Cultural Studies ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rcus20 Learning From Lana: Netflix’s Too Hot to Handle, COVID-19, and the human-nonhuman entanglement in contemporary technoculture Fan Yang To cite this article: Fan Yang (2021): Learning From Lana: Netflix’s Too�Hot�to�Handle, COVID-19, and the human-nonhuman entanglement in contemporary technoculture, Cultural Studies, DOI: 10.1080/09502386.2021.1898036 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2021.1898036 Published online: 10 Mar 2021. Submit your article to this journal View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rcus20 CULTURAL STUDIES https://doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2021.1898036 Learning From Lana: Netflix’s Too Hot to Handle, COVID-19, and the human-nonhuman entanglement in contemporary technoculture Fan Yang University of Maryland Baltimore County, Baltimore, MD, US ABSTRACT The Netflix popular reality series Too Hot to Handle (THTH), released during the coronavirus outbreak in 2019, requires all contestants to refrain from sexual activities of any kind in order to win a cash prize in the end. Mirroring the physical distancing mandate during the COVID-19 crisis, the show offers an opportunity to discern a set of interrelated human and nonhuman entanglements in contemporary technoculture that the outbreak has brought into sharper relief. This essay probes into the conditions of possibility for the popularity of THTH by placing an analytical focus on the role of Lana, a nonhuman sensor centrally featured in the show with a female voice typical of digital assistants. Lana, a cone-shaped device from ‘Factory, China’, is a surveillance robot embodying the operation of Netflix as part of the expanding regime of data colonialism, which extracts personal data for profit. Her nonhuman identity is evocative of China as at once a manufacturing locale for the material gadgets that make up the global digital economy and an authoritarian state that has deepened its censorship and surveillance practices during the COVID-19 outbreak. Instructing the contestants to care for their entrepreneurial selves while encroaching upon their autonomy, Lana invites us to rethink the common framing of China – a coveted market for Netflix – as the nonhuman Other of the liberal-democratic West. During a time when the nonhuman virus keeps humans apart while intensifying their reliance on nonhuman machines for communication, Lana promotes a kind of intimacy without proximity characteristic of the global infrastructures of connection. A symptomatic reading of THTH, which also conjures a vision of collectivity as a basis for surviving the pandemic, thus allows us to recognize the entanglement of the human and the nonhuman and to imagine new paths toward global social justice. KEYWORDS Netflix; surveillance; data colonialism; China; sinophobia; entanglement The Netflix reality series Too Hot to Handle (THTH) hit the top charts in the United States (#2), the United Kingdom (#1), and Canada (#2) upon its release on April 17, 2020 (O’Brien 2020). As Judy Berman (2020) writes in the Time magazine, the producers of this ‘unabashedly trashy’ show could CONTACT Fan Yang fanyang@umbc.edu © 2021 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group 2 F. YANG not have predicted that it’d become so ‘weirdly relevant in the time of coronavirus’, as ‘the participants face a low-stakes version of the ethical drama playing out across nations trying to flatten the curve’. Like many of its dating reality TV predecessors, THTH is premised on an experiment. That is, all contestants must refrain from sexual activities of any kind – including kissing and self-gratification – in order to develop ‘deeper and more meaningful connections’ with those to whom they are attracted (Newton 2020a). Violations are penalized in the form of deductions from the $100,000 prize money, with winner(s) to be determined at the end. At first sight, the popularity of THTH amid an unfolding global pandemic seems self-explanatory. The show follows in the footsteps of The Circle and Love is Blind, two other reality series released by Netflix since the beginning of 20201 whose mandate of physical separation has made them ‘seem like touching, hilarious portraits of all our lives right now’ (Reklis 2020). Nonetheless, in an era of Netflix’s expanding global influence, it is worthwhile to subject this ‘remarkably prescient artifact for the lockdown age’(Garland 2020) to a symptomatic reading. Just