Black Mirror season 6 spoilers follow.
If there is one constant theme running across all six seasons of Black Mirror, now on Netflix, it's not, as many seem to think, about how we must be worried about tech going rogue. Rather, it's the humans who are the problem.
It's always easy to blame the machines: a clawing device that will somehow eat us up, or how artificial intelligence will swallow all our jobs, robots will take over the world once they become sentient, and the bad, bad world of Big Data.
When Black Mirror first started airing on Channel 4 in 2011, it never claimed to be the authority in wild, tech-related nightmares. Showrunner Charlie Brooker, in endless interviews, made it clear that his anthology series is about reality not a hundred years into the future, but minutes away from now.
The title of the show itself, Brooker has explained, refers to the black mirror of our phone screens, when they are switched off, reflecting you. This is an important distinction often lost on the show's critics. With the recently released sixth season, even more so.
The criticism of the new season has been overwhelmingly simple — where is the tech? Except for the first episode 'Joan Is Awful', which takes us inside a world of streaming platforms that can make shows about our lives with the help of a quantum computer, most of the episodes don't really focus on a weird gizmo.
In an interview with GamesRadar, Brooker explained that he consciously wanted to shift away from overtly emphasising tech this season. "The show isn't saying tech is bad, the show is saying people are f**ked up," he said.
The stories of season six indeed take us into a world where humans will go to any ends to justify their idea of the world, embroiled in pettiness and a myopic understanding of our past and present.
The show even upends the idea of Black Mirror always being set in the future by setting at least two episodes in the past — 'Demon 79' (set in the 1970s, centring on a shoe-shop assistant who has to deal with a demon from a talisman) and 'Beyond the Sea' (where two astronauts from an alternative past confront problems of identity).
However, even in the most "tech" episode of them all, 'Joan Is Awful', the rationale is pretty much rooted in the biases that all of us hold to our chests. When the characters are trying to make sense of why shows with negative titles are being produced by the quantum computer, the explanation is simple: all of us feed off negative news, and we see ourselves reflected in the messiness of on-screen characters.
If a character is too happy, too chirpy or too optimistic, it gives us a headache. Hence one of the most unsettling episodes, 'Loch Henry', in which a perverted serial killer has a sex dungeon in a sleepy Scottish village. The only "tech" in it is a VHS camcorder, used by two film students to capture the raw, analogue-y graininess of the late 1990s when the serial killer was out and about.
Perhaps those of us who still can't get behind Black Mirror abandoning its tech premise would do well to take a leaf from writer Margaret Atwood's synopsis of how a dystopian future and the present align. When her novel The Handmaid's Tale started flying off the shelves again after Donald Trump was elected president, for the way it imagined the objectification and imprisonment of women's bodies, she said that "fiction has to be something that people would actually believe".
Stray comments about how something is 'like a Black Mirror episode' can always be found across social media, whether it be in response to a massive tech company's data leak or a spray-on dress on a fashion runway.
Even when the show is satirising pop culture, our obsession with celebrities, or the vulture-like media commentary on the most sensitive news topics, Black Mirror is only amplifying the here and now. As George Orwell famously put it in the novel 1984: "If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever."
A boot, then. Not a gizmo or a flying car.
Black Mirror is available on Netflix.
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