Worried about the future of technology? For years, Charlie Brooker’s sci-fi show Black Mirror has given us a taste of what might be in store for us.
Since its release in 2011, this dystopian series has shaped our imagination about the not-so-near future. From virtual reality that gets a little bit too real to the horror of artificial intelligence, memory implants, and spending life after death living in a simulation, Black Mirror is often eerily realistic. More than a decade after its first season, the show is more relevant than ever.
In this blog post, I’m looking at Black Mirror’s “Nosedive” episode, which makes us confront the power of social media and the risks of (social) credit systems.
Is Black Mirror Becoming a Reality?
In 2022, a new season of Black Mirror was announced. Widely considered one of the best Netflix shows, I can’t wait to see what the creators do next!
The world we live in today is already vastly different from the early 2010s when Black Mirror first came out. Most of us interact with tech on a daily basis, and not only when it comes to our smartphones. We install security systems in our houses, can have conversations with our speakers, and track our fitness goals with our watches.
Everything is touched by tech—in fact, our very own identities are shaped by the digital world. Thanks to social media, the distinction between the real world and the internet is becoming less clearly defined.
Do we really want to live in a future where technology dictates everything? Though we might feel like it could improve our lives, “Nosedive” shows how quickly things can turn around.
The rise of social media
Do you remember a time before social media? I think I got my first smartphone when I was about sixteen years old. Facebook was the social platform of the moment, though Twitter and Instagram were quickly climbing the ranks.
In a way, I think I managed to escape the worst of it. All my younger cousins have been growing up online. They don’t really remember a time without social networks. Privacy is a foreign concept to them.
Though I still use social media every day, I have also developed a growing aversion to it. Going back and forth between horrifying news stories and people’s personal highlights is disorienting and alienating. A lot has been written about the negative effects of social media. Yet there’s still this sense that if you’re not on social media, you’re missing out.
On top of that, there’s the strange artificial ladder of social media. You might unexpectedly go viral, but the cliffs are steep – one misstep, and you can plummet all the way to the bottom again. For some reason, we’ve all accepted this as normal. After all, it’s only online, right?
What if it wasn’t? What if the conditions of your life depended entirely on how others viewed you? This is the premise of Black Mirror’s “Nosedive.”
Black Mirror: Nosedive – Season 3, Episode 1
“Nosedive” is the first episode of the third season of Black Mirror. It was written by Rashida Jones and Michael Schur and directed by Joe Wright. The episode was released on 21 October 2016.
SPOILERS:
What follows has spoilers for the entire episode.
Black Mirror’s “Nosedive” is set in a world where people can rate each and every interaction they have with someone on a scale from one to five stars. A nice talk with a barista? Five stars. Someone cutting you off in traffic? Two stars.
You can amp up your ratings by posting perfect photos and status updates on social media, but you lose points for social missteps. Based on these ratings, a personal credit score is generated, indicative of someone’s socioeconomic status. The lower your score, the fewer opportunities you get.
We follow Lacie Pound, whose social credit score is at 4.2 at the beginning of the episode. Having her eye on a luxurious apartment, Lacie seeks to raise this score to a 4.5, or she won’t be qualified to live in the complex. Despite Lacie’s best efforts to climb the social ranks, her score begins to plummet when negative interactions start to pile up in the run-up to the