(dr) molly tov

bombs in bottles

The X-Files' "Kill Switch" is still horror, but in a completely different way

I rewatched the X-Files episode "Kill Switch" last night (S05E11). The tech is quaint (45 Mb/s download speeds! 64-bit encryption! CD-ROMs!), but what really struck me is how the horror of the episode is completely different in 2025 than it was in 1998.

I saw "Kill Switch" when it first aired. Back then, we feared the things the episode asserts we should fear. Computerized sentience that turns malevolent. Machines with their own agendas. Byers pronouncing "Linux" as "Lie-nux." (That last one doesn't happen in "Kill Switch," but it does happen, and I will never forgive the writers for it.)

Watching "Kill Switch" today raises a whole new horror: We are so accustomed to computers invading our privacy and eliminating our security that the characters' actions in "Kill Switch" make almost no sense.

For me, it started with a struggle to suspend my disbelief - more so than usual, I mean. I grew up with the tech shown in the episode, so I was willing to accept that. But the characters' relationships to it seemed unbelievably naive. To cite just a few examples:

Esther refuses to use a phone because the AI can track her voice. But she'll happily ride around with Agent Scully, who has a cell phone, ignoring the fact that cell phones can be tracked even when they're turned off.
Esther is dismayed when the AI can target her on a random road after she turns on her laptop: "I'm not even on the Net!" Girl, that computer has the same problem Scully's cell phone does: If it's putting out a signal, it can be tracked, and a hacker should know that.
Mulder walks right up to the AI's mobile home hideout, identifies himself verbally, and even presses the doorbell, without a care in the world that he's being voice-, video- and fingerprint-tracked by doing it. (Today, we'd assume the doorbell alone could and would do all three.)

At first, I was thinking "wow, people today would absolutely know better." Then it hit me:

Our relationship to tech has changed so much since 1998 that "failing to assume malevolence from tech" now looks naive and foolish, instead of the other way around.

That's horrifying.

Today, it's not the machine launching malevolent invasions on our daily lives. Rather, it's the use of that tech by corporations unrestrained by regulations and run by billionaires accountable to no one. The X-Files imagined a world where the government would be nosing into our every move, but it did not imagine a world where private corporations were doing it - without even the nominal safeguards of due process to stand in their way. And we are so used to this that to live any other way seems ridiculous.

What's horrifying about "Kill Switch" in 2025 isn't the tech's control and manipulation of the humans' actions. It's how the episode reveals the depths to which we, 27 years later, have been brainwashed to accept that level of control and manipulation in our daily lives. It horrifies me that "assuming the tech is out to get you" is so normal now that I thought it was weird to watch characters behave as if it were not. As if there were ever a time we could trust that tech worked for us. Yet that was a completely normal assumption in 1998!

At times like this, I fall back on the reassurance that it's all still humans behind the scenes. We built the society in which we cannot trust tech not to spy on us (or rather, we failed to build a society in which we could trust our tech), and we can build a society that handles its technology and its tech leadership differently. We can build a world without tech oligarchs and spyware. It won't be easy, but it can be done. Unlike the rogue AI in "Kill Switch," the villains in 2025 are still human beings.

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