Here’s what Stranger Things is about.
It’s about the nearly-complete loss of freedom in our modern “voluntary” panopticon.
This is something I’d been pondering before ST — that is, how the 1980s represented maximum technologically-boosted freedom before it transitioned to our current liberty-stifling all-surveilling all-consuming data-gathering dystopia.
You had cable or satellite but no one monitored what you watched – it was not technically possible, especially en masse. You had walkie-talkies but no one cared to or much monitored them either. You could still ride your bike — even as a kid — and no one attempted to arrest you or your parents. There was no Stingray, no mobile license plate readers, no ad tracking, no Google search history, no black boxes in cars, no constantly-tracked cellphones, no crypto locker and no damn Cortana.
Eleven of course represents the embodied loss of that freedom as she is abducted literally from her mother’s womb and lacks the de facto ability even to control the use of her own mind, not coincidentally much like our current situation where omnipresent surveillance and electronic confinement literally affects how we think. She becomes the tool of the system, beneficial even only to the co-protagonists for the most part when she is being exploited for her ability to do stranger and stranger things to their foes. Her presence and her often-unintentional path of destruction represents the invasion of the modern super-surveillance normalized paradigm into a time of maximal personal freedom.
Like us, then, she is both the system and exploited by the system and — the brilliant part of the show — that she is like us so enmeshed in this arrangement that even the tools she uses to fight it and how she understands it are all available only in the terms she already knows. Thus, despite her best efforts, she is still in fighting back only reinforcing the walls of her penitentiary.
But can you blame her? She’s only twelve years old.
What’s our excuse?