Huh, i guess i both agree and disagree with this article.
I disagree that black mirror has to save the world. Art doesn't have to literally save the world to be useful, it just has to add to the conversation. The fact we are talking about it proves that it has.
On the other hand, i've never really liked black mirror that much. It feels polemical to me. Its unrelenting pessimism robs it of nuance, which makes it feel flat to me. To be clear it doesn't have to be happy, it can still be grim and dark, but when every character is a terrible character, it undermines the story
Take the episode "nosedive" where everyone is obsessed with social media ratings. Compare it to other people who copied it (meow meow beans in community, or majority rule in the orvile). I think the other tv shows did it better and honestly made technology look worse, because they had characters that weren't cartoon villians.
Maybe the part i don't like about black mirror is not that it showd technology stripping people of their hummanity but that all its characters already lack humanity so there is nothing to strip, which is kind of boring.
The part I don't like about it is that the premise is too often:
"Imagine some theoretical technological advancement. Now take it out of context, put it in the worst possible circumstances, and imagine it appeared into a society like ours without any prior thought or discussion about the possible downsides of that technology."
For example: in a society where autonomous security guard robots kill intruders, there would not be people sneaking into warehouses. In a society where people can play back and re-live prior memories, it would not suddenly come up that one can relive experiences with past lovers. In a society where one's consciousness could be contained inside a "cookie," being unexpectedly in a strange place with no explanation would immediately have one questioning whether that's what happened.
It just feels ham-fisted. In their defense, I'm sure it's tough to introduce an entirely new concept and world and sell a brand new story all in the scope of a single episode, but the formula felt a little stale, at least while I was watching it.
> Imagine some theoretical technological advancement. Now take it out of context, put it in the worst possible circumstances, and imagine it appeared into a society like ours without any prior thought or discussion about the possible downsides of that technology
This is precisely why I love Black Mirror. Despite the warnings, we're allowing companies to build killer robot and are running a large scale experiment to build a god. For a long time, I thought ethics is what prevented us from cloning human but recent years are showing balance sheet will outweigh it. As Netflix is 99.9% garbage, watching something like Black Mirror is refreshing
We always have moved forward technologically despite doomers. They were there for first person shooter games, the Internet in general, dating apps, etc.
That’s not to say those things didn’t have significant downsides. They do. But it took years to get there and they weren’t an overnight surprise, like they seem to be in the Black Mirror episodes I saw.
Imagine what a few Black Mirror episodes would look like if they were made in the 50s or 60s about some technology we have today. It’d be silly. Our culture and values have changed so much since then over time as the technology came about.
“Tonight's story on the Twilight Zone is somewhat unique and calls for a different kind of introduction. This, as you may recognize, is a map of the United States and there's a little town there called Peaksville. On a given morning not too long ago the rest of the world disappeared and Peaksville was left all alone. Its inhabitants were never sure whether the world was destroyed and only Peaksville left untouched, or whether the village had somehow been taken away. They were, on the other hand, sure of one thing. The cause. A monster had arrived in the village. Just by using his mind, he took away the automobiles, the electricity, the machines, because they displeased him. And he moved an entire community back into the dark ages, just by using his mind.”
>We always have moved forward technologically despite doomers
Have we? There's a de facto moratorium on gene editing in humans that all nations have so far adhered to (except for one person who promptly went to prison), there's a general moratorium on gene terminator seeds that so far all nations have adhered to, and we're in discussions for a deep sea-mining moratorium. Not all technologies move forward without impediment.
The problem is I feel is that the "value system" tied to tech. innovation is very simplistic and often doesn't really have any forcing functions other than short term profit for a small number of people.
Things like AI, surgical bots etc. can definitely be useful and can better our condition. They probably are doing that too but the amount of serious long term thinking from a traditionally ethical standpoint is limited compared the amount of research that goes into making the technology more powerful.
Feels like a car with an overpowered gas pedal but very rudimentary brakes and steering.
> Imagine what a few Black Mirror episodes would look like if they were made in the 50s or 60s about some technology we have today. It’d be silly.
It might be silly, but that doesn’t mean it would be wrong. We depend heavily on a number of technologies with significant downsides, which are downplayed or ignored or can-kicked into the future.
It isn't like it didn't happen. Here's an example [0] where a factory owner started replacing the workers with automation/robots. This was in 1964. There's another episode [1] where a scientist creates a computer that can converse with him and it goes all wrong.
These kinds of plots were actually quite common as people wrestled with the unknown future of the coming nuclear age.
> We always have moved forward technologically despite doomers.
We nowadays always introduce technology no matter what. Focused on 'users' as a small subgroup for which we rationalize and validate the introduction. Success measured by profit and damn the externalities. It got reasonable outcomes in terms of (technological) progress for a long time. Today if the technology isn't outright owned by a billionaire class who get their hands on the innovations first, it is stock market driven development that not necessarily serves society. Today all the externalities are compounding into a real Black Mirror mess.
That's a very simplistic and deficient way of stating a half-truth. The dangers of technology and their ethical implications have historically been a serious consideration in the way we regulate a lot of stuff, from TikTok to nuclear development.
You are also biased in the way you only see what came to be and ignore what did not.
There have been enough declassified "close call" stories that I don't think "we haven't had nuclear war yet" doesn't carry much water for me. Kind of like "I have never died", which is technically true but I have lots of info that makes me think extrapolating my past doesn't mean I'll never die in the future.
>We always have moved forward technologically despite doomers. They were there for first person shooter games, the Internet in general, dating apps, etc.
You say as if they weren't right about those things, and they aren't the toxic to society crap they're today.
> Despite the warnings, we're allowing companies to build killer robot and are running a large scale experiment to build a god.
I am doing everything I can think of to stop AI companies from building a god (to borrow your words). Last year and this year I've donated five figures to nonprofits that are trying to slow down AI development. I write letters to legislators whenever the opportunity arises — I wrote a letter to Gavin Newsom urging him to support SB-1047, which unfortunately he did not do; also wrote a letter to Scott Weiner offering support and encouraging him to keep trying.
You could do the same. I'm not confident about what's the best thing to do and I think the things I've done probably didn't help, but they are worth trying anyway.
> […] and imagine it appeared into a society like ours without any prior thought or discussion about the possible downsides of that technology."
Which is basically how most technologies appear{s,ed} in society: without prior thought / discussion.
There's certainly a lot of talk while it's being rolled out, but rarely prior.
> For example: in a society where autonomous security guard robots kill intruders, there would not be people sneaking into warehouses.
People do crime because they think† they can get away with it, because if you knew that you'd probably get caught why would you do it in the first place? How many people purposefully do crime in order to get caught?
In your specific example people will think they've figured out a way to get past the automated system. (Not even getting into the fact that in some jurisdictions it's illegal to set traps, e.g., Canada Criminal Code §247.)
† When they think at all, and it's not just a heat / spur-of-the-moment action (often when drunk).
> Which is basically how most technologies appear{s,ed} in society: without prior thought / discussion.
> There's certainly a lot of talk while it's being rolled out, but rarely prior.
This is a semantic argument about timing. One could argue the Internet is still "being rolled out" today, but it's certainly widely available and we've had decades to reflect on its impact on society. It's not like the Internet was suddenly thrust on 1950s Mississippi and nobody considered that hackers might exist until everyone was on it.
The point is that some of the basic questions posed by the show would have been asked, answered, and accounted-for by society long before they seem to be in the societies depicted in the show.
> People do crime because they think they can get away with it, because if you knew that you'd probably get caught why would you do it in the first place?
It's not a binary decision. Of course you don't do it if you think you will be caught, but the likelihood of being caught and the consequences if you do are also significant factors in the decision.
If people were executed for stealing candy bars from convenience stores, we'd have a lot fewer people stealing, even if we put the same effort into catching them as we do now.
I think context matters as well. In your final example of death for shoplifting we would have less shoplifting, all other things being equal. We might also have other unexpected consequences like more embezzlement or more knock offs or more people selling things that "fell off the truck".
Additionally, even if I know you'll kill me if you catch me, I'll still try to steal food if my family is starving and there is no way for me to earn it.
For example: in a society where autonomous security guard robots kill intruders, there would not be people sneaking into warehouses.
We have a society (in the US) where cops often shoot first and ask questions later, but many people still do crimes. People will take risks about things that desperately matter to them, and indeed stories of such risk-taking are common cultural fodder. Are you not just generalizing from your own behavior?
I am not (see below) and in any case this is not relevant to the question posed to GP, which was why s/he thinks people would abstain from risky behavior just because risks exist.
> In a society where people can play back and re-live prior memories, it would not suddenly come up that one can relive experiences with past lovers.
I think this episode was one of Black Mirror's strongest, because not only would it suddenly come up, it does to a lesser degree with the technology we have today. I've been the guy obsessively replaying painful memories from old photos I have. I don't think it was really presented as though the characters are the first ones to ever think of the idea.
Correct. Kinda like it suddenly came up when Facebook started showing memories of dead friends and relatives to people that didn't want it nor enjoyed it. There's many instances of humanity plowing headfirst into some technology thinking "this will be great!" only to haphazardly run into the unanticipated not-so-great parts.
Not to mention there's literally people creating tech out here _today_ that's recreating _exactly_ what some Black Mirror episodes were talking about years ago. Like interactive chatbots model after dead people from voice samples, videos, and messages.
I liked "Crocodile" too, if I remember the name correctly. The other one that got to me was the one with the two astronauts. It raised a lot of ethical / moral dilemmas in me.
> without any prior thought or discussion about the possible downsides
In BM's defense, I think it needs to be that way to a point, to have the viewer react and acknowledge these downsides within their current frame of reference.
It can be hard to swallow both a world that has evolved for 10~20 years, and also think about a whole new paradigm that matches that unfamiliar world.
> Imagine some theoretical technological advancement. Now take it out of context, put it in the worst possible circumstances, and imagine it appeared into a society like ours without any prior thought or discussion about the possible downsides of that technology.
Isn't this the premise for the original Terminator ? Sure it was "unnecessarily" pessimistic, but man oh man it really hit a nerve and it set a tone for (all?) subsequent societal conversation.
"Imagine some theoretical technological advancement. Now take it out of context, put it in the worst possible circumstances, and imagine it appeared into a society like ours without any prior thought or discussion about the possible downsides of that technology.... It just feels ham-fisted."
So like exactly what is happening with driverless car technology.
A technology that was in its infancy in lab settings; taken out of that context and thrust upon our public roads by capricious impulsive billionaires in "beta" form, which has predictably killed people; but instead of pulling back and having a discussion about the possible downsides, this technology is allowed to plague us; because thought or discussion about possible downsides are short circuited by platitudes about how you have to crack eggs to make an omelet.
Can't get a driverless car future free of car deaths without first killing some people with driverless cars, ya know?
> In a society where people can play back and re-live prior memories, it would not suddenly come up that one can relive experiences with past lovers.
I am not much of a TV watcher so this is the only episode of black mirror I've seen but this really got me - for a show that got so much hype - this is the first couple to have jealousy issues around this technology? Really?? And he has to cut it out of his head with a double edged razor? Really??? People want to forget things all of the time.
It's TV and the other shows I watch are mostly because they're terrible, so it was better than those, but it definitely felt like, cmon guys, we can do better.
My take was that it was not about jealousy or wanting to forget, but about the obsession for an objective truth. The main character was rewatching his memories looking for the objective truth of what had happened, only to discover that all his memories were, in fact, a lie (because his wife was lying to him all the time).
I agree with this take, aside from a plot nuance about all his memories, there was one base factual lie (paternity) that propagated through his memories. I also occasionally rewatch that episode to try to convince myself that the Willow Grain would not be a panacea for so many of the worlds ills that it would outweigh any shame-motivated reason to dislike it.
Put another way, easy and on-demand access to objective truth seems to present a resolution to so many stupid arguments that it just has to net out as a positive where people quit dying on rhetorically silly hills.
As you correctly identify the weakness is when you want access to the objective truth of another. They need not be inclined to share it and this presents a social issue, as opposed to a technical or factual issue.
The EYE Tech Zoe implant and the Willow Grain were similar but the Willow Grain was usable by the users while installed and the Zoe was generally only accessible after it had been extracted from the user after the user had died.
>"Imagine some theoretical technological advancement. Now take it out of context, put it in the worst possible circumstances, and imagine it appeared into a society like ours without any prior thought or discussion about the possible downsides of that technology."
So, exactly like the real world case with all modern tech advancements?
Black Mirror got way less nuanced after Netflix picked it up.
“Nosedive” was the most surface-level take of that idea, the “pain chip” episode was basically just shock-value, the “trapped in the weird guys computer simulation” episode was “Whiteout” but derivative. The killer robot bees episode was…an episode of tv I guess?
Possibly it’s a format that just inevitably “wears thin” quite quickly, but it did feel like the early episodes had far more “existential dread” and interesting-exploration about them.
Exactly. The first two seasons were mostly a dark humour satire of our times and obsessions rather than a grim depiction of possible futures. The first episode is not even SF like also "the Waldo moment". 15 million merits is a metaphor that is not taking place in any real future.
It got much more commercial and literal after that.
It's not necessary for a work of fiction to focus on diverse and realistic characters, particularly when its primary aim is to critique a specific aspect of technology. In such cases, characters often function as just means to highlight and amplify that central theme.
Take 1984. It reads like a thought experiment reflecting the author's deepest fears about the dangers of unchecked power structures. Allegedly, Orwell’s own son would have been around 40 years old in the year 1984 (I read so in Pynchon's introduction to this book in Penguin's edition. It was a great essay.)
But, 1984 also features a great protagonist and an absolutely haunting language. While many of the other characters mainly serve to convey the broader ideas, it’s him who grounds the story emotionally. His suffering, his moral collapse, and the eventual loss of his ability was so tough to read and will forever haunt me. When he breaks, it feels like a loss for all of humanity. But, what I mean is characters are not essential to make a great work. When Orwell wants to convey his ideas, the characters are sidelined and ideas take the front wheel.