as the coronavirus sometimes produces asymptomatic carriers, cultural artifacts like THTH demand a mode of critical engagement that, as Louis Althusser (1970) tells us, works to unveil what they do not immediately manifest. Indeed, probing the reality that creates the conditions of possibility for the popularity of THTH reveals a set of interrelated entanglements that the COVID-19 crisis has brought into sharper relief. As the nonhuman virus keeps humans from touching one another while intensifying the reliance of their connection on nonhuman machines, recognizing these intricate human-nonhuman entanglements becomes crucial for imagining new forms of collectivity and politics. The premise of THTH is not unlike many of its gamified counterparts in the dating shows genre, whose origins may be traceable to the production of The Dating Game in 1965 or Temptation Island in 2001 (Feuer 2018). Compared to many of its contemporary rivals that follow a heteronormative ‘romantic love to marriage’ trajectory, THTH seems quite unabashed about sex as a common, if not legitimate, goal of human encounter.2 The first verbal exchange and onscreen monologues among the contestants in Episode One, for instance, highlight their clear preference for casual hook-ups to long-term commitment, lending legitimacy to the voiceover host’s description of them as ‘the horniest, commitment-phobic swipsters’ (Newton 2020a). This apparent defiance of the dating-for-marriage show convention notwithstanding, the contestants learn, upon their arrival on the beautiful island in Mexico (unnamed throughout the show), that they cannot engage in sex, not even self-gratification. The self-described ‘first sex-less dating show’ of course, remains full of sexual innuendos and heated moments thanks to the rebelliousness of CULTURAL STUDIES 3 numerous contestants; after all, they were chosen via Instagram based on the criteria of being ‘sexy, sex-ed up, and charismatic’ (Too Hot To Handle Revealed - The Secrets of How They Film The Show 2020). Yet for many contestants and viewers alike, the sexiest presence on screen is not a human but takes the form of a cone-shaped device. A ‘virtual guide’ of this ‘no bone zone’ is how the comedian-narrator Desiree Burch first introduces her, prior to the arrival of all contestants (Newton 2020a). With a sleek design aesthetic reminiscent of Apple products, the robot is easily mistaken for an air freshener or a sex toy. In a voice resembling that of Siri’s and Alexa’s – reflecting ‘the merging of woman, machine, and work … with the advent of the ‘digital assistant’’ (Hester 2016) – she reveals early on that ‘Lana’ is her name. Netflix announced later that the producers have intentionally chosen the name for how it is spelled backwards (Too Hot To Handle Revealed - The Secrets of How They Film The Show 2020). Lana’s accent is British,3 and her tone, cool and rational, even distant. ‘Flirting is not a function I am programmed for’ is her response to one of the contestants’ attempt to get more intimate (Newton 2020b). Placed at various spots of the resort, including the bedroom and the bathroom, Lana is presented – by the producers who write her role and lines into the script – as the ultimate surveillance machine. For the first twelve hours of the contestants’ stay, Lana is said to be ‘secretly gathering personal data before she lays down the sex ban’ (Newton 2020b), though it is never clear what kinds of data she has collected. Throughout the show, Lana always lights up unannounced to deliver messages and give orders to the contestants. She is believed to be scrutinizing behaviours and assessing intimacies ‘in order to help them towards better relationships’ (Newton 2020a). She grants couples dates and rewards them with brief rule-lifted moments during which they can kiss or touch without penalty, but only when she deems the connection genuine.4 She even offers an itemized ‘bill’ of prize deductions on the mornings following those rule-breaking nights. Because of Lana’s power – or more precisely, the power that the THTH writers have given her – it is little wonder that ‘The Too Hot To Handle Revealed – The Secrets of How They Film’, a video released on Youtube by Netflix UK & Ireland, calls Lana ‘the real star’ of the show. Based on tweets collected on Buzzfeed, Lana is also very popular among fans of THTH. One tweet demands Netflix to ‘put Lana in more shows’; another declares: ‘GOAL of 2020 – to be as sarcastic and witty as Lana the cockblocking cone’ (Yapalater 