Episode 32: Black Mirror S7E1: Common People

Transcript

I would be extremely shocked if anyone listening to this show hasn't heard of, hasn't watched, and at least heard of Black Mirror.
But in the off chances of the first time you're hearing this, go check out Black Mirror.
It's a Netflix series. It's been running for several years. I don't know, maybe seven, eight years.
But they just released season seven at the time of recording this show.
I think it's one of the stronger seasons in a while.
A few of the early seasons were really good and there was kind of a little bit, at least in my opinion, a lull in the middle.
Some of that was because I think some of those seasons were pretty short.
There were a couple where there was only like three episodes or something, so kind of unsatisfying.
And also I think some of the plot lines were just a little bit weaker.
But I thought that this season was a very strong season.
Again, if you're not familiar, it's kind of an inspection on things like technology and society and politics and people's psychology and just a lot of interesting topics.
And it very much has like a Twilight Zone feel or stint to it, you know, if you're a Twilight Zone fan, that kind of it's somewhat eerie.
A lot of times there's twist ending kind of things.
That's this kind of thing.
And it's not the episodes are not generally connected to one another.
Some of them have repeat characters and stuff, but by and large, they are self-contained episodes that run about an hour apiece, something like that.
So anyway, if you're not familiar, if you've never heard of it, strongly recommend checking it out.
But this particular season, season seven, the first episode, which I think was called Common People, I'm going to get into some spoiler stuff here.
So if you don't want to hear about this, maybe just skip this episode because I'm going to talk about it a bit.
I'll try to stay out of total spoiler territory, but I will reveal a few, you know, beats along the way.
Episode or I'm sorry, episode one of season seven, Common People.
It's about a couple, kind of a blue-collar working class.
It's a blue-collar, the guy's kind of a blue-collar welder of some sort.
And the woman, I think, is a kindergarten or an elementary school teacher.
So, you know, maybe like middle class, lower middle class type of economic situation.
She has a tumor in her brain that they have to remove.
If they remove it, she essentially either becomes a vegetable or dies.
She can't function anymore.
So this tech company comes in and offers a solution.
They make essentially a prosthetic that can be plugged into the brain and hook up to the cloud.
And the cloud will stream the parts of her personality and brain that would have been missing from the surgery so that she can continue to function and live as a person.
And they kind of come in with this pitch that's like, look, the surgery is free.
And then you just pay a subscription cost for us to keep this thing working.
And the subscription cost is not inexpensive.
It's kind of a stretch for this family, but they can do it.
So a number of things happen from there.
You know, the tech company, much like we're familiar with with tech companies, the subscription costs go up.
They offer new premium plans that have features to them that are the things that they actually want.
But they're the premium packages are much more expensive.
There's issues with the coverage area so that the, you know, the satellites or whatever that send these signals.
Unless you pay for the higher packages, you're kind of locked into a certain geographic area.
All kinds of things like that.
And it's largely a reflection on the subscription-based technology company world of today and how it's quite predatory and all that kind of stuff.
But there's an interesting thing embedded, I thought.
There was one piece that really got its hooks in me and really just keeps rolling around in my head.
And it's a small part of the episode.
There's a, there's a, among all this stuff, there's a piece where they say, you know, you, the, she'll, she'll sleep a couple extra hours each day.
And that's just to be able to, as they say, you know, they need extra, needs extra rest in order to, you know, essentially fuel or, you know, continue to help the person.
Prosthetic operator.
That's kind of how they pitch it.
So they show her through the show, through the episode, where she's sleeping a little bit extra, but she's progressively getting more and more tired.
Like, even while she's awake, she's exhausted.
And they do a great job at kind of showing the progression where in the beginning, they're so happy and thrilled that she's, you know, alive.
And they get this extra time together and all that kind of stuff.
And as they go, the time that they have together becomes less and less, she's less and less engaged because she's mostly just exhausted.
And there's components with advertising, which are both kind of humorous and also kind of sad.
But anyway, she's getting more and more tired.
So they go and they ask about this.
And this, this account representative that they talked to on the tech company side explains that when she's sleeping at night, she's not actually sleeping.
