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Black Mirror's pessimism porn won't lead us to a better future
11–20 of 186 posts
Re: Black Mirror's pessimism porn won't lead us to a better future
#12I disagree with the premise of this article. Sometimes an extremely pessimistic vision of a possible future CAN change things...by making it so people are determined to fight to prevent that possible future from ever happening. The novel 1984 by George Orwell was published in 1948. It is an extremely pessimistic vision of a possible future for mankind....and many of us over the generations who read it really really d…
Me too I also dislike the cherry picked and wrongly built narrative, see the nuclear one.
> In contrast, France ran from the past towards the future, overcoming public fears of nuclear disasters, now getting 70% of its electricity from nuclear power.
France has put a single reactor online in the last 25 years, it has closed reactors and cancelled building new ones for some time.
The problem has always been financial with other sources becoming simply cheaper, more competitive and easier/quicker to put online.
Re: Black Mirror's pessimism porn won't lead us to a better future
#13The 80s had tons of scifi based on nuclear annihilation, pent up fears about nuclear annihilation based on the cold war. I dont know if that 'lead' us to a better future but we got an at least slightly better future. So the impact of pessimistic scifi is somewhere between nil and good.
Re: Black Mirror's pessimism porn won't lead us to a better future
#14Huh, i guess i both agree and disagree with this article.
I disagree that black mirror has to save the world. Art doesn't have to literally save the world to be useful, it just has to add to the conversation. The fact we are talking about it proves that it has.
On the other hand, i've never really liked black mirror that much. It feels polemical to me. Its unrelenting pessimism robs it of nuance, which makes it feel flat to me. To be clear it doesn't have to be happy, it can still be grim and dark, but when every character is a terrible character, it undermines the story
Take the episode "nosedive" where everyone is obsessed with social media ratings. Compare it to other people who copied it (meow meow beans in community, or majority rule in the orvile). I think the other tv shows did it better and honestly made technology look worse, because they had characters that weren't cartoon villians.
Maybe the part i don't like about black mirror is not that it showd technology stripping people of their hummanity but that all its characters already lack humanity so there is nothing to strip, which is kind of boring.
Re: Black Mirror's pessimism porn won't lead us to a better future
#15I'm not sure the pessimistic screes are so bad. We need criticism to keep us honest and make sure we think things through a bit.
I think the issue is that we seem to be getting less creative and less adventurous. We have fewer visions and stories of what could be.
Re: Black Mirror's pessimism porn won't lead us to a better future
#16> [During Covid] In a moment when screens kept us connected, protected and employed, the reductiveness of dystopian science fiction felt silly. Biotechnology like GMOs and mRNA offered existential hope, rather than risk.
He can thank Elon & the Tech Lords for bringing the public perception of tech right back into dystopian nightmare territory.
But even apart from that, this seems like an extremely selective recollection of the Covid era. Yes, technology was a livesaver during that time, and we all were using it in frequency and to a degree like never before. (And indeed even that time brought lasting new "skills" which offer genuine new possibilities, like the new casualness and ubiquity of online meetings)
But I also remember that tech didn't actually feel very empowering during, on the contrary: Suddenly being online changed from something fun and interesting to mandatory: You had to be online, even for the things you'd much rather do offline. What been an extension of possibilities before now became a constraint. This definitely made it feel much more dystopian than before.
> We must move away from binary tales of catastrophe, not towards naive utopianism that ignores problems and risks that comes with change, but hopeful solutionism that reminds us we can solve and mitigate them [...]
I think this misunderstands the reasons why people are wary of new technology and instead pulls up the old "Luddite" strawman (which was itself a misrepresentation).
Of course we could introduce new tech carefully and with a strong emphasis of identifying and mitigating the risks. The problem is that we won't do that, because the incentives point into the opposite direction. Companies don't want to fall behind, so they move fast and break things instead of being careful. The general population then finds themselves as guinea pigs in barely tested new technology with little power to actually influence the course this technology takes. This causes a feeling of helplessness and resentment.
Re: Black Mirror's pessimism porn won't lead us to a better future
#17I feel like a big problem in the modern world is the small scale of our dreams. Dreams drive us, they change the world. In 1865, French author Jules Verne decided to write a book to inspire people to dream big, impossible dreams. He decided to write a novel proving that humans could do anything- by describing how, if enough people worked together, they could journey all the way to the moon. This became one of the first hit books in a new genre, science fiction. Sure, plenty of people had written about travelling to the moon before- e.g. the Roman poet Lucian wrote of being sucked up into a giant waterspout and deposited on the moon- but Verne was the first to write at a level of detail that made is seem realistic, something that humans could do- e.g. he spends several pages discussing- with math- how, if you are in America and want to go into space, the coast of Florida is the right spot (he picked a spot two hundred km from Cape Canaveral).
These stories are important. The fathers of rocketry in at least two different countries (Konstantin Tsiolkovsky of Russia and Hermann Oberth of Germany) were inspired by Verne (Goddard of the US was more inspired by H.G. Wells than Verne). They independently realized that you couldn't build a cannon (like Verne depicted) that could let humans survive and get to the moon, so they went into rocketry. Verne and H.G. Wells told stories that were the first step to changing the world.
And modern science fiction seems stuck in a dystopian rut. Most of the good sci-fi (and I enjoy things like the Murderbot Diaries) are largely dystopic. Hell, Star Trek- long the most utopian of sci-fi- is doing movies about Section 31 and whole seasons about android slave uprisings. No one is inspired to build a better future by "Don't create the Torment Nexus", they just get inspired to build the Torment Nexus.
Basically, we are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be, as Kurt Vonnegut wrote.
Thank you for reading my TED talk.
Re: Black Mirror's pessimism porn won't lead us to a better future
#18I disagree with the premise of this article. Sometimes an extremely pessimistic vision of a possible future CAN change things...by making it so people are determined to fight to prevent that possible future from ever happening. The novel 1984 by George Orwell was published in 1948. It is an extremely pessimistic vision of a possible future for mankind....and many of us over the generations who read it really really d…
"The Jungle" by Upton Sinclair published in 1906 described an extremely pessimistic vision of the exploitation of the American factory worker. The descriptions of the meat packing industry in the book led to passing of the Meat Inspection Act. Sinclair was frustrated that most people were more concerned about eating bovine tuberculosis infected beef than the exploitation of people, but, nonetheless, it was pessimistic novel which lead to positive action.
Re: Black Mirror's pessimism porn won't lead us to a better future
#19Huh, i guess i both agree and disagree with this article. I disagree that black mirror has to save the world. Art doesn't have to literally save the world to be useful, it just has to add to the conversation. The fact we are talking about it proves that it has. On the other hand, i've never really liked black mirror that much. It feels polemical to me. Its unrelenting pessimism robs it of nuance, which makes it feel…
Nosedive is easily among the worst Black Mirror episodes and I was very confused by so many people praising it when it came out.
Re: Black Mirror's pessimism porn won't lead us to a better future
#20"Absent is the plot twist of Pandora’s box that made it philosophically useful: the box also contained hope and opportunity that new knowledge brings." Yes, add that and it might be something interesting but sure not the Black Mirror I want to watch. I mean it is called Black Mirror for a reason. And it is not even true. Take the episode "San Junipro" for example? Isn't there some hope and opportunity in it? And yet,…
I dunno about you, but I don't care about a computer program that believes it's me living on after I die. You can wrap it with all the feel good trappings you want, that set of bits is not you. If anything, living a life in a way that you put off doing the fun things until the after life, spiritual or digital, sounds awful.