2020). Such a fascination with a technology’s on-screen presence is certainly not brand new. In making Lana a visible figure, the producers of THTH have arguably channelled the creators of Black Mirror, the dystopian Channel 4-turnedNetflix series that centrally features one (futuristic) technology in each episode.5 ‘Hated in the Nation’ from Season Three of Black Mirror, for 4 F. YANG example, visibly displays a technology called Autonomous Drone Insects (ADI). When hacked, these bee-like machines can turn into killing armies that target online users of a viral hashtag, thus putting a visceral spin on the term ‘virality’. The airing of THTH during the pandemic, likewise, latches on to these complicated feelings toward the power of the nonhuman, be it biological or technological. ‘Too hot to handle is real life rn [right now] and Lana is the corona virus’, says one tweet (Byrne 2020). Just as the coronavirus is a nonhuman agent that has made humans vulnerable, thereby exerting control over their behaviour, Lana the nonhuman machine is able to limit humans’ capacity to engage in bodily interactions with one another. Netflix has arguably opted to capitalize on this fear and fascination with the nonhuman during the COVID-19 crisis. Another heavily marketed and hugely popular documentary series, Tiger King, for example, depicts the human obsession with the nonhuman entity that is the big cat. The show became a hit at the onset of the US lockdown and has been seen by 64 million viewers (Rushe and Lee 2020). Calling it the ‘first media event of the lockdown’, Jeff Scheible (n.d.) suggests that the show has ‘in many ways … domesticated’ the perceived wildlife origin of the coronavirus in a Wuhan wet market. An ‘accidental allegory’, Tiger King ‘coincides with the strange moment in which it, like COVID-19, went viral’ (Scheible 2020, p. 1). Its virality also evokes the ways in which ‘Netflix itself acts as a deadly contagion’, as ‘the streaming service has in many senses algorithmically “infected” our viewing practices and the entertainment industry alike, leaving studios struggling to find their footing and forced to reform their business models’ (Scheible 2020, p. 3). Just as the nonhuman animals caged in Tiger King have come to remind quarantined, Netflix-binging viewers of their own confinement, Lana in THTH has also taken on awe-inspiring characteristics of the coronavirus and in turn the ‘viral’ power of Netflix itself. On May 5, 2020, in an obvious attempt to promote THTH, Netflix released a horror-film parody titled ‘Lana Knows What You Did’ on Youtube. Clips from the show and Lana’s voiceover are interspersed with dark screens with blood-stained titles in white such as ‘She’s Always Watching’, ‘Always listening’, ‘She knows what you did’, and ‘Test Your Temptation’. In the end, ‘A Netflix Horror Series’ appears, with the word ‘horror’ replaced by ‘reality’ seconds later. A contestant’s exclamation ‘Oh my God!’ is followed by Lana declaring: ‘I’m taking it all in’ (Lana Knows What You Did 2020). If the heightened sense of horror in this clip accentuates the association between Lana and the coronavirus, the THTH parody has also made clear that Lana is quite self-referential of Netflix as a company. Like Lana, Netflix is always watching you watch it. It gathers allencompassing user data to inform its production, programming, and recommendations (Harris 2012) – not unlike the virus, which adapts and mutates in constant interactions with the host environment (Dupré and CULTURAL STUDIES 5 Guttinger 2016). Variously termed ‘surveillance capitalism’ (Zuboff 2019), ‘platform capitalism’ (Srnicek 2016), or ‘data colonialism’ (Couldry and Mejias 2019), Netflix’s operation characterizes a distinctive mode of economic value creation that is predicated on the extraction of behavioural data. Importantly, as Sarah Arnold (2018, p. 49) points out, ‘Netflix posits the use of data mining systems as beneficial for the consumer and suggests that such systems allow the company to better understand and respond to audience tastes’. This ‘marketing ideology of personalization’, as Nick Couldry and Ulises A. Mejias (Couldry and Mejias 2019, p. 16) argue, ‘makes … tracking and surveillance attractive’. It is, therefore, quite reasonable for the audience to perceive Lana – an embodiment of Netflix’s reliance on Artificial Intelligence – as ‘sexy’. Just like the enigmatic Lana who never tells us how she does her job, Netflix has until recently been reluctant to reveal the