In 'Black Mirror' Season 7, Scary Tech Is in the Past
Black Mirror’s whole shtick has always been that it could be true. With episodes set a few years away from, or even with just a few alterations to our current way of life, creator Charlie Brooker’s anthology show has usually served as a cautionary tale about society’s increasing dependence on technology and how nefarious people, governments or even the tech itself may use that to destroy us figuratively and/or physically.
(*That this show started on Channel 4 in the UK before going omnipresent on Netflix in 2016 is the meta icing on that cake).
But the series’ seventh season, which premiered this week on the streamer, seems to take the opposite approach. Most of the six episodes look at what could happen if we let technology have access to the past. What kind of power does tech have on our own memories and on what we choose to forget? Are we playing God if we try to rewrite history or redirect fate? How can anybody be a reliable narrator when there are Kilimanjaro-sized social media footprints of almost everything that’s happened in our lives since Mark Zuckerberg (probably) stole the Winklevoss twins’ idea for a better MySpace? How much power should we give not just people, but entire institutions, to avenge past mistakes or misfortunes?
