Black Mirror Becomes True; Predictions Markets, Our Downfall
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We're here because your heightened awareness deserves heightened entertainment. The Last Show with David Cooper. New technology.
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? Think about how satisfying it would be you get cut off in traffic and instead of just flipping the bird at the guy, you give the driver of the car a bad review, which maybe makes it hard for him to buy a house. Just imagine how much better behaved everyone would be if they knew that they were being publicly ranked all of the time.
But of course, in classic Black Mirror fashion, this could and will go extremely poorly. I mean, if you're an Uber passenger and you start drifting below four and a half stars, you can start finding yourselves waiting longer to get a ride or maybe not getting a ride at all. Now, because you were having a bad day a few weeks earlier, you're trapped in a rainstorm instead of hopping into a car. For drivers, they operate on slim margins anyway, and losing their star status can cause them financial peril. And on a society-wide level, who is it exactly that gets to decide what's antisocial and what's prosocial? The people in power? Exactly. That's how it always goes. It's easy to see how it could switch from what's good for society to what's good for the people in charge.
And as you mentioned, we did sort of see this implemented. In 2020, the Chinese city of Suzhou implemented a new system of digitally ranking and evaluating citizens for their behavior. Everybody starts with a thousand points. You lose points for antisocial activity. You gain points for prosocial activity. And people with higher scores would be given preference for getting jobs and enrolling in schools. And this ran as a trial. It was a very unpopular idea, but we have the tech for it. And you could definitely see something like this being implemented on a wider scale.
The weird thing is if it's implemented properly in like a utopian society with fairness and a way to correct your number by doing charitable acts or engaging in actual pro-social behavior, it doesn't sound all that bad until you start to think about who's running the system, why are they running it, and what are the ways in which it works badly or wrong or unfairly, and then it's a total nightmare.
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