The Last Show with David Cooper
Black Mirror Becomes True; Predictions Markets, Our Downfall
11 Mar 2026
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
We're here because your heightened awareness deserves heightened entertainment. The Last Show with David Cooper. New technology.
Chapter 2: How does Black Mirror reflect our current reality?
With what's available today, it feels like we're living in an episode of the TV show Black Mirror. That's the near future dystopian show where sci-fi tech kind of ruins everybody's life. We're talking about how we're basically already there. The show was a great predictor of what's happening now, at least some episodes. We're joined by Nathan Radke, a professor of conspiracy studies.
Check out his podcast, The Uncover Up. Check out his upcoming book called The Uncover Up. Huh? Nathan Radke, welcome. You got a book coming up.
Yeah, thanks for the book plug.
That was sweet of you. You can pre-order it, ladies and gentlemen. Okay. Black Mirror, it is a weird show because I remember watching it like 10 years ago thinking this is basically an inch away from where we are now. Now, some of the episodes, thank goodness, have not come true. But some of them were really good predictors of what was going to come.
Yeah, I mean, Black Mirror, it's a Twilight Zone-esque show. The implications of new digital technologies are portrayed in a terrifying manner, as they often deserve to be. Things like surveillance and AI and social media and robotics. So it's easy to see why a show like that would be relevant.
In fact, it's so relevant that a lot of people have noted that more than a few Black Mirror episodes have ended up coming true.
The one that really scares me is this like social credit system. I don't know if it's what they called it on the show, but like how you do on social media assigns you some number and then the government treats you a certain way based on that number. If it gets too low, it's like you've committed a criminal act.
This is like, the worry is the government's compiling these numbers on you without you knowing. And then this has already been implemented by some countries, at least in some form.
Yeah, this was an episode called Nosedive from season three. And at first, this idea seems sort of satisfying. I mean, this is the problem with a lot of these texts is that they kind of promise something that almost tempts you a little bit. Because we already do this, this sort of social credit rating for Uber drivers and eBay sellers. Why not everyone we encounter in our daily lives?
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Chapter 3: What are the implications of a social credit system?
About a couple weeks ago on the show, we covered a new patent filed by Facebook, basically Death Book. Facebook would use AI to train their models on your deceased loved ones and friends' Facebook page, private messages, interactions online, in a way to resurrect them and create a chatbot that was like them. Now, they just patented the tech. They're not deploying it right now, they're saying.
But basically, there are other companies and people out there trying to resurrect your loved ones as a chatbot. And there's a black mirror out there. episode about that, too.
Yeah, it was season two's Be Right Back, a woman's partner's killed in a car crash, so a company builds her an AI version of him based on his online communications and social media posts. And again, at first, this makes perfect sense. Loss is a terrible thing. Grief is hard to bear. I remember when my mom died, I spent months wishing that I could at least still text with her a little bit.
And lots of people feel that way about their loved ones. It's why an entire industry sprung up at the end of the 19th century with people in dark rooms with crystal balls who promised that they could communicate with your dead loved ones. But of course, these days, who needs crystal balls and incense when you've got AI chatbots?
You could feed all of your loved one's media, social media hot takes and drunken emails into it, mix in a few voice notes so that the chatbot even sounds like the person, and voila, it's as if the person has never died.
It is. There's also another one. We didn't talk about it at the break, but subscription-based healthcare. There's an episode where there's some implant this woman needs in her brain or something to stay alive because she's got this terminal illness, but it's a subscription service. And if she can't pay it, it downgrades her reality. I feel like we're not too far away from that.
Everything's subscription-based these days. What if there is some healthcare implant or something and you got to pay a monthly fee? What happens if you can't
Well, what happens is it turns from a subscription model into more of a blackmail model. I mean, think about what we were just talking about where you can recreate a dead loved one with AI. I mean, the mediums back in the day in the 19th century, they could use their position as the voice of your dead loved one to take a financial advantage of you.
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.
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