If there is one TV series I wish I’d written it would be black mirror, it’s just so fudging clever.

Most Sci-fi and fantasy, not sure this is the correct genre, postulates the idea of an alternative, a future trajectory, a misunderstood past event, or a clean slate after a disaster. Some imagine myths, some superhuman strength, some use outer space as the canvas to do just about anything.

What BM does is to extrapolate the meaning in the now, the meaning of what the objects in the world that define our social existence really mean. What are their falseness, their untrue truths, what implications do they have that might change us?

Explored in one of my favorite episodes is the effect on the abilities of a person to get anything done in the world based on what current score they hold on social media. Their likes give them a score, each interaction with each other person they encounter contributes to this score, and their running score determines how the next person they interact with will view them before they interact. This social media score acts like a CV before an interview, it predetermines the first impression, and once it starts on a downward trajectory it tumbles like dominoes falling. The onus is on the individual to make their behaviour pleasing to the persons they interact with so as to gain tokens, this means that there is always falsehood involved. Now I am sure I could link this back to a theory that it has always been so, mentioning the please and thank you culture that we have been taught, and it is likely that you could too, but I would contend that this has never been prohibitive in the way that BM imagines it now is. We could be rude yet still get on the flight, we could drive in an inconsiderable manner and folks would just put up with us, we could make no effort in our appearance and that would stop us from getting favour but not bar us from entry to the pub. BM imagines that, without a large social media score, we could be ostracised entirely.

Another episode speculates on what would happen if all human interaction was stored and retrievable. Secrets are part of being human, the separation between consent of memory and what we offer as a facade to others, even others we are intimate with, is a protection against their judgment and the consequences of their jealousy. I think that this story highlights the way society has changed so that every deed can now be recorded by somebody using the device we all have in our pocket, and how that changes how we act, how much less we now reveal and how performative our lives are in all our interactions.

Another focuses on how some are mandated to earn capital credits by contributing energy to the state, and what they could then do with those credits. One young person gives their credits to another so that she can fulfil her dream of being a star by going on a reality TV show and being judged worthy. In this we see the lesson of modernity being that you are not talented at all, you are merely potential viable to someone else’s revenue stream, you must have what they thing they can use, and if so they may make you talented by enabling you and providing coaching toward stardom. A society with an artificial barrier between the talent and the audience, much as we have become, and for the purpose of making that barrier the focus all the while.

A further episode takes us into the questioning around what justice is, and uses a very old method of realising it in one theory. In the Bible there is a passage where the damned are witnessed in their torture and pain by the just and righteous, and later St Aquinas echoes this in his writings. In this episode the process of punishment is realised by the wiping of a criminal’s memory then the enactment of a painful scenario of terror and fear upon them for the entertainment of the masses. We’ve seen this sort of thing in movies before, and heard of punishment as a spectacle of entertainment in stories from the Romans. Here in BM you find yourself sickened by it and asking yourself if this is really just at all, you wonder what sort of person is entertained by witnessing suffering even if deserved?

There’s an episode where we are warned about the dangers of technology being used by nefarious persons, this time it’s bees. There’s another where sentient human beings created to be part of a simulation overthrow the code and the controller of the game, showing that anyone with humanity in them wishes to be free and not just part of an ego expression of a controlling mind. Another episode explores the safety versus freedom conversation that parentalism tries to find balance between, where an implant in a child prevents them from absorbing the reality of real media and consequences, and allows them to be monitored by someone else.

One episode explores the idea that people can be psychological experts on the potential matches between person in a coupling. It runs through a simulation of matching persons based on what can be known of them. I see a lot of dating shows because my partner finds them intriguing, almost always they suffer from the same vitally important flaws…. No person is an expert on themselves and knows what would suit them best in a partner so as to define it in words. No person reveals all of themselves in a survey, no matter how detailed it is we will not be honest with the answers as we are never 100% honest with ourselves. The “experts” often inject in traits that they think fill gaps for the participant, like a fix of sorts, and often people want to be understood in their broken nature rather than have it repaired.

What we are witnessing here is the dissection of culture, these societal things we build, to find influences. Behavioural modification has always been a thing, when you teach the child to not pick its nose or to say certain phrases or not, when you tap the machine with your card instead of reaching for the cash, when you read your own meter etc, you know that something has changed in the way things are to be done, and it is rarely accidental. Yet we never think of these things, BM makes us think about them, the what if we could speculates on the trajectory of knowing that we will soon be able to.

There are many more episodes, and each is philosophically interesting in itself. I could likely link them to existing theories but that would be boring, some things are better absorbed by this format and not subjected to academia where some grey haired nerd told you what to make of them. I watched it all on Netflix, but for a list of episodes … https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Black_Mirror_episodes#

Paul S Wilson