Dan DeLuca: Pop culture probes the dark side of our virtual lives

It's coursing through pop culture: the idea that there are sinister if not downright soul-sapping consequences to the wondrous, click-here-tap-there innovations the Web has made in our daily lives.

In "Be Right Back," an episode of Black Mirror, the British TV series on Netflix that explores the dark side of technology, a woman played by Agent Carter actress Hayley Atwell is forced to throw things at her husband to try to get his attention while he's busy sharing a childhood photo of himself on social media.

"It's a thief, that thing," she says. She's referring to the mobile phone. He can't take his eye off its screen, or "black mirror." In creator Charlie Brooker's ingenious anthology, frequently compared to the dark-side series Twilight Zone, the larcenous device will steal your time, your soul, and maybe your ability to have an actual human relationship with a living, breathing human being. (Note: In a be-careful-what-you-wish-for plot twist in "Be Right Back," it also might provide a way to communicate with the dead, who live on in a virtual afterlife.)

In "Content Nausea," the title track to the 2014 album by Parkay Quarts (an alternate identity to the rock band's primary name Parquet Courts, but that's another story), Andrew Savage sings about Internet fatigue and a nefarious world with "too much data, too much tension" that saps creative energies and kills art.

"People clicked and people read/ 'Modern Life' is what it said" - it's a song that would fit nicely as a commercial jungle for Self Control, the free Web app that mercifully allows users to block distracting sites like Facebook and Twitter to aid concentration and actually get some work done. "Life's lived best when scrolling least," Savage sings over grinding guitars. "The more connected, the more alone."

Then there's Citizenfour, Laura Poitras' film about onetime National Security Administration contractor Edward Snowden. Its subject: government-sponsored electronic spying. Its theme: You have every reason to be paranoid.

Set in a tense Hong Kong hotel room, this heavy favorite to win the Best Documentary award at next Sunday's Oscars puts a human face on Snowden, the leaker of government documents. His revelations included the news that the NSA developed the capability to mine users' personal information from "leaky" apps such as the Angry Birds smartphone game. The movie will air on HBO on Feb. 23, the day after the Oscars.

A similarly Orwellian - and Philip K. Dickian - note is struck in Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, David Shafer's highly entertaining 2014 tech thriller novel about an evil multinational corporation intent on owning all the world's personal data, and the underground network of hackers that springs up to fight it. There's something called the Node, a ubiquitous device that "can collect all our movements, our vital signs, our images, our ambient audio, our DNA." Such invasiveness might seem far-fetched - until you consider your new activity tracker, gathering vital signs as you sleep and sending them to an undisclosed location in the Cloud.

Is the technological future really something to be afraid of? Should we not be listening to such fantastic recent cyborg-friendly albums as Janelle Monáe's The Electric Lady or St. Vincent's album St. Vincent, which won the Grammy for Best Alternative Music Album?

Is logging on to the Web really as bad for you as former Web evangelist Andrew Keen makes it out to be in his new book The Internet Is Not the Answer? Keen joins the parade of onetime Web enthusiasts, like Jaron Lanier, who argue that what was once thought to be an egalitarian tool with the potential to bring free information to all is actually a job-killing scourge that has helped concentrate massive power and wealth in the hands of a few individuals.

Or is the present/near future really as creepy as in "The Entire History Of You"? This deeply discomfiting Black Mirror episode is set in a near future in which people wear Google Glass-like contact lenses that record everything they see. The footage is stored in hard drives, embedded in the neck, which can be watched as entertaining - or menacing - "re-do's" on your living room flat-screen.

The visionary show's first episodes aired in 2011 in the U.K. but became available on Netflix in the United States only in December. Already the buzz is such that a re-do of Black Mirror is planned for American TV. And Robert Downey Jr. has outbid George Clooney for the rights to make "The Entire History of You" into a feature film.

Maybe the nefarious side of technology is as dark and unsettling as Mirror would have it. But that doesn't mean we can't laugh about it on the way to our certain doom. That's what the always-Skyping women of Comedy Central's Broad City did in this last week's drunken yet incisive episode, "Hashtag FOMO." (ICYMI, that stands for Fear of Missing Out.)

The show followed our heroines - Ilana, played by Ilana Glazer; and Abbi, portrayed by Wayne, Pa.'s own Abbi Jacobson - as they move from one party to the next. Ilana and Abbi never stay long because texts and Instagram posts are always telling them that there's a better time to be had in somebody else's Brooklyn apartment, which we can go to if we leave right now.

"This party's a 7; we could be missing out on a 10!" says Ilana.

"But what if it turns out to be a 6?," worries Abbi.

The revelation comes when the duo wander into a basement bar so far underground that there is no cell reception. By this point, Abbi is so many sheets to the wind she won't remember anything the next day. But even in her inebriated state, she's able to come up with a pearl of wisdom. Sure, FOMO arises because the Internet is always telling you there's something better happening somewhere else. But "if you're always worried about missing out on life," Abbi says, slurring her words, "you never bother to actually live."

@delucadan www.philly.com/inthemix