Executable Code

Abstract

The “Bandersnatch” episode of Black Mirror has been widely hailed as a groundbreaking effort to combine elements of interactivity generally associated with gaming and the video streaming experience. This chapter argues that Borges’s classic tale, “The Garden of Forking Paths,” provides a map for reading “Bandersnatch.” Borges’s story of espionage and betrayal exemplifies the same binary logic that informs the interactive decision nodes of “Bandersnatch.” But it also sensitizes us to the ways that the paths we have not chosen nevertheless leave their traces upon what Borges intriguingly alludes to as the agent’s “obscure body,” transforming it into a persistent reminder of those infinitely bifurcating paths. By reading “Bandersnatch” and Borges together, one may see how the figure of the labyrinth—with its countless junctions and turns that double in upon themselves—reveals itself in a corporeal register and not merely as a conceptual exercise. The chapter concludes with an examination of the possibility that, even if our choices may not be altogether free, they might still be invested with ethical significance.