specificities of the viewing data collected (Laporte 2014). Its lack of transparency allows the company to frequently declare shows on the platform as ‘the most watched’ without the backing of actual numbers. In part thanks to its veiled ‘sexiness’ and the ‘deeper connection’ encouraged between Netflix and its users, the company has accrued 15.77 million new subscribers since the global pandemic began, more than doubling its predicted numbers (Rushe and Lee 2020). Its stock value has also risen quite remarkably since March 16, when the outbreak sent much of the (developed) world into isolation mode. The linkage between Lana and the coronavirus thus takes on a new shade; Netflix, working like Lana and quietly permeating human lives like the virus, is no doubt a beneficiary of the pandemic. Yet Lana’s identity has another intriguing layer. In the first episode, when the contestants’ hometowns are displayed on screen to accompany their first appearances (e.g. ‘British Columbia, Canada’ for Francesca), we learn that Lana is from ‘Factory, China’. Of course, ‘factory’ is not exactly a geographical location. But its invocation brings immediately to mind the well-told story of the globalized production of electronics. China, the manufacturing powerhouse often dubbed ‘the world’s factory’, is an all-too-familiar locale in that story. Once ‘China’ is noted, no more geographical specificity would appear to be necessary; ‘factory’ the abstract concept would suffice. One can even argue that Lana’s gendered voice simultaneously evokes and erases the labour of the female workers who toil on the assembly lines in China producing the material gadgets that make up the global digital economy (e.g. Pun 2005, Qiu 2017). China, an expanding media market, has also had an intricate relationship with Netflix. Reed Hastings (2016), the CEO and cofounder of Netflix, during his keynote at the 2016 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, informed the audience: ‘The Netflix service has gone live in nearly every country of the world but China – where we also hope to be in the future’. 6 F. YANG By 2019, it has appeared that the chance of launching Netflix in China is looking slimmer due to the extant success of homegrown platforms like iQiyi – with which Netflix has once partnered – and the tremendous state censorship to which the platform must subject itself (Kharpal 2019). Naming ‘factory, China’ as the birthplace for Lana can thus be read as one way in which Netflix is coming to terms with its ‘loss’ of the Chinese market, by representing China as a place for merely making, not creating, technologies or contents. But this mention becomes more significant when China was also emphasized, most (in)famously by the former President of the United States, as the place of origin of the coronavirus. The narrative of ‘Coronavirus: Made in China’ surfacing in both official and vernacular settings (Riechmann 2020) has had a pervasive effect in spreading the perception that not only was the coronavirus most likely manufactured in China (Schaeffer 2020), it is the censorship of the Chinese state – an anti-human (-rights) practice – that has created a false initial impression of the severity of the virus, thus causing the spread of COVID-19 globally (Smith 2020). The nonhuman, then, appears to not only connect Lana and Netflix to the coronavirus, but also to China as well. The ‘anti-human’ framing of China is indeed operative in shaping the narrative of state control and surveillance during the COVID-19 crisis. This may be seen in the reportage of the Chinese government’s order to lock down Wuhan (Kuo 2020a) and the subsequent rollout of symptom monitoring and contact tracing (through the Health Code on the app Alipay, for example) (Kuo 2020b). Highlighting the inhumane level of China’s repressive state apparatus – often through the voices of human rights activists interviewed by the journalists – offers an easy explanation for the low number of reported cases daily out of China. This, in combination with the critique of China’s state censorship, also helps to lessen the embarrassment of staggering numbers emerging in places like the United States since March 2020. Arguably, such rising Sinophobia has contributed in no small part to the recently growing number of racist attacks on people of Chinese/East Asian descent in the West, whose dehumanizing tendency is part of a long history of the Yellow Peril discourse (Billé 2018). However, as David Eng et al. (2011, p. 2), editors of