I understand your perspective. I'm not a fan of many of the episodes either. I really liked the first season, but the ones that followed just didn’t live up to it. And it does not rise above a horror centered around some particular technology. But, it's them give it cultural relevance.
> But, 1984 also features a great protagonist and an absolutely haunting language. While many of the other characters mainly serve to convey the broader ideas, it’s him who grounds the story emotionally. His suffering, his moral collapse, and the eventual loss of his ability was so tough to read and will forever haunt me. When he breaks, it feels like a loss for all of humanity. But, what I mean is characters are not essential to make a great work. When Orwell wants to convey his ideas, the characters are sidelined and ideas take the front wheel.
This paragraph goes one way and then suddenly pivots to the opposite conclusion without any justification. Orwell's character is why the story is wrenching. Without that emotional weight it has no staying power.
I kind of think both are true. I will remember Winston as great thinker who is extremely aware his world. And the tragedy or death of him is death of his awareness. His ability to think. In all the protagonist I have seen in tragedies, he is peculiar. While reviewing one another writer's work, Orwell said
> ‘... was a bad writer, and some inner trouble, sharpening his sensitiveness, nearly made him into a good one; his discontent healed itself, and he reverted to type. It is worth pausing to wonder in just what form the thing is happening to oneself.’
In the first act, the writing was so cold and I could not feel any connection to Winston. Even, when getting intimate with Julia, he is thinking,
> In the old days, he thought, a man looked at a girl’s body and saw that it was desirable, and that was the end of the story. But you could not have pure love or pure lust nowadays. No emotion was pure, because everything was mixed up with fear and hatred. Their embrace had been a battle, the climax a victory. It was a blow struck against the Party. It was a political act.
I don't know when I started to feel things and empathize with him so much. When you think about circumstances and how he feels, he is cold as it gets, always scheming.
And in the most hopeful time of his life, he say these
> ‘We are the dead,’ he said.
> ‘We’re not dead yet,’ said Julia prosaically.
> ‘Not physically. Six months, a year – five years, conceivably. I am afraid of death. You are young, so presumably you’re more afraid of it than I am. Obviously we shall put it off as long as we can. But it makes very little difference. So long as human beings stay human, death and life are the same thing.’
But, when you think of an inner life, he has one of the richest and rare ones. We empathize with that, and when crystal ball falls, it was the most tragic thing I have experienced. I think, genius of Orwell is that he made the character and the idea indistinguishable.
Not very upbeat actually. The episode drops several reminders that the simulated people can't die, by accident or choice. After they tire of life, they are trapped in an eternity of boredom and madness.
I guess it wouldn't be black mirror without some technophobia. But it seems like I didn't imagine it [1]:
> The episode received critical acclaim, with particular praise for Mbatha-Raw's and Davis's performances, its plot twist, its visual style, and its uplifting tone, which is atypical for the series.
The part you’re misunderstanding about black mirror is that it’s about how technology will strip the humanity out of people.
Also, the name of the show is BLACK mirror. Besides the iPhone symbolism by which the name is inspired, the whole point of the show is to hold up a mirror to the dark side of society.
This may lead to a show that is without nuance or is less interesting, but thats the point of the show.
Every conversation about art runs into this problem: you can't criticize art without someone saying that the critic simply doesn't understand the art. Maybe in some cases this is true, but I don't think that's what's happening here. It seems pretty clear that OP understands Black Mirror's point perfectly and still thinks that unrelenting pessimism devoid of nuance is a bad point—they understand what the art is saying and don't like it.
I understand that is the goal. I just don't think it succeeds.
To show darkness you have to have light. You can't cast a shadow if its pitch black.
In terms of black mirror, they show a society devoid of humanity, true. But in most episodes (there are probably some exceptions) it feels like the lack of humanity is not because of technology, but because the world of the show is populated by monsters. As a result, it doesn't effectively show the dehumanizing power of technology.
When watching an episode - ask yourself, would these characters still do monsterous things without the tech premise? If the answer is yes, then its not really about the tech.
> it feels like the lack of humanity is not because of technology, but because the world of the show is populated by monsters.
But...that's always been the case. Technology is a tool, and a tool is neither good nor evil; it's how you choose to use it. That gets repeated here all the time. Tech grants powers to people that we didn't have before, so people with a propensity to perpetrate evil can do it at efficiently at scale. The same goes for people who want to do good but aren't aware of the consequences of their actions. We can learn a lot more from the failure cases than the happy path, and it makes for more entertaining stories.
That may or may not be the case, but either way it's still valid to criticize that approach, in favor of a more nuanced and potentially more effective one.
Like, maybe that's the show the creators wanted to make. I'm not certain about that, but it's a valid premise. But then maybe I would prefer if the show was a bit different regardless of that. That's always allowed.
I re-watched Community probably 5 times by now. It's one of my favourite television series in spite of it's flaws.
Sometimes I feel like Community is a more subtle Black Mirror than what we give it credit for. The writers came up with the weirdest ideas, and they just threw these at this world they created in Community to see what came out. /Everyone/ in that story finds themselves at Greendale because of some less-than-optimal circumstance, and the only thing they can do is react to the circumstances given to them.
Meow meow beans is a stand-out episode because it takes the absurdity of a social credit system all they way beyond the vale and straight to it's natural conclusion, where common sense failed to step in and take control.
Small correction: The meow meow beans episode of Community aired in 2014 and the Nosedive episode of Black Mirror aired 2016. So the Community episode came first.
Meow Meow Beans episode in Community predated the Black Mirror episode by a couple of years.
But yes, agreed about Black Mirror feeling hollow with its lack of nuance in its pessimism.
However I don't think Nosedive is the right episode to make this point as we see the protagonist getting assistance from the truck driver lady as well as the people protagonist ends up being held with are able to share a laughter in the freedom of losing it all.
> To be clear it doesn't have to be happy, it can still be grim and dark, but when every character is a terrible character, it undermines the story
The world is full of terrible people, though. It's a "mirror" on current society, which is probably where they got the name. And by terrible I don't mean "literally Hitler," but the boring terribleness and malaise that so many around us have kind of just slipped into: Selfishness, impoliteness, paranoia, anger, belligerence, spitefulness, indifference to cruelty, unnecessary competitiveness in everything. Just an overall lack of socialization, grace and empathy.
Maybe it's boring to you because the characters' traits can be found all over the place in real life.
I don't feel my social circle is like that. I mean, you're right that there are plenty of people as you describe, but I like to think that I surround myself with people for which that does not match (not always successfully when I was younger, but you learn as you grow older).
As such, bawolff's point resonates with me. And even if that wasn't the case, they still have a good point. If you pick terrible protagonists to begin with, it undermines the morale of the episode a little. Showing how "reasonable" people are affected is stronger, and I indeed feel that both Community and Orville did that really well.
Yea, I do the same, I try to surround myself with positive people. Friends I choose, local businesses I frequent. But there are some forced interactions (like kid's school friends' parents for example) where you have no choice to have to interact with terrible people.
My recollection is that niceness used to be the default in random people you might meet. But that's not been true for about the last ten years or so. You actively have to seek out nice people now. Something happened back in 2015-2016, where "casual meanness" became suddenly OK, and people went mask off and it was cool to be an insufferable jerk.
Hmm. One thing I have noticed, and something that I discuss with my wife relatively frequently (she notices it as well), is that when I engage with "new" people in something like a professional context, the initial contact indeed often starts as "rough", not rarely unfriendly, even. And that's not just the first sentence, it's through the first few minutes or so.
But when I persist in being nice, and having an "I know you're just doing your job attitude", and depending on the situation also an "I know my problem is convoluted" attitude, then more often than not, people suddenly switch to being nice. Depending on what's appropriate, I add in that I'm not in a rush, or signal for unpleasant situations on my side that I understand that it's not the fault of the person I'm talking to (I rarely, if ever, explicitly state that one, it's just clear).
Just recently I've even had it that several people then suddenly went out of their way to help me, for example giving me "private" extensions to people who should definitely be able to help me, despite that very explicitly not the procedure they or I am supposed to follow.
I always put it down to: People with more public facing jobs have to deal with a lot of angry, dumb, and/or generally unpleasant people, and when they sense that they are now facing someone who is understanding, cooperative, and wants nothing more than for both sides to resolve an issue in a mutually friendly way, but that also understands the limitations of their positions, they jump at that opportunity.
So in some sense, this strengthens your point: Society is full of badly acting (I'm explicitly not saying "bad") people, and this fosters the initial rough response of people in public facing positions.
But on the other hand, my relative success in "turning" people to be friendly and helpful in an instant, suggests that often, people are not like that at their core, but rather are inherently friendly and helpful and have just adopted a defense mechanism.
We have an expression in Germany: "How you shout into the forest, is how it sounds back."
Are most of us kind but have to hide our kindness beneath a rough veneer due to the grumpy hostile antagonistic people who perhaps only make up some of the population?
But yes I agree with what that other guy said. It wasn’t always this way was it? I also feel like around 2015 people became more hostile and meaner to each other in general. I used to think it was my imagination but now I’m seeing this sentiment more and more from others. Not just here on hacker news but even some of my real life friends feel this way. Not sure what happened.
I don't know where you are located. But, in my experience living in a major city you can walk past 1000 perfectly nice people in a day and also one or two jerks. Who do you remember five days later? Do you remember Nice Person #385? Inconsequential Person #722? No. You remember Jerk #3. He sticks with you for a long time.
> It's a "mirror" on current society, which is probably where they got the name.
Nope. It's a reference to the surface of a screen. (Though undeniably there's important double meaning there)
> The "black mirror" of the title is the one you'll find on every wall, on every desk, in the palm of every hand: the cold, shiny screen of a TV, a monitor, a smartphone.
It was the one many of us thought was most likely to happen. Some aspects of it were in prior, media reports. It connected to people's memories on top of believable speculation. Then, something like that happened in China.
I think this is exactly why I dislike black mirror. It feels very 'pointless' as a show, because the situations and characters are so far divorced from anything real, that it feels like a meaningless critique. Sure, a technology could be used in a particular way, but all black mirror presents is the consequences, and it feels like it neglects the much more important question of how we got there to the point where it feels completely unrealistic
It encapsulates most of what I dislike about horror films as well - so many of them are just a jumpscare extravaganza but without actually trying to present you with anything meaningful, like an underlying critical analysis or anything (or even any characters). Like sure, if we use technology to torture people, that's bad. So what?
Somehow though I don't think a legal drama about the creeping erosion of people's rights and the transformation of society by well meaning but unintentionally invasive technology will have mass market appeal, but at least it would feel like its critiquing something real
A lot of the early episodes, especially, aren’t about hypothetical uses of technology but current ones, or even are barely about technology at all. White Bear, Fifteen Million Merits, The National Anthem, and The Waldo Moment are mostly works of social and media criticism that aren’t predicting much, or even anything, because they’re about people and situations today.
To the extent they employ sci-fi it’s usually to force the viewer into an outsider’s perspective.
Admittedly, the show’s skewed farther into straight five-minutes-in-the-future tech-prediction readings as it’s gone on.
Sometimes an extremely pessimistic vision of a possible future CAN change things...by making it so people are determined to fight to prevent that possible future from ever happening.
The novel 1984 by George Orwell was published in 1948. It is an extremely pessimistic vision of a possible future for mankind....and many of us over the generations who read it really really did not want to live in such a future and acted accordingly.
Black Mirror's pessimism could be similar.
Also in Black Mirror technology in of itself is never portrayed as inherently bad in any episode. It is the people and the way they choose to use the technology that leads to the horror. In that way every Black Mirror episode has that element of optimism. If only each new piece of tech in reality could ever be introduced so we maximize the positives rather than the negatives.
"The Jungle" by Upton Sinclair published in 1906 described an extremely pessimistic vision of the exploitation of the American factory worker. The descriptions of the meat packing industry in the book led to passing of the Meat Inspection Act. Sinclair was frustrated that most people were more concerned about eating bovine tuberculosis infected beef than the exploitation of people, but, nonetheless, it was pessimistic novel which lead to positive action.
Me too I also dislike the cherry picked and wrongly built narrative, see the nuclear one.
> In contrast, France ran from the past towards the future, overcoming public fears of nuclear disasters, now getting 70% of its electricity from nuclear power.
France has put a single reactor online in the last 25 years, it has closed reactors and cancelled building new ones for some time.
The problem has always been financial with other sources becoming simply cheaper, more competitive and easier/quicker to put online.
It's not that Black Mirror is bad. It's that, as the article points out, we don't have a fictional vision of the future to use as a goal.
The author mentions Jill Lapore's 2017 article in the New Yorker, which is sort of a survey paper of dystopian fiction from that period.[1] No alternatives are presented.
For most of human history, the big problem was making enough stuff. There just wasn't any way to make enough stuff for everybody. In the 20th century, high volume manufacturing got going. By the 1950s, the US had this totally worked out. At long last, society really could make enough stuff for everybody.
Science fiction of the 1950s is mostly utopian. With scarcity conquered, the future looked bright.
I remember an article, I think by Neal Stephenson, that described the change in the attitude of SF over the years. Things like 20000 leagues under the sea, off on a comet etc. were optimistic, adventurous and generally upbeat. Even the Asimov books were more about world building than doomsaying. There's quite a bit of dystopian pessimistic stuff that's in the market now and perhaps it's just because it's what sells or maybe there's a deeper underlying reason. In any case, the shift was something he talked about in the article/talk.
I remember reading round the world in 80 days when I was a kid and while it's not really "science fiction" in the 90s, the overall premise really triggered my imagination. Can't really say that for many of the more doom and gloom type stories that I read later in my adult life. I liked the freshness of Black Mirror when it first came out (pre Netflix) but then it dawned on me that it was mostly doomscrolling repackaged and converted into slick entertainment. I tuned out after that.
The dystopian era of SF movies started in 1972 with Silent Running.[1] That was the first "grubby future" Hollywood movie, and is an obscure but notable milestone in cinema history.
There was early dystopian SF. H.G. Wells' The Time Machine ends with a dystopia.
