The gap between reality and Black Mirror is closing

In “Common People”, one of the new Black Mirror episodes, Rashida Jones plays a schoolteacher (Amanda) who falls into a coma after a medical emergency. Her husband Mike (Chris O’Dowd) is told that, while there’s not much conventional medicine can do, an experimental new procedure offered by a start-up called “Rivermind” might be able to save her. A company representative (Tracee Ellis Ross) reassures the desperate husband that they will simply make a computer “backup” of the damaged part of his wife’s brain and replace it with “synthetic receiver tissue” onto which her missing cognitive function can be transmitted from their “cloud-based server”. In practice this means that her newly upgraded brain can only work within the range of the company’s transmitters (“kind of like cell service”). But of course, as anyone familiar with the show will have already guessed, this Faustian bargain with for-profit healthcare comes with a whole host of dreadful consequences hidden in the small print.

For a while, the couple are able to resume an almost normal existence, although Mike has to pick up a few extra shifts at the construction site, and they both have to cut back on nonessential expenses to pay the monthly $300 subscription. But when the fee more than doubles, Mike has to resort to performing humiliating and painful acts crowdfunded by sadistic internet users. That the episode takes place in the United States is of course relevant. None of this is particularly far removed from the reality of the American patients who are forced to come out of retirement to pay for their cancer treatments, or who turn to GoFundMe to cover the cost of life-saving drugs. 

With her life in the hands of a greedy tech company, Amanda soon discovers that subscription services may be fine for things like Netflix, but not for vital cognitive functions. Unlike with streaming services, you can’t unsubscribe from your own brain. As is often the case with Black Mirror, the sci-fi element of the episode is not particularly far-fetched or futuristic. In fact, this particular bleak future has already been here for a while. In the early 2010s, tech start-up Second Sight launched its neural implant and hundreds of visually impaired patients were able to enjoy a kind of artificial vision through a mechanism that involved a chip, special glasses and sophisticated software. A decade later, the company was on the brink of bankruptcy, and its users lost their ability to see and were left with outdated technology implanted in their retinas. In the world of the show, if Rivermind were to go under, Amanda would simply be left brain dead. 

This being a Black Mirror episode, the layers of overlapping bleakness only get bleaker. At wildly inappropriate moments – including during a conversation with a young pupil experiencing family problems and during intercourse with her husband – Amanda unwittingly begins spouting advertisements (for “faith-based family counselling” and for lubricant, respectively). The Rivermind rep informs the couple that the ad-free version of her functioning brain subscription is now reserved to those on the more expensive “Rivermind plus” tier. Of course, it doesn’t stop there, and the company finds ever more inventive and cruel ways of forcing its customers into higher more expensive tiers, with unbearable drawbacks on the lower “common” tier (like the need to sleep 16 hours a day to allow the company to “harness your spare processing capabilities to help with the overall workload”). 

These are all textbook examples of a phenomenon the Canadian-British writer Cory Doctorow calls “enshittification.” Do you ever feel that online platforms and services are getting worse over time? Have you noticed the uptick of AI disinformation on Facebook? Or that Google searches seem to return more adverts than actual results? This is enshittification at work: “First, [online platforms] are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves.” Now imagine that, but for your brain. 

Again, this is not particularly far-fetched. Elon Musk’s company Neuralink has already implanted a chip in a human brain. If the billionaire’s other companies are anything to go by – off the top of my head, most of Tesla’s Cybertrucks were recently recalled due to the risk of large parts flying off of the car, and then there’s whatever he did to Twitter – we should probably be worried. 

Subtlety has never been one of Black Mirror’s strong suits, and this episode’s message hits us like a ton of pessimistic bricks: the logic of corporate greed is cruel and exploitative, and corporations will not hesitate to crush us if it means they can squeeze more profits out of us for their shareholders. Viewers of the new season opener are given no reason to feel hopeful. In fact, it’s almost as if Netflix, a service that is certainly not immune to enshittification, is telling us that there’s no point in trying to do anything about it. It could have been interesting to see Amanda and Mike try to fight back, find strength in community, and organise with other victims of Rivermind. Instead they are portrayed as completely isolated and doomed from the start. In an era when there is so much overlap between the dystopian vision presented in Black Mirror and our many instances of real-life dystopia, perhaps it is time for the show’s characters to join the resistance.