I disagree that black mirror has to save the world. Art doesn't have to literally save the world to be useful, it just has to add to the conversation. The fact we are talking about it proves that it has.
On the other hand, i've never really liked black mirror that much. It feels polemical to me. Its unrelenting pessimism robs it of nuance, which makes it feel flat to me. To be clear it doesn't have to be happy, it can still be grim and dark, but when every character is a terrible character, it undermines the story
Take the episode "nosedive" where everyone is obsessed with social media ratings. Compare it to other people who copied it (meow meow beans in community, or majority rule in the orvile). I think the other tv shows did it better and honestly made technology look worse, because they had characters that weren't cartoon villians.
Maybe the part i don't like about black mirror is not that it showd technology stripping people of their hummanity but that all its characters already lack humanity so there is nothing to strip, which is kind of boring.
"Imagine some theoretical technological advancement. Now take it out of context, put it in the worst possible circumstances, and imagine it appeared into a society like ours without any prior thought or discussion about the possible downsides of that technology."
For example: in a society where autonomous security guard robots kill intruders, there would not be people sneaking into warehouses. In a society where people can play back and re-live prior memories, it would not suddenly come up that one can relive experiences with past lovers. In a society where one's consciousness could be contained inside a "cookie," being unexpectedly in a strange place with no explanation would immediately have one questioning whether that's what happened.
It just feels ham-fisted. In their defense, I'm sure it's tough to introduce an entirely new concept and world and sell a brand new story all in the scope of a single episode, but the formula felt a little stale, at least while I was watching it.
This is precisely why I love Black Mirror. Despite the warnings, we're allowing companies to build killer robot and are running a large scale experiment to build a god. For a long time, I thought ethics is what prevented us from cloning human but recent years are showing balance sheet will outweigh it. As Netflix is 99.9% garbage, watching something like Black Mirror is refreshing
Which is basically how most technologies appear{s,ed} in society: without prior thought / discussion.
There's certainly a lot of talk while it's being rolled out, but rarely prior.
> For example: in a society where autonomous security guard robots kill intruders, there would not be people sneaking into warehouses.
People do crime because they think† they can get away with it, because if you knew that you'd probably get caught why would you do it in the first place? How many people purposefully do crime in order to get caught?
In your specific example people will think they've figured out a way to get past the automated system. (Not even getting into the fact that in some jurisdictions it's illegal to set traps, e.g., Canada Criminal Code §247.)
† When they think at all, and it's not just a heat / spur-of-the-moment action (often when drunk).
We have a society (in the US) where cops often shoot first and ask questions later, but many people still do crimes. People will take risks about things that desperately matter to them, and indeed stories of such risk-taking are common cultural fodder. Are you not just generalizing from your own behavior?
I think this episode was one of Black Mirror's strongest, because not only would it suddenly come up, it does to a lesser degree with the technology we have today. I've been the guy obsessively replaying painful memories from old photos I have. I don't think it was really presented as though the characters are the first ones to ever think of the idea.
In BM's defense, I think it needs to be that way to a point, to have the viewer react and acknowledge these downsides within their current frame of reference.
It can be hard to swallow both a world that has evolved for 10~20 years, and also think about a whole new paradigm that matches that unfamiliar world.
Isn't this the premise for the original Terminator ? Sure it was "unnecessarily" pessimistic, but man oh man it really hit a nerve and it set a tone for (all?) subsequent societal conversation.
So like exactly what is happening with driverless car technology.
A technology that was in its infancy in lab settings; taken out of that context and thrust upon our public roads by capricious impulsive billionaires in "beta" form, which has predictably killed people; but instead of pulling back and having a discussion about the possible downsides, this technology is allowed to plague us; because thought or discussion about possible downsides are short circuited by platitudes about how you have to crack eggs to make an omelet.
Can't get a driverless car future free of car deaths without first killing some people with driverless cars, ya know?
I am not much of a TV watcher so this is the only episode of black mirror I've seen but this really got me - for a show that got so much hype - this is the first couple to have jealousy issues around this technology? Really?? And he has to cut it out of his head with a double edged razor? Really??? People want to forget things all of the time.
