Learning from Lana: Netflix's Too Hot to Handle, COVID-19, and the human-nonhuman entanglement in contemporary technoculture. (Special Issue: The cultural politics of COVID-19.)

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.