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Black Mirror and design fiction

Tomorrow, Netflix will release the first new episodes of Black Mirror, the popular BBC show created by satirist and broadcaster Cory Brooker that debuted in England in 2011. The show made its way to the United States a few years later to wide acclaim, leading the streaming service to purchase the rights and produce a new season. Presented anthology style where every episode is a different story with different actors, the show presents various near-future scenarios about the dark side of technology. There’s an episode where everyone has video chips inserted behind their ears that record all memories and another that uses someone’s social media presences to create an artificial intelligence to revive them after they’ve died. It can be disturbing and hard to watch while also fascinating and engrossing. It is not quite science fiction. There are no aliens or flying cars or time travel. It portrays a world we’re wholly familiar with — YouTube, Facebook, and Downton Abbey show up in episodes — but its been twisted just a bit to give us a glimpse of a possible future. (Or, maybe, a possible present.)

The design critic Rob Walker argues that the show is not about fear of future technologies. It’s not about a world (a future? an alternate reality?) where technology goes wrong and gains too much power, but rather about how people who interact with this technology misuse it. “[Brooker] has called it a show about ‘weak people using powerful tools’,” Walker writes, “I’m pretty sure that by ‘weak people’ he means most of humanity. That narrative approach is precisely what makes the best episodes so unnerving.” When you view the show through this lens, it’s less about dystopian futures and the abuses of technology and more about our world — here, now — and how we interact with it. Black Mirror is a story about design.

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