
Our World Is Going Full ‘Black Mirror’ - jonbaer
https://backchannel.com/our-world-is-going-full-black-mirror-946212a98184#.5qhncp8nz
======
zitterbewegung
This basically is a set of summarizations of episodes Black Mirror. You should
really watch Black Mirror before you read this piece. The idea of good SciFi
is that is supposed to parallel reality so that you can suspend your disbelief
and all the article does is attempt to make those connections that the authors
put in intentionally.

------
1_2__3
I remember asking someone why Cyberpunk died and he said, a dystopian and
orwellian future where we lose our individuality in favor of technical
advancement? Why would anyone be interested in that as fiction, it's what
we're living today.

~~~
dominotw
The great purge on twitter has begun.
[http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/news/2016/11/15/twitter-s...](http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/news/2016/11/15/twitter-
suspends-alt-right-accounts/93943194/)

~~~
pjc50
A few days late and dollars short there.

Meanwhile, it's not the partisan purge you think it is:

Kevin Allred posted "would conservatives care as much abt the 2nd amendment if
guns killed more white people? a question meant to expose double standard"
[https://twitter.com/KevinAllred/status/798751660340195328](https://twitter.com/KevinAllred/status/798751660340195328)

and gets the police coming to him
[https://twitter.com/KevinAllred/status/798729156557205504](https://twitter.com/KevinAllred/status/798729156557205504)
and twitter ordering him to take it down (but not the quote??)
[https://twitter.com/KevinAllred/status/798925131288641536](https://twitter.com/KevinAllred/status/798925131288641536)

~~~
dwaltrip
Is there more to this story? I'm blown away. That's insane and very troubling.

EDIT: It seems that the poster above may have left out some important details.
According to an alleged screenshot linked below, the tweet actually said:
"Will the 2nd amendment be as cool when _I_ buy a gun start shooting at random
white people?"

This is not obviously just an abstract political point. It could
understandably be interpreted as a direct threat.

~~~
fmj
[https://twitter.com/Travesham/status/798941639909609472](https://twitter.com/Travesham/status/798941639909609472)

Here are the since deleted tweets. I'll let you come to your own conclusions.

~~~
pjc50
How do we know those are the actual deleted tweets?

(Now we have a truth problem don't we? I could be lying, the guy posting the
screenshots could be lying, the original poster could be lying. Turtles all
the way down)

I mean, there's some MSM coverage of this which says essentially what I did:
[http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/rutgers-professor-
psych-...](http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/rutgers-professor-psych-eval-
threatening-tweets-article-1.2875736)

------
irishcoffee
> in the past week, as we reel from the 2016 presidential election

Unless of course, you voted for him.

I'm just gonna leave this here, he says it better than I could:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLG9g7BcjKs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLG9g7BcjKs)

~~~
guelo
A lot of Trump voters did it just to spite liberals. Small things like whether
the candidate would do a good job running the government didn't really enter
into the picture because hate of "the other side" is the only thing that
mattered.

And it continues now, I was just reading someone saying that the choice of
Bannon is great because it upset liberals. Apparently that's the only
qualification you need to run the government of the world's largest economy
and military.

This logic, if liberals hate it it is good, is going to be the ruin of the
republic.

~~~
zeroer
I like liberals. I am a liberal. Even still, I voted Trump, because of how
corrupt the Clintons are.

~~~
jedberg
You may want to reevaluate your stance after you look more closely at the
evidence. For example, the supposed "smoking gun" emails about her rigging the
primary. Do you know what everyone failed to report on those? The date the
emails were sent. They were all sent _after_ Sanders had already lost. Clinton
was already the nominee. Of course they would talk about how they are going to
help her in the general -- because she was already the candidate.

It was important details like that that were intentionally left out of the
reporting to make her look worse.

Edit: Not that it should matter, but I voted for and contributed to the
Sanders campaign. I wanted him to win, but I also believe in facts.

~~~
wavefunction
Why then were some of them about targeting Bernie Sanders re: his Jewishness,
for example?

I downvoted you for a very good reason.

~~~
jedberg
Because he had already lost and they were trying to get him out of the race
because at that point he was just dragging the party down. Using his
Jewishness was wrong, but not corrupt.

~~~
ta_donk_gt
What about the one discussing getting the New York primary moved up if Clinton
were to get a big challenger so that she could get an early victory and kill
that momentum? What about the ones discussing moving the Illinois primary back
so that moderate republicans could not get early victories (and further the
narrative that the right is extremist)? And what about the ones where Donna
Brazile fed debate questions? And what about the ones showing clear collusion
across the board with the media to appease Clinton and push the preferred
narrative against her competition?

Were any of those indicative of corruption?

~~~
jedberg
As someone who works in IT, I know how easy it is to forge emails. So far all
those emails have been denied by their senders.

Using DKIM to "prove" they are real only works if you assume the attacker
doesn't have access to the private key. If someone hacked the mail server,
then they probably have the private key.

