Black Mirror's 'Common People' is unsettling because we're already (kind of) living in it

If you haven't seen the new season of Black Mirror, SPOILER ALERT.

Black Mirror's new season is here and its starts off with a banger of an episode. This episode follows a couple who find themselves stuck paying a monthly fee to keep one of them alive.

The Main Themes

The episode explores three main themes which I argue are already present in today's world

1. Subscription Everything.

   Instead of letting the couple pay a one time fee to restore the health of Amanda, Rivermind makes the couple pay a subscription to keep her brain and her body working. They keep adding tiers and make the lower tiers increasingly more annoying, forcing the couple to upgrade eveytime. First they made the plus tier to add more geographic coverage. Amanda's brain shuts down automatically when she goes outside her coverage area. They then put ads on that tier, making her say commercials that are context specific out loud to whoever is listening without her even being aware of it. They made an even higher tier with no ads and the ability to use other users' brain power.

   While not literally subscription based, our healthcare systems mirror Rivermind's tier system. basic coverage with high deductibles for those who can barely afford it, mid tier coverage with reasonable access, and premium 'concierge' healthcare for the rich offering immediate access to specialists and experimental treatments. This tier system commodifies life-saving care making it accessible primarily to the wealthy and creates class tension. This is likely what frustrated and pushed Luigi Mangione over the edge to murder UnitedHealthcare's CEO.

   To have to pay a subscription for things we used to pay once and enjoy forever in the past is a real shame. There is a great push among big companies to go on a subscription model since it allows them to have a continuing stream of money from the users. Adobe and Microsoft are just two of the companies that are notorious for this. I'd be happy to pay a one-time fee to keep using Lightroom since I get a lot of value out of it but they have since stopped offering any options for this, effectively forcing Lightroom users to upgrade to their subscription plans. Yes, I've tried using open source tools like Rawtherapee and Darktable and I've found the learning curve to be too steep and I couldn't be bothered since ive already been accustomed to the workflow in Lightroom. This is probably why they do it though, they know people have been using it for years and have only known this as the way to go.

   Rivermind, offering the surgery for free and having the monthly subscription eerily sounds like WHOOP's health tracker that offers the strap for free when you join their subscription. Is health and wellness only for those who can afford it?

2. Personalised ads.

   This one is already here, think Youtube ads and Spotify ads. You have to pay a subscription to remove the ads which are, by the way, all personalised to you based on your recent activity on the app and on the internet.

   I'm not sure how to feel about this one. This is only made possible with data science. Personalised ads have become increasingly sophisticated and uncanny. While tech companies deny actively listening through our devices, users often report experiences that suggest otherwise, like somehow getting ads for dog toys when you vaguely mention dog toys around your phone.

   They can be a great source of influence. They can push us in either direction on any subject matter and it can be weapon of radicalisation. An already left leaning person might turn far left and a right leaning person might turn far right with the right targeted content. The side that pays more ends up significantly influencing their targeted audience more making power a matter of money. This already worked for the people who utilised data from Cambridge Analytica.

3. Gambling and Paying Content Creators to do nasty things

   In the episode, Mike is forced to do dares in front of a live audience to earn money to pay off their monthly subscription. With the rise of OnlyFans, Twitch and Kick. We've seen increasingly perverse behavior among content creators to attract attention and get paid for having eyes on them. Just recently, the content creator Vitaly Zdorovetskiy was detained for recording himself harassing locals in the Philippines purely for his content. Social media algorithms are built in such a way that maximises viewership and unforunately what bubbles to the top is often the negative content which is novel and rage inciting, creating a negative feedback loop.

These three trends form a perfect storm. Together, they create a world where our most basic needs are held hostage to recurring payments, our attention is manipulated through increasingly personalized content, and those with fewer resources are incentivized to perform increasingly degrading acts for survival. 'Common People' simply accelerates these existing trends to their logical conclusion: a world where even consciousness becomes a premium service.

A bonus theme. Immortality.

If you think about it, they have already unlocked the technology of immortality in 'Common People'. It's the ultimate extension of the subscription model and what could be more profitable than controlling access to existence itself? In a world where death becomes optional but energy remains finite, economic inequality transforms into existential inequality. The wealthy wouldn't just live better lives, they'd live longer or potentially forever. The episode forces us to confront whether our current trajectory of commodifying essentials leads inevitably to commodifying existence itself.

Ok, that was crazy. What can we do about it?

Im no expert in ethics but I would sleep more soundly at night if there are ethics experts and not just technical experts in high tech companies and in the government. Luckily, it seems like ... "OpenAI team in charge of safeguarding humanity imploded". umm yeah I think we need to do something about this.

To prevent this future, I think that we need multiple approaches: consumer protection laws that limit what can be moved to subscription models, particularly for essentials; data privacy legislation with real enforcement mechanisms; stronger antitrust enforcement to prevent companies from becoming too powerful to regulate; and public investment in open-source alternatives to proprietary subscription services. As individuals, we can support companies with ethical business models, encrypt our digital communications, and consciously evaluate which subscriptions truly add value to our lives. Each action we take is a vote on who we are and what we are ok with and this is specially true with the use of our money.

Black Mirror has always been less about predicting the future and more about reflecting our present concerns back to us in exaggerated form. What makes 'Common People' so disturbing isn't that it portrays some distant dystopia, it's that it shows us where our current path leads if we continue prioritizing profit over people. The subscription-based consciousness in the episode may be fiction, but the commodification of human necessities is already our reality.