E. M. Foester's The Machine Stops (1909) was way, way ahead of its time.
Vashti’s next move was to turn off the isolation switch, and all the accumulations of
the last three minutes burst upon her. The room was filled with the noise of bells, and
speaking-tubes. What was the new food like? Could she recommend it? Has she had any
ideas lately? Might one tell her one’s own ideas? Would she make an engagement to visit
the public nurseries at an early date? — say this day month.
To most of these questions she replied with irritation — a growing quality in that accelerated age. She said that the new food was horrible. That she could not visit the public
nurseries through press of engagements. That she had no ideas of her own but had just
been told one-that four stars and three in the middle were like a man: she doubted there
was much in it. Then she switched off her correspondents, for it was time to deliver her
lecture on Australian music.
The clumsy system of public gatherings had been long since abandoned; neither Vashti
nor her audience stirred from their rooms. Seated in her armchair she spoke, while they in
their armchairs heard her, fairly well, and saw her, fairly well. She opened with a humorous
account of music in the pre-Mongolian epoch, and went on to describe the great outburst
of song that followed the Chinese conquest. Remote and primæval as were the methods of
I-San-So and the Brisbane school, she yet felt (she said) that study of them might repay the
musicians of today: they had freshness; they had, above all, ideas.
Her lecture, which lasted ten minutes, was well received, and at its conclusion she and
many of her audience listened to a lecture on the sea; there were ideas to be got from the
sea; the speaker had donned a respirator and visited it lately. Then she fed, talked to many
friends, had a bath, talked again, and summoned her bed.
There's the whole 'solarpunk' genre of fiction that I'd say is more optimistic. Epitomised by stuff like Becky Chamber's books 'A Psalm for the Wild Built' and 'A Prayer for the Crown Shy' (which are both excellent by the way).
Thank you for the recommendation. I haven't read much solarpunk. Cyberpunk is too dystopian for me. Steampunk, I like the aesthetic but I don't think I've read much literature in that genre except the difference engine.
I think Neal Stephenson had it backwards. The utopian science fiction comes second and is more of a reaction against the pessimistic dystopian science fiction.
Frankenstein is considered by many to be among the first science fiction books and is essentially a Black Mirror story from the 1800's. You had HG Wells and War of the Worlds for example. The Time Machine by HG Wells also portrays a possible negative vision for humanity based on an extrapolation of the social trends of the time.
Look at Asimov's robot stories. The orignal "robot" story was not from Asimov but a pessimistic story written in the 1920's about killer robots attacking people and being violent and all that. Asimov's optimistic peaceful robot stories were actually a reaction to the pessmistic violent robot stories that had been popular previously.
I think humans generally over the past few centuries have had uneasy feelings about technological changes and then that is reflected in dystopian, negative fiction. People react to that negativity by intentionally writing bright optimistic positive science fiction stories.
Look at Star Trek the Original Series for my final example. That tv show came out during the turmoil of the late 1960's and it responded to that turmoil and feelings of nuclear holocaust with a vision of the future that was filled with optimism and idealism.
* The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers (+ sequels)
* Monk & Robot by Becky Chambers (+ sequel)
* Most of, but not all of, Star Trek. This is getting infected with cynicism in some places, but still largely optimistic about a utopian future.
* The Martian by Andy Weir
* For All Mankind on Apple TV+
* Arrival movie
That's what I can think of since the 90s. Doubt it's a complete list, but really Becky Chambers is the optimistic voice in the domain, primarily since she focuses her works on interpersonal vs. galactic or societal dynamics.
What's going to be interesting near term is when AI management outperforms human management. The dynamics of capitalism then demand that AI be in charge. Marshall Brain's "Manna" is the classic in this area.
> [During Covid] In a moment when screens kept us connected, protected and employed, the reductiveness of dystopian science fiction felt silly. Biotechnology like GMOs and mRNA offered existential hope, rather than risk.
He can thank Elon & the Tech Lords for bringing the public perception of tech right back into dystopian nightmare territory.
But even apart from that, this seems like an extremely selective recollection of the Covid era. Yes, technology was a livesaver during that time, and we all were using it in frequency and to a degree like never before. (And indeed even that time brought lasting new "skills" which offer genuine new possibilities, like the new casualness and ubiquity of online meetings)
But I also remember that tech didn't actually feel very empowering during, on the contrary: Suddenly being online changed from something fun and interesting to mandatory: You had to be online, even for the things you'd much rather do offline. What been an extension of possibilities before now became a constraint. This definitely made it feel much more dystopian than before.
> We must move away from binary tales of catastrophe, not towards naive utopianism that ignores problems and risks that comes with change, but hopeful solutionism that reminds us we can solve and mitigate them [...]
I think this misunderstands the reasons why people are wary of new technology and instead pulls up the old "Luddite" strawman (which was itself a misrepresentation).
Of course we could introduce new tech carefully and with a strong emphasis of identifying and mitigating the risks. The problem is that we won't do that, because the incentives point into the opposite direction. Companies don't want to fall behind, so they move fast and break things instead of being careful. The general population then finds themselves as guinea pigs in barely tested new technology with little power to actually influence the course this technology takes. This causes a feeling of helplessness and resentment.
Black Mirror is dystopian fiction that hits pretty close to home. Maybe too close to home.
S07E01 "Common People" hit me pretty close to home with my own healthcare insurance experiences, where my rates go up every year and my coverages go down, and things that were formerly covered are now covered in Plus/Premium add-on packages. We also see this streaming and cellular services, except those are more elective.
Yeah but toxic optimism won’t lead us to a better future either. We need optimists to work towards a better society and pessimists to keep them in check when they are being naive to a fault. Optimists built the nukes, pessimists keep us from using them.
Thanks for the link - that was great. Yeah, with some exceptions (15 million merits being one, given that it's pure allegory) the show seems to ask, "given some new technology, what is the cruelest most horrifying situation in which it could be used?" This basic premise can indeed be applied to anything, past or present. Personally I'd take the automobile, call the episode "Meat Grinder," reference the ~30k deaths/year in the US from car accidents, noting the ambivalence of literally everyone to that fact.
This is a great idea. Like a 1905 person’s weird vision of the 1950s— getting a bunch of things wildly wrong, like fashion and geopolitics, but strangely accurately describing a fledgling attempt to mandate ‘seat belts’ and criminalize drunk driving, so as to diminish the tens of thousands of preventable traffic deaths yearly, against the lobbying efforts of industry and the insouciance (and even outright opposition) of the public.
"Absent is the plot twist of Pandora’s box that made it philosophically useful: the box also contained hope and opportunity that new knowledge brings."
Yes, add that and it might be something interesting but sure not the Black Mirror I want to watch. I mean it is called Black Mirror for a reason.
And it is not even true. Take the episode "San Junipro" for example? Isn't there some hope and opportunity in it? And yet, this episode (one of the best in my opinion) only works because the hope can shine against a black background.
> Take the episode "San Junipro" for example? Isn't there some hope and opportunity in it? And yet, this episode (one of the best in my opinion) only works because the hope can shine against a black background.
Arguably though that episode is a bit of an outlier. I think its the most hopeful (relatively speaking) of all the black mirror episodes i've seen.
I dunno about you, but I don't care about a computer program that believes it's me living on after I die. You can wrap it with all the feel good trappings you want, that set of bits is not you. If anything, living a life in a way that you put off doing the fun things until the after life, spiritual or digital, sounds awful.
The end shows us the entirety of anything real happening: it’s a modern day pharaoh’s tomb. Nothing’s alive, just pantomiming at life. Hieroglyphs and organs in jars, but even less human.
What you see is the only real thing. Caretaker machines swapping hard drives or whatever it is they were doing (it’s been a while since I watched it)
i think it's both, and more. i didn't read the ending as particularly opinionated about how 'real' the depicted emulation was, though i do think it had a decidedly hopeful tinge. the idea that we might somehow, in some way get the opportunity to do it over, to do it right, even if weird/contingent/incomplete, has i think a mythic resonance that transcends strict bounds of realism. even in a fully fantastic utopian afterlife unmediated by technology there would still be the question of whether this is 'really real': ontological, psychologically, etc. nonetheless, there are levels of unreality many seem willing to accept, the ending of 'inception' being another paradigmatic film example. i guess my perspective is that many aspects of 'real life' also abut artifice and pantomime (a phenomena not unrelated to the feelings of regret inspiring desire for strictly-impossible second chances), and the decision to accept anything as 'real' is always contains an element of tenuousness, uncertainty, and faith.
I disagree, because they show the characters inside the computer simulation experiencing the world. They're conscious beings, and there's a big fight between the two main characters related to that existence, with both deciding to mind upload at the end for starting a new life together. You might disagree that simulated characters can ever be conscious in the real world, but there's plenty of fictional stories where the simulated characters are conscious, this being one of them.
As such, it doesn't matter what the substrate is for this story. The technology allows a kind of conscious life after death where people can choose to live life differently than they previously did.
> You can wrap it with all the feel good trappings you want, that set of bits is not you.
If there's a continuity of experience from your present day life to your virtual life, if the virtual version shares all your memories, hopes, fears, thought patterns... Then in what way is it not you?
Do you also think that "reconstructive teleporting" would build another person but that person would not be you?
>If there's a continuity of experience from your present day life to your virtual life
There cannot be. There isn't even a continuity of experience for when you go to sleep.
It doesn't matter at all how perfect the copy is, because I STILL AM ME.
Brain uploading has never made sense because, well, I can't fit in the wires.
It doesn't matter that some digital simulation of my brain activity happens, and that the simulation feels like it was me and now is an immortal simulation, because I still die. My consciousness cannot be transported to software.
> There isn't even a continuity of experience for when you go to sleep.
But you remember having lived the previous day. Why is it any different if you remember having lived as a human a second ago and are a computer program now?
> My consciousness cannot be transported to software.
You perhaps don't notice that your entire argument hinges on this claim. This is the central point of disagreement.
I'm saying "if your consciousness was uploaded to a computer you would still experience being yourself", and you're saying "no, if my consciousness were uploaded to a computer I wouldn't experience it as being myself, because uploading a consciousness to a computer is not possible".
> I dunno about you, but I don't care about a computer program that believes it's me living on after I die.
1% of your cells are replaced daily. Presumably you still believe you're you even though much of you is constantly being replaced. If it were an option would you really deny your future self an arbitrarily long happy life because you got hung up on Theseus's Paradox?
I don't remember the part of that scenario where a scan is taken of the ship and uploaded to a server.
I long ago accepted that my image of self is a sort of illusion. That things I consider other, like microbes in my gut, constitute a large portion of me. And I change over time. Even the memories I have are copies of copies.
But all that happens in a continuity. Being uploaded is a stark difference and a disconnect that I cannot philosophically reconcile.
You lose consciousness for a few hours every night. If you've ever been put out for surgery the effect is even stronger. If someone could copy you when you were out, are you sure you'd have any idea it occurred? Could you prove you're not the copy? What if we're in that uploaded world now, would you be able to tell?
Arguably the only "you" that exists is the "you" right now. For how can you show that you are not in vat? Prove that yesterday was real? Even if a second ago was real?
Of course the only me that exists is right now. In no feasible reality would I ever shake hands with me from yesterday or me in the vat. Nor would I ever shake hands with me in a robot, just a robot that thinks it's me. Even if those other entities exist they are not me.
Except you don't treat them that way. You feel sorry about your old self. You feel sorry for other people, even though you cannot prove that they even "exist". You care about future you even though it doesn't exist.
Unless you don't.
I agree with your conclusion that because that is the reality of life, the only time worth spending is right now.
Iirc Pandora’s Box explicitly contained the opposite of hope. The last demon which she kept trapped inside it was “foreknowledge” and the only reason humanity was able to continue was that without knowing the future, we were able to have hope.
Eh, Black Mirror is basically just a 21st century version of The Twilight Zone only with the Cold War fears replaced with modern ones. But still, TZ wasn't all doom and gloom but found the time to be optimistic now and then.
Humans need some level of paranoia, mistrust and waryness of new technology in the same way electrical circuits need circuit breakers and ships need life boats.
Pessimism saves lives and resources. It won't lead us to a better future, but it might save what does.
Furthermore, for many of us, we are already in a state of technological mindfuckery beyond Black Mirror levels. Black Mirror sounds like a fairy tale.
We need humans, kind humans that are not fools. That's very hard to make. Without that any future, technological or not, is bleak.
Trying to replace everyone with AI and actively build a surveillance state also won't lead us to a better future. They say Black Mirror is dystopian but I would say we are on the dystopian timeline so it is just emulating reality a few years into the future.
When did it promise that it would? I feel like people reject these stories not because they're counterproductive, but because they frighten them. We feel so personally and viciously attacked by modern narratives because they question everyday concepts and routines we're all comfortable with.
I'm reminded of growing up watching episodes of Twilight Zone and Star Trek that yes, were kitschy stories, but instilled lifelong lessons about independence in their audience. Black Mirror isn't my favorite show but it seems to resemble the same "near future cautionary tale" archetype that has remained popular for centuries.
Unrelenting pessimism without nuance is no more profound than unrelenting optimism without nuance, but it comes off as “deeper” and more “sophisticated” because of human negativity bias.
Dark, pessimistic, sad, tragic things seem superficially more profound for the same reason that people slow down when they pass a car wreck and true crime shows about serial killers are popular.
We are this way because it probably had evolutionary survival value. “If you mistake a bush for a lion you’re fine, but if you mistake a lion for a bush you’re dead.”
Why does media and film even need to be about changing the world? It gives perspectives and exaggerates it for entertainment from which we occasionally draw cultural memes. Those can influence us as societies occasionally but ultimately they are just stories, personal visions.
The exaggerations in media often defines our outward perceptions more than the boring reality of our actual lives. So it can equally do harm if taken too seriously. And it definitely won't make better films/tv shows.
I've given up on a lot of TV as much seem to be about pushing a message. The more I don't watch it, the more obvious it seems to be when I do. A much smaller bunch of shows seem explicitly designed to push a political/cultural message and we even have politicians talk about legislation based on the show that was on the screen the previous night!
