Black Mirror is more than science fiction – its stories about modernity have become akin to science folklore, shaping our collective view of technology and the future.
Each new innovation gets an allegory: smartphones as tools for a new age caste system, robot dogs as overzealous human hunters, drones as a murderous swarm, artificial intelligence as new age necromancy, virtual reality and brain chips as seizure-inducing nightmares, to name a few. Episodes most often channel our collective anxieties about the future – or foment new ones through masterly writing, directing, casting and acting. It is a must-watch, but must we take it so seriously?
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.
Black Mirror is more pessimism porn than Plato’s parable, imparting to its audience a tacit lesson: fear the future more than the past. Fear too much technological change, not too little. It is an inherently populist narrative – one that appeals to nostalgia: intellectually we understand the present is better than the past in large part due to scientific and technological change, yet emotionally and instinctually we can’t help but feel this time in history is different, that the future can only get worse.
The heavy consequences of technological fearmongering
This kind of reductive dystopianism – a hallmark of post-1960s science fiction – clouds our thinking about the future because it “cannot imagine a better future, and it doesn’t ask anyone to bother to make one”, as New Yorker writer Jill Lepore noted in 2017.
We run from the speculative risks of the future, towards the proven dangers of the past, a dynamic I call the Frankenstein fallacy. This pessimistic archetype has bipartisan allure because “it requires so little by way of literary, political, or moral imagination”, according to Lepore; consequently, it is politically useful but unconstructive – as populism tends to be.
Technological pessimism will insure against a more dystopian tomorrow. Fear of genetically modified organisms – which kicked off around the release of Jurassic Park – has seen countries run from GMO food aid toward famine, from vitamin-enriched GMO “golden rice” towards malnutrition leading to millions of avoidable deaths. Countries such as the United States and Germany ran from a future of nuclear energy, towards coal and oil. In the Philippines, a nuclear plant built in the 1970s sits unused – never turned on – while its population deals with sky-high energy prices. All three countries are now trying to reverse course, realizing that the certainty of stasis and stagnation is its own form of dystopia. 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.
Countries such as India, Brazil, Mexico and Thailand have run from vapes – outlawing them, while permitting traditional tobacco cigarettes for 1.8 billion of their citizens. Better unsafe than sorry.
In the US, Robert F Kennedy Jr runs from vaccines towards natural herd immunity – although he might be having second thoughts now that the risks have become less abstract. Bipartisan efforts have sought to remove online anonymity to protect children, forgetting that as adults they’ll lose the protection that anonymity brings in the context of free speech. Attacks on environmentally friendly lab-grown beef from Republicans have drawn support by Democrats such as John Fetterman.
In the UK, encryption is under siege, a modern-day promethean protection that angers the powerful, in the name of keeping society from runaway technology. Meanwhile, Adolescence is the latest dystopian Netflix show to shape public policy conversations about technology and the future.
Artificial intelligence has been touted as an existential threat to humanity while it accelerates cancer treatments, reduces sepsis deaths and produces new antibiotics to treat stubborn superbugs.
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The folly of treating the miracles of science and technology as inevitable curses became unavoidable in the global coronavirus pandemic. The risk of inaction and stasis was too real to ignore, the absence of technology became the threat. Tellingly, it was in this period – between 2020 and 2022 – that Black Mirror went on hiatus. Charlie Brooker said this was because people didn’t want to consume dystopian fiction when everything felt so bleak. 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.
Suddenly it became deeply uncool and unintellectual to fear technology – as 5G masts burned and Black Mirror-esque conspiracy theories of computer chips being injected through vaccines spread, dystopian fiction lost its allure, though its vestiges still lurked: Chipotle offered free burritos to the vaccinated, burritos it proudly markets as GMO-free. King Charles, who once warned that genetically modified organisms would cause the biggest environmental disaster of all time, would congratulate Oxford researchers for their GMO-based Covid vaccine. Publications like Scientific American would deplore pandemic conspiracy theories, when less than a year earlier it would amplify unfounded alarmism about 5G.
New parables
A new progressivism – one that embraces construction over obstruction, of pragmatism over precaution – must find new allegories to think about technology and the future. Stories that challenge a mindset the British prime minister, Keir Starmer, criticized for leading us to miss massive opportunities “because of the fears of small risk”.
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. Stories that don’t make us forget that brain chips can liberate paraplegics, robot dogs can protect us from landmines, AI can prevent super bugs and VR can connect us rather than cut us off from reality – even if their vibes are “a bit Black Mirror”.
