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Black Mirror’s pessimism porn won’t lead us to a better future | Louis Anslow
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 10 Apr 2025
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Black Mirrors shows the future, extrapolated from current systems and events. It's not about new paradigms that might be possible.
It doesn't "show the future", though. This is exactly what frustrates me so much about online discourse and shows like Black Mirror, some new technology comes along and people go "that's a terrible idea, haven't you seen Black Mirror?" As if Black Mirror was some kind of rigorous scientific study that shows the One True Way that the future will unfold.
It's an entertainment show. Its purpose is to draw in viewers and keep them watching. You don't do that with episodes that show a new technology coming out and everything turning out fine, you do it by presenting a scary, compelling narrative.
We don't get freaked out in real life by summer camps and restrict the availability of machetes and other bladed instruments near them because of what happened in that documentary series "Friday the 13th." It's fiction. Plot trumps realism.
Honestly I'm with black mirror. These days when a new tech appears, the mind immediately wonders how this will be abused it obstructed by other parties. That's not the show's fault but of what keeps happening in real life.
I don't think that way. Only when it comes from billionaires do I think that, but FOSS doesn't elicit the same feelings, nor does the advent of a new telescope or life-saving laparoscopic robot.
The problem isn't technology, it's the billionaires, and we collectively groan only because they've been allowed to abuse humanity for too long. Black Mirror is only correct insomuch as we allow that to keep happening, and we're far from powerless.
Popular media doesn't really investigate other ways of organizing society. It's always the standard job, shop and money with only rare exceptions. It just swaps dollars with credits, uses hovercars instead of normal cars and calls it a day. Hell, they were shoveling coal into a reactor in Rebel Moon to power their space ship. I don't expect that much from entertainment and can live with the black mirror doom porn. Maybe I give writing my own stuff another try, but I'm not a good writer.
Same here. There have been tons of technologies coming out recently where my main reaction is "awesome, I can't wait to use the heck out of that." If anything my biggest sigh comes from "but I bet the comment threads are going to be littered with tedious doomers moaning about how it's going to enable the awful stuff they're imagining instead."