It's TV and the other shows I watch are mostly because they're terrible, so it was better than those, but it definitely felt like, cmon guys, we can do better.
So, exactly like the real world case with all modern tech advancements?
“Nosedive” was the most surface-level take of that idea, the “pain chip” episode was basically just shock-value, the “trapped in the weird guys computer simulation” episode was “Whiteout” but derivative. The killer robot bees episode was…an episode of tv I guess?
Possibly it’s a format that just inevitably “wears thin” quite quickly, but it did feel like the early episodes had far more “existential dread” and interesting-exploration about them.
It got much more commercial and literal after that.
Take 1984. It reads like a thought experiment reflecting the author's deepest fears about the dangers of unchecked power structures. Allegedly, Orwell’s own son would have been around 40 years old in the year 1984 (I read so in Pynchon's introduction to this book in Penguin's edition. It was a great essay.)
But, 1984 also features a great protagonist and an absolutely haunting language. While many of the other characters mainly serve to convey the broader ideas, it’s him who grounds the story emotionally. His suffering, his moral collapse, and the eventual loss of his ability was so tough to read and will forever haunt me. When he breaks, it feels like a loss for all of humanity. But, what I mean is characters are not essential to make a great work. When Orwell wants to convey his ideas, the characters are sidelined and ideas take the front wheel.
I understand your perspective. I'm not a fan of many of the episodes either. I really liked the first season, but the ones that followed just didn’t live up to it. And it does not rise above a horror centered around some particular technology. But, it's them give it cultural relevance.
This paragraph goes one way and then suddenly pivots to the opposite conclusion without any justification. Orwell's character is why the story is wrenching. Without that emotional weight it has no staying power.
Also, the name of the show is BLACK mirror. Besides the iPhone symbolism by which the name is inspired, the whole point of the show is to hold up a mirror to the dark side of society.
This may lead to a show that is without nuance or is less interesting, but thats the point of the show.
To show darkness you have to have light. You can't cast a shadow if its pitch black.
In terms of black mirror, they show a society devoid of humanity, true. But in most episodes (there are probably some exceptions) it feels like the lack of humanity is not because of technology, but because the world of the show is populated by monsters. As a result, it doesn't effectively show the dehumanizing power of technology.
When watching an episode - ask yourself, would these characters still do monsterous things without the tech premise? If the answer is yes, then its not really about the tech.
Like, maybe that's the show the creators wanted to make. I'm not certain about that, but it's a valid premise. But then maybe I would prefer if the show was a bit different regardless of that. That's always allowed.
Sometimes I feel like Community is a more subtle Black Mirror than what we give it credit for. The writers came up with the weirdest ideas, and they just threw these at this world they created in Community to see what came out. /Everyone/ in that story finds themselves at Greendale because of some less-than-optimal circumstance, and the only thing they can do is react to the circumstances given to them.
Meow meow beans is a stand-out episode because it takes the absurdity of a social credit system all they way beyond the vale and straight to it's natural conclusion, where common sense failed to step in and take control.
But yes, agreed about Black Mirror feeling hollow with its lack of nuance in its pessimism.
However I don't think Nosedive is the right episode to make this point as we see the protagonist getting assistance from the truck driver lady as well as the people protagonist ends up being held with are able to share a laughter in the freedom of losing it all.
The world is full of terrible people, though. It's a "mirror" on current society, which is probably where they got the name. And by terrible I don't mean "literally Hitler," but the boring terribleness and malaise that so many around us have kind of just slipped into: Selfishness, impoliteness, paranoia, anger, belligerence, spitefulness, indifference to cruelty, unnecessary competitiveness in everything. Just an overall lack of socialization, grace and empathy.
Maybe it's boring to you because the characters' traits can be found all over the place in real life.
As such, bawolff's point resonates with me. And even if that wasn't the case, they still have a good point. If you pick terrible protagonists to begin with, it undermines the morale of the episode a little. Showing how "reasonable" people are affected is stronger, and I indeed feel that both Community and Orville did that really well.
