NAB
After years of exploring society’s dark
absurdities, the sixth season of Netflix’s dystopian anthology series “Black
Mirror” gazes at its own reflection.
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Like all good sci-fi, Black Mirror reflected
our present into the future, but in the four years since the last run of
episodes on Netflix the world seems to have become so dystopian that you
couldn’t make it up.
The pandemic forcing everyone
indoors, the riots on Capitol Hill fed on social media conspiracy, the rise and
rise of generative AI, entrepreneurs commercializing space, and, of course, the
metaverse.
The Emmy-winning anthology series is
back and writer-creator-showrunner Charlie Brooker has been talking about how
he took the opportunity to mix things up.
“It feels like the dystopia is lapping onto our
shores at the present moment,” he told GQ’s Brit Dawson of
the five-episode instalment.
“I definitely approached this season thinking,
‘Whatever my assumptions are about Black Mirror, I’m going to throw
them out and do something different,’” Brooker said.
This included more comedy, particularly in the
episodes “Joan Is Awful” and “Demon 79,” a horror story subtitled “Red Mirror”
that draws on staples like Hammer and the work of Dario
Argento.
“I sort of circled back to some classically Black
Mirror stories as well,” Brooker said. “So it’s not like it’s a bed of
roses this season. They’re certainly some of the bleakest stories we’ve ever
done.”
He’s also perhaps not as wary of the future or of
technology as his Black Mirror persona might suggest. He
recalls how frightening it was in the 1980s during the height of the nuclear
cold war.
“That didn’t quite happen! The other
thing I would say, I do have faith in the fact that the younger generation seem
to have their heads screwed on and seem to be pissed off. So that’s going to be
a tsunami of people, it’s just that they’re not at the levers of power yet,” he
says.
“We have eradicated lots of diseases
and generally lots of things are going well that we lose sight of but it’s just
a bit terrifying if you think democracy is going to collapse. That and the
climate breaking down.”
In another pre-season interview with Amit Katwala at Wired,
Booker continues, “I am generally pro-technology. Probably we’re going to have
to rely on it if we’re going to survive, so I wouldn’t say [Black Mirror episodes]
necessarily warns, so much as worries, if you know what I mean. They’re maybe
worst-case scenarios.”
Three of the five episodes are set in
the past, with seemingly no connection to the evils of the internet from past
seasons.
“I think there was a danger that Black Mirror was becoming the show about consciousness being uploaded into a little disc,” Brooker explains to Emma Stefansky at Esquire. “Who says I have to set this in a near-future setting, and make it all chrome and glass and holograms and, you know, a bit Minority Report?” he asks. “What happens if I just set it in the past? That opens up all sorts of other things.”
However, one episode does openly “worry” about a near-future in which AI takes control of our lives in ways we hadn’t imagined. “Joan Is Awful” is about a streaming service called Streamberry — cheekily mirroring Netflix and clearly with the streamer’s consent — that makes a photoreal, AI-generated show out of a woman’s life.
It was specifically inspired by The Dropout,
the ABC mini-series about Theranos founder and convicted fraudster Elizabeth
Holmes, along with the possibility of all of us having the ability to generate
personalized media using AI. Except in Black Mirror’s take this is
another example of Big Tech using our private data for the entertainment of
others.
People prefer viewing content “in a
state of mesmerized horror,” the CEO of Streamberry says in the episode.
“Obviously the first thing I did was ask it to come
up with a Black Mirror episode to see what it would do,”
Brooker told GQ. “What it came out with was simultaneously too generic and dull
for any serious consideration. There’s a generic quality to the art that it
pumps out.
“That was the first wave [of generative AI], when
people were going, ‘Hey, look at this, I can type “Denis Nilsen the serial
killer in the Bake Off tent” into Midjourney’ and it’ll spit
out some eerily, quasi-realistic images of that, or ‘Here’s Mr. Blobby on a
water slide,’ or ‘Paul McCartney eating an olive.’
“It’ll be undeniably perfect in five
years, but at what point it’ll replace the human experience? It does feel now
like we’re at the foothills of new, disruptive technology kicking in again.”
The episode “Loch Henry” is set in
the present day, following a pair of documentary filmmakers who plan to give a
shocking hometown murder the lurid true crime treatment. “Loch Henry” relies on
VHS tapes to build its narrative, instead of a smartphone app or webcam.
“It’s a weird one, because it is
about the archive of the past that people are digging into,” Brooker tells
Stefansky. “But it is also about the way all that stuff is now hoovered up and
presented to you on prestige TV platforms — that we’re mining all these
horrible things that happened and turning it into a sumptuous form of
entertainment.”
He continues, “There’s nothing more frustrating
than when you’re watching a true crime documentary, and it starts to dawn on
you somewhere around Episode 3: They’re not going to tell me who did
this. Not what I want. I want to see an interview with the killer. Go and
generate one on ChatGPT.”
At Wired, Katwala speculates that maybe the next step is personalized content about personalized content. Society and social media has been moving in this direction for years, he says.
“One of the supposed benefits of
generative AI is that it will enable personalized content, tailored to our
individual tastes: your own algorithmically designed hell, so horribly
well-targeted that you can’t tear your eyes away.”
But, he wonders, what happens
to cultural commentary when everyone is consuming different stuff?
The irony is that while hyper-personalized content
might be great for engagement on streaming platforms, it would be absolutely
terrible for landmark shows like Black Mirror and Succession,
which support a whole ecosystem including websites like Wired and NAB
Amplify.
“We siphon off a portion of the search interest in
these topics, capitalizing on people who have just watched something and want
to know what to think about it. This helps explain the media feeding frenzy
around the Succession finale and why I’m writing this story
about Black Mirror even though we ran an interview with the
creator yesterday,” Katwala argues.
“In a way, you could see that as the
media’s slightly clumsy attempt to replicate the success of the algorithm.”
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