Comment by Vaskivo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Vaskivo | Hacker News Reader

[OFF TOPIC]

Am I the only one who thinks Black Mirror is not that good?

I've seen around five episodes and the only one I genuinely thought to be good was the very first one.

1 - The technology is extremely vague. There is no way to really gauge it's impact besides what the writer explicitly shows.

2 - The episodes are extremely moralist. They usually take a stance of "Look How Bad This Is", usually using appeals to emotion. They don't show the other side, the good side of that concept.

3 - In my opinion, the story of most of them is uninteresting. The most egregious is the "eye camera" one. The whole episode drops you hints of how that technology affects society, but we are focused on a lovers quarrel.

4 - None of those show anything really new. If you removed the new concept, it would be _really_ easy to replace it with known stuff. In a world with a new disruptive technology they write people acting like they always did!

5 - This is mostly my elitism, but I hate most people's reaction to it. They see the episode, adore it, and just take it at face value. I watch it, think it's crap, and spend the next hour discussing it and thinking about it. Most people don't think beyond what is shown on the episode. I fear that that, coupled with (1) and (2), is making people fear technology [1].

(I have to add that the last minute of the "robot boyfriend" episode are so nuanced, subtle and insidious that I'm amazed the writers managed to slip that through. Especially how dumbed down the whole episode was)

/rant

[1] I think people should be careful with technology. I have a bit of "privacy paranoia". But that should come from reason.

Most people find that they like some Black Mirror episodes a lot more than others, it's inherent in the nature of this type of anthology SF format.

The people being people thing is _right_. A good antidote to the sort of beliefs we easily trick ourselves into here is to go read Samuel Pepys personal diary. Read about a year's worth, doesn't matter which bits, start in 1666 if you want to actually connect events to history (that's the year of the Great Fire of London). Pepys is over 350 years different in time from us. Yet he's not really different at all. He worries about money, he suffers illness, he moans about incompetent people, he lusts after pretty people who won't sleep with him (and to be fair, some who do). I say Pepys partly because he wrote this stuff down for his own records, whereas most earlier writers have an audience in mind and so we must assume they self-censor, and partly because he wrote just after English had settled down, his meaning is easy to follow without a modern translator between you adding their own interpretation.

> Am I the only one who thinks Black Mirror is not that good?

I see it as a collection of short movies and not like a series. With that mindset, I only watch a few of "episodes" each season.

Since I only watch the movies that interest me, I really like Black Mirror.

Seen that way, it makes sense. I wouldn't watch a lot of those episodes if they were feature lentgh movies, so I don't watch them as short movies.

Every episode that interested me at first glance did not disappoint.

Some episodes are much stronger than others. I think the eye camera episode was good, because it humanizes the dystopia: it moves past abstract moralizing and unrealistic "how things could be" like in e.g. Brave New World and gives you a real human story. It feels more real than reading stories about orgy-porgies, etc. And the technology for it is basically already here.

I think Altered Carbon is a better dystopian tech story though. The actual plot is not even really the point. The setting, backdrop and society that it envisions feels more plausible than any episode of Black Mirror.

The best sci fi dystopian stories imprint our current economic and social structures onto a new future with technology: the world of Altered Carbon asks what if we had our current economic system, which creates a class of impossibly powerful oligarchs who hoard all of the world's wealth and act with impunity while the poor suffer and die, but now these technologies allow their power to extend and expand indefinitely, past death?

The crux of every tech sci fi dystopian story is the question: What if we progress technologically but refuse to progress economically or socially? What if we encourage people to study STEM and sneer at the humanities forever? What if economics is always taught as an exercise in cheerleading for our current system?

Media like this makes us think about the changes that need to be made as technology more and more amplifies the (potentially bad) choices we make about the world we want to live in.

It's easy to get caught in the echo chamber of "technology good, disruption good, gadgets fun" especially living in the tech world so I think it's great stories like these make us take a step back.

My biggest overall knock is that I often found that there really wasn't a payoff for unrelenting grimness. Which I guess gets to your point #2. Although I'd say 1.) The series is called Black Mirror after all and 2.) There are exceptions like "San Junipero," which was probably my favorite episode. (think, in part, the unrelenting grimness may actually help set the stage for episodes that were a bit more hopeful.)

Overall, like a lot of anthology series, you could probably pick the best N (where, for me in this case, N is probably somewhere between 5 and 10) and easily skip the rest.

So, it's like a TV program equivalent of most TED Talks?

Well, your favorite episode is the one I don't really care about.

The other episodes are outstanding, because they show how technology affects human issues.

Now, may be there's something in the first episode you feel identified with, so either you are the prime minister or a hacker that can control all TVs.

But that doesn't apply to most people. Having relationships even failed ones, on the other hand is something we can all relate.

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