Black Mirror will grace our screens for a seventh time, and Cybernews has analyzed which episodes hit too close to home.
The dystopian TV drama Black Mirror is set to debut another season on April 10th, 2025.
We at Cybernews have broken down episodes that mirror reality and that are too close for comfort.
Warning: spoilers ahead.
Jack, Rachel, and Ashley Too
While this is arguably one of the worst episodes of Black Mirror, Jack, Rachel, and Ashley Too tells the story of a teenage outcast whose obsession with pop star Ashley O (Miley Cyrus) pushes her further into isolation after getting a robot powered by artificial intelligence.
The doll “mimics” Ashley O’s “real personality” but instead ends up being the real Ashley after the pop star slips into a coma.
While the plot is messy and the message is cliche, the idea of AI-powered agents becoming our companions isn’t far-fetched.
Chatbots like Replika are marketed as your “AI companion who is eager to learn and would love to see the world through your eyes.”
Like the Ashely Too bot, chatbots learn from the data we feed them. This information is then regurgitated in a toxically positive manner, similar to that of ChatGPT.
Nosedive
A woman on the quest for the perfect life must have the perfect rating. This is the tale of Nosedive, the third episode in the first season of the British dystopian anthology.
The episode focuses on one woman, Lacie Pound, who wants to raise her social rating from 4.2 to 4.5 in order to move into luxury housing.
This concept of social rating isn’t too dissimilar from the way social media functions. We use our devices to provide our followers and even random people with likes and comments on their posts.
The episode is extremely dystopian and reflects the same concerns surrounding social status and how social media has shaped these anxieties.
As the title suggests, Pound’s social status takes a nosedive and she embarrasses herself in front of the “social elite.”
This idea of a social credit system, where people’s behavior is tracked and they’re given a score based on this, isn’t new.
In China, there is a government led initiative that tracks citizen’s behavior using specific technology – they are then given a score, much like in Nosedive.
Hated in the Nation
The final episode of the third series of Black Mirror is a dark episode that really is too close for comfort.
Hated in the National starts with detectives who are investigating a slew of deaths related to those who are hated online – which is an overt reference to modern day cancel culture.
The victims are attacked by Autonomous Drone Insects or ADIs, a type of technology which, in a way, can be observed today.
Engineers at the University of California, Berkeley, have created the world’s smallest wireless flying robot.
The flying bot is less than one centimeter in diameter and weighs 21 milligrams, making it the world’s smallest wireless robot capable of flight.
Liwei Lin, a professor at UC Berkeley and senior author of the paper said that the inspiration for this type of device came from bees and their ability to navigate, hover, and pollinate.
While these devices aren’t being used for murder, they are being used to navigate small spaces, the study explained.
Metalhead
Metalhead is the fifth episode in the fourth season of Black Mirror and was inspired by already established technologies brought to us by Boston Dynamics.
The episode focuses on Bella (Maxine Peake) who is attempting to escape from robotic dogs. These robots are said to have been inspired by Boston Dynamics’ quadruped robots.
The idea that AI, humanoid robots, and other autonomous technologies could turn against humanity is a conversation we’ve been having since the release of ChatGPT in 2022 and even earlier.
Joan is Awful
One of the latest episodes of the franchise is Joan is Awful – it’s an extremely meta episode that features the characters in the episode becoming characters in the episode’s internal TV show.
The episode revolves around Joan Tait (Annie Murphy) who goes about her day firing people who reduce carbon emissions in the company she works for, alongside other menial tasks.
Later, Joan and her finance (Avi Nash) hop onto the fictional streaming platform “Streamberry” and find a new show titled “Joan is Awful.”
As they watch the show, they realize that it plays out the events of Joan’s day – a practice that Joan later realized she consented to when signing up for Streamberry.
The episode looks into the effects of deepfake technology, and how detrimental it can be to use someone’s likeness without their explicit consent.
Yet, the episode flips this convention on its head, as ordinary people are being played by celebrities (Salma Hayek).
So instead of ordinary people exploiting celebrities by appropriating their likeness’, big corporations are exploiting ordinary people to make money.
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