As if the nightly news and our daily social media feeds weren’t dystopian enough, this week Netflix will unleash a seventh series of Charlie Brooker’s future-shock anthology series Black Mirror.
Buckle up for further tales of virtual reality gone wrong and seemingly benign technology revealed to have a demonic flip-side. In Brooker’s parallel universe, anything from a vintage ZX Spectrum computer to a bang-up-to-date smartphone could contain the seeds of your destruction – or, at least, your severe embarrassment and long-term trauma.
But while Black Mirror has a justifiable reputation for focusing on the negative aspects of tech, there is more to it than gadget-fuelled horror. “I sometimes get a bit frustrated when people describe the show as being a warning about technology,” Brooker said in 2023.
“Okay, we did an episode with a load of killer robot dogs – maybe that wasn’t focusing on the upside of technology. But generally, in the stories, it’s a weak human who messes things up rather than that there’s an inherently evil device being used.”
Still, there is no question that Black Mirror has had crystal ball-like powers since its very first episode on Channel 4 in 2011. It has predicted the future in all sorts of ways – and not only in terms of terrifying tech.
Here are seven times Black Mirror gave us a sneak peek of things to come:
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Nosedive, series three
Bryce Dallas Howard as Lacie (Photo: David Dettmann/Netflix)
In the 2016 series opener, Bryce Dallas Howard’s Lacie sees her world fall apart after a series of unfortunate events send her social rating status plummeting. In this vision of the near future, everyone has eye implants through which they can rate their social interactions with other individuals – and when Lacie’s “score” falls below one, she ends up in prison.
A real-world equivalent of that system has been rolled out across China, where more than seven million people have received a tick next to their name for misdemeanours such as tax evasion. Blacklisted individuals can be deprived of the right to purchase plane or train tickets. It is worth noting, however, that this system hasn’t been rolled out nationwide and is instead operated on an individual basis by local administrations.
PM meets pig
The National Anthem, series one
Donald Sumpter as Julian Hereford, Rory Kinnear as Michael Callow, Lindsay Duncan as Alex Cairnes and Tom Goodman-Hill as Tom Bilce (Photo: Ed Miller/Channel 4)
In the very first episode of Black Mirror, kidnappers threaten to kill a member of the British royal family unless the Prime Minister (Rory Kinnear) does something rude with a pig on national TV.
This was seen merely as an example of Brooker’s dark and twisted imagination at the time. But in 2015 came “piggate”, in which an unauthorised biography of then-PM David Cameron claimed that, as a student, the future leader of the United Kingdom had placed a “private part of his anatomy” into a dead pig’s head as part of a university initiation rite.
Brooker was as shocked as anyone, saying the parallels between his story and the allegations in Call Me Dave were “a complete coincidence, albeit a quite bizarre one.”
Cycling as a currency
Fifteen Million Merits, series one
Daniel Kaluuya as Bing and Jessica Brown as Abi (Photo: Giles Keytes/Channel 4)
In this series one episode, people ride stationary bikes to gain a currency called “merits”. Flash forward to 2025, and commuters at Paris’s Gare Du Nord have the option to charge their phones by riding stationary bikes.
Coldplay has rolled out similar technology at their concerts, where fans can help generate energy to power the performance via “energy-storing stationary bikes.”
Communicate with loved ones from beyond the grave
Be Right Back, series two
Hayley Atwell as Martha Powell (Photo: Channel 4)
Be Right Back – one of Black Mirror’s creepiest episodes – is about a woman who resurrects her dead boyfriend via a robot that reproduces his personality based on social media posts and online communications.
In 2022, Amazon announced an experimental feature on its Alexa speakers that would allow the AI assistant to mimic the voices of users’ dead relatives. The company said that adding “human attributes” to its AI systems was increasingly important “in these times of the ongoing pandemic”. It noted, “While AI can’t eliminate that pain of loss, it can definitely make their memories last.” How utterly terrifying.
A joke politician takes over the world
The Waldo Moment, series two
Chloe Pirrie as Gwendolyn, Louis Waymouth as Simon Finch, Tobias Menzies as Liam Monroe, Daniel Rigby as Jamie and Christina Chong as Tamsin (Photo: Hal Shinnie/Channel 4)
In The Waldo Moment, a computer-animated bear becomes a successful politician after spouting the sort of prejudicial nonsense no respectable leader would dare utter. Or so we thought.
Within just a few years, comparisons were being drawn between Waldo and another gibberish-emitting figure, Donald Trump (though Brooker would reveal that future British Prime Minister Boris Johnson partly inspired the clownish caricature).
Deep fakes of real actors
Joan Is Awful, series six
Annie Murphy as Joan (Photo: Nick Wall/Netflix)
Schitt’s Creek‘s Annie Murphy plays the eponymous Joan, a woman who is horrified to discover that Streamberry (Black Mirror’s version of Netflix) has been using her AI likeness in its TV shows.
The episode foreshadowed that year’s Hollywood actor’s strike, which was partly sparked by fears of studios using actors’ images without their permission. However, as with the Prime Minister and the pig, Brooker says any link between Joan is Awful, and the AI controversy that contributed to the Hollywood work stoppage was purely coincidental.
Robot bees
Hated in the Nation, series three
Faye Marsay as Blue Coulson, Jonas Karlsson as Rasmus Sjoberg, Esther Hall as Vanessa Dahl and Kelly Macdonald as Karin Parke (Photo: Laurie Sparham/Netflix)
The twist at the end of this thriller is that the hidden villain whose crimes we’ve been tracking is (spoiler alert) a swarm of artificial bees.
In the real world, there is little imminent danger of robot bees bumping you off when you least suspect. However, researchers at the Massachusetts Institution of Technology have created tiny flying robots that mimic insects capable of pollinating flowers. So, the terrifying future of android bees, as sketched out by Black Mirror, is at least halfway towards coming true.