Nathan Radke

But like scams have gotten so much more sophisticated since then.

These days, it could be a subscription model.

Keep your dead loved one alive for only $12 a month or $10 a month with commercials.

Oh, God.

Well, I think where it leaves us, and I think everybody listening to this is going to kind of agree, it leaves us in kind of an exhausted state.

We feel like we are bombarded constantly.

The reason a good Black Mirror episode is so effective is because even though it's about futuristic tech, it also goes back to an old-fashioned kind of story trope, which is the monkey's paw.

Okay.

So the idea of the monkey's paw is you get this magical device, and this magical device promises to solve all of your problems, and it comes from, of course, the famous short story.

But then when you use it, it does exactly what you ask it to do.

But it also turns out there's some horrifying consequences that you didn't foresee.

So a monkey's paw is a curse, but it's disguised as a blessing.

It's poison, but it's coated in sugar.

And the lesson to every monkey's paw story is, of course, when you're offered one, don't take it.

But these days, it seems like we're not even being offered technological monkey's paws.

We're just being presented with them against our will.

And we're being forced to live out the unintended consequences without necessarily even seeing any kind of benefit.

But yeah, it's like- Good consumer advice there.

It sounds familiar, and this is one of those cases where I feel like reality has gotten out ahead of shows like Black Mirror, and that our actual real world is getting in some ways darker and stranger and more alarming than even our fiction is.

Yeah, it's ugly and it's disturbing.