Hacker News Reader

Comment by ViktorRay | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone remember the Hacker News thread last week about Black Mirror?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43648890

Many in the comments were criticizing Black Mirror for being unrealistic. Especially in Black Mirror’s assumption that negative technologies would be introduced into society and ruin people without folks realizing.

Well…Snapchat is basically a Black Mirror story. It was introduced and became widespread without much debate. The negative effects are happening. We know of them. Nothing happens. So the Black Mirror criticizers were wrong.

“You best start believing in Black Mirror stories Mrs Turner. You’re in one!”

And so are the rest of us. Look around you and tell me the world isn’t a Black Mirror episode.

View on HN

I take the opposite viewpoint as the criticisers -- they're too real, too foreseeable, that I would almost ask the Black Mirror writers not to give "them" any more ideas.

It's the same problem as Charles Stross wrote about in "Don't Create the Torment Nexus":

https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2023/11/dont-cr...

Discussed on HN in 2023, with 392 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38218580

The question is whether you want Black Mirror producers or SciFi authors to continue generating art and entertainment. Those have value to people with literary comprehension, but they might also be misinterpreted by people who believe them to be a roadmap. My fear is that by shifting the medium from novel to TV show, you're removing the slight filter that keeps out those with insufficient literacy to sit down with an interesting 400-page paperback and opening it to those who can press "Play".

How is Snapchat a black mirror episode? Do you think even 10% of Snapchat users are harmed in the ways discussed in this article?

This is like saying we are living in Dune because we have some people in space.

So just because some people are harmed in society suddenly black mirror is not too on-the-nose or unrealistically pessimistic?

Yes. A large fraction of Snapchat's users are significantly harmed.

First hand, I see it all the time in students. There's an extreme unhealthy obsession with social media that leads to serious inferiority complexes and depression. All of this wrapped in algorithms that compel people to participate in various ways, from streaks to points, etc.

Quantitatively, everything from anxiety to depression to suicide has more than doubled in teens.

Oh heck, forget about teens. I see it in plenty of adult groups, like mothers. There's a major pressure from others to keep up, serious self-doubt for normal setbacks, unrealistic expectations around even mundane things.

Social media is black mirror, and we're doing it to ourselves.

> Social media is black mirror, and we're doing it to ourselves.

You mean black mirror is a pessimistic exaggeration on the state of society and technology. It’s not the other way around. What you’re observing is not profound, it’s literally how the writers approach their process for the show.

In fact, you’re doing this weird thing where you make it seem like black mirror was prophetic and it came before all the observations about tech and society, when it was clearly the other way around.

The criticism from the thread you’re referencing is that their approach is too on the nose and the villains are cartoonish. There’s no subtlety or even anything interesting anymore in the latest seasons. A critique on software subscriptions? We’ve been doing that since it was invented.

Those are fair criticisms.

What’s missing from black mirror, this article, and your perspective is how much social media has benefited everybody. How many jobs has it created? How many brand new careers and small businesses exist only because of social media? It’s an entire economy at this point. The good and bad effects of democratization of information dissemination.

There’s hardly an interesting analysis or critique of the actual current state of tech & society because you’re out here looking for the bad and ignoring the good. Much like black mirror is doing. Its main goal is to be as shocking as possible. That’s why in the thronglets episode, which I did enjoy, there was so much pointless gore. Yes, the point was that the throng had to see what humans are capable of, but there’s no reason to show all the gore associated with drilling through your head or dismembering a dead body. All of that is bottom of the barrel shock value stuff, which is ultimately what black mirror has devolved into.

Yeah, it would be fair more valuable to have the villains everyday folks like you and me just trying to make a buck, too busy or selfish to see the implications of of the software they make.

Your defense of social media seems to be that the jobs it has created outweigh the horrible things it has done to many of the young people in society.

Some of us apparently apply very different weighting to the two sides and come to a different conclusion on the efficacy of social media.

I’m not defending social media. I’m talking about how there’s no nuance in ops perspective, black mirror, or the article. It only highlights the negatives and that’s all there is. Basically nobody is looking at the positives. If you’re going to do a societal harm analysis you should probably consider the benefits too before coming to a conclusion.

But to your point about young people in society, this feels like a classic “but oh, isn’t anybody thinking about the children” moment. https://en.m.wikiquote.org/wiki/Think_of_the_children

It’s a logical fallacy. If we are simply thinking about whether any of society is harmed we might as well just do nothing at all and cease to exist. Nobody in this thread is willing to engage and sincerely discuss the benefits vs the harms.

You're welcome to present the benefits. I can only speak for myself though: they don't amount to a thing worth otherwise poisoning society for.

Other than people that already agree with you, I'm not sure who you are appealing to by suggesting others are caught up in "think of the children".

I bring children up because studies seem to focus on the negatives of social media on children in particular. Also I raised three children and watched social media play out in their lives.

What are you responding to?

Children committing suicide at twice the rate is bad. Childhood depression at twice the rate is bad. Declining scores on every metric of well-being and attainment is bad.

I'm ignoring the good?!

No. When kids that I know self harm at alarming rates because of social media, I'm not ignoring the good.

You're prioritizing some abstract nonsense over the actual people who are suffering.

That doesn't really track.

Most technologies in Black Mirror are fully implemented as-is, usually with clear and prescient knowledge of the downsides known and suppressed by the owner of the technology.

Snapchat is not that. It started out as an innocent messaging app and slowly mutated into the monster it is after it was already widely adopted.

The criticism of Black Mirror is that it's presented as immediate widespread adoption of the new Torment Nexus 5000, which was always intended to be a force of evil and suffering. Everyone knows exactly what the torment nexus is and willingly accepts it. Snapchat only became a torment nexus after it was established and adopted, and was done this way maliciously.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com