On Christmas Day, Matt and Joe start talking about their past for the first time, after five years that they have been stationed together in a remote cabin. Matt used to help single men seduce women. His clients had optical implants that allowed him to see through their eyes and give them advice in real-time using the "Eye-Link" technology. His main profession, however, was subjugating artificial copies of clients' consciousness, stored into bean-sized chips called "cookies", into docile personal assistants in charge of running smart houses. (Description from Wikipedia.)
In this situation, Joe reveals that after a domestic squabble, his pregnant girlfriend Beth "blocked" him (around 48 minutes into the episode), using a technology that turned them into incomprehensible pixelated blurs to each other.