Perhaps those whose job it is to push messages (e.g. journalists) see themselves and their mission in TV shows and so we have this view as shown in the article.
>It is an inherently populist narrative, one that appeals to nostalgia
I don't agree with this or the article at all. There's very little nostalgia, if any, in Black Mirror. (nostalgia being a desire to return to the past, or romantic display of the past). The show is very firmly centered on present day or future abuse of technology, that much is true, but there's nothing wrong or inaccurate about that.
The article just does what is common but wrong, fetishize technology, that is to claim that technology itself makes the world better. But that is to attribute agency to something that has no agency. We're not better off than the past because of technology, but because of ethical progress. Technology is a lever. It as easily makes you a virus as it can make you a cure.
Give modern technology to a dictator and you get the most total surveillance state on earth. Black Mirror makes an accurate observation, that technological progress is outrunning our ethical progress. Insofar pessimism is justified. When you're at the mercy of at best idiots and at worst despots not handing them bigger levers is not nostalgia but just means you have a healthy survival instinct.
I don't think Black Mirror is supposed on it's own to lead us to a better future. It's list of things that could go wrong maybe counter the Sam Altman like tech boosters.
I can't help feeling
>Biotechnology like GMOs and mRNA offered existential hope, rather than risk.
rather skips over the fact that the whole pandemic was probably set off by a lab screw up illustrating the value of warning about such things.
I agree in the sense that Black Mirror seems almost required to be extra pessimistic when... there's a better and far more complex story available with a different approach or ending.
Granted I'm also WAY burnt out on pessimistic Si-Fi, it's the default now, and it's predicable and far too easy.
That's not to say it can't be mostly dark, but for many movies and shows, that's most of the meat...
I was on a project that avoided making a bad decision because of Black Mirror. The project didn’t succeed regardless but people do get insights from the show even if it’s not always a plausible scenario.
I feel like a big problem in the modern world is the small scale of our dreams. Dreams drive us, they change the world. In 1865, French author Jules Verne decided to write a book to inspire people to dream big, impossible dreams. He decided to write a novel proving that humans could do anything- by describing how, if enough people worked together, they could journey all the way to the moon. This became one of the first hit books in a new genre, science fiction. Sure, plenty of people had written about travelling to the moon before- e.g. the Roman poet Lucian wrote of being sucked up into a giant waterspout and deposited on the moon- but Verne was the first to write at a level of detail that made is seem realistic, something that humans could do- e.g. he spends several pages discussing- with math- how, if you are in America and want to go into space, the coast of Florida is the right spot (he picked a spot two hundred km from Cape Canaveral).
These stories are important. The fathers of rocketry in at least two different countries (Konstantin Tsiolkovsky of Russia and Hermann Oberth of Germany) were inspired by Verne (Goddard of the US was more inspired by H.G. Wells than Verne). They independently realized that you couldn't build a cannon (like Verne depicted) that could let humans survive and get to the moon, so they went into rocketry. Verne and H.G. Wells told stories that were the first step to changing the world.
And modern science fiction seems stuck in a dystopian rut. Most of the good sci-fi (and I enjoy things like the Murderbot Diaries) are largely dystopic. Hell, Star Trek- long the most utopian of sci-fi- is doing movies about Section 31 and whole seasons about android slave uprisings. No one is inspired to build a better future by "Don't create the Torment Nexus", they just get inspired to build the Torment Nexus.
Basically, we are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be, as Kurt Vonnegut wrote.
Star Trek has been hijacked by people who have no understanding whatsoever of the franchise's spirit. Perhaps this is a symptom of something deeper: not only are they unable to conceive of optimistic stories, they can't even imagine a dystopic original show. Instead, they resort to co-opting an existing franchise and disfiguring it.
Maybe this is an oversimplification, but optimism is gone from media because people are no longer optimistic about the future. For a long time, the next generation always just kind of assumed they'd have it better than the previous ones. Apart from a couple of terrible historic blips like world wars, of course. Everyone has kind of believed they'd live better lives than their parents. The Baby Boomers were the last generation that really felt that way, and it was by and large true for them. From there on, Gen-X knows already that they'll never live as good as their parents. Milleneals are finding out very quickly the same, the next generation is going to have it worse, and so on. So it's no big surprise that all of our media is doomer and pessimistic.
Maybe if we want more optimism in our media, we should give ourselves something to be optimistic about.
> Maybe if we want more optimism in our media, we should give ourselves something to be optimistic about.
It seems to me that it's the opposite. Stories are how we form our views of the world and our dreams for the future. Therefore if we want to have people who build towards things worthy of optimism, we should start by telling stories that inspire them to be optimistic.
Look at Star Trek - Roddenberry didn't go "well the world is hella racist so I guess the show should be too". He made the show reflect his vision for how we could live a better life, and people responded to that over time. I think we badly need the same thing today.
It's kind of a chicken and the egg, but I feel like 1966 with Vietnam, race riots across the US, the Cuban Missile Crisis only four years past, and everything else was hardly a time that people would have been optimistic.
But you had a guy who had been a bomber pilot in World War Two and flown combat missions against the Japanese, who desperately wanted to put a (gay) Japanese-American who had spent the war in an internment camp into his show, and a black woman (and have her kiss his white male lead star!), and later on, when people seemed to not be getting what he was trying to say, even added a good Russian character (played by an actual Russian-American). Because the point was to show, just like Verne a century earlier, that if truly all of humanity worked together, we could accomplish anything, for example travelling the stars. And so many people were inspired by his vision, and wanted to build his vision, to make his dreams real.
And nowadays the dreams that I see, both in stories and made manifest, seem drab and small and more than a little evil by comparison. And I do think that story-tellers (of whatever medium- very much including start-up founders) need to be aware of the power of their stories, that their myths become real, and have a responsibility to use that power for good and not for evil.
That “long time” is a blip on the historical timeline. Most of history is people expecting things to basically stay the same or to get worse.
We’re talking a few decades at a time in a few places scattered over a couple hundred years, maybe, if we mean the median person in that time and place.
The 20th century got a big optimism and productivity boost from finally all but ending cyclical famines, antibiotics, and vaccines, and most of the stuff since has been of far smaller consequence. We’re coming down off the brief high of Haber-Bosch and penicillin, and haven’t found another fix yet. Computers and the Internet ain’t it, so far.
How did we have shows like The Handmaid's Tale and 50.5% of America was like yeah that sounds good let's go for that?
How did we have decades of superhero movies and then elect a bonafide fascist villain? I don’t know. The lessons we were teaching weren’t the right lessons somehow. Or they were swamped by social media nonsense and decades of underfunding education.
This article, I feel, misclassifies the show and then criticizes it on the wrong grounds.
It's in the horror genre. Of course it's fearmongering, that's what horror stories do. Just because it's not the stereotypical horror doesn't mean it's not in that domain. It's great as a horror show because it shows somewhat plausible futures, and that dream/nightmarelike quality is truly gripping.
"San Junipero" I think was the kind of black mirror episode that black mirror always should have done. An honest depiction of a certain technology to its ultimate realization. Is it completely perfect? Absolutely not, but it's good in all the ways that matter to people.
The 80s had tons of scifi based on nuclear annihilation, pent up fears about nuclear annihilation based on the cold war. I dont know if that 'lead' us to a better future but we got an at least slightly better future. So the impact of pessimistic scifi is somewhere between nil and good.
So, it starts by showing Black Mirror is playing on people's fears in cheap ways that could have negative, long-term effects. Then, it switches to throw out lots of political, talking points with loose connection to the original story. I wish they stuck with that line of questioning.
So, in the Psalms, many of them are lament. The structure addresses God, lists the complaints, and usually ends on a positive note citing His future promises. They might cite previous times God delivered them. So, the pattern is a unifying, objective truth followed by a mix of bad news and good news that offsets it. This helped the Israelites stay mentally strong as they faced circumstances like the Exile.
The author wondered if Black Mirror could explore the risks without pessimism porn. I think the pattern in the lament Psalms could be helpful. We know, though, that Hollywood often appeals to the dark, sinful part of our psyche. The producers know people often want to watch horrible things more than pleasant things. That's the real reason.
Personal pessimism is the only form that is actualy possible to achive.Unfortunately anything dreamed up to do with society is no longer capable of bieng called pessismistic, as something worse is happening out there already.
It’s doomer fuel, just like how most AI doomer always reference Skynet to scare people. Most lack the practical imagination because it is often complex, so they let Hollywood do most of the work for them.
I thought the AI doomer was more paper clipping than Skynet. Even before terminator, you had Dune's Butlerian Jihad with Frank Herbert's warning about letting technology do the thinking for humanity, which led to humans being enslaved.
Yeah this series is consistently excellent. If you want positivity you want "cutesy robots" and anime stuff. Everbody wants lovable robots that work for us instead of the corp. (Twist your own brain to imagine that capitalism wouldn't ruin it guaranteed)
Charlie Brooker has said that the new season of Black Mirror is different. In a recent interview (amusingly, also in The Guardian) he said, "If you want dystopia, look out your window."
Don't forget nuclear power in the Simpsons and many shlocky horror movies before that. America could have had thousands of nuclear power plants by the 2000s. Though oil politics and deep pockets directly funding anti nuclear advocacy groups plays more of a role here than fiction.
The direct cost is at least 100,000 lives in America alone, all the technological advancement that comes with cheap electricity, and who knows what affects it would have had on the climate.
It is weird to read this. It is especially weird read this on HN and see arguments for and against "Black Mirror" as a piece of art as opposed to direct, stark warning of 'what if the wrong path is taken'. In that sense, it is really simple and, frankly, not nearly scary enough given how the author of the article attempts to dismiss it. That said, at least the author of the article is consistent with a consistent tally of war on doomers of all stripes.
I am mildly amused. We all see the ways technology goes wrong and every day. It is right and proper to at least try to see into the future by exploring all the ways it can go wrong if only because we do.. or at least should know.. that Murphy was an optimist.
The problem is the constant
fear-mongering instead of simply presenting the facts. Honestly, the emotional overdrive in our culture is exhausting. It's like everyone's hooked on a steady drip of doom, and for some reason, they crave it.
That said, I won't lie-watching a corrupt politician fuck a pig on a livestream was a hilarious idea.
"How dare you try to make things better by making big changes, make small incremental changes that get pulled back in four or eight years instead and be happy about it"
Huh, i guess i both agree and disagree with this article.
I disagree that black mirror has to save the world. Art doesn't have to literally save the world to be useful, it just has to add to the conversation. The fact we are talking about it proves that it has.
On the other hand, i've never really liked black mirror that much. It feels polemical to me. Its unrelenting pessimism robs it of nuance, which makes it feel flat to me. To be clear it doesn't have to be happy, it can still be grim and dark, but when every character is a terrible character, it undermines the story
Take the episode "nosedive" where everyone is obsessed with social media ratings. Compare it to other people who copied it (meow meow beans in community, or majority rule in the orvile). I think the other tv shows did it better and honestly made technology look worse, because they had characters that weren't cartoon villians.
Maybe the part i don't like about black mirror is not that it showd technology stripping people of their hummanity but that all its characters already lack humanity so there is nothing to strip, which is kind of boring.
The part I don't like about it is that the premise is too often:
"Imagine some theoretical technological advancement. Now take it out of context, put it in the worst possible circumstances, and imagine it appeared into a society like ours without any prior thought or discussion about the possible downsides of that technology."
For example: in a society where autonomous security guard robots kill intruders, there would not be people sneaking into warehouses. In a society where people can play back and re-live prior memories, it would not suddenly come up that one can relive experiences with past lovers. In a society where one's consciousness could be contained inside a "cookie," being unexpectedly in a strange place with no explanation would immediately have one questioning whether that's what happened.
It just feels ham-fisted. In their defense, I'm sure it's tough to introduce an entirely new concept and world and sell a brand new story all in the scope of a single episode, but the formula felt a little stale, at least while I was watching it.
> Imagine some theoretical technological advancement. Now take it out of context, put it in the worst possible circumstances, and imagine it appeared into a society like ours without any prior thought or discussion about the possible downsides of that technology
This is precisely why I love Black Mirror. Despite the warnings, we're allowing companies to build killer robot and are running a large scale experiment to build a god. For a long time, I thought ethics is what prevented us from cloning human but recent years are showing balance sheet will outweigh it. As Netflix is 99.9% garbage, watching something like Black Mirror is refreshing
We always have moved forward technologically despite doomers. They were there for first person shooter games, the Internet in general, dating apps, etc.
That’s not to say those things didn’t have significant downsides. They do. But it took years to get there and they weren’t an overnight surprise, like they seem to be in the Black Mirror episodes I saw.
Imagine what a few Black Mirror episodes would look like if they were made in the 50s or 60s about some technology we have today. It’d be silly. Our culture and values have changed so much since then over time as the technology came about.
“Tonight's story on the Twilight Zone is somewhat unique and calls for a different kind of introduction. This, as you may recognize, is a map of the United States and there's a little town there called Peaksville. On a given morning not too long ago the rest of the world disappeared and Peaksville was left all alone. Its inhabitants were never sure whether the world was destroyed and only Peaksville left untouched, or whether the village had somehow been taken away. They were, on the other hand, sure of one thing. The cause. A monster had arrived in the village. Just by using his mind, he took away the automobiles, the electricity, the machines, because they displeased him. And he moved an entire community back into the dark ages, just by using his mind.”
It’s A Good Life (The Twilight Zone, 1961)
Seems rather on the nose for 2025.
>We always have moved forward technologically despite doomers
Have we? There's a de facto moratorium on gene editing in humans that all nations have so far adhered to (except for one person who promptly went to prison), there's a general moratorium on gene terminator seeds that so far all nations have adhered to, and we're in discussions for a deep sea-mining moratorium. Not all technologies move forward without impediment.
The problem is I feel is that the "value system" tied to tech. innovation is very simplistic and often doesn't really have any forcing functions other than short term profit for a small number of people.