Nope. It's a reference to the surface of a screen. (Though undeniably there's important double meaning there)
> The "black mirror" of the title is the one you'll find on every wall, on every desk, in the palm of every hand: the cold, shiny screen of a TV, a monitor, a smartphone.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/dec/01/charlie-b...
I believe it was popular for those reasons.
It encapsulates most of what I dislike about horror films as well - so many of them are just a jumpscare extravaganza but without actually trying to present you with anything meaningful, like an underlying critical analysis or anything (or even any characters). Like sure, if we use technology to torture people, that's bad. So what?
Somehow though I don't think a legal drama about the creeping erosion of people's rights and the transformation of society by well meaning but unintentionally invasive technology will have mass market appeal, but at least it would feel like its critiquing something real
To the extent they employ sci-fi it’s usually to force the viewer into an outsider’s perspective.
Admittedly, the show’s skewed farther into straight five-minutes-in-the-future tech-prediction readings as it’s gone on.
Sometimes an extremely pessimistic vision of a possible future CAN change things...by making it so people are determined to fight to prevent that possible future from ever happening.
The novel 1984 by George Orwell was published in 1948. It is an extremely pessimistic vision of a possible future for mankind....and many of us over the generations who read it really really did not want to live in such a future and acted accordingly.
Black Mirror's pessimism could be similar.
Also in Black Mirror technology in of itself is never portrayed as inherently bad in any episode. It is the people and the way they choose to use the technology that leads to the horror. In that way every Black Mirror episode has that element of optimism. If only each new piece of tech in reality could ever be introduced so we maximize the positives rather than the negatives.
> In contrast, France ran from the past towards the future, overcoming public fears of nuclear disasters, now getting 70% of its electricity from nuclear power.
France has put a single reactor online in the last 25 years, it has closed reactors and cancelled building new ones for some time.
The problem has always been financial with other sources becoming simply cheaper, more competitive and easier/quicker to put online.
You live in exactly that future.
The screens that you watch, watch you. You can't escape them in your own home, let alone in public.
Words are redefined by the elite at their whim, as they were in the novel.
Very few would dare to publicly align themselves with the nation which we have always been at war with.
You live in that world now.
The author mentions Jill Lapore's 2017 article in the New Yorker, which is sort of a survey paper of dystopian fiction from that period.[1] No alternatives are presented.
For most of human history, the big problem was making enough stuff. There just wasn't any way to make enough stuff for everybody. In the 20th century, high volume manufacturing got going. By the 1950s, the US had this totally worked out. At long last, society really could make enough stuff for everybody. Science fiction of the 1950s is mostly utopian. With scarcity conquered, the future looked bright.
But it didn't work out.
Think about why for a while. I'll wait.
[1] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/06/05/a-golden-age-f...
I remember reading round the world in 80 days when I was a kid and while it's not really "science fiction" in the 90s, the overall premise really triggered my imagination. Can't really say that for many of the more doom and gloom type stories that I read later in my adult life. I liked the freshness of Black Mirror when it first came out (pre Netflix) but then it dawned on me that it was mostly doomscrolling repackaged and converted into slick entertainment. I tuned out after that.
There was early dystopian SF. H.G. Wells' The Time Machine ends with a dystopia. E. M. Foester's The Machine Stops (1909) was way, way ahead of its time.
Vashti’s next move was to turn off the isolation switch, and all the accumulations of the last three minutes burst upon her. The room was filled with the noise of bells, and speaking-tubes. What was the new food like? Could she recommend it? Has she had any ideas lately? Might one tell her one’s own ideas? Would she make an engagement to visit the public nurseries at an early date? — say this day month.
To most of these questions she replied with irritation — a growing quality in that accelerated age. She said that the new food was horrible. That she could not visit the public nurseries through press of engagements. That she had no ideas of her own but had just been told one-that four stars and three in the middle were like a man: she doubted there was much in it. Then she switched off her correspondents, for it was time to deliver her lecture on Australian music.
