Westworld: A Mirror of Our Cyber Age
Westworld is not just a science fiction show—it is an adventure to an era when the line between man and machine is very blurred. Written by Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan, the series takes its inspiration from the tale of an amusement park in a future utopia in which people get to live their greatest fantasy within an Old West universe populated with realistic-looking androids that appear like real people, or hosts. One of the important things about Westworld is that on its surface, it’s an action adventure, but beneath the surface, it gets us thinking about our presuppositions of free will, identity, and ethics and technology. I was totally hooked by Westworld from the first episode because it combines chic aesthetic with intelligent storylines.
One of the most uncomfortable images is likely to be the back of the maze. At its face, it’s a fantastically engaging visual illusion, but as the show progresses, the maze itself is used metaphorically to describe the journey towards self-awareness—not just for the human castaways, but for the hosts as well. That idea of being forced through a ever-changing environment where every turn and every bend could potentially lead one to some arbitrary truth was something that really spoke to me. It made me question my life and how hard it is to decide who I am in this world that keeps on changing. Another fascinating thing about it is that Westworld stands for our own world with technology these days.
We’re living in an era where social media and digital technology are in control, and they get us to observe the line between what is real and what is not very loosely at many instances. The series has you wondering: What if technology becomes so advanced that it starts to make its own decisions? It’s not some science fiction horror of dystopia—that already happens, here in our world, as artificial intelligence and automation hurtle along at a whirling pace. The ethical issues Westworld raises are uncomfortably true, with you left pondering whether or not our dependency on technology will take away from us our freedom. Personally, watching Westworld made one think about how much of our online life mirrors who we are. I am awed—and unnerved—to think about how technology dictates what we like, what we think, and even what we remember. It’s like the show is holding up a mirror to our reality and forcing us to grapple with uneasy questions of humanity when so much of our life is dictated by algorithms and screens.
Here in this essay, I try to make the argument that Westworld is not only fiction, but a commentary on our addiction to technology and our affluent relationship with it.
By medium in multi-layered narratives, visual metaphor like the maze, and self-reflection by introspective characters, Westworld encourages us to question the limits between creator and creation, enslavement and freedom, reality and fantasy. In the end, Westworld challenges us to rethink our contemporary lives and the role played by advanced technology in shaping our identities. This is a journey, in a broad sense more than merely analyzing the subject matter of the series, that will instruct us to the moral complexities of our era of digitalization and render Westworld an anchor text for analyzing human interaction with technology in the years to come.