Sandra Moyano Ariza Boston, NeMLA 2020 3/5/20 Black Mirror’s “Hang the DJ:” On Love in Algorithmic Embodiment. My paper discusses the episode titled “Hang the DJ” (2017) of Netflix-produced show Black Mirror, which tackles the highly computed experiences of romantic love. Rather than analyzing it as representative of current dating experiences within the regimes of digitization and datafication, today I want to focus on how the episode’s approach to these themes engages in ontological reflection about digital technologies, thus aligning with recent speculative philosophy and critical media theory scholarship. This ontological reflection comes with the episode’s attempt to represent the algorithmic calculation itself, which I’ll refer to here as “algorithmic embodiment.” This algorithmic embodiment, I argue, grapples with knowledge-production of computational systems in order to, on the one hand, rethink the agency of digital technologies that decenter the human (which I’ll tackle in the first part of my paper), and on the other, lead us, hopefully, to an alternative approach to understanding love in our neoliberal context (which I’ll address at the end). [SLIDE] So “Hang the DJ” depicts a near-future world where romantic relationships are exceedingly regulated by an app called “The System,” which among other things , coaches the user, plans dates, anticipates the length of the relationship, or ultimately finds “the real one” (on a 99.8% success rate, as they tell us repeatedly throughout). However, at the end of the episode, [spoiler alert] we find out that the encounters we’ve seen, mainly between the protagonists, Amy and Frank, are in fact [SLIDE] relationships simulated by a dating app’s algorithm calculating the users’ compatibility in real life –similar to what apps like OKCupid currently do. Therefore, instead of (fictionalized) real encounters between the protagonists, these virtual relationships are actually