![]() ![]() But "Hang The DJ" takes the idea that algorithms can predict happiness to a whole new level. Sure, humans are vain and shallow creatures so using apps that allow you to swipe right or left, determining someone’s value and attractiveness with just your thumb seems like an unsurprising evolution in the game of love. In a world where human interaction is increasingly reliant upon a technological interface, the idea of dating feels especially terrifying. Ultimately, he loses track of what’s imagined and what’s not but the point of the episode - that we as humans are drifting towards a life that feels more and more like a videogame than anything else - is a bit too on the nose. It follows the story of a man who volunteers for a study, one that asks him to confront his darkest fears as if they were real. But what if that wasn’t the case? What if virtual reality could hurt you? What if your worst nightmares played on a loop? What if those nightmares had the ability to physically cause you harm? "Playtest" is every doubt, every suspicion gone unvoiced about VR and how the brain perceives reality. People use it to catch up with friends halfway across the world, to experience travel without ever leaving the comfort of their couch, to have adventures, to explore, to interact, with an unstated guarantee of safety. Virtual reality is all the rage in the gaming community and it’s beginning to stretch its tentacles into other areas of our lives as well. It takes the idea that, in this golden age of the internet, everyone has a paper trail and bumps it up to uncomfortable levels, revealing an affair for one couple that ends up destroying their relationship. It’s a universal failing of humanity we’ve just come to accept, but what if technology could fix that? What if, when you interrogated your boyfriend about who he’s been texting late at night or questioned your wife about her relationship with a co-worker, instead of relying on their playback of events, you could literally watch those interactions in real-time? That’s what "The Entire History of You" proposes, a way to tap into the “grain” - a chip implant that allows you to record your daily life at will - to watch someone else’s life unfold. It’s inherently biased and often influenced by the dreaded “unreliable narrator.” The way one person remembers an event is singular to their experience, and almost always differs from how someone else catalogs that same event in their mind. The Entire History of You (Season 1, Episode 3) It’s eerily similar to how we interact with people now, especially given the power of social media channels like Instagram and Twitter. Forget to tip your barista, bail on a co-worker’s birthday party, give a stranger an accidental side-eye, and your rating goes down. You see, in this world, people are rated on every interaction they have and those ratings are your currency, they determine everything from where you’ll live to how you’ll be treated by strangers, to whether or not you’ll end up in jail. The pastel dream of a glamorous apartment, celebrity friends, the picture-perfect life hinges on her likability. The episode follows Bryce Dallas Howard, a woman trying to elevate her status through Instagram likes. Technology, both the joys and terrors it can bring, is a recurring theme in Black Mirror but no episode feels as viscerally, spine-chillingly real as Season 3’s "Nosedive." That’s because, unlike other episodes on this list that trade in futuristic tech and hypothetical dystopias, "Nosedive" is just grounded in reality enough to make us all completely uncomfortable. ![]()
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