Latest news with #RiverMind
Yahoo
14-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
'Black Mirror' used to feel like a distant dystopian future. Now we're living in it.
In the first episode of 'Black Mirror's' recently debuted seventh season, Amanda and Mike, played by Rashida Jones and Chris O'Dowd, are an enviably in love couple with a simple, happy life. But when Amanda passes out while teaching her elementary-aged students a lesson on solar panels, we learn she has an inoperable brain tumor. Later, in a hospital waiting room, an immutably serene saleswoman played by Tracee Ellis Ross meets with Mike and offers to 'give him time' with a new product by a company called RiverMind. The technology is simple, she explains, gesturing to an iPad: We 'take an imprint of the affected part of [Amanda's] neural structure and we clone it onto our mainframe […] a backup of part of her brain onto our computer.' I remember watching the first season of 'Black Mirror' in 2011 when it debuted with just three episodes. The stories were thought-provoking and alarming, the sort of speculative dystopian fiction that generates good conversation and makes you hope desperately for a different kind of future. Six seasons and well over a decade later, this episode, called 'Common Place,' is a salient indication that we are now squarely in the future we hoped would never come. Like all techno-dystopic episodes of 'Black Mirror,' the narrative takes aim at how technology exposes and exploits our society's ills, starting with the constantly moving goal post that is paying for streaming services. First, Amanda and Mike are promised a free surgery and the 'less than you think' monthly fee of $300. For Amanda and Mike, very intentionally depicted as industrious members of the working class, that $300 is just nearly too much. And of course, expensive and necessary upgrades are coming. Soon, the couple must pay more, much more, to prevent Amanda from verbalizing 'contextually relevant' advertisements. We watch as she enters something of a fugue state and begins shilling products in the middle of teaching a lesson, morning coffee and sex. A baby, they learn to their horror, will be an additional $90 a month. It's interesting that "Black Mirror" would so conspicuously critique the payment model used by Netflix, the streaming giant that pays the show creator's bills (and it feels worth noting that in January Netflix raised the cost of its streaming plans and added an ad-supported, cheaper tier.) But the bait-and-switch freemium model underscores the narrative's real concern: America's deeply flawed and profit-driven health care system. There are thousands, probably tens of thousands, of active GoFundMe campaigns raising money for medical emergencies right now. Media coverage of these fundraising efforts is often positive: highlighting the kindness and altruism people so often rely on as the only way to get a lifesaving surgery or medication. And viral appeal is critical. If your story is heart-wrenching, if your blurb is funny or poignant, and if your family is beautiful, chances are you'll get a little bit more. Of course, GoFundMe is for-profit and charges a transaction fee of 2.9% and $0.30 per donation. In 'Common People,' Mike doesn't turn to crowdsourcing to raise money for Amanda's RiverMind subscription, but to a fictional social media platform called Dum Dummies. Dum Dummies allows users to pay so-called creators to complete certain tasks live onscreen. The tasks, as you can imagine, are dark, degrading and often physical. We watch Mike earn just $90 on Dum Dummies by closing his tongue in a mousetrap. It gets worse from there. 'Common People' watches like a vintage "Black Mirror" episode. It is thought-provoking, well acted, entertaining and, frankly, laborious. Yet, if you believe, like I do, that the critical role of dystopian storytelling is preparation for the worst-case scenario, then this episode has failed. There is nothing to prepare for, nothing to examine, nothing to stop, because that reality is already here. This article was originally published on
New York Times
10-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
‘Black Mirror' Creator Nibbles the Hand That Feeds Him