Things like AI, surgical bots etc. can definitely be useful and can better our condition. They probably are doing that too but the amount of serious long term thinking from a traditionally ethical standpoint is limited compared the amount of research that goes into making the technology more powerful.
Feels like a car with an overpowered gas pedal but very rudimentary brakes and steering.
> Imagine what a few Black Mirror episodes would look like if they were made in the 50s or 60s about some technology we have today. It’d be silly.
It might be silly, but that doesn’t mean it would be wrong. We depend heavily on a number of technologies with significant downsides, which are downplayed or ignored or can-kicked into the future.
It isn't like it didn't happen. Here's an example [0] where a factory owner started replacing the workers with automation/robots. This was in 1964. There's another episode [1] where a scientist creates a computer that can converse with him and it goes all wrong.
These kinds of plots were actually quite common as people wrestled with the unknown future of the coming nuclear age.
> We always have moved forward technologically despite doomers.
We nowadays always introduce technology no matter what. Focused on 'users' as a small subgroup for which we rationalize and validate the introduction. Success measured by profit and damn the externalities. It got reasonable outcomes in terms of (technological) progress for a long time. Today if the technology isn't outright owned by a billionaire class who get their hands on the innovations first, it is stock market driven development that not necessarily serves society. Today all the externalities are compounding into a real Black Mirror mess.
Does Pirates of the Caribbean have to live up to the same standard? Or is it only sci fi? Star Trek?
The BBC black mirror seasons where great and a fresh take on sci fi. They filled the gap X-Files left behind, and it doesn’t need to do more.
It was on Channel 4 not BBC.
Brookers' earlier and finest work (Screenwipe) was on BBC4 though.
That's a very simplistic and deficient way of stating a half-truth. The dangers of technology and their ethical implications have historically been a serious consideration in the way we regulate a lot of stuff, from TikTok to nuclear development.
You are also biased in the way you only see what came to be and ignore what did not.
Part of moving forward is that we've avoided nuclear war so far, but we certainly built the arsenals to stop all forward progress.
There have been enough declassified "close call" stories that I don't think "we haven't had nuclear war yet" doesn't carry much water for me. Kind of like "I have never died", which is technically true but I have lots of info that makes me think extrapolating my past doesn't mean I'll never die in the future.
>We always have moved forward technologically despite doomers. They were there for first person shooter games, the Internet in general, dating apps, etc.
You say as if they weren't right about those things, and they aren't the toxic to society crap they're today.
> Despite the warnings, we're allowing companies to build killer robot and are running a large scale experiment to build a god.
I am doing everything I can think of to stop AI companies from building a god (to borrow your words). Last year and this year I've donated five figures to nonprofits that are trying to slow down AI development. I write letters to legislators whenever the opportunity arises — I wrote a letter to Gavin Newsom urging him to support SB-1047, which unfortunately he did not do; also wrote a letter to Scott Weiner offering support and encouraging him to keep trying.
You could do the same. I'm not confident about what's the best thing to do and I think the things I've done probably didn't help, but they are worth trying anyway.
I like that you are trying to influence the world into a shape you think is better and more just.
> […] and imagine it appeared into a society like ours without any prior thought or discussion about the possible downsides of that technology."
Which is basically how most technologies appear{s,ed} in society: without prior thought / discussion.
There's certainly a lot of talk while it's being rolled out, but rarely prior.
> For example: in a society where autonomous security guard robots kill intruders, there would not be people sneaking into warehouses.
People do crime because they think† they can get away with it, because if you knew that you'd probably get caught why would you do it in the first place? How many people purposefully do crime in order to get caught?
In your specific example people will think they've figured out a way to get past the automated system. (Not even getting into the fact that in some jurisdictions it's illegal to set traps, e.g., Canada Criminal Code §247.)
† When they think at all, and it's not just a heat / spur-of-the-moment action (often when drunk).
> Which is basically how most technologies appear{s,ed} in society: without prior thought / discussion.
> There's certainly a lot of talk while it's being rolled out, but rarely prior.
This is a semantic argument about timing. One could argue the Internet is still "being rolled out" today, but it's certainly widely available and we've had decades to reflect on its impact on society. It's not like the Internet was suddenly thrust on 1950s Mississippi and nobody considered that hackers might exist until everyone was on it.
The point is that some of the basic questions posed by the show would have been asked, answered, and accounted-for by society long before they seem to be in the societies depicted in the show.
> People do crime because they think they can get away with it, because if you knew that you'd probably get caught why would you do it in the first place?
It's not a binary decision. Of course you don't do it if you think you will be caught, but the likelihood of being caught and the consequences if you do are also significant factors in the decision.
If people were executed for stealing candy bars from convenience stores, we'd have a lot fewer people stealing, even if we put the same effort into catching them as we do now.
I think context matters as well. In your final example of death for shoplifting we would have less shoplifting, all other things being equal. We might also have other unexpected consequences like more embezzlement or more knock offs or more people selling things that "fell off the truck".
Additionally, even if I know you'll kill me if you catch me, I'll still try to steal food if my family is starving and there is no way for me to earn it.
For example: in a society where autonomous security guard robots kill intruders, there would not be people sneaking into warehouses.
We have a society (in the US) where cops often shoot first and ask questions later, but many people still do crimes. People will take risks about things that desperately matter to them, and indeed stories of such risk-taking are common cultural fodder. Are you not just generalizing from your own behavior?
> We have a society (in the US) where cops often shoot first and ask questions later, but many people still do crimes.
Often?
The reason they still commit crimes is there's fairly good chances they won't get caught and even better chances they won't get shot.
On the other hand, how often are people robbing places with hired security? Robot dog security is just security escalated.
No. You are just generalizing from specific news stories you've read about cops.
I am not (see below) and in any case this is not relevant to the question posed to GP, which was why s/he thinks people would abstain from risky behavior just because risks exist.
https://www.annualreviews.org/content/journals/10.1146/annur...
What would happen if we fed LLM all the videos from YouTube channels such as PoliceActivity?
Maybe I am generalizing too, based on the videos (bodycam) I have seen, but I agree with parent.
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> In a society where people can play back and re-live prior memories, it would not suddenly come up that one can relive experiences with past lovers.
I think this episode was one of Black Mirror's strongest, because not only would it suddenly come up, it does to a lesser degree with the technology we have today. I've been the guy obsessively replaying painful memories from old photos I have. I don't think it was really presented as though the characters are the first ones to ever think of the idea.
Correct. Kinda like it suddenly came up when Facebook started showing memories of dead friends and relatives to people that didn't want it nor enjoyed it. There's many instances of humanity plowing headfirst into some technology thinking "this will be great!" only to haphazardly run into the unanticipated not-so-great parts.
Not to mention there's literally people creating tech out here _today_ that's recreating _exactly_ what some Black Mirror episodes were talking about years ago. Like interactive chatbots model after dead people from voice samples, videos, and messages.
I liked "Crocodile" too, if I remember the name correctly. The other one that got to me was the one with the two astronauts. It raised a lot of ethical / moral dilemmas in me.
> without any prior thought or discussion about the possible downsides
In BM's defense, I think it needs to be that way to a point, to have the viewer react and acknowledge these downsides within their current frame of reference.
It can be hard to swallow both a world that has evolved for 10~20 years, and also think about a whole new paradigm that matches that unfamiliar world.
> Imagine some theoretical technological advancement. Now take it out of context, put it in the worst possible circumstances, and imagine it appeared into a society like ours without any prior thought or discussion about the possible downsides of that technology.
Isn't this the premise for the original Terminator ? Sure it was "unnecessarily" pessimistic, but man oh man it really hit a nerve and it set a tone for (all?) subsequent societal conversation.
"Imagine some theoretical technological advancement. Now take it out of context, put it in the worst possible circumstances, and imagine it appeared into a society like ours without any prior thought or discussion about the possible downsides of that technology.... It just feels ham-fisted."
So like exactly what is happening with driverless car technology.
A technology that was in its infancy in lab settings; taken out of that context and thrust upon our public roads by capricious impulsive billionaires in "beta" form, which has predictably killed people; but instead of pulling back and having a discussion about the possible downsides, this technology is allowed to plague us; because thought or discussion about possible downsides are short circuited by platitudes about how you have to crack eggs to make an omelet.
Can't get a driverless car future free of car deaths without first killing some people with driverless cars, ya know?
> In a society where people can play back and re-live prior memories, it would not suddenly come up that one can relive experiences with past lovers.
I am not much of a TV watcher so this is the only episode of black mirror I've seen but this really got me - for a show that got so much hype - this is the first couple to have jealousy issues around this technology? Really?? And he has to cut it out of his head with a double edged razor? Really??? People want to forget things all of the time.
It's TV and the other shows I watch are mostly because they're terrible, so it was better than those, but it definitely felt like, cmon guys, we can do better.
My take was that it was not about jealousy or wanting to forget, but about the obsession for an objective truth. The main character was rewatching his memories looking for the objective truth of what had happened, only to discover that all his memories were, in fact, a lie (because his wife was lying to him all the time).
I agree with this take, aside from a plot nuance about all his memories, there was one base factual lie (paternity) that propagated through his memories. I also occasionally rewatch that episode to try to convince myself that the Willow Grain would not be a panacea for so many of the worlds ills that it would outweigh any shame-motivated reason to dislike it.
Put another way, easy and on-demand access to objective truth seems to present a resolution to so many stupid arguments that it just has to net out as a positive where people quit dying on rhetorically silly hills.
As you correctly identify the weakness is when you want access to the objective truth of another. They need not be inclined to share it and this presents a social issue, as opposed to a technical or factual issue.
This sounds vaguely similar to the plot of The Final Cut.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Final_Cut_(2004_film)
The EYE Tech Zoe implant and the Willow Grain were similar but the Willow Grain was usable by the users while installed and the Zoe was generally only accessible after it had been extracted from the user after the user had died.
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>"Imagine some theoretical technological advancement. Now take it out of context, put it in the worst possible circumstances, and imagine it appeared into a society like ours without any prior thought or discussion about the possible downsides of that technology."
So, exactly like the real world case with all modern tech advancements?
Black Mirror got way less nuanced after Netflix picked it up.
“Nosedive” was the most surface-level take of that idea, the “pain chip” episode was basically just shock-value, the “trapped in the weird guys computer simulation” episode was “Whiteout” but derivative. The killer robot bees episode was…an episode of tv I guess?
Possibly it’s a format that just inevitably “wears thin” quite quickly, but it did feel like the early episodes had far more “existential dread” and interesting-exploration about them.
Exactly. The first two seasons were mostly a dark humour satire of our times and obsessions rather than a grim depiction of possible futures. The first episode is not even SF like also "the Waldo moment". 15 million merits is a metaphor that is not taking place in any real future.
It got much more commercial and literal after that.
Every episode is just "What if people are forced to wear IoT butt plugs?" or something ridiculous stretched over an episode.
Well, you have to go slow for wider reception.
It's not necessary for a work of fiction to focus on diverse and realistic characters, particularly when its primary aim is to critique a specific aspect of technology. In such cases, characters often function as just means to highlight and amplify that central theme.
Take 1984. It reads like a thought experiment reflecting the author's deepest fears about the dangers of unchecked power structures. Allegedly, Orwell’s own son would have been around 40 years old in the year 1984 (I read so in Pynchon's introduction to this book in Penguin's edition. It was a great essay.)
But, 1984 also features a great protagonist and an absolutely haunting language. While many of the other characters mainly serve to convey the broader ideas, it’s him who grounds the story emotionally. His suffering, his moral collapse, and the eventual loss of his ability was so tough to read and will forever haunt me. When he breaks, it feels like a loss for all of humanity. But, what I mean is characters are not essential to make a great work. When Orwell wants to convey his ideas, the characters are sidelined and ideas take the front wheel.
I understand your perspective. I'm not a fan of many of the episodes either. I really liked the first season, but the ones that followed just didn’t live up to it. And it does not rise above a horror centered around some particular technology. But, it's them give it cultural relevance.
> But, 1984 also features a great protagonist and an absolutely haunting language. While many of the other characters mainly serve to convey the broader ideas, it’s him who grounds the story emotionally. His suffering, his moral collapse, and the eventual loss of his ability was so tough to read and will forever haunt me. When he breaks, it feels like a loss for all of humanity. But, what I mean is characters are not essential to make a great work. When Orwell wants to convey his ideas, the characters are sidelined and ideas take the front wheel.
This paragraph goes one way and then suddenly pivots to the opposite conclusion without any justification. Orwell's character is why the story is wrenching. Without that emotional weight it has no staying power.
I kind of think both are true. I will remember Winston as great thinker who is extremely aware his world. And the tragedy or death of him is death of his awareness. His ability to think. In all the protagonist I have seen in tragedies, he is peculiar. While reviewing one another writer's work, Orwell said
> ‘... was a bad writer, and some inner trouble, sharpening his sensitiveness, nearly made him into a good one; his discontent healed itself, and he reverted to type. It is worth pausing to wonder in just what form the thing is happening to oneself.’
In the first act, the writing was so cold and I could not feel any connection to Winston. Even, when getting intimate with Julia, he is thinking,
> In the old days, he thought, a man looked at a girl’s body and saw that it was desirable, and that was the end of the story. But you could not have pure love or pure lust nowadays. No emotion was pure, because everything was mixed up with fear and hatred. Their embrace had been a battle, the climax a victory. It was a blow struck against the Party. It was a political act.
I don't know when I started to feel things and empathize with him so much. When you think about circumstances and how he feels, he is cold as it gets, always scheming.
And in the most hopeful time of his life, he say these
> ‘We are the dead,’ he said.
> ‘We’re not dead yet,’ said Julia prosaically.
> ‘Not physically. Six months, a year – five years, conceivably. I am afraid of death. You are young, so presumably you’re more afraid of it than I am. Obviously we shall put it off as long as we can. But it makes very little difference. So long as human beings stay human, death and life are the same thing.’
