A friend recently told me that his favorite thing about the show Black Mirror is that he finally has a term for a certain type of technological anxiety. It’s a type of anxiety that seemed everywhere this year. The Sony hack could have been an episode of Black Mirror, as could Gamergate. In the same way that we refer to Blade Runner as shorthand for gritty dystopian cityscapes, Gattaca for worries about corporate use of genetic information, and Terminator for ominously powerful AI, Black Mirror has become shorthand for a certain type of contemporary internet-age creepiness.
If you haven’t seen the show, go watch it and come back: it's streaming on Netflix, and what follows contains many, many spoilers. If you don't care about that and need a primer, Black Mirror is a British sci-fi miniseries created by the satirist Charlie Brooker. Each of its seven episodes stands alone and usually features a character caught in the gears of a technologically infused society just a little farther along than where we are now. Instead of Google Glass there are optical implants; neat at first, but their recordings become fodder for obsession and jealousy. In another episode, a woman buys a simulacrum of her dead husband, its personality constructed out of his leftover digital presence; it's comforting until it's uncanny, and then the emotional bond she’s formed is too strong to break.
The premises are absurd exaggerations of current trends, but the episodes abide by a fairly realistic internal logic. That may seem like a strange thing to say about a show which at one point features a cartoon bear running for political office, but consider what isn’t in a Black Mirror story. There are no villains — no evil corporations, nefarious security states, or malevolent AIs. Nor are there any clear-eyed outsider heroes, the usual protagonists in dystopian sci-fi. Instead there are jealous husbands, egotistical politicians, callous TV hosts, and vengeful audiences. In a Black Mirror story, technology only provides a more effective way for people torture each other and themselves in all the usual ways, magnifying ordinary passions and insecurities to an absurd scale. Suddenly someone is demanding the erasure of a rival's memory implant, or the prime minister is soberly consulting polling on whether he should have sex with a pig on live television.
The bewildering escalation of events is a key part of Black Mirror, and it's a phenomenon this year was rich in — that how did we get here? Is this real life? feeling that so many of 2014's events had. Did some kids upset about critiques of their games really just threaten women from their homes and turn the internet into a hellscape? Did a dumb bro-comedy really become a matter of national security? Did the president just commend Seth Rogen?
Technology gets used for a lot of horrible things in Black Mirror, but the lesson is never simply that technology is bad. In fact, part of what makes the show eerie is that the tech on display is appealing but unremarkable, as ordinary and inescapable as phones and social networks are today. If Brooker were a luddite, railing against the evils of technology, Black Mirror would be easy to dismiss, but I’d wager he’s an avid user; he certainly has a nuanced understanding of the particular ways tech can mess you up and remain seductive.
Take the ocular implants in "The Entire History of You" and the recent Christmas special, "White Christmas." The implants end up causing everyone a great deal of emotional pain, but it’s obvious why you’d want them. You have total recall of every experience, sure, but it’s also where you send and receive messages, use facial recognition to identify new people, and navigate the world. (Sound familiar?) Without them, one would not be able to fully function in society. Even after Jon Hamm’s wife blocks him in the Christmas special, reducing both of them to staticky silhouettes, the most critical thing he can say is that he supposes that’s just "the price of progress." This is what makes the show truly dark, because it leads most of the characters to participate in their own destruction.
The bleakest episodes end with a half-rebellion. The protagonist realizes he or she is trapped, tries to escape, and only ends up more tangled. One of the darkest episodes, "Fifteen Million Merits," almost has an outsider character in the sullen Daniel Kaluuya. When the girl he loves is taken from him, he rebels — and his rebellion instantly gets commodified. The episode ends with him performing his protest for entertainment in exchange for a slightly larger cage. Almost every episode ends with a similar twisting of the knife. It’s reminiscent of the best Twilight Zone episodes (You think the aliens want to serve you? LOL, "To Serve Man" is a cookbook.), except in Black Mirror it’s less a moralistic reversal than a clarifying of the situation.
This is the paranoia at the heart of Black Mirror: we’re building systems the full repercussions of which we don’t yet understand, and the idea of opting out of them is a myth. It’s the suspicion that even as technology is making life better and better — and I believe it is — it’s exposing us to dangers we won’t understand until it’s too late to do anything about them.
At times this year has felt like a Black Mirror clarifying moment, which is to say, it felt like the future, but in an ominous way. Everything is connected now, which turns out to mean that pretty much everything is getting hacked. Anyone can talk to anyone now, which means everyone risks getting harassed by trolls. Our news is increasingly curated by algorithms whose biases and blind spots we’re just beginning to understand. Oh, and also those algorithms can inadvertently inflict pain, and they’re kept relatively clean by an army of foreign laborers traumatized daily by the worst humanity has to offer. Of course, I’m still saving everything to the cloud, still on every social network and signing up for new ones, still not really sure where my data is going.
A couple years ago I would have had to say that these events feel like something out of dystopian science fiction. Now I can be more concise. When I read a story like this one, about companies giving employees fitness trackers and awarding insurance discounts if they exercise, I think, imagining my wristband beeping my premium increase after I eat a burger — right, this is a Black Mirror story.
Comments
I think the "15 million merits" episode was more of a commentary on reality TV than technology
By osit. on 12.31.14 10:05am
That episode was a commentary on a lot of things. As you will notice with most of the episodes. They have multiple points that is trying to show to the audience and that’s the reason why it’s awesome. White Bear for me has to be the darkest episode for me. I was bloody conflicted when the twist came at the end…………… Still haven’t made my mind up lol
By axellink on 12.31.14 10:09am
and also the future of ads being forced onto consumers
By Skeith on 12.31.14 7:45pm
As amazing as this show was. The second series was very weak. Be right back was a great start… But white bear was just too much of a stretch to really like it. And the Waldo moment was just awful. All 3 episodes of the first series were brilliant… What happened? It’s not like they’re were so many episodes they ran out of ideas…
By richard.servello on 12.31.14 10:13am
I personally didn’t care for episode 1 of series 1. But I agree with you about series 2. However, they totally redeemed themselves with White Christmas. It might be my favorite episode of all. So they still have some ideas left.
By jonathanleewilson on 12.31.14 10:55am
Honestly, I felt like most of the series wasn’t too great, after all the hype it was getting.
By Citizen85 on 12.31.14 2:28pm
After watching the first season, I’m with you on the "ain’t all that" tip. I suspect it’s the usual Anglophilia which makes some people automatically ascribe greatness to anything from England where if the EXACT SAME THINGS were coming from American networks/studios, the same people fawning would be turning their noses up at them. If SyFy was running Black Mirror, it’d be dismissed as "a weak Twilight Zone wannabe with delusions of social commentary relevance as if forcing a Prime Minister to bugger a pig meant anything."
By DirkBelig on 01.02.15 3:00pm
in the end i determined that white bear was more about generating revenue than punishment and came to terms with what they were doing through that thought. it’s be interesting to see a cost analysis of putting on the show, paying for the technology behind it and hiring actors vs. how much money comes in through people paying to attend/paying to be a part of it. it’s an interesting take on prison and taxpayer money being spent.
By selenite on 12.31.14 10:14am
Great write-up, and I am so glad that niche intelligent sci-fi writing from the UK is finally breaking through over here – there is definitely hope for us all if we can be so self critical over the things we love.
And you’re right, Charlie Brooker is a serious technology lover… he did some very amusing write-ups of Apple products, from serious doubter to obsessor.
Charlie Brooker on why he hates Mac Users (2007)
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2007/feb/05/comment.media
By 2009, he was converted to Apple…
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/feb/28/charlie-brooker-pfroblem-with-macs
"The lady doth protest too much. A few weeks later, I buckled and bought an iPhone. And you know what? It felt good. Within minutes of switching it on, sliding those dinky little icons around the screen, I was hooked. This was my gateway drug. Before long I was also toting an iPad. And after that, a Macbook. All the stuff people said about how Macs were just better, about them being a joy to use . . . it was true, all of it."
By Wooloomooloo on 12.31.14 10:29am
You left out the rest of the column which basically refutes that paragraph.
The very next sentence:
By YozMan on 12.31.14 12:43pm
Lol, well said
By teqnick on 01.02.15 12:16am
He used to be a computer games reviewer for PC Zone back in the day so he is a commited technophile.
By zzzz9000 on 12.31.14 2:17pm
Black Mirror excels at demonizing the mob mentality that humans tend to have and telling us how technology can just make that worse. It’s a good show, though sometimes I feel like it’s forced to take extremes of character traits to force emotion since every episode is so short and self-contained. The format has its ups and downs.
By NieblaRL on 12.31.14 11:07am
I don’t get the near-universal appresal this show received. Even the supposedly brilliant first season was a series of episodes that required the viewer to willfully, and in my opinion naively, indulge the writers into accepting the fictional universe and consequences they presented. The parallels drawn to real Internet / tech culture are merely subjective and the points every episode makes, to me, are of the same level of of preachiness the typical’ absence-only’ advocate would present when it comes to sex. The relatively high production value masks the true, narrow look on tech most episodes contain.
That said, In haven’t seen the Christmas Special yet so I’mmeilling to give it the benefit of the doubt.
By Love 7 on 12.31.14 12:11pm
Routinely dealing with some of the worst humans on the planet, I feel like the episodes are crystal balls into the future
By geodescent on 12.31.14 12:40pm
Are you a police officer? I can believe your statement if that’s the case.
By groberts1980 on 01.01.15 8:28am
No, he’s just a Verge commenter.
By eallan on 01.02.15 3:35pm
I don’t get it either. I can’t figure out why people think this show is so amazing. I forced myself to sit through three or four episodes hoping it would get better, but it never did. I feel like there’s some kind of joke I’m not in on.
By AurochsOfDoom on 12.31.14 1:56pm
Judging by your reply, I think you may just not be into British TV. It has a certain flavor, and is different in an unidentifiable way than American TV. I simply can’t get into some British shows myself. Doctor Who and the one about all the clones of that girl.
By groberts1980 on 01.01.15 8:30am
The one about all the clones of that girl is Canadian/British ;-)
By fourthletter on 01.01.15 3:55pm
The flipside of that is that after getting used to British TV, I can’t watch US TV.
The sets are too bright, everyone is a 25 year old model, laugh tracks… Even the way BBC shows are purchased in blocks that allow them to be mini-movies with actual character development. US shows have to make sure that at the end of the Half-Hour, everything is back to "normal" so that the next writer can keep going. British shows are usually written by one person instead of the many people who write various episodes of American TV. I know with Boardwalk Empire that there was one writer who wrote all of the episodes I hate.
We all get used to what we get used to. One isn’t better than the other.
By Jason Maggard on 01.02.15 11:12am
The Christmas episode is basically all the others rolled into one, a big wink to the other various plotlines. It was pretty good, on par with the best of the show. But yeah, so much of the series seemed like the same repeated lazy execution but with high production values. It was like they just kept trying to recreate The Entire History of You.
By Citizen85 on 12.31.14 2:31pm
Very well said. Exactly!
By lurker22 on 01.01.15 10:46pm
I suspect it’s the usual Anglophilia which makes some people automatically ascribe greatness to anything from England where if the EXACT SAME THINGS were coming from American networks/studios, the same people fawning would be turning their noses up at them. If SyFy was running Black Mirror, it’d be dismissed as "a weak Twilight Zone wannabe with delusions of social commentary relevance as if forcing a Prime Minister to bugger a pig meant anything."
By DirkBelig on 01.02.15 3:02pm
7 episodes? Netflix only has 6. We actually just finished it last night. Where can one find the 7th?
By YouKnowThatOtherGuy on 12.31.14 12:13pm