this post was submitted on 10 Apr 2025
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69
Black Mirror’s pessimism porn won’t lead us to a better future | Louis Anslow (www.theguardian.com)
submitted 3 days ago by Womble@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world
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A new progressivism, one that embraces construction over obstruction, must find new allegories to think about technology and the future

Black Mirror fails to consistently explore the duality of technology and our reactions to it. It is a critical deficit. The show mimics the folly of Icarus and Daedalus – the original tech bros – and the hubris of Jurassic Park’s Dr Hammond. Missing are the lessons of the Prometheus myth, which shows fire as a boon for humanity, not doom, though its democratization angered benevolent gods. 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. While Black Mirror explores how humans react to technology, it too often does so in service of a dystopian narrative, ignoring Isaac Asimov’s observation: that humans are prone to irrationally fear or resist technology.

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[–] TheFriar@lemm.ee 10 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

That’s a relatively new phenomenon. All tech media was positive and the stuff of dreams until around the 2010s. Because we were seeing a steady and noticeable shift in the power dynamics. We were being pulled deeper under a capitalist nightmare instead of flying in a techno futuristic dreamscape. We couldn’t see anything but the piling negative aspects of our technology: it’s killing us, it’s enslaving us, its being used to spy on us, we’re being told it’s a wonder but we keep finding out it’s a horror. This isn’t on us for not being enlightened enough to see asimov’s words. We’re too aware of the active manipulation and torture. They made us the product, and they made the things we bought spy machines and tools of manipulation and deception.

We need to create better, freer tech, free from the oligarchs currently wringing us all dry while they build their multimillion dollar doomsday bunkers with the money they’re stealing from us if we are going to build the better world in which the better half of humanity succeeds. Art imitates life. And currently they’re outsourcing art to the oligarchs machines that are 10000x worse for the planet and the power dynamics.

[–] FaceDeer@fedia.io 6 points 2 days ago

There's been plenty of negative portrayals of new technology throughout the history of sci-fi. Heck, the very first one is usually considered to be "Frankenstein", and it's all about how new technology can backfire spectacularly.

I think the problem is not the existence of negative portrayals, but the absence of positive ones. There aren't a lot of shows for folks who want to see a positive view of the future, where technology solves problems rather than always being the source of them. That used to be the domain of things like Star Trek but modern Star Trek is a pale shadow that no longer paints a particularly rosy view of humanity's future. The Orville took up that mantle, I suppose, but it's stretched pretty thin.