White Mirror

Imagine imagining good futures.

Black Mirror

I watched Black Mirror on Netflix years ago. Although it was a fun TV show with nice images, I disliked its vibe.

If you haven't watched it, its formula was fairly simple: imagine [Technology] existed (although don't imagine too hard), and [Bad trait of human nature] made about the worst of it.

It is social commentary through dystopian science fiction.

Inspiring art makes you want to be better and gives you the energy to do great things. Black Mirror is the opposite of that. It is largely hopeless.

The World, The System, Society, hates you. You can't change that. The best you can do is find your own private island in a sea of shit.

Technology always goes bad. It is never explained how it went bad, but it is implied that Capitalism caused it.

My reaction to this is, "Aaaaaaah, not again!".

"Everything sucks."

Cynicism is cheap. Complaining is much easier than pinpointing what is wrong, discussing, suggesting improvements, and tackling the problems.

More precisely, it is much easier to cope with complaining and doing nothing than acting.

This cope can take many forms. Such as convincing oneself that change is impossible, that it is cool to be cynical, that it is arrogant to try to affect change, that nothing but a Global Revolution counts, etc.

Still, this is too painful. This is just useless suffering. Doing things is hard enough; no need to add another layer of mental fuckery and global discouragement.

Also, on an artistic level, this is just too lazy. Don't artists get fed up? Don't they get fed up with writing the same noir cynical set-up where everything is shit because we are shit and Capitalism, and either you are a cool pariah who knows better than to try to change things or a young revolutionary who wants to overthrow everything?

White Mirror

I want White Mirror.

It's like Black Mirror, but with good ends instead. In each episode, a new piece of technology is developed. Through concerted efforts and facing various challenges discussed during the show, it ends up going well.

Or it could be like Black Mirror, but with good fights instead. In each episode, we get the standard set-up of Black Mirror when a piece of technology goes to shit. But then, people remember that they can do things! They organise, participate in political parties or social movements, build a political programme, lobby for it, elect representatives or insert themselves in structures that matter. It can fail, but at least there should be a nice fight.

Or, like Black Mirror, but technology is deployed incrementally. Why would we need to deploy every piece of technology everywhere all at once? How about not being maximalist and instead deploying it in a single state or for a limited duration? Then, pausing to reflect on what has happened? Checking if people struggle with the new tech, if we learned much from the experiment, and if we should start deploying it at bigger scales or restrict it more.

Sure, it might be hard in real life, but that's an affordance of fiction: depicting original things that are hard. That way, seeing how cool they are, people are then inspired to try them.

Conclusion

This is a more negative post than usual: I usually avoid negativity.

Still, I have a non-nil allowance, and I am using it to shit against cynicism. Cynicism sucks; I just want my White Mirror and inspiring art that has more depth than "Work More", "The Power of Friendship", "Let's Fuck Up Institutions Instead of Repairing Them", and "If Only Humanity Submitted to Mother Nature".

On this, cheers, and have a nice day!