I'm saying it didn't happen, but I'm saying that everyone needs to be a little
more critical in their analysis of the "evidence" presented.

~~~
zeroer
You're right that the emails could have been forged. I take this as a serious
possibility.

You say that "all those emails have been denied by their senders". I'm not
sure what you're referring to. Would you mind linking it? I've been following
the news rather closely, and I've never heard any sender of a leaked email say
something to the effect of "I did not send this". The only thing they say is
that they won't comment on veracity.

Also, the Wikileaks organization has never leaked forged documents before and
have never lied. The Clintons and their cronies are caught in lies repeatedly.
While it's not proof, you have to take things like credibility into account
when evaluating who's lying _this_ time.

However, for me, my mind was already made up before any emails were leaked
based on the Clintons' previous scandals. If it were proven that the email
leaks were entirely fabricated, I would definitely update my opinion of
Wikileaks, but my opinion of the Clintons would remain unchanged.

------
joggery
Myself I prefer optimistic SF such as classic Asimov and Clarke. I don't mind
things going wrong because mistakes are normal. But there ought to be
resolution and problems solved by hard-won knowledge and the efforts of good
people. If you think that is immoral or unrealistic consider whether you would
read your children bedtime stories with no good guys and/or no happy endings.
Consider how such children might grow up. Then consider the effect on society
of unrelenting pessimism in SF.

------
pavel_lishin
Scifi has always been a source of "what-if" predictions, warning us of
potential failure modes of new technologies. (As Larry Niven said, it's not
enough to predict the car, you have to predict the traffic jam.) It's not
surprising that we didn't heed every warning.

~~~
ukyrgf
I can only guess that Black Mirror coming to Netflix is the first time a lot
of people have ever seen decent science fiction. Before that it was what,
Battlestar Galactica?, which is basically a soap opera with b-roll of a
spaceship.

------
jack9
The Waldo moment would be used to compare any iconoclast in this marketing
article. Trump is just the most well-known target of the day.

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234dd57d2c8db
Is this an advertisement for black mirror? All I see is one intro paragraph
bashing Trump and then a summary of popular episodes. Nice stealth
advertisement.

~~~
camtarn
Bit of an anti-advertisement: the article contains spoilers for a lot of the
episodes, making watching them for the twist a bit pointless.

I still want to watch Black Mirror at some point; I'm lucky that I have a
terrible memory for spoilers ;)

~~~
untoreh
there is close to none twist in them, apart a couple, you really know where
they are going

------
dictum
Oh man, Black Mirror is becoming the highbrow version of Harry Potter/Game of
Thrones metaphors.

------
kqr2
After watching S3E1 "Nosedive" :
[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt5497778/](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt5497778/)

It was eerie to watch a video about Klout score :
[https://klout.com/corp/score](https://klout.com/corp/score)

The guy mentioned how people with high Klout scores would get free upgrades,
etc.

------
at-fates-hands
>> in the past week, as we reel from the 2016 presidential election, the world
of Black Mirror seems nearer than ever to our current reality—less a warning
than a crystal ball.

Not everyone is "reeling" from the presidential election and choosing now to
look at the parallels because of it is, well, a bit myopic considering this
things have been taking place for so long that suddenly they just realized
there were a ton of parallels between the show and reality?

------
hash-set
I fail to see the connection to Trump, frankly. The world over, people are
getting sick of elitists, oligarchs, and a crony system that is impoverishing
them while making hollow promises. It's all very obvious why these nascent
populist movements have come about. Only the hard left doesn't get it.

~~~
llamataboot
If you think the Trump administration won't AT BEST be the most crony
capitalist administration that has ever existed with a high degree of nepotism
thrown in for good measure, then you haven't been paying attention to the
transition so far.

~~~
theWatcher37
Neither have you. I suggest you refresh your browser because the situation is
dveeloping by the day, from Christie, to letting Christie make picks, to
booting Christie, to then booting everyone he picked... things are changing
fast.

~~~
keepper
And i hate to deviate.. but.. by all reports, Jared Kushner kicked Christie
off.

Jared Kushner's dad was jailed by Chris Christie...[1]

But sure, go on about that not paying attention part...

[1][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Kushner](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Kushner)

------
ManFromUranus
I think Black Mirror is a terrible ham-fisted show. The assertion by the
article that real life is coming close to the worlds of black mirror is
ridiculous.

~~~
run4yourlives2
Holy Crap someone else doesn't get the hype for that show. It isn't just me.

I find it pretty shallow as well. People compare it to the Twilight Zone all
the time and I really can't see it. Black Mirror isn't really as deep and it
deals with the issues it tries to examine pretty poorly.

~~~
tunap
I had no idea downvotes were used for blocking negative reviews of our fav
shows. Have an up.

BTW, never seen he show, came here to get some edification. What I got is more
one-sided equality for all who agree and a lot of people who see the future
b/c the media told them which portents are truer than others.

~~~
bcassedy
What? The criticisms that are getting downvoted are pure assertions with no
reasoning to back them up. I'm pretty sure that if these posters had provided
more than 1 line proclaiming their distaste, they wouldn't be receiving
downvotes.

~~~
tunap
run4yourlives2 posted 3 lines of his take on seeing the show. Preceeded by an
agreement to the OP. Looks like he is indeed a part of the discussion, albeit
an unpopular _opinion_.

edit: he or she.

edit 2: manfromuranus's(lulz) opinion provoked posts of disagreement and what
alternatives are available. Again, a meaningful discussion with substance.

~~~
bcassedy
run4yourlives2 posted an unpopular, unsupported opinion yes. Half of one
sentence dedicated to that opinion and the rest about another subject.
Completely understandable why that would get downvotes.

manfromuranus provoking meaningful discussion does not make that post worthy.
If I post trolling nonsense and someone calls me out with an informative post,
I somehow don't deserve downvotes? That's some ends justify the means logic
there.

~~~
tunap
I concede that is your opinion for R4YL2's post though still disagree to it's
worth, the other subject was a comparison to Black Mirror content & execution;
guess that is why there is no sole arbiter of value here.

As for MFU's post, yeah, I cannot defend it in itself. It is solely his
opinion that was not supported in any meaningful way.

------
twism
more like idiocracy