But, when you think of an inner life, he has one of the richest and rare ones. We empathize with that, and when crystal ball falls, it was the most tragic thing I have experienced. I think, genius of Orwell is that he made the character and the idea indistinguishable.
I meant to type, it was one of the tragic things I have read, but too late to edit.
I enjoyed several episodes, some more than others. "San Junipero" is one of the better ones IMO and IIRC it's a good bit more upbeat than the others.
Not very upbeat actually. The episode drops several reminders that the simulated people can't die, by accident or choice. After they tire of life, they are trapped in an eternity of boredom and madness.
There's explicitly a conversation of "fine, not forever then - however long you like. You can always choose to leave."
I guess it wouldn't be black mirror without some technophobia. But it seems like I didn't imagine it [1]:
> The episode received critical acclaim, with particular praise for Mbatha-Raw's and Davis's performances, its plot twist, its visual style, and its uplifting tone, which is atypical for the series.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Junipero
The only episode I really enjoyed.
Slight correction, Black Mirror copied Community’s MeowMeowBeenz, not the other way around.
The part you’re misunderstanding about black mirror is that it’s about how technology will strip the humanity out of people.
Also, the name of the show is BLACK mirror. Besides the iPhone symbolism by which the name is inspired, the whole point of the show is to hold up a mirror to the dark side of society.
This may lead to a show that is without nuance or is less interesting, but thats the point of the show.
Every conversation about art runs into this problem: you can't criticize art without someone saying that the critic simply doesn't understand the art. Maybe in some cases this is true, but I don't think that's what's happening here. It seems pretty clear that OP understands Black Mirror's point perfectly and still thinks that unrelenting pessimism devoid of nuance is a bad point—they understand what the art is saying and don't like it.
I understand that is the goal. I just don't think it succeeds.
To show darkness you have to have light. You can't cast a shadow if its pitch black.
In terms of black mirror, they show a society devoid of humanity, true. But in most episodes (there are probably some exceptions) it feels like the lack of humanity is not because of technology, but because the world of the show is populated by monsters. As a result, it doesn't effectively show the dehumanizing power of technology.
When watching an episode - ask yourself, would these characters still do monsterous things without the tech premise? If the answer is yes, then its not really about the tech.
> it feels like the lack of humanity is not because of technology, but because the world of the show is populated by monsters.
But...that's always been the case. Technology is a tool, and a tool is neither good nor evil; it's how you choose to use it. That gets repeated here all the time. Tech grants powers to people that we didn't have before, so people with a propensity to perpetrate evil can do it at efficiently at scale. The same goes for people who want to do good but aren't aware of the consequences of their actions. We can learn a lot more from the failure cases than the happy path, and it makes for more entertaining stories.
That may or may not be the case, but either way it's still valid to criticize that approach, in favor of a more nuanced and potentially more effective one.
Like, maybe that's the show the creators wanted to make. I'm not certain about that, but it's a valid premise. But then maybe I would prefer if the show was a bit different regardless of that. That's always allowed.
I re-watched Community probably 5 times by now. It's one of my favourite television series in spite of it's flaws.
Sometimes I feel like Community is a more subtle Black Mirror than what we give it credit for. The writers came up with the weirdest ideas, and they just threw these at this world they created in Community to see what came out. /Everyone/ in that story finds themselves at Greendale because of some less-than-optimal circumstance, and the only thing they can do is react to the circumstances given to them.
Meow meow beans is a stand-out episode because it takes the absurdity of a social credit system all they way beyond the vale and straight to it's natural conclusion, where common sense failed to step in and take control.
Small correction: The meow meow beans episode of Community aired in 2014 and the Nosedive episode of Black Mirror aired 2016. So the Community episode came first.
Meow Meow Beans episode in Community predated the Black Mirror episode by a couple of years.
But yes, agreed about Black Mirror feeling hollow with its lack of nuance in its pessimism.
However I don't think Nosedive is the right episode to make this point as we see the protagonist getting assistance from the truck driver lady as well as the people protagonist ends up being held with are able to share a laughter in the freedom of losing it all.
> To be clear it doesn't have to be happy, it can still be grim and dark, but when every character is a terrible character, it undermines the story
The world is full of terrible people, though. It's a "mirror" on current society, which is probably where they got the name. And by terrible I don't mean "literally Hitler," but the boring terribleness and malaise that so many around us have kind of just slipped into: Selfishness, impoliteness, paranoia, anger, belligerence, spitefulness, indifference to cruelty, unnecessary competitiveness in everything. Just an overall lack of socialization, grace and empathy.
Maybe it's boring to you because the characters' traits can be found all over the place in real life.
I don't feel my social circle is like that. I mean, you're right that there are plenty of people as you describe, but I like to think that I surround myself with people for which that does not match (not always successfully when I was younger, but you learn as you grow older).
As such, bawolff's point resonates with me. And even if that wasn't the case, they still have a good point. If you pick terrible protagonists to begin with, it undermines the morale of the episode a little. Showing how "reasonable" people are affected is stronger, and I indeed feel that both Community and Orville did that really well.
Yea, I do the same, I try to surround myself with positive people. Friends I choose, local businesses I frequent. But there are some forced interactions (like kid's school friends' parents for example) where you have no choice to have to interact with terrible people.
My recollection is that niceness used to be the default in random people you might meet. But that's not been true for about the last ten years or so. You actively have to seek out nice people now. Something happened back in 2015-2016, where "casual meanness" became suddenly OK, and people went mask off and it was cool to be an insufferable jerk.
Hmm. One thing I have noticed, and something that I discuss with my wife relatively frequently (she notices it as well), is that when I engage with "new" people in something like a professional context, the initial contact indeed often starts as "rough", not rarely unfriendly, even. And that's not just the first sentence, it's through the first few minutes or so.
But when I persist in being nice, and having an "I know you're just doing your job attitude", and depending on the situation also an "I know my problem is convoluted" attitude, then more often than not, people suddenly switch to being nice. Depending on what's appropriate, I add in that I'm not in a rush, or signal for unpleasant situations on my side that I understand that it's not the fault of the person I'm talking to (I rarely, if ever, explicitly state that one, it's just clear).
Just recently I've even had it that several people then suddenly went out of their way to help me, for example giving me "private" extensions to people who should definitely be able to help me, despite that very explicitly not the procedure they or I am supposed to follow.
I always put it down to: People with more public facing jobs have to deal with a lot of angry, dumb, and/or generally unpleasant people, and when they sense that they are now facing someone who is understanding, cooperative, and wants nothing more than for both sides to resolve an issue in a mutually friendly way, but that also understands the limitations of their positions, they jump at that opportunity.
So in some sense, this strengthens your point: Society is full of badly acting (I'm explicitly not saying "bad") people, and this fosters the initial rough response of people in public facing positions.
But on the other hand, my relative success in "turning" people to be friendly and helpful in an instant, suggests that often, people are not like that at their core, but rather are inherently friendly and helpful and have just adopted a defense mechanism.
We have an expression in Germany: "How you shout into the forest, is how it sounds back."
Makes me wonder…
Are most of us kind but have to hide our kindness beneath a rough veneer due to the grumpy hostile antagonistic people who perhaps only make up some of the population?
But yes I agree with what that other guy said. It wasn’t always this way was it? I also feel like around 2015 people became more hostile and meaner to each other in general. I used to think it was my imagination but now I’m seeing this sentiment more and more from others. Not just here on hacker news but even some of my real life friends feel this way. Not sure what happened.
Around 2014 'kindness is weakness' became part of the social fabric so we all put on tough fronts to not be identified as targets.
Big-city people were always like this. The internet brought big-city culture to every corner of the planet. Now everyone has to act like a New Yorker.
I don't know where you are located. But, in my experience living in a major city you can walk past 1000 perfectly nice people in a day and also one or two jerks. Who do you remember five days later? Do you remember Nice Person #385? Inconsequential Person #722? No. You remember Jerk #3. He sticks with you for a long time.
> It's a "mirror" on current society, which is probably where they got the name.
Nope. It's a reference to the surface of a screen. (Though undeniably there's important double meaning there)
> The "black mirror" of the title is the one you'll find on every wall, on every desk, in the palm of every hand: the cold, shiny screen of a TV, a monitor, a smartphone.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/dec/01/charlie-b...
Nosedive is easily among the worst Black Mirror episodes and I was very confused by so many people praising it when it came out.
It was the one many of us thought was most likely to happen. Some aspects of it were in prior, media reports. It connected to people's memories on top of believable speculation. Then, something like that happened in China.
I believe it was popular for those reasons.
It was praised for its visual style.
I think this is exactly why I dislike black mirror. It feels very 'pointless' as a show, because the situations and characters are so far divorced from anything real, that it feels like a meaningless critique. Sure, a technology could be used in a particular way, but all black mirror presents is the consequences, and it feels like it neglects the much more important question of how we got there to the point where it feels completely unrealistic
It encapsulates most of what I dislike about horror films as well - so many of them are just a jumpscare extravaganza but without actually trying to present you with anything meaningful, like an underlying critical analysis or anything (or even any characters). Like sure, if we use technology to torture people, that's bad. So what?
Somehow though I don't think a legal drama about the creeping erosion of people's rights and the transformation of society by well meaning but unintentionally invasive technology will have mass market appeal, but at least it would feel like its critiquing something real
A lot of the early episodes, especially, aren’t about hypothetical uses of technology but current ones, or even are barely about technology at all. White Bear, Fifteen Million Merits, The National Anthem, and The Waldo Moment are mostly works of social and media criticism that aren’t predicting much, or even anything, because they’re about people and situations today.
To the extent they employ sci-fi it’s usually to force the viewer into an outsider’s perspective.
Admittedly, the show’s skewed farther into straight five-minutes-in-the-future tech-prediction readings as it’s gone on.
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I disagree with the premise of this article.
Sometimes an extremely pessimistic vision of a possible future CAN change things...by making it so people are determined to fight to prevent that possible future from ever happening.
The novel 1984 by George Orwell was published in 1948. It is an extremely pessimistic vision of a possible future for mankind....and many of us over the generations who read it really really did not want to live in such a future and acted accordingly.
Black Mirror's pessimism could be similar.
Also in Black Mirror technology in of itself is never portrayed as inherently bad in any episode. It is the people and the way they choose to use the technology that leads to the horror. In that way every Black Mirror episode has that element of optimism. If only each new piece of tech in reality could ever be introduced so we maximize the positives rather than the negatives.
"The Jungle" by Upton Sinclair published in 1906 described an extremely pessimistic vision of the exploitation of the American factory worker. The descriptions of the meat packing industry in the book led to passing of the Meat Inspection Act. Sinclair was frustrated that most people were more concerned about eating bovine tuberculosis infected beef than the exploitation of people, but, nonetheless, it was pessimistic novel which lead to positive action.
Me too I also dislike the cherry picked and wrongly built narrative, see the nuclear one.
> In contrast, France ran from the past towards the future, overcoming public fears of nuclear disasters, now getting 70% of its electricity from nuclear power.
France has put a single reactor online in the last 25 years, it has closed reactors and cancelled building new ones for some time.
The problem has always been financial with other sources becoming simply cheaper, more competitive and easier/quicker to put online.
To be fair, the reason behind this was the arguably poor decision decades ago to overbuild reactor capacity.
France sells energy to it's neighbors.
>> many of us over the generations who read it really really did not want to live in such a future
You live in exactly that future.
The screens that you watch, watch you. You can't escape them in your own home, let alone in public.
Words are redefined by the elite at their whim, as they were in the novel.
Very few would dare to publicly align themselves with the nation which we have always been at war with.
You live in that world now.
If we did, you wouldn't be able to post this comment.
I wonder if any ancient Greeks leveled this same criticism at Aesop’s Fables.
It's not that Black Mirror is bad. It's that, as the article points out, we don't have a fictional vision of the future to use as a goal.
The author mentions Jill Lapore's 2017 article in the New Yorker, which is sort of a survey paper of dystopian fiction from that period.[1] No alternatives are presented.
For most of human history, the big problem was making enough stuff. There just wasn't any way to make enough stuff for everybody. In the 20th century, high volume manufacturing got going. By the 1950s, the US had this totally worked out. At long last, society really could make enough stuff for everybody. Science fiction of the 1950s is mostly utopian. With scarcity conquered, the future looked bright.
But it didn't work out.
Think about why for a while. I'll wait.
[1] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/06/05/a-golden-age-f...
I remember an article, I think by Neal Stephenson, that described the change in the attitude of SF over the years. Things like 20000 leagues under the sea, off on a comet etc. were optimistic, adventurous and generally upbeat. Even the Asimov books were more about world building than doomsaying. There's quite a bit of dystopian pessimistic stuff that's in the market now and perhaps it's just because it's what sells or maybe there's a deeper underlying reason. In any case, the shift was something he talked about in the article/talk.
I remember reading round the world in 80 days when I was a kid and while it's not really "science fiction" in the 90s, the overall premise really triggered my imagination. Can't really say that for many of the more doom and gloom type stories that I read later in my adult life. I liked the freshness of Black Mirror when it first came out (pre Netflix) but then it dawned on me that it was mostly doomscrolling repackaged and converted into slick entertainment. I tuned out after that.
The dystopian era of SF movies started in 1972 with Silent Running.[1] That was the first "grubby future" Hollywood movie, and is an obscure but notable milestone in cinema history.
There was early dystopian SF. H.G. Wells' The Time Machine ends with a dystopia. E. M. Foester's The Machine Stops (1909) was way, way ahead of its time.
Vashti’s next move was to turn off the isolation switch, and all the accumulations of the last three minutes burst upon her. The room was filled with the noise of bells, and speaking-tubes. What was the new food like? Could she recommend it? Has she had any ideas lately? Might one tell her one’s own ideas? Would she make an engagement to visit the public nurseries at an early date? — say this day month.
To most of these questions she replied with irritation — a growing quality in that accelerated age. She said that the new food was horrible. That she could not visit the public nurseries through press of engagements. That she had no ideas of her own but had just been told one-that four stars and three in the middle were like a man: she doubted there was much in it. Then she switched off her correspondents, for it was time to deliver her lecture on Australian music.
