episodes are set in the near future in a hyperconnected society like our own in which technology determines what is real and what is fiction, and it is a future that is so close that each episode causes a knot in one’s stomach.
What I would never have imagined is some day making a 3D and 360º immersive mashup of Cuéntame and Black Mirror. In this mashup there are Civil Guard officers entering printworks and seizing posters and printing plates, entering delivery companies and impounding envelopes after holding them up to the light, entering Catalan government and political party buildings, frisking cleaning ladies and arresting programmers, local police officers confiscating posters (with mops and buckets), municipal brigades taking down banners and tearing down posters, police officers taking down the details of journalists and seizing mobile phones, Post Office employees opening private correspondence and lieutenant colonels performing coups. Graduating with honours in the 21st century.
"In this mashup there are Civil Guard officers entering printworks and seizing posters and printing plates, entering delivery companies and impounding correspondence"
The part of Black Mirror about the future and technology is not so easy. Judges that close down servers, internet providers that block websites with more than dubious techniques, armies of trolls devoted to spreading disinformation on social media, patriotic hackers overturning websites with mass attacks and established outlets that live off the clickbait that it all generates.
If it is easy to close down a server in Malgrat de Mar, it is also easy to open one up in Luxembourg; if it is easy (as well as being nasty) to block access to a certain website, it is even easier for an influential internet user —the Catalan president, for example— to send a tweet on how to access a proxy. Among the influential figures on the internet we can add the founder of Wikileaks Julian Assange, Wikileaks itself or Peter Sunde, the creator of The Pirate Bay.
"There are thousands of anonymous users that have commented on the referendum website, graphic designers that put posters up in favour of the referendum... All with a smartphone and a Twitter account"
Julian Assange has embraced the Catalan cause and, as he no doubt has plenty of free time in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, has been compulsively tweeting about what is going on in Catalonia. His timeline is like a minute-by-minute account of the game. His great contribution —apart from spreading the message to the more than five million Wikileaks followers— is providing the community with the referendum websites closed down by the Spanish authorities so that people can comment. Similarly, Peter Sunde, founder of the file exchange website The Pirate Bay, offers hosting services and domain names to Catalan websites closed down by the Spanish authorities. Literally.
The list goes on with thousands of anonymous users that have commented on the referendum website—some as funny as referendum.lol— graphic designers that put up posters in favour of the referendum, programmers like those of @censura1oct that monitor the censorship of referendum websites or the popular Twitter account @empaperem that encourages people to print out posters and put them up in the streets. All with just a smartphone and a Twitter account. Graduating with honours in the 21st century.