a special issue in Social Text, caution us, neither ‘China’ nor ‘the human’ should be taken for granted as ‘a pre-given object of knowledge’. There is much need to destabilize China as a ‘paradigmatic site of the inhuman, the subhuman, and the humanly unthinkable’ vis-à-vis ‘the universal human’ construed by the West (Eng et al. 2011, p. 5). Instead of pitting China as an authoritarian Other against Western democracies, it is important to recognize here that ‘China, the censor’ may not be so different from ‘Lana, the sensor’. While the former restricts the movement of information and the latter limits the proximity and interaction of bodies, both rely on the sensing and tracking of data generated by citizens/users, presumably to make or serve them better. CULTURAL STUDIES 7 Akin to Netflix’s recommendation system marketed to enhance the viewers’ experience of media, Lana is not only bent on detecting and tracking the contestants’ feelings and actions but also takes as her ostensible goal to promote their sense and care of the self. At a time when major components of what some call ‘the experience economy’, from fitness to travel, are restricted, Lana has put together a series of ‘New Age-y’ workshops (Berman 2020) designed to cultivate the contestants’ self-awareness and self-respect. However, the emphasis of such ‘experiential learning’ on inner personal growth invariably comes into tension with Lana’s (and Netflix’s) ability to encroach upon the ‘boundedness that constitutes a self as a self’, or what Couldry and Mejias (2019, p. 156) call the ‘minimal integrity’ of the self. For Couldry and Mejias, the invasion of the space of the self constitutes the major costs of internet-based human connection, as individual autonomy is increasingly subject to the control of external power, whether it is that of the state, like China, or corporations, like Netflix. Under this regime of data colonialism, the continuous dispossession of human life has rendered ‘the orders of “liberal” democracies and “authoritarian” societies … increasingly indistinguishable’ (Couldry and Mejias 2019, p. 20). In this light, the tongue-in-cheek joke of ‘Lana (Factory, China)’ serves as an invitation to more carefully consider the deep technocultural entanglement of – rather than ideological opposition between – China and the West. The boundary between the human and the nonhuman – be it Lana or China – is thus a blurred one at best. Indeed, the kind of ‘intimacy without proximity’ (Metcalf 2008) that Lana promotes among the THTH contestants is a practice long embraced by the global infrastructures of connection. The lack of physical contact depicted in The Circle, Love is Blind, and THTH, as Colin Horgan (2020) suggests, is more reminiscent of ‘life pre – and post-pandemic’, for these shows have merely dramatized the ‘basic idea … that people these days often default to distanced communication over personal interaction’. The key, however, is that ‘these shows are fantasizing about an extreme we currently inhabit’ (Horgan 2020). The contestants on screen get to ‘go home’ to reality after the shows. By contrast, our reality of social distancing, which extends the already intensely mediated interpersonal communication prior to the pandemic, is one from which we can no longer escape (Horgan 2020). It is tempting to speculate, as many have done, that China’s stringent surveillance system under the ‘state of exception’ that is COVID-19 will become the norm not just in China but the world at large (Kuo 2020b). Meanwhile, a seemingly halted global economy – as indicated by massive unemployment, among other things – has not thwarted the growth of a financial market dominated by key players in surveillance capitalism, sometimes dubbed the ‘FAANG Stocks’, encompassing Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Google. In highlighting the dominating role of Lana, the technological 8 F. YANG nonhuman, THTH indeed appears to provide no less than an ‘allegory for the sad and frustrating predicament plaguing our pandemic-stricken world’ (Berman 2020). After all, it is communication technologies that also allow the privileged to be sheltered at and working from home, deepening the longstanding divide (Patton 2020) between the ‘knowledge workers’ and ‘essential workers’; the latter, often consisting of populations long subject to dehumanizing racism, have no choice but to put their bodies at risk to sustain the lives of the former. Nevertheless, it is equally worthwhile to reflect on another