in science, television

How ‘Black Mirror’ mirrors reality

Miranda Katz over at Backchannel has a comparison of Black Mirror episodes and their theoretically real-life counterparts:

What makes Black Mirror so chilling isn’t just its technologies, but their uncanny interplay with human behavior. The show can feel gratuitously pessimistic, yet it’s rooted in reality: nearly every scenario parallels something in our current world. In particular, an early episode disturbingly foreshadows the rise of Donald Trump.

It’s impossible to write off Black Mirror as fiction. So we’ve decided to nail down the parallels between the nightmares on screen and our world today. And so we present: the real-life equivalents of Black Mirror’s dystopias, loosely ordered by how closely each episode reflects our current reality.