"Look in the Mirror. Do you recognise yourself?"
For posterity
For posterity"It can't be easy for Black Mirror to constantly come up with with nightmare technological scenarios, especially when reality seems to be constantly on the lookout for ways to turn Charlie Brooker's smartphone-based fever dreams into actual, livable truth."
You know how this show is about a Nightmare Fuel-inducing Techno Dystopia? Just making sure.
- The National Anthem: In which the British Prime Minister is blackmailed into fucking a pig. Introducing Piggate, the scandal caused by the British Prime Minister allegedly fucking a pig. This one, however, was dead before penetration, and it was (reportedly) stuck in the pig's mouth. Makes it better, huh.
- Fifteen Million Merits:
- British people were not happy when it was revealed that some public bathrooms, and all bathrooms on national express trains, would play unskippable adverts on repeat whenever the doors were locked. What's worse: uncontrollable privacy, or uncontrollable advertisements?
- That news article includes reference to Orwell and the line "If a novelist tried to create the worst dystopia they could think of as a harrowing but necessary warning to us all, this plot point would easily be dismissed as too ridiculous." to give more reason for facepalming.
- Sony might have attempted this on the PS4, as shown by this patent.
- The development of actual exercise bikes that power gaming apps on your TV. Just sounds like the gym? It's educational and informational games for children. Bonus points: it's all recorded and able to be controlled by their parents.
- A Japanese company wants to make eerily similar "living pods": bed, TV, communal living space. Thankfully, the intended city (Barcelona) has given it a strong pass.
- British people were not happy when it was revealed that some public bathrooms, and all bathrooms on national express trains, would play unskippable adverts on repeat whenever the doors were locked
- The Entire History of You: The introduction of, first the Google Glass, and then Facebook's Timeline feature, are coming scarily close to enabling 24/7 recordings of not just our lives, but how we perceived them.
- Be Right Back: Artificial Intelligence recreating a dead loved one through messages? Say hello to Luka, an A.I. startup created specifically for doing this. Extra points for being directly inspired by this episode.
- The Waldo Moment:
- Noted as having been made much Harsher in Hindsight by the rise of openly trollish, media-driven, populist politicians who say outrageous things to get famous and win elections. Charlie Brooker himself stated that this episode foreshadowed the appeal of people like Donald Trump to voters.
"At the time I thought that was one I didn’t nail, I didn’t get the stakes right," Brooker admitted. "I thought it should have been a separate thing, like it should have been a two-part miniseries. And then you look at it now and go, 'fuck me, that’s Trump.'"- In interviews, Charlie Brooker admitted that the character of Waldo was loosely based on Boris Johnson, who at the time was known for acting like a clownish buffoon on television and was also involved with Brexit. Lo and behold, Johnson himself would become the UK's Prime Minister in 2019, serving until 2022.
- Noted as having been made much Harsher in Hindsight by the rise of openly trollish, media-driven, populist politicians who say outrageous things to get famous and win elections. Charlie Brooker himself stated
- Nosedive is apparently the closest to becoming real life, as it got long enough to get its own page.
- Hated in the Nation:
- Writing hate on Twitter Can. Be. Dangerous!
- This story about a school student setting up a twitter account for people to send anonymous hate to, then broadcasting all the people who had done it, shows that even children are capable of doing this.
- Arkangel: While rudimentary parental controls have been around for years, they've gotten increasingly smarter in the last decade; the Mobicip app, for instance, allows parents to block not only sites promoting gambling or alcohol but also dating and chat sites, and blocking adult or violent content. Other apps allow parents to track their child wherever they go, spy on who they talk to, and shut their phone off whenever they choose.
- Crocodile: Pizza Hut's new autonomous delivery trucks.
- Hang the DJ: Netflix actually made a version of the app from the System, just for fun, for Valentine's Day 2018. Apparently it will gather some kind of data to give its best accurate answer, though. Find it at coach.dating
- Metalhead: About a month after this episode aired, Boston Dynamics released a video showing one of its "SpotMini" robots opening a door on its own. Certainly not intentional by Boston Dynamics...
- Black Museum:
- A 2018 Superbowl commercial for Cox's new g1gablast internet service featured an animatronic talking monkey stuffed toy, with the voice actually being a little girl's grandma. It was creepy, but apparently a real thing now.
- "A brain-computer interface was used to read the thoughts of patients to answer basic yes-or-no questions." It is simply just Germany in real life inventing the technology that becomes outlawed in this episode. Charlie Brooker tweeted about it before the episode, too, likening it to San Junipero in the thread.
- Multiple: The Sims, those videogames where it is perfectly acceptable for us real people to torture and abuse fake characters For the Lulz. Encouraged, even. The implications of human behavior is bad, but what if the sims have feelings and we don't know.
- Joan Is Awful: A Bland-Name Product version of Netflix depicts an original drama of a woman's life using a CGI recreation of Salma Hayek, with the real Hayek becoming disgusted with how the service uses her likeness, only to discover that she legally can't retaliate against any usage of her likeness. A few months after this episode's release, the SAG-AFTRA strike started, with one of the reasons for the strike being that the AMPTP had proposed an agreement paying background actors for only a single day's worth of work to scan their likeness and perpetually own their CGI models to be used for whatever they wanted, without any consent or compensation for the actor involved. Needless to say, 'many viewers began drawing similarities to what's depicted in this episode.