lesson taught by Lana. As mentioned, THTH’s contestants are chosen from Instagram. This process of selection arguably reverses the standard ‘reality-to-influencer trajectory’ taken for granted in other shows of similar premise and ‘is now obvious to everyone watching, as well as those participating’ (Horgan 2020). In essence, Lana has instructed these fully entrepreneurialized neoliberal ‘selves’ to form deeper bounds with others, as ‘the success of the community relies on the compliance of every individual’ (Berman 2020). To be sure, this gamified premise of THTH references a dominant myth of data colonialism, that ‘today’s infrastructures of connection and data extraction fulfil human beings’ collective potential in some transcendent way’ (Couldry and Mejias 2019, p. 17). But under the conditions of COVID-19, this collective potential deserves more rethinking. The kind of intimate sociality that Lana calls for among humans, so frequently dependent on all those nonhuman devices and infrastructures ‘made in China’ (including masks), now arguably also forms a basis for surviving the pandemic, if not the climate crisis for which it is said to be ‘a dress rehearsal’ (Latour 2020). A conjunctural analysis of the deepening COVID-19 crisis through the lens of THTH is understandably open-ended. In fact, Netflix has already begun advertising Too Hot To Handle: Brazil, tantalizingly suggesting different perspectives that may emerge from the Global South. Learning from Lana the nonhuman does not necessarily mean a disavowal of human agency, just like cultural studies and human rights can be critically examined through each other (Erni 2018) without reducing the latter to a Sinophobic trope. During and after the US Presidential Election in 2020, the talk of decoupling between China and America – the so-called superpowers and past and present epicentres of the pandemic – continues to escalate. Meanwhile, despite the effects of the Trump-era trade war, stay-at-home holiday shoppers in the US have re-distributed their disposable income from spending on (now restricted) travels and dining to the purchase of more Chinesemade goods (Swanson 2020). In this context, Lana from ‘Factory, China’ serves as a helpful reminder that acknowledging – by way of critically unfolding – the multiple and serial entanglements of the human and the nonhuman in the realm of popular culture is an urgent and necessary step for imagining new paths toward global social justice. CULTURAL STUDIES 9 Notes 1. In The Circle, released on January 1, 2020, eight contestants are isolated in separate apartments and compete for social-media popularity. Only those eliminated are granted an opportunity to visit one other contestant in person. In Love is Blind, released on February 13, 2020, ten couples are placed in isolated pods to talk to their dates strictly through verbal communication for ten days and are not allowed to meet their romantic partners until a marriage proposal is made. 2. Arguably, such popular series as The Bachelor franchise on ABC, its newer competitor Married at First Sight on Lifetime, and Netflix’s more adventurous Love is Bind all simultaneously uphold marriage as a sanctified ideal while undermining this sacredness by rendering the search for love a playful game. 3. All of the contestants come from English-speaking countries, including the United Kingdom, Ireland, the United States, Canada, and Australia. The choice of British accent appears quite reasonable given its relation to Britain’s colonial history and the air of superiority with which it is often associated. 4. Mid-way through the series, a watch-like device akin to self-monitoring tools like the Apple Watch is given to the contestants to convey Lana’s approval with a green light. 5. A similar technological presence is also discernible in The Circle, where the large TV screens placed in contestants’ rooms periodically display a ring – an obvious logo for the fictitious social media platform named ‘The Circle’ - that sends out alerts and invites participants to chat, rate others, and play games. Disclosure statement No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s). Notes on contributor Fan Yang is an Associate Professor in the Department of Media and Communication Studies at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC). She is the author of Faked in China: Nation Branding, Counterfeit Culture, and Globalization (Indiana University Press, 2016). 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