The clumsy system of public gatherings had been long since abandoned; neither Vashti nor her audience stirred from their rooms. Seated in her armchair she spoke, while they in their armchairs heard her, fairly well, and saw her, fairly well. She opened with a humorous account of music in the pre-Mongolian epoch, and went on to describe the great outburst of song that followed the Chinese conquest. Remote and primæval as were the methods of I-San-So and the Brisbane school, she yet felt (she said) that study of them might repay the musicians of today: they had freshness; they had, above all, ideas. Her lecture, which lasted ten minutes, was well received, and at its conclusion she and many of her audience listened to a lecture on the sea; there were ideas to be got from the sea; the speaker had donned a respirator and visited it lately. Then she fed, talked to many friends, had a bath, talked again, and summoned her bed.
Social media. 1909.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_Running
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Machine_Stops
There's the whole 'solarpunk' genre of fiction that I'd say is more optimistic. Epitomised by stuff like Becky Chamber's books 'A Psalm for the Wild Built' and 'A Prayer for the Crown Shy' (which are both excellent by the way).
Thank you for the recommendation. I haven't read much solarpunk. Cyberpunk is too dystopian for me. Steampunk, I like the aesthetic but I don't think I've read much literature in that genre except the difference engine.
I think Neal Stephenson had it backwards. The utopian science fiction comes second and is more of a reaction against the pessimistic dystopian science fiction.
Frankenstein is considered by many to be among the first science fiction books and is essentially a Black Mirror story from the 1800's. You had HG Wells and War of the Worlds for example. The Time Machine by HG Wells also portrays a possible negative vision for humanity based on an extrapolation of the social trends of the time.
Look at Asimov's robot stories. The orignal "robot" story was not from Asimov but a pessimistic story written in the 1920's about killer robots attacking people and being violent and all that. Asimov's optimistic peaceful robot stories were actually a reaction to the pessmistic violent robot stories that had been popular previously.
I think humans generally over the past few centuries have had uneasy feelings about technological changes and then that is reflected in dystopian, negative fiction. People react to that negativity by intentionally writing bright optimistic positive science fiction stories.
Look at Star Trek the Original Series for my final example. That tv show came out during the turmoil of the late 1960's and it responded to that turmoil and feelings of nuclear holocaust with a vision of the future that was filled with optimism and idealism.
>we don't have a fictional vision of the future to use as a goal.
yes we do, it's called The Culture by Iain M Banks.
It's a series of books, and it's not easy-web-novels reading, so in the grand scheme of things is pretty niche
Yeah, The Culture, where the real powers are AI. Very niche, just as Yudkowski...
Optimistic scifi properties:
* The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers (+ sequels)
* Monk & Robot by Becky Chambers (+ sequel)
* Most of, but not all of, Star Trek. This is getting infected with cynicism in some places, but still largely optimistic about a utopian future.
* The Martian by Andy Weir
* For All Mankind on Apple TV+
* Arrival movie
That's what I can think of since the 90s. Doubt it's a complete list, but really Becky Chambers is the optimistic voice in the domain, primarily since she focuses her works on interpersonal vs. galactic or societal dynamics.
you can always split away from the Culture and go on without the Minds, if you so desire.
That's a long way off.
What's going to be interesting near term is when AI management outperforms human management. The dynamics of capitalism then demand that AI be in charge. Marshall Brain's "Manna" is the classic in this area.
We do, it's called Star Trek - The Next Generation.
> [During Covid] In a moment when screens kept us connected, protected and employed, the reductiveness of dystopian science fiction felt silly. Biotechnology like GMOs and mRNA offered existential hope, rather than risk.
He can thank Elon & the Tech Lords for bringing the public perception of tech right back into dystopian nightmare territory.
But even apart from that, this seems like an extremely selective recollection of the Covid era. Yes, technology was a livesaver during that time, and we all were using it in frequency and to a degree like never before. (And indeed even that time brought lasting new "skills" which offer genuine new possibilities, like the new casualness and ubiquity of online meetings)
But I also remember that tech didn't actually feel very empowering during, on the contrary: Suddenly being online changed from something fun and interesting to mandatory: You had to be online, even for the things you'd much rather do offline. What been an extension of possibilities before now became a constraint. This definitely made it feel much more dystopian than before.
> We must move away from binary tales of catastrophe, not towards naive utopianism that ignores problems and risks that comes with change, but hopeful solutionism that reminds us we can solve and mitigate them [...]
I think this misunderstands the reasons why people are wary of new technology and instead pulls up the old "Luddite" strawman (which was itself a misrepresentation).
Of course we could introduce new tech carefully and with a strong emphasis of identifying and mitigating the risks. The problem is that we won't do that, because the incentives point into the opposite direction. Companies don't want to fall behind, so they move fast and break things instead of being careful. The general population then finds themselves as guinea pigs in barely tested new technology with little power to actually influence the course this technology takes. This causes a feeling of helplessness and resentment.
Black Mirror is dystopian fiction that hits pretty close to home. Maybe too close to home.
S07E01 "Common People" hit me pretty close to home with my own healthcare insurance experiences, where my rates go up every year and my coverages go down, and things that were formerly covered are now covered in Plus/Premium add-on packages. We also see this streaming and cellular services, except those are more elective.
The way I see it, if you don't like it, too bad.
Yeah but toxic optimism won’t lead us to a better future either. We need optimists to work towards a better society and pessimists to keep them in check when they are being naive to a fault. Optimists built the nukes, pessimists keep us from using them.
While I don't fully agree with the article, I really like this sketch about "Black Mirror in medieval times": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y1aSqZ23ydk
It does show rather well (and rather funnily) how it can be a fine line between warning about technology, and taking it too cynically.
Thanks for the link - that was great. Yeah, with some exceptions (15 million merits being one, given that it's pure allegory) the show seems to ask, "given some new technology, what is the cruelest most horrifying situation in which it could be used?" This basic premise can indeed be applied to anything, past or present. Personally I'd take the automobile, call the episode "Meat Grinder," reference the ~30k deaths/year in the US from car accidents, noting the ambivalence of literally everyone to that fact.
This is a great idea. Like a 1905 person’s weird vision of the 1950s— getting a bunch of things wildly wrong, like fashion and geopolitics, but strangely accurately describing a fledgling attempt to mandate ‘seat belts’ and criminalize drunk driving, so as to diminish the tens of thousands of preventable traffic deaths yearly, against the lobbying efforts of industry and the insouciance (and even outright opposition) of the public.
Every weapon ever devised by humankind has been used
I must have missed the time we used tungsten telephone poles and cobalt bombs?
[dead]
"Absent is the plot twist of Pandora’s box that made it philosophically useful: the box also contained hope and opportunity that new knowledge brings."
Yes, add that and it might be something interesting but sure not the Black Mirror I want to watch. I mean it is called Black Mirror for a reason.
And it is not even true. Take the episode "San Junipro" for example? Isn't there some hope and opportunity in it? And yet, this episode (one of the best in my opinion) only works because the hope can shine against a black background.
> Take the episode "San Junipro" for example? Isn't there some hope and opportunity in it? And yet, this episode (one of the best in my opinion) only works because the hope can shine against a black background.
Arguably though that episode is a bit of an outlier. I think its the most hopeful (relatively speaking) of all the black mirror episodes i've seen.
I dunno about you, but I don't care about a computer program that believes it's me living on after I die. You can wrap it with all the feel good trappings you want, that set of bits is not you. If anything, living a life in a way that you put off doing the fun things until the after life, spiritual or digital, sounds awful.
The end shows us the entirety of anything real happening: it’s a modern day pharaoh’s tomb. Nothing’s alive, just pantomiming at life. Hieroglyphs and organs in jars, but even less human.
What you see is the only real thing. Caretaker machines swapping hard drives or whatever it is they were doing (it’s been a while since I watched it)
That’s why it shows us that, when it does.
i think it's both, and more. i didn't read the ending as particularly opinionated about how 'real' the depicted emulation was, though i do think it had a decidedly hopeful tinge. the idea that we might somehow, in some way get the opportunity to do it over, to do it right, even if weird/contingent/incomplete, has i think a mythic resonance that transcends strict bounds of realism. even in a fully fantastic utopian afterlife unmediated by technology there would still be the question of whether this is 'really real': ontological, psychologically, etc. nonetheless, there are levels of unreality many seem willing to accept, the ending of 'inception' being another paradigmatic film example. i guess my perspective is that many aspects of 'real life' also abut artifice and pantomime (a phenomena not unrelated to the feelings of regret inspiring desire for strictly-impossible second chances), and the decision to accept anything as 'real' is always contains an element of tenuousness, uncertainty, and faith.
I disagree, because they show the characters inside the computer simulation experiencing the world. They're conscious beings, and there's a big fight between the two main characters related to that existence, with both deciding to mind upload at the end for starting a new life together. You might disagree that simulated characters can ever be conscious in the real world, but there's plenty of fictional stories where the simulated characters are conscious, this being one of them.
As such, it doesn't matter what the substrate is for this story. The technology allows a kind of conscious life after death where people can choose to live life differently than they previously did.
It ends with the song "Heaven on Earth" with no distortions or long fade out.
The final scene has, imo, no inherent negative connotation. It seems intended as an hopeful outcome.
> You can wrap it with all the feel good trappings you want, that set of bits is not you.
If there's a continuity of experience from your present day life to your virtual life, if the virtual version shares all your memories, hopes, fears, thought patterns... Then in what way is it not you?
Do you also think that "reconstructive teleporting" would build another person but that person would not be you?
>If there's a continuity of experience from your present day life to your virtual life
There cannot be. There isn't even a continuity of experience for when you go to sleep.
It doesn't matter at all how perfect the copy is, because I STILL AM ME.
Brain uploading has never made sense because, well, I can't fit in the wires.
It doesn't matter that some digital simulation of my brain activity happens, and that the simulation feels like it was me and now is an immortal simulation, because I still die. My consciousness cannot be transported to software.
> There isn't even a continuity of experience for when you go to sleep.
But you remember having lived the previous day. Why is it any different if you remember having lived as a human a second ago and are a computer program now?
> My consciousness cannot be transported to software.
You perhaps don't notice that your entire argument hinges on this claim. This is the central point of disagreement.
I'm saying "if your consciousness was uploaded to a computer you would still experience being yourself", and you're saying "no, if my consciousness were uploaded to a computer I wouldn't experience it as being myself, because uploading a consciousness to a computer is not possible".
I don't like teleportation that much either. But at least there is meat on the other end. Uploading is an entirely different mode of existence.
> I dunno about you, but I don't care about a computer program that believes it's me living on after I die.
1% of your cells are replaced daily. Presumably you still believe you're you even though much of you is constantly being replaced. If it were an option would you really deny your future self an arbitrarily long happy life because you got hung up on Theseus's Paradox?
I don't remember the part of that scenario where a scan is taken of the ship and uploaded to a server.
I long ago accepted that my image of self is a sort of illusion. That things I consider other, like microbes in my gut, constitute a large portion of me. And I change over time. Even the memories I have are copies of copies.
But all that happens in a continuity. Being uploaded is a stark difference and a disconnect that I cannot philosophically reconcile.
You lose consciousness for a few hours every night. If you've ever been put out for surgery the effect is even stronger. If someone could copy you when you were out, are you sure you'd have any idea it occurred? Could you prove you're not the copy? What if we're in that uploaded world now, would you be able to tell?
Arguably the only "you" that exists is the "you" right now. For how can you show that you are not in vat? Prove that yesterday was real? Even if a second ago was real?
Of course the only me that exists is right now. In no feasible reality would I ever shake hands with me from yesterday or me in the vat. Nor would I ever shake hands with me in a robot, just a robot that thinks it's me. Even if those other entities exist they are not me.
Except you don't treat them that way. You feel sorry about your old self. You feel sorry for other people, even though you cannot prove that they even "exist". You care about future you even though it doesn't exist.
Unless you don't.
I agree with your conclusion that because that is the reality of life, the only time worth spending is right now.
>computer program that believes it's me
So, a computer program can believe?
Iirc Pandora’s Box explicitly contained the opposite of hope. The last demon which she kept trapped inside it was “foreknowledge” and the only reason humanity was able to continue was that without knowing the future, we were able to have hope.
A friend of mine curated Black Mirror for me. I've got a lot tolerance for horror.
She showed me San Junipero and Hang the DJ. And then we were done.
Eh, Black Mirror is basically just a 21st century version of The Twilight Zone only with the Cold War fears replaced with modern ones. But still, TZ wasn't all doom and gloom but found the time to be optimistic now and then.
Humans need some level of paranoia, mistrust and waryness of new technology in the same way electrical circuits need circuit breakers and ships need life boats.
Pessimism saves lives and resources. It won't lead us to a better future, but it might save what does.
Furthermore, for many of us, we are already in a state of technological mindfuckery beyond Black Mirror levels. Black Mirror sounds like a fairy tale.
We need humans, kind humans that are not fools. That's very hard to make. Without that any future, technological or not, is bleak.
Trying to replace everyone with AI and actively build a surveillance state also won't lead us to a better future. They say Black Mirror is dystopian but I would say we are on the dystopian timeline so it is just emulating reality a few years into the future.
Thats why we need a strong open source competitor to closed source AI.
Open source AI won't change what I'm referring to. Open source or closed source AI leads to the same thing.
When did it promise that it would? I feel like people reject these stories not because they're counterproductive, but because they frighten them. We feel so personally and viciously attacked by modern narratives because they question everyday concepts and routines we're all comfortable with.
I'm reminded of growing up watching episodes of Twilight Zone and Star Trek that yes, were kitschy stories, but instilled lifelong lessons about independence in their audience. Black Mirror isn't my favorite show but it seems to resemble the same "near future cautionary tale" archetype that has remained popular for centuries.
Unrelenting pessimism without nuance is no more profound than unrelenting optimism without nuance, but it comes off as “deeper” and more “sophisticated” because of human negativity bias.
