When a newer television anthology gets compared to an institution as groundbreaking as The Twilight Zone, it’s natural to assume that the hype machine is overstating the case. But Black Mirror, which debuted in 2011 in the U.K. and on Netflix in 2014 in the U.S., is one of the rare instances in which the publicity matches up with the reality. With The Twilight Zone, Rod Serling and a stable of top science fiction writers deftly wove the pertinent fears and moral conflicts of the 1950s into timeless works of speculative fiction – giving viewers a weekly dose of fictional futures that oftentimes double as clear commentary on the present. In today’s world of rapid technological change, Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror manages to fill the same role.
What Cold War paranoia and nuclear annihilation were to The Twilight Zone, mass communication and the fast pace of technological change are to Black Mirror. Not to mention there’s a generous helping of farther-future fables – perennial cyberpunk speculation on what it means to be human in virtual worlds, updated with an iPhone aesthetic. It’s television that entertains as much as it tells us something about ourselves, and with each passing year it seems as though there are handful of real-life events that fans can’t help but point to as Black Mirror moments – where the world seems to be referencing Black Mirror rather than the opposite.
In the wake of Black Mirror’s interactive film Black Mirror: Bandersnatch, let’s examine three recent tech stories that came eerily close to events on the show.
“Nosedive” and China’s Social Credit Score
While some Black Mirror episodes are uncompromisingly dark, season three’s first episode “Nosedive” gave use a view of a kinder, gentler dystopia. The main character, Lacie, lives in a world in which every interaction between people gets its own star rating. In this pastel panopticon, dropping beneath a certain rating negatively impacts where you can live, work and travel. A few chance encounters as she sets out on a rating-boosting trip to a childhood friend’s wedding send her down a spiral to the bottom of the social milieu.
Plenty of fans saw an eerie overlap between this world of ever-smiling, star-rating hungry Stepford folk and today’s real world, where cutting a poor figure on social media can doom businesses and even ruin relationships. But the 2018 media focus on China’s social credit system showed us that “Nosedive” may – by the year 2020 – be even more of a reality in some parts of the world. Indeed, reports indicate that based on some elements of social credit now being consolidated by the Chinese government, citizens have already been deprived rights such as traveling, renting hotels and using credit cards.
China’s plan has been decried as chilling, arbitrary and downright creepy, and has also raised eyebrows among critics who have wondered if Western governments aren’t at risk of meandering into the same territory – and if there needs to be something done to stop it from heading in that direction. If we imagine a world in which having a dissident opinion – or a bad day – can impact, for instance, our right to go grocery shopping, we find “Nosedive” to be a rare occasion in which Black Mirror is lighter than the world it reflects.
“Metalhead” and 2018’s Laws about LAWs
One of the most stylistically distinct Black Mirror episodes, “Metalhead” is a piece of science fiction shot like an old-school horror movie. A woman in a post-apocalyptic future is on the run from a killer AI. But the robot-run future of “Metalhead” isn’t the full-on, chaotic, bombs-away nightmare that Terminator fans associate with a self-aware Skynet. Rather it’s one where simple, dog-like androids chase down their prey in dogged pursuit – with every movement they make aimed at the singular goal of tracking and killing. The sparse look and feel of the episode seem to drive the point home – a robot that just won’t stop coming is classically horrific; as scary as a real-life Michael Meyers or Jason Voorhees.
