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.
Black Mirror is about placing the mirror to society (hence the title). If you find the show childish, maybe because humans are childish?
there always seemed to be significant obstacles in getting there from where we are that are never explored or explained away.
Just my opinion but i don’t think it matters. Since the show is about putting the mirror onto society and how immature (and cruel) we are, my impression is that getting to the dystopian aspects is because we dropped the ball and allowed ourselves to submit to the darker and physical manifestation of our psyche, which we see in technology spying or trying to kill us, or torturing a person over and over just to feel good about ourselves by inflicting what we perceive to be “justice”.
It matters to me because it renders it ineffective. The mirror isn’t held up if what you show doesn’t reflect reality and, because of what I said I don’t think it does.
Agree to disagree but as someone mentioned already, the path to the dystopia depicted in Black Mirror is happening all around us already. We’re frogs in boiling water.
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.
Black Mirror is about placing the mirror to society (hence the title). If you find the show childish, maybe because humans are childish?
Just my opinion but i don’t think it matters. Since the show is about putting the mirror onto society and how immature (and cruel) we are, my impression is that getting to the dystopian aspects is because we dropped the ball and allowed ourselves to submit to the darker and physical manifestation of our psyche, which we see in technology spying or trying to kill us, or torturing a person over and over just to feel good about ourselves by inflicting what we perceive to be “justice”.
It matters to me because it renders it ineffective. The mirror isn’t held up if what you show doesn’t reflect reality and, because of what I said I don’t think it does.
Agree to disagree but as someone mentioned already, the path to the dystopia depicted in Black Mirror is happening all around us already. We’re frogs in boiling water.
FWIW, showrunner Charlie Brooker says that the starting point for every episode is finding an idea he thinks is funny
The episode “Dogs” isn’t funny though. It went straight for the jugular! It is way scarier than The Terminator films if you ask me.
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.
in particular because there are other countries which in some parts are already further down the road
The explanation of “how we got there” is all around you. Every day.
Nah.
I think it was writer Daniel M. Lavery who described Black Mirror as, “What if cell phone… but too much!”
The title even refers to your phone screen.
It’s just a new generation of The Twilight Zone or The Outer Limits, written by a comedian. It’s not supposed to be amazingly deep.
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.
You do know that the elite actually use things pike Orwell’s 1984 and Black Mirror as suggestions?
accurate!
and what a fantastic first dystopian scifi those first seasons were (for me)
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…