Dark, pessimistic, sad, tragic things seem superficially more profound for the same reason that people slow down when they pass a car wreck and true crime shows about serial killers are popular.
We are this way because it probably had evolutionary survival value. “If you mistake a bush for a lion you’re fine, but if you mistake a lion for a bush you’re dead.”
Why does media and film even need to be about changing the world? It gives perspectives and exaggerates it for entertainment from which we occasionally draw cultural memes. Those can influence us as societies occasionally but ultimately they are just stories, personal visions.
The exaggerations in media often defines our outward perceptions more than the boring reality of our actual lives. So it can equally do harm if taken too seriously. And it definitely won't make better films/tv shows.
I've given up on a lot of TV as much seem to be about pushing a message. The more I don't watch it, the more obvious it seems to be when I do. A much smaller bunch of shows seem explicitly designed to push a political/cultural message and we even have politicians talk about legislation based on the show that was on the screen the previous night!
Perhaps those whose job it is to push messages (e.g. journalists) see themselves and their mission in TV shows and so we have this view as shown in the article.
>It is an inherently populist narrative, one that appeals to nostalgia
I don't agree with this or the article at all. There's very little nostalgia, if any, in Black Mirror. (nostalgia being a desire to return to the past, or romantic display of the past). The show is very firmly centered on present day or future abuse of technology, that much is true, but there's nothing wrong or inaccurate about that.
The article just does what is common but wrong, fetishize technology, that is to claim that technology itself makes the world better. But that is to attribute agency to something that has no agency. We're not better off than the past because of technology, but because of ethical progress. Technology is a lever. It as easily makes you a virus as it can make you a cure.
Give modern technology to a dictator and you get the most total surveillance state on earth. Black Mirror makes an accurate observation, that technological progress is outrunning our ethical progress. Insofar pessimism is justified. When you're at the mercy of at best idiots and at worst despots not handing them bigger levers is not nostalgia but just means you have a healthy survival instinct.
I don't think Black Mirror is supposed on it's own to lead us to a better future. It's list of things that could go wrong maybe counter the Sam Altman like tech boosters.
I can't help feeling
>Biotechnology like GMOs and mRNA offered existential hope, rather than risk.
rather skips over the fact that the whole pandemic was probably set off by a lab screw up illustrating the value of warning about such things.
I agree in the sense that Black Mirror seems almost required to be extra pessimistic when... there's a better and far more complex story available with a different approach or ending.
Granted I'm also WAY burnt out on pessimistic Si-Fi, it's the default now, and it's predicable and far too easy.
That's not to say it can't be mostly dark, but for many movies and shows, that's most of the meat...
> Granted I'm also WAY burnt out on pessimistic Si-Fi, it's the default now, and it's predicable and far too easy.
Gosh yeah. Even watching Black Mirror this season is difficult because I'm so tired of dystopian stuff.
Can you recommend any recent non-dystopian scifi?
Honestly I was just thinking of watching old Star Trek DS9
Not a bad plan :)
The Orville is really good if you haven't seen it yet
I was on a project that avoided making a bad decision because of Black Mirror. The project didn’t succeed regardless but people do get insights from the show even if it’s not always a plausible scenario.
I feel like a big problem in the modern world is the small scale of our dreams. Dreams drive us, they change the world. In 1865, French author Jules Verne decided to write a book to inspire people to dream big, impossible dreams. He decided to write a novel proving that humans could do anything- by describing how, if enough people worked together, they could journey all the way to the moon. This became one of the first hit books in a new genre, science fiction. Sure, plenty of people had written about travelling to the moon before- e.g. the Roman poet Lucian wrote of being sucked up into a giant waterspout and deposited on the moon- but Verne was the first to write at a level of detail that made is seem realistic, something that humans could do- e.g. he spends several pages discussing- with math- how, if you are in America and want to go into space, the coast of Florida is the right spot (he picked a spot two hundred km from Cape Canaveral). These stories are important. The fathers of rocketry in at least two different countries (Konstantin Tsiolkovsky of Russia and Hermann Oberth of Germany) were inspired by Verne (Goddard of the US was more inspired by H.G. Wells than Verne). They independently realized that you couldn't build a cannon (like Verne depicted) that could let humans survive and get to the moon, so they went into rocketry. Verne and H.G. Wells told stories that were the first step to changing the world.
And modern science fiction seems stuck in a dystopian rut. Most of the good sci-fi (and I enjoy things like the Murderbot Diaries) are largely dystopic. Hell, Star Trek- long the most utopian of sci-fi- is doing movies about Section 31 and whole seasons about android slave uprisings. No one is inspired to build a better future by "Don't create the Torment Nexus", they just get inspired to build the Torment Nexus.
Basically, we are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be, as Kurt Vonnegut wrote.
Thank you for reading my TED talk.
Star Trek has been hijacked by people who have no understanding whatsoever of the franchise's spirit. Perhaps this is a symptom of something deeper: not only are they unable to conceive of optimistic stories, they can't even imagine a dystopic original show. Instead, they resort to co-opting an existing franchise and disfiguring it.
Maybe this is an oversimplification, but optimism is gone from media because people are no longer optimistic about the future. For a long time, the next generation always just kind of assumed they'd have it better than the previous ones. Apart from a couple of terrible historic blips like world wars, of course. Everyone has kind of believed they'd live better lives than their parents. The Baby Boomers were the last generation that really felt that way, and it was by and large true for them. From there on, Gen-X knows already that they'll never live as good as their parents. Milleneals are finding out very quickly the same, the next generation is going to have it worse, and so on. So it's no big surprise that all of our media is doomer and pessimistic.
Maybe if we want more optimism in our media, we should give ourselves something to be optimistic about.
> Maybe if we want more optimism in our media, we should give ourselves something to be optimistic about.
It seems to me that it's the opposite. Stories are how we form our views of the world and our dreams for the future. Therefore if we want to have people who build towards things worthy of optimism, we should start by telling stories that inspire them to be optimistic.
Look at Star Trek - Roddenberry didn't go "well the world is hella racist so I guess the show should be too". He made the show reflect his vision for how we could live a better life, and people responded to that over time. I think we badly need the same thing today.
It's kind of a chicken and the egg, but I feel like 1966 with Vietnam, race riots across the US, the Cuban Missile Crisis only four years past, and everything else was hardly a time that people would have been optimistic.
But you had a guy who had been a bomber pilot in World War Two and flown combat missions against the Japanese, who desperately wanted to put a (gay) Japanese-American who had spent the war in an internment camp into his show, and a black woman (and have her kiss his white male lead star!), and later on, when people seemed to not be getting what he was trying to say, even added a good Russian character (played by an actual Russian-American). Because the point was to show, just like Verne a century earlier, that if truly all of humanity worked together, we could accomplish anything, for example travelling the stars. And so many people were inspired by his vision, and wanted to build his vision, to make his dreams real.
And nowadays the dreams that I see, both in stories and made manifest, seem drab and small and more than a little evil by comparison. And I do think that story-tellers (of whatever medium- very much including start-up founders) need to be aware of the power of their stories, that their myths become real, and have a responsibility to use that power for good and not for evil.
That “long time” is a blip on the historical timeline. Most of history is people expecting things to basically stay the same or to get worse.
We’re talking a few decades at a time in a few places scattered over a couple hundred years, maybe, if we mean the median person in that time and place.
The 20th century got a big optimism and productivity boost from finally all but ending cyclical famines, antibiotics, and vaccines, and most of the stuff since has been of far smaller consequence. We’re coming down off the brief high of Haber-Bosch and penicillin, and haven’t found another fix yet. Computers and the Internet ain’t it, so far.
How did we have shows like The Handmaid's Tale and 50.5% of America was like yeah that sounds good let's go for that?
How did we have decades of superhero movies and then elect a bonafide fascist villain? I don’t know. The lessons we were teaching weren’t the right lessons somehow. Or they were swamped by social media nonsense and decades of underfunding education.
Don't forget all the people that thought Homelander was the good guy.
This article, I feel, misclassifies the show and then criticizes it on the wrong grounds.
It's in the horror genre. Of course it's fearmongering, that's what horror stories do. Just because it's not the stereotypical horror doesn't mean it's not in that domain. It's great as a horror show because it shows somewhat plausible futures, and that dream/nightmarelike quality is truly gripping.
"San Junipero" I think was the kind of black mirror episode that black mirror always should have done. An honest depiction of a certain technology to its ultimate realization. Is it completely perfect? Absolutely not, but it's good in all the ways that matter to people.
The 80s had tons of scifi based on nuclear annihilation, pent up fears about nuclear annihilation based on the cold war. I dont know if that 'lead' us to a better future but we got an at least slightly better future. So the impact of pessimistic scifi is somewhere between nil and good.
I always go read a novel or two of Iain M Banks' Culture series whenever I want a Utopian future. It hits everything I want fairly perfectly.
Honestly there are way too many dystopian "omg this tech will do this" media as opposed to "this tech will do this good thing."
So, it starts by showing Black Mirror is playing on people's fears in cheap ways that could have negative, long-term effects. Then, it switches to throw out lots of political, talking points with loose connection to the original story. I wish they stuck with that line of questioning.
So, in the Psalms, many of them are lament. The structure addresses God, lists the complaints, and usually ends on a positive note citing His future promises. They might cite previous times God delivered them. So, the pattern is a unifying, objective truth followed by a mix of bad news and good news that offsets it. This helped the Israelites stay mentally strong as they faced circumstances like the Exile.
The author wondered if Black Mirror could explore the risks without pessimism porn. I think the pattern in the lament Psalms could be helpful. We know, though, that Hollywood often appeals to the dark, sinful part of our psyche. The producers know people often want to watch horrible things more than pleasant things. That's the real reason.
I'm not sure the pessimistic screes are so bad. We need criticism to keep us honest and make sure we think things through a bit.
I think the issue is that we seem to be getting less creative and less adventurous. We have fewer visions and stories of what could be.
Personal pessimism is the only form that is actualy possible to achive.Unfortunately anything dreamed up to do with society is no longer capable of bieng called pessismistic, as something worse is happening out there already.
Cyberpunk is now a well known aesthetic, Cyberprep[0] not so much, yet
[0] https://aesthetics.fandom.com/wiki/Cyberprep
It’s doomer fuel, just like how most AI doomer always reference Skynet to scare people. Most lack the practical imagination because it is often complex, so they let Hollywood do most of the work for them.
I thought the AI doomer was more paper clipping than Skynet. Even before terminator, you had Dune's Butlerian Jihad with Frank Herbert's warning about letting technology do the thinking for humanity, which led to humans being enslaved.
Toxic positivity. Some of us just enjoy dark fiction. Let us be.
Yeah this series is consistently excellent. If you want positivity you want "cutesy robots" and anime stuff. Everbody wants lovable robots that work for us instead of the corp. (Twist your own brain to imagine that capitalism wouldn't ruin it guaranteed)
Charlie Brooker has said that the new season of Black Mirror is different. In a recent interview (amusingly, also in The Guardian) he said, "If you want dystopia, look out your window."
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2025/apr/04/if-you-...
If you're new to the realization that every technology has both good and bad effects, where have you been in the last 40 years?
Don't forget nuclear power in the Simpsons and many shlocky horror movies before that. America could have had thousands of nuclear power plants by the 2000s. Though oil politics and deep pockets directly funding anti nuclear advocacy groups plays more of a role here than fiction.
The direct cost is at least 100,000 lives in America alone, all the technological advancement that comes with cheap electricity, and who knows what affects it would have had on the climate.
You know someone could make white mirror (or a title of a techno utopia) but those people are too busy making memes using AI.
We did sort of have that, it was called Star Trek: The Next Generation.
And the Culture.
And if you look beyond Western sci-fi, there was plenty of that stuff in the USSR. Most of it not particularly good, but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noon_Universe and Ivan Yefremov's books (most notably https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andromeda:_A_Space-Age_Tale) stand out.
I like that term "pessimism porn", although I might qualify it further as "techno-pessimism porn"
It is weird to read this. It is especially weird read this on HN and see arguments for and against "Black Mirror" as a piece of art as opposed to direct, stark warning of 'what if the wrong path is taken'. In that sense, it is really simple and, frankly, not nearly scary enough given how the author of the article attempts to dismiss it. That said, at least the author of the article is consistent with a consistent tally of war on doomers of all stripes.
I am mildly amused. We all see the ways technology goes wrong and every day. It is right and proper to at least try to see into the future by exploring all the ways it can go wrong if only because we do.. or at least should know.. that Murphy was an optimist.
It helps extrapolate the already present dystopian things the tech industry is doing.
Black Mirror of all work should not be called "pessimism porn". It's not unrealistic for the depicted scenarios to happen in real life.
You can kill a messenger for delivering a false message, but not a true one, even when it's bad.
Tell that to the people funding kill bot technology.
The show is named Black Mirror after all. It is meant to be dark.
Stories about a utopia where everyone is happy tend to be boring.
Even "My Neighbour Totoro" has something "go wrong" for drama and interest.
Maybe we need more "My Neighbour Totoro"-like stories set in a Solar Punk world.
The problem is the constant fear-mongering instead of simply presenting the facts. Honestly, the emotional overdrive in our culture is exhausting. It's like everyone's hooked on a steady drip of doom, and for some reason, they crave it.
That said, I won't lie-watching a corrupt politician fuck a pig on a livestream was a hilarious idea.
wot if ya mum ran on batteries
""" A new progressivism embracing construction over obstruction must find new allegories for technology and the future """
WTF? Somebody needs to touch some !@#@%^ grass. Like roll around in it for hours, maybe smoke some (legal) weed before hand.
It's sci-fi entertainment, for crying out Louis, not a political or philosophy movement.
Get over it, get outside, and go hug a tree.
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"How dare you try to make things better by making big changes, make small incremental changes that get pulled back in four or eight years instead and be happy about it"
> Black Mirror fails to consistently explore the duality of technology and our reactions to it
Reality fails to present a reason to expect there to substantially be a “duality”.