The clumsy system of public gatherings had been long since abandoned; neither Vashti nor her audience stirred from their rooms. Seated in her armchair she spoke, while they in their armchairs heard her, fairly well, and saw her, fairly well. She opened with a humorous account of music in the pre-Mongolian epoch, and went on to describe the great outburst of song that followed the Chinese conquest. Remote and primæval as were the methods of I-San-So and the Brisbane school, she yet felt (she said) that study of them might repay the musicians of today: they had freshness; they had, above all, ideas. Her lecture, which lasted ten minutes, was well received, and at its conclusion she and many of her audience listened to a lecture on the sea; there were ideas to be got from the sea; the speaker had donned a respirator and visited it lately. Then she fed, talked to many friends, had a bath, talked again, and summoned her bed.
Social media. 1909.
Frankenstein is considered by many to be among the first science fiction books and is essentially a Black Mirror story from the 1800's. You had HG Wells and War of the Worlds for example. The Time Machine by HG Wells also portrays a possible negative vision for humanity based on an extrapolation of the social trends of the time.
Look at Asimov's robot stories. The orignal "robot" story was not from Asimov but a pessimistic story written in the 1920's about killer robots attacking people and being violent and all that. Asimov's optimistic peaceful robot stories were actually a reaction to the pessmistic violent robot stories that had been popular previously.
I think humans generally over the past few centuries have had uneasy feelings about technological changes and then that is reflected in dystopian, negative fiction. People react to that negativity by intentionally writing bright optimistic positive science fiction stories.
Look at Star Trek the Original Series for my final example. That tv show came out during the turmoil of the late 1960's and it responded to that turmoil and feelings of nuclear holocaust with a vision of the future that was filled with optimism and idealism.
yes we do, it's called The Culture by Iain M Banks.
It's a series of books, and it's not easy-web-novels reading, so in the grand scheme of things is pretty niche
He can thank Elon & the Tech Lords for bringing the public perception of tech right back into dystopian nightmare territory.
But even apart from that, this seems like an extremely selective recollection of the Covid era. Yes, technology was a livesaver during that time, and we all were using it in frequency and to a degree like never before. (And indeed even that time brought lasting new "skills" which offer genuine new possibilities, like the new casualness and ubiquity of online meetings)
But I also remember that tech didn't actually feel very empowering during, on the contrary: Suddenly being online changed from something fun and interesting to mandatory: You had to be online, even for the things you'd much rather do offline. What been an extension of possibilities before now became a constraint. This definitely made it feel much more dystopian than before.
> We must move away from binary tales of catastrophe, not towards naive utopianism that ignores problems and risks that comes with change, but hopeful solutionism that reminds us we can solve and mitigate them [...]
I think this misunderstands the reasons why people are wary of new technology and instead pulls up the old "Luddite" strawman (which was itself a misrepresentation).
Of course we could introduce new tech carefully and with a strong emphasis of identifying and mitigating the risks. The problem is that we won't do that, because the incentives point into the opposite direction. Companies don't want to fall behind, so they move fast and break things instead of being careful. The general population then finds themselves as guinea pigs in barely tested new technology with little power to actually influence the course this technology takes. This causes a feeling of helplessness and resentment.
S07E01 "Common People" hit me pretty close to home with my own healthcare insurance experiences, where my rates go up every year and my coverages go down, and things that were formerly covered are now covered in Plus/Premium add-on packages. We also see this streaming and cellular services, except those are more elective.
The way I see it, if you don't like it, too bad.
It does show rather well (and rather funnily) how it can be a fine line between warning about technology, and taking it too cynically.
Yes, add that and it might be something interesting but sure not the Black Mirror I want to watch. I mean it is called Black Mirror for a reason.
And it is not even true. Take the episode "San Junipro" for example? Isn't there some hope and opportunity in it? And yet, this episode (one of the best in my opinion) only works because the hope can shine against a black background.
Arguably though that episode is a bit of an outlier. I think its the most hopeful (relatively speaking) of all the black mirror episodes i've seen.
What you see is the only real thing. Caretaker machines swapping hard drives or whatever it is they were doing (it’s been a while since I watched it)
That’s why it shows us that, when it does.
If there's a continuity of experience from your present day life to your virtual life, if the virtual version shares all your memories, hopes, fears, thought patterns... Then in what way is it not you?
Do you also think that "reconstructive teleporting" would build another person but that person would not be you?
1% of your cells are replaced daily. Presumably you still believe you're you even though much of you is constantly being replaced. If it were an option would you really deny your future self an arbitrarily long happy life because you got hung up on Theseus's Paradox?
So, a computer program can believe?
She showed me San Junipero and Hang the DJ. And then we were done.
Pessimism saves lives and resources. It won't lead us to a better future, but it might save what does.
Furthermore, for many of us, we are already in a state of technological mindfuckery beyond Black Mirror levels. Black Mirror sounds like a fairy tale.
We need humans, kind humans that are not fools. That's very hard to make. Without that any future, technological or not, is bleak.
I'm reminded of growing up watching episodes of Twilight Zone and Star Trek that yes, were kitschy stories, but instilled lifelong lessons about independence in their audience. Black Mirror isn't my favorite show but it seems to resemble the same "near future cautionary tale" archetype that has remained popular for centuries.
Dark, pessimistic, sad, tragic things seem superficially more profound for the same reason that people slow down when they pass a car wreck and true crime shows about serial killers are popular.
We are this way because it probably had evolutionary survival value. “If you mistake a bush for a lion you’re fine, but if you mistake a lion for a bush you’re dead.”
The exaggerations in media often defines our outward perceptions more than the boring reality of our actual lives. So it can equally do harm if taken too seriously. And it definitely won't make better films/tv shows.
Perhaps those whose job it is to push messages (e.g. journalists) see themselves and their mission in TV shows and so we have this view as shown in the article.
I don't agree with this or the article at all. There's very little nostalgia, if any, in Black Mirror. (nostalgia being a desire to return to the past, or romantic display of the past). The show is very firmly centered on present day or future abuse of technology, that much is true, but there's nothing wrong or inaccurate about that.
The article just does what is common but wrong, fetishize technology, that is to claim that technology itself makes the world better. But that is to attribute agency to something that has no agency. We're not better off than the past because of technology, but because of ethical progress. Technology is a lever. It as easily makes you a virus as it can make you a cure.
Give modern technology to a dictator and you get the most total surveillance state on earth. Black Mirror makes an accurate observation, that technological progress is outrunning our ethical progress. Insofar pessimism is justified. When you're at the mercy of at best idiots and at worst despots not handing them bigger levers is not nostalgia but just means you have a healthy survival instinct.
I can't help feeling
>Biotechnology like GMOs and mRNA offered existential hope, rather than risk.
rather skips over the fact that the whole pandemic was probably set off by a lab screw up illustrating the value of warning about such things.
Granted I'm also WAY burnt out on pessimistic Si-Fi, it's the default now, and it's predicable and far too easy.
That's not to say it can't be mostly dark, but for many movies and shows, that's most of the meat...
Gosh yeah. Even watching Black Mirror this season is difficult because I'm so tired of dystopian stuff.
Can you recommend any recent non-dystopian scifi?
And modern science fiction seems stuck in a dystopian rut. Most of the good sci-fi (and I enjoy things like the Murderbot Diaries) are largely dystopic. Hell, Star Trek- long the most utopian of sci-fi- is doing movies about Section 31 and whole seasons about android slave uprisings. No one is inspired to build a better future by "Don't create the Torment Nexus", they just get inspired to build the Torment Nexus.
Basically, we are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be, as Kurt Vonnegut wrote.
Thank you for reading my TED talk.
Maybe if we want more optimism in our media, we should give ourselves something to be optimistic about.
It seems to me that it's the opposite. Stories are how we form our views of the world and our dreams for the future. Therefore if we want to have people who build towards things worthy of optimism, we should start by telling stories that inspire them to be optimistic.
Look at Star Trek - Roddenberry didn't go "well the world is hella racist so I guess the show should be too". He made the show reflect his vision for how we could live a better life, and people responded to that over time. I think we badly need the same thing today.
But you had a guy who had been a bomber pilot in World War Two and flown combat missions against the Japanese, who desperately wanted to put a (gay) Japanese-American who had spent the war in an internment camp into his show, and a black woman (and have her kiss his white male lead star!), and later on, when people seemed to not be getting what he was trying to say, even added a good Russian character (played by an actual Russian-American). Because the point was to show, just like Verne a century earlier, that if truly all of humanity worked together, we could accomplish anything, for example travelling the stars. And so many people were inspired by his vision, and wanted to build his vision, to make his dreams real.
And nowadays the dreams that I see, both in stories and made manifest, seem drab and small and more than a little evil by comparison. And I do think that story-tellers (of whatever medium- very much including start-up founders) need to be aware of the power of their stories, that their myths become real, and have a responsibility to use that power for good and not for evil.
We’re talking a few decades at a time in a few places scattered over a couple hundred years, maybe, if we mean the median person in that time and place.
The 20th century got a big optimism and productivity boost from finally all but ending cyclical famines, antibiotics, and vaccines, and most of the stuff since has been of far smaller consequence. We’re coming down off the brief high of Haber-Bosch and penicillin, and haven’t found another fix yet. Computers and the Internet ain’t it, so far.
How did we have decades of superhero movies and then elect a bonafide fascist villain? I don’t know. The lessons we were teaching weren’t the right lessons somehow. Or they were swamped by social media nonsense and decades of underfunding education.
It's in the horror genre. Of course it's fearmongering, that's what horror stories do. Just because it's not the stereotypical horror doesn't mean it's not in that domain. It's great as a horror show because it shows somewhat plausible futures, and that dream/nightmarelike quality is truly gripping.
Honestly there are way too many dystopian "omg this tech will do this" media as opposed to "this tech will do this good thing."
So, in the Psalms, many of them are lament. The structure addresses God, lists the complaints, and usually ends on a positive note citing His future promises. They might cite previous times God delivered them. So, the pattern is a unifying, objective truth followed by a mix of bad news and good news that offsets it. This helped the Israelites stay mentally strong as they faced circumstances like the Exile.
The author wondered if Black Mirror could explore the risks without pessimism porn. I think the pattern in the lament Psalms could be helpful. We know, though, that Hollywood often appeals to the dark, sinful part of our psyche. The producers know people often want to watch horrible things more than pleasant things. That's the real reason.
I think the issue is that we seem to be getting less creative and less adventurous. We have fewer visions and stories of what could be.
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2025/apr/04/if-you-...
The direct cost is at least 100,000 lives in America alone, all the technological advancement that comes with cheap electricity, and who knows what affects it would have had on the climate.
And if you look beyond Western sci-fi, there was plenty of that stuff in the USSR. Most of it not particularly good, but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noon_Universe and Ivan Yefremov's books (most notably https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andromeda:_A_Space-Age_Tale) stand out.
I am mildly amused. We all see the ways technology goes wrong and every day. It is right and proper to at least try to see into the future by exploring all the ways it can go wrong if only because we do.. or at least should know.. that Murphy was an optimist.
You can kill a messenger for delivering a false message, but not a true one, even when it's bad.
Stories about a utopia where everyone is happy tend to be boring.
Even "My Neighbour Totoro" has something "go wrong" for drama and interest.
Maybe we need more "My Neighbour Totoro"-like stories set in a Solar Punk world.
That said, I won't lie-watching a corrupt politician fuck a pig on a livestream was a hilarious idea.
WTF? Somebody needs to touch some !@#@%^ grass. Like roll around in it for hours, maybe smoke some (legal) weed before hand.
It's sci-fi entertainment, for crying out Louis, not a political or philosophy movement.
Get over it, get outside, and go hug a tree.
Reality fails to present a reason to expect there to substantially be a “duality”.
