Subscribing to Living

[Episode Name: Common People
Series Name: Black Mirror (Season 7 Episode 1)
Available on: Netflix]

(Spoilers)

In the age of RAGING consumerism, when you see more advertisements than you see human faces, imagine what may happen if you find a way to feed ads to people directly through human interactions. This episode of the famous British anthology television series explores that scenario in the most terrifying way possible.

When Amanda, a teacher, is diagnosed with a brain tumor, her husband Mike is willing to make almost any sacrifice to bring her back to normal life. At this moment, a tech startup called ‘Rivermind’ offers a free surgery that will replace the damaged tissues in Amanda’s brain with synthetic tissues backed up by their servers. But there is a subscription cost of $300 every month and a lot of other constraints (for example, the geographical area is limited where this will work). Desperate, Mike signs up for it. Amanda recovers.

The horrors start some days after, when Amanda starts blurting out product advertisements in the middle of normal conversations (maintaining perfect contextuality), and, which is worse, she does not have any memory of them afterwards. After one incident, her career is nearly compromised. So they contact Rivermind immediately and to their horror, are told that the system has started rolling out ads. Now they have to pay even more each month to go ad-free. A human being, of flesh and bone, now has to pay charges so that she does not utter ads while conversing with others.

The episode goes on for several more minutes, and the subscription fees get worse until they are almost bankrupt. Mike starts performing for a trash streaming site to pay for the continuous upgrades that the company keeps asking for and thus loses his dignity in his workplace.

Here is my personal reflection of the episode. What terrified me in the concept is that what is presented as a dystopian image is now almost our reality. Everywhere we look, we see products, and someone is promoting them. The most popular form of entertainment right now, i.e., social media content, runs chiefly on promotions and advertisements. Not only that, owing to the ‘surveillance capitalism’, we see advertisements of the exact things that we need right at the moment, much like how Amanda blatantly promotes a coffee brand while having the usual conversation about coffee in the morning with her husband.

Also, the episode tells us the horror of trying to drag a life on synthetically when it was meant to be terminated, and how it invites all sorts of unnatural horror that human beings are not meant to suffer through.

The fact that this episode came out on Netflix is an irony in itself, because that streaming platform also indulges in the same kind of predatory behaviour (consider how their subscription fees increase and how they keep on introducing hidden constraints one after another). The episode lampoons the subscription culture that is in vogue for the last couple of years thanks to the tech giants like Amazon, Hotstar, Apple TV+ etc.

Lastly, the pressure of the increasing amount of subscription fees simply to keep a person alive invokes not only horror, but also kind of pity and terror– keeping faithful to the definition of tragedy, because we know that the threat is very much real and similar kinds of situations are not an improbable future anymore.

Us common people may very soon be paying subscription costs for having the ability to look and feel.

Personal rating : 4/5

Tags: Mohona Debroy, একাদশ বর্ষ প্রথম সংখ্যা, মোহনা দেবরায়