On the off chance that one feeling is by all accounts totally non-existent later on tragic universe of Black Mirror, it's good faith. Composed and made by the famously sharp-tongued British TV pundit and comedian Charlie Brooker, the as of late increased to-Netflix British dull drama is in reality a reflection of sorts, offering a mercilessly unforgiving take a gander at our post-web, tech-fixated times. Still, the seven scenes that have circulated up to this point (counting, most as of late, a unique "White Christmas" scene with John Hamm) tend to feel less like portrayals of the present than looks of a conceivable future that we could carry on two or three decades from now—that is, whether we don't stop to consider the human results of the mechanical advancements we tend to reflexively grasp.SPOILER ALERT: If you haven't watched the show yet, kindly do as such before you continue: this article uncovers a portion of the plot shocks. On the off chance that you have, read on for seven possibly terrifying results of innovation foreshadowed by the show, from computerized spouse surrogates to in-cerebrum police examinations.
1. Online Spectacle Will Take Precedence Over Real Life
In the inaugural episode of Black Mirror, a fictional British Prime Minister awakes in the middle of the night to discover himself the target of an anonymously authored ransom video: the royal princess has been kidnapped, and she'll be killed unless he has sex with a pig on national television. At first, he and his staff try to everything they can to spare him this gruesome inevitability—making preparations for a simulated version of the fornication scene in a TV studio, sending a squad team to a compound where they believe the kidnapper may be housed. When these attempts backfire, his approval rating takes a hit, and mounting pressure from the public via social media compels him to go through with it.
However, as is often the case with Black Mirror, things aren't exactly as they appear. It turns out the kidnapping was a conceptual art prank, one designed to make a very specific point: when we're too busy rubbernecking the latest sensational headlines online, we miss out on what is readably observable in real life.
How likely is this? It's already happening, on some level. According to The Guardian, Black Mirror creator Charlie Brooker says the scenario was partly inspired by the real-life experiences of Gordon Brown: when the former British prime minister was caught on-tape making disparaging remarks about a voter who'd just asked him some questions on camera, the public kicked up such a storm that he was forced to publicly apologize.
2. Every Moment Of Your Life Will Be Monetized
There are a lot of disturbing things going on in this dystopian vision of the future, where ordinary citizens peddle away on exercise bikes all day long to the earn credits they need to survive, all the while absorbing an endless stream of televised content that they have to pay for even when they don't feel like watching. For the most part, this mysteriously exercise-powered totalitarian universe bears little resemblance to the world we inhabit today, though it can also feel like an extreme metaphor for a phenomenon that is already well under way: as much of quotidian experience migrates to the digital sphere, there's nary a moment that passes where we aren't being "economically useful" in some way, be it through the direct purchase of online entertainment or simply the lending of our eyeballs to traffic-hungry web properties. Read more on "Fifteen Million Merits"here.
How likely is this? To the extent that we already spend most of our lives in front of screens, supplying page views and consumer data to advertisers, this is already our reality.
3. You Won't Be Able To Forget Anything
Life in this domestic drama doesn't look or feel all that different from the present, except nearly all the characters has something called a "memory grain" implanted in his or her neck—a device that enables you to record video-style footage of everything you see and hear, then play it back for yourself and others, in a process referred to as a "redo". Consequently, the characters spend a lot of their time reliving things that happened to them in the past—often for entertainment and nostalgic purposes, in the way that one might Bluetooth one's Instagram feed onto an Apple TV for friends. Instead of only preserving select memories, though, "grain" technology records pretty much everything that happens to you; that means that you can always relive cherished memories of a lost love, but in the case of the married couple at the heart of this episode, the impossibility of "deleting" the past proves disastrous.
How likely is this? We don't have anything like the memory grain implant yet, but one could achieve a similar result by walking around wearing a Google glass or a GoPro, hitting record, and letting it roll all day. Those more expensive technologies aside, we're always recording everything with our phones. Who knows what's next?
4. You'll Probably End Up Dating A Machine
As a young woman mourns the loss of her fiancé in a car accident, a friend of hers recommends a controversial service that might ease the pain: it allows the bereaved to "speak" with a deceased family member by creating a digital alter ego of them using information sourced from their emails and social media presence. Discovering she is pregnant, our protagonist uses the application to continue her relationship with her dead hubby online; eventually, she starts talking to him on the phone, and even invests in a feature that grafts his algorithmic personality onto a synthetic body. Living side by side with this personalized robot, though, turns out to be increasingly creepy and saddening: the life-like replica of her husband lacks many of the particularizing details that made him him (a mole, his facial hair), but more importantly, it omits all the aspects of his personality that he didn't leave any traces of online. The takeaway: being in a relationship with a computer isn't nearly as a good as the real thing.
How likely is this? There is a new text-messaging app calledSocial Proof that can simulate the experience of having a boyfriend or girlfriend, and since 2009, an email service calledThe Last Messages Club has enabled people to schedule messages for their loved ones to receive long after they're dead. Still, in both cases, there is a real human holding up his or her end of the dialogue on the other end of the line—not a digital simulacrum of one, because science obviously hasn't yet figured out a way to reproduce human consciousness.
5. Reality TV Will Reach A Whole New Level of Exploitative
Probably the most psychologically excruciating episode of Black Mirror, "White Bear" follows a day in the life of a woman who wakes up in her house one day and finds herself on the run from a crew of mask-wearing, blood thirsty vigilantes (along with the rare cluster of unsympathetic civilians, mindlessly capturing the events on their cellphones). To her horror, she discovers that she is actually the protagonist of a reality TV show—and a criminal, convicted for her participation in a gruesome kidnapping and murder plot spear-headed by her deceased boyfriend.
Instead of being locked up behind bars, she's been condemned to a life as the star of a TV series that has turned the scene of the crime into a stage set, and forces her to relive the circumstances of her crime on the daily as a "studio audience" walks around, helping to record footage of the action. At the end of each day, she undergoes a round of electronically induced amnesia, and the scenario repeats again. Probably the scariest thing is, because of the amnesia factor, there's no knowing whether she's actually guilty of the crimes she's being punished for—or if she's just an ordinary civilian who signed an unusually punishing reality TV contract, all for the sake of her 15 minutes of fame.
How likely is this? Reality TV has always been pretty ethically cringe-worthy, whether it's spotlighting people with mental illnesses or driving otherwise healthy individuals to psychological breakdown or worse; there's something pretty ugly about turning a person's real-life trials and tribulations into mass entertainment. On the other side of the coin, one could also read "White Bear" as a metaphor for the voyeuristic sensationalizing of true crime in the media, transforming tragic events into public, "town-pillory"-style shaming spectacles.
6. Memes Will Become More Poweful Than Politicians
Waldo is a scratchy-throated blue bear with a puerile sense of humor who interviews politicians for a late-night comedy show and manipulates them into saying embarrassing things. He's "voiced" and "animated" by a failed comedian who doesn't actually care much for politics, but by a curious turn of events, Waldo ends up becoming enough of a crowd favorite to stand a chance of winning a government seat in the fictional English town of Stentonford. The character hits the campaign trail, and though he doesn't win, he attracts enough votes away from Labour-leaning voters to effect the outcome of the election. In a frightening twist on the "tyranny of the majority" idea, Waldo ends up garnering more attention than the "real" politicians that he makes fun of without standing for much of anything at all. The sex jokes and fart noises even attract the attention of a few CIA operatives, who see the cartoon character's broad populist appeal as a tool for staging political coups in countries governed by "enemy" political regimes.
How likely is this? Technologically speaking, it's absolutely possible.
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