I’m not quite sure what to make of Netflix’s latest Black Mirror entry, Bandersnatch, the choose-your-own-adventure style film with…how many possible endings? As I sit here attempting to explain the connection between the episode and the writings of George Shackle, I realize that I’m watching an entirely new permutation, with an entirely new ending. Each choice that Stefan makes turns the Shacklean kaleidoscope, resulting in entirely new choices, leading to an outcome far different than the others.
Of course Bandersnatch would remind me of Shackle, whose entire creative output is leering at me from its place on my bookshelf. Shackle’s concepts of unknowledge, choice in the face of ignorance and expectation, time as a ‘forceps’ in which we are held between “the past which is unchoosable and the future which is unknowable”, the very strangeness of choice based on the choices of others, as well as the visions of the future that our imagination gives us, all sprung to mind as I watched Stefan’s spiraling descent into insanity in the face of the implications of the ‘White Bear’. We take our imagination for granted, mainly because we use it so much, but our entire social order depends on for its functioning the choices that are first passed through the imagination. And yet the social order functions in spite of the strangeness. And not only functions, but thrives. But only as long as we are allowed to make our own choices.
And that’s what happens when you try making sense of Shackle and other philosophers in that vein. Before you know it, you’re lost in a phenomenological wilderness, lured there by his Orphic prose, only to be confronted by the tomes of Alfred Shutz, Edmund Husserl, and Max Weber as your only means of escape. Yet each new revelation brings you only deeper into what feels like a labyrinth of the mind, and you eventually place the books back on the shelf. And from there they will loom, weighing you with guilt until you take them off the shelf again
Our individual choices turn the kaleidoscope. Our choices affect the choices of others. Our interpretation of the past, present, and future affect the interpretations of past, present, future, of others. They are reflected and refracted throughout the social web we are a part of, with the prism of imagination changing, reinterpreting, and then re-broadcasting them back into that social web in a never-ending, kaleidoscopic cycle. The future is being created, destroyed, and reborn in our collective imagination in the present. It really is strange.
