I always found black mirror to be like… very kid’s first sci-fi. Like, “what if you were FORCED to watch ads?” “Bro, like… What if Facebook likes mattered! Like a lot!”
The ideas aren’t impossible but… from the dystopian episodes I saw, there always seemed to be significant obstacles in getting there from where we are that are never explored or explained away.
That’s kind of an accurate way to describe a lot of society these days though, from doomscrolling to phone addiction to social media disinformation to surveillance and tracking and advertising.
True, but these ideas were not quite in vogue in 2011 when Black Mirror first aired. The internet still felt like a wonder full of endless possibility. There was an app for everything. Personal data was not mined on planetary scales.
If we’re talking about sci-fi and disappointment, I can’t help but state again how disappointed I am that after nearly a decade of rumours and promises and whatnot, we are not getting a Gateway TV show after all…
I always found black mirror to be like… very kid’s first sci-fi. Like, “what if you were FORCED to watch ads?” “Bro, like… What if Facebook likes mattered! Like a lot!”
The ideas aren’t impossible but… from the dystopian episodes I saw, there always seemed to be significant obstacles in getting there from where we are that are never explored or explained away.
FWIW, showrunner Charlie Brooker says that the starting point for every episode is finding an idea he thinks is funny
To me that’s always been the point of the show.
Take some real world thing and push it to the point of being dystopian.
In the “Facebook likes” one, you can make a connection to social credit systems IRL.
The explanation is applying a “slippery slope” fallacy for pretty much every single concept.
The explanation of “how we got there” is all around you. Every day.
I think it was writer Daniel M. Lavery who described Black Mirror as, “What if cell phone… but too much!”
That’s kind of an accurate way to describe a lot of society these days though, from doomscrolling to phone addiction to social media disinformation to surveillance and tracking and advertising.
True, but these ideas were not quite in vogue in 2011 when Black Mirror first aired. The internet still felt like a wonder full of endless possibility. There was an app for everything. Personal data was not mined on planetary scales.
Yeah. It would be sweet to live in a world that doesn’t keep proving the cynics and doomsayers correct.
accurate!
They are but since we don’t get a lot of true scifi media ( I would describe most as space fantasy ) I’ll take what I can get
If we’re talking about sci-fi and disappointment, I can’t help but state again how disappointed I am that after nearly a decade of rumours and promises and whatnot, we are not getting a Gateway TV show after all…
and what a fantastic first dystopian scifi those first seasons were (for me)