a friend sent me this tweet, and it just shows how tech bros don’t understand art, and more specifically, black mirror.

the “white mirror” already exists, that’s tech companies, they make adverts about how wonderful their new technology is, why you must use it, etc. look at how ads for ai a lot of time try and make it seem like ai can make something “perfect” - like that gemini ad about a little girl writing a fan letter to the olympian they admire - google says "hey, you’re gonna fuck this letter up, let ai fix it”, it creates this sense of inadequacy if you don’t allow ai to rewrite your own words.

my point is that the tech industry is the white mirror, they make us think that they will create a utopia for us if we just let them do what they want. but in reality many of us know that is coming with immense tradeoffs, their idea of utopia doesn’t seem to align with ours more and more.

black mirror is in a lot of ways the antithesis of this “white mirror” - it tries to imagine and explore what our future could be. it’s the person at the asbestos factory wondering why everyone is getting cancer while everyone else is praising how good of a building material it is.

not every black mirror episode is about tech, but most of them are some kind of satire that push things happening in the real world to their logical extreme, especially technological advancements. not every episode works, but when they do, they hit hard. the national anthem haunts me to this day