Learning From Lana: Netflix’s Too Hot to Handle, COVID-19, and the human-nonhuman entanglement in contemporary technoculture

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

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Further information

This Special Issue article has been comprehensively reviewed by the Special Issue editors, Associate Professor Ted Striphas and Professor John Nguyet Erni.

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.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Fan Yang

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). Yang’s scholarship lies at the intersection of transnational media/cultural studies, globalization and communication, postcolonial studies, and contemporary China. She is completing a new book entitled Disorienting Politics: Rising China and Chimerican Media, which examines a set of transpacific media that enact the entanglements of China and America.