She's in a, quote unquote, sleep mode.
And the idea being that while you're in this sleep mode, the prosthetic in her brain is actually tapping into the rest of her brain to essentially feed processing power back to the tech company.
So that when you're, when you're, when you're quote unquote sleeping, your brain is giving back power and processing power to the central cloud, basically for the, for the company.
You can kind of think of it like how, um, like solar works, you know, where a certain amount of your power goes back into the grid.
That's kind of the idea.
I thought this was so interesting and such a mirror in many ways being held up to the modern, again, subscription based tech world.
Cause techs all just rushed over the last decade to move to subscription models wherever possible, but you're not, it's not enough anymore just to pay the subscription.
They've got companies that have gotten clever about this stuff.
You know, they've found ways to both bill you on a subscription basis for whatever service they're providing and take many other things from you, your data, your time, your attention.
There are services that you pay for and you still get advertisements.
There are services that you pay for, and they're still collecting all of your data and, and, and there's still, it's amazing and they can, you know, modify their terms at any time.
And it's, it's, it's pretty rough when you really sit down and think about it.
And this was, this to me was a great like symbolism or a metaphor for all of that, where they're paying the absolute maximum they possibly can.
They can't even afford to get to the premium service where the, where their lives would actually get better.
And then the, the, despite giving every last bottom dollar, the, the company is still taking more from them.
There's still hidden costs or true costs behind the scenes that they can't avoid.
If you want to keep using this service and if they don't keep using it, you know, she essentially dies.
So it's interesting because yes, the company is providing a very valuable service and you can make the same argument with, you know, non sci-fi technology of today.
We'll take, we'll pick on Google.
Google is still providing a search service.
Many of us would have a very difficult time living without the services Google provides.
Even if you want to skip the search piece, what about the maps, you know, even other map services often look back to Google map APIs in order to deal, you know, to, to provide their services.
But the true cost is, is that every time you use one of these things, like let's say you're using Google search, the true cost is that they are trying to steal your time and attention.
What they want you to do is click on an ad really badly.
And they've made that more and more clear over the years, right?
Or we can pick on some of my favorite, you know, you talk about social media networks, which I have a very negative view on, generally speaking.
They provide a service, right?
And I can speak to this from firsthand.
I don't engage in much social media platform stuff.
I do a little bit on LinkedIn, but I feel it's more of like a obligation than anything else.
But I don't really engage with anything like a Facebook or a Twitter or, you know, an Instagram or anything these days.
Because I don't engage in those things, I am far more disconnected from both friends and the world.
I try to stay in touch, like I do it kind of the old fashioned way, you know, but I don't have that world open to me.
But that's because to me, the cost is too high.
The cost is too high because there is, you know, plethora of studies out there that show all of the negative psychological impacts of these things.
And even if you ignore that and say, well, I can control that, they're still very clever about taking your time and your attention.
It's very important to a social network that you actually don't go out and socialize.
That instead you feel like you're socializing while using a platform that is mostly designed to serve you advertisements and get you to buy something at some point in time.
But anyway, without going too deep into all that, this episode was a great kind of reflection on these things.
And I thought it was just so well done.
Great characters.
You empathize with what they were doing.
You didn't feel like they were doing things that were really outlandish or that people wouldn't do.
The choices that they make are natural for the most part.
And it just feels like real people.
And it's not that far off.
You could see the parallels.
And it was very interesting.
So anyway, I highly recommend the season overall.
But that first episode really got me.
It really rung home for me, I suppose.
And what I would encourage people to do.
And again, it's not it's I don't mean to be all negative about all this.
As I said, there's pros and cons.
These companies do provide important services, social services, search services, you know, the AI productivity boons that are coming.
All of these things really are things.
But just remember to think a little bit about what the true cost is.
Because it's not just that 20 bucks a month to use ChatGPT or, you know, the 10 bucks a month for some premium service.
There's a bunch of other stuff going on there.
They're squeezing a lot more blood from the stone than you may realize.
So just think about that a little bit and definitely check the episode out.
It was it was a it was a great episode.
Really found it moving and interesting and deep and worth a watch.
It was a great episode.