Over the break, I watched Black Mirror, the highly acclaimed British futurist show. I am tempted to call it a tech-dystopian show, but it isn’t quite that. To count as dystopian, you need a corresponding utopian vision that has failed or is stillborn, and the show doesn’t offer or suggest any. People have also been comparing it to The Twilight Zone, but I think the comparison is off. The what-ifs of the Twilight Zone are about the nature of the world, in the sense of what if the Earth were spiraling into the Sun? The what-ifs of the Black Mirror are about human nature, as in what if all our relationships are based on lies?
The shows differ in their humor content. Black Mirror is humorless right now, but I suspect The Twilight Zone was at least a little funny back when it first aired. More to the point, while The Twilight Zone has acquired significant camp value (in Sontag’s sense of failed seriousness) today, somehow I don’t think Black Mirror will seem campy in a few decades; merely obsolete like old documentaries. This difference in humor content is significant in a way I’ll get to.
So what we have here is a dark but not dystopian show. A show about a steady loss of innocence through increasing knowledge (enabled by technological evolution rather than a fall from Eden), but not about apocalyptic collapses. A show that is not anti-technology per se, but about the idea that technology makes life easier in part by forcing harder, if rarer, choices upon us, as the price of automating simpler, more commonplace decisions. About going from moral mediocristan to moral extremistan.
It’s not quite a must-watch as far as the entertainment value goes. It has the ponderousness of a lecturing professor. But it’s a must-watch in the sense of cultural homework. People will be using the show as a reference point for talking about the emerging future for at least a few years. The conclusion most will jump to is that this is a show about tech dystopias, but it is really a show about the theory that hell is other people. The futurism angle is that information technology makes this particular kind of hell more possible.
I don’t have spoilers in this post, and you don’t need to have watched the show to read it, but if you don’t want to hear a theory of the show before actually watching it, come back later.