The deal is too good to be true: The setup is free, the monthly fee low. Streaming is unlimited with further benefits still to come. But hidden costs emerge. Intrusive ads pop up. The app's time in sleep mode becomes longer and longer. Those perks? You'll have to pay more for them — much, much more. This story arc should be familiar to anyone who has ever downloaded a free app or subscribed to a streaming service, which at this point is pretty much all of us. And it is at the very dark heart of 'Common People,' the first episode of Season 7 of 'Black Mirror,' the anthology sci-fi series that helped to give Netflix, which has distributed it since its 2011 debut, artistic cred. All of this season's six episodes arrive on Thursday. Is mocking streaming services biting the hand that keeps renewing you? Charlie Brooker, the creator of 'Black Mirror,' was more equivocal. 'To be honest, I'm probably more nibbling the hand that feeds us,' he said on a recent video call. In its past seasons, 'Black Mirror' has promoted a skeptical view, perhaps an utterly nihilistic one, regarding the ways in which entertainment is created and enjoyed. In the near future, we are all amusing ourselves to death, or worse. But with the exception of last season's episode 'Joan Is Awful,' written by Brooker and directed by Ally Pankiw, in which a Netflix stand-in creates humiliating shows adapted from its subscribers' lives, Brooker has never come for streamers so baldly. Brooker first conceived of 'Common People' while listening to true-crime podcasts. He was struck by the disjunction of hearing a host describe a mutilated corpse in one moment and advertise a meal prep service the next. What, he wondered, would make a human integrate sponsorship into their ordinary speech? At that point, he thought that the show would be, like 'Joan Is Awful,' a dark comedy, a funny story. 'He kind of tricked me,' Pankiw, who also directed 'Common People,' said of Brooker's pitch. 'I was like, OK great. Then I read the script and I was like, Oh, it's actually incredibly devastating.' In 'Common People,' Amanda (Rashida Jones), a schoolteacher, is diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor. But a new service, RiverMind, can make a digital copy of her brain and stream it right back into her skull. Her husband, Mike (Chris O'Dowd), signs her up. But then the costs rise, the subscription tiers multiply and the terms and conditions become increasingly onerous. Soon Mike is humiliating, even disfiguring, himself on a social media site called Dum Dummies just to pay the monthly fee. In the real world, a streaming subscription is hard enough to cancel. In 'Black Mirror,' it's a matter of life and death. 'It's not subtle,' Brooker said. 'To take a comedic idea and then follow it through to an unrelenting conclusion is something that I like to do.' And as with 'Joan Is Awful,' which introduced Streamberry, the obvious Netflix copycat, Netflix has been a good sport about Brooker's critique, never asking him to alter or soften it. 'They seem to have been very relaxed about it, which is almost a shame,' he said. That's probably because the real target of 'Common People' is not so much streamers as a health care system that freely bankrupts people who can't afford lifesaving treatment. Pankiw, who was raised in Canada, finds this as shocking and dystopian as anything that the 'Common People' describes. 'The episode is so topical, because you have to make decisions under late-stage capitalism that you shouldn't have to make,' she said. 'It's a hellscape out there. Literally, people can't afford to keep their loved ones alive.' Jones, who stars in the episode, understands the late-stage capitalism conundrum, especially as it relates to questions of artistic integrity. For her, though the episode may ultimately concern health care, 'it's not not about streaming,' she said. 'A lot of us work for giant conglomerates that do have this unchecked control to arbitrarily change pricing and tell people what their worth is in the marketplace.' She sees the episode as a treatise on the lack of agency that many of us may feel in the big tech era. And she realizes she's complicit in that. (Asked which streamers she subscribes to, she replied, 'Kind of all of them.') But then again, who isn't? Other episodes this season also pose doomy questions of entertainment — making it ('Hotel Reverie,' 'Plaything'); being in thrall to it ('USS Callister: Into Infinity,' a sequel to a beloved Season 4 episode); allowing it to destroy the world ('Plaything' again). That's true of other seasons, too. A generation ago, the promise of being able to watch, hear or play nearly anything almost anywhere would have seemed utopian. Turns out that it's oddly unsatisfying, and annoyingly expensive. 'Black Mirror' reflects this. Netflix, which hiked its prices earlier this year, is of course implicated in that dissatisfaction. And so by extension is 'Black Mirror.' Asked if he could imagine an ethical way to consume a show like this, Brooker hesitated. 'A way of consuming entertainment that doesn't chip away our souls — that's such a bleak question,' he said. He thought about it for a while. 'No,' he said, 'there isn't.' But he joked that the best way might be to watch it, then watch it again, then leave a rave review. 'We're just trying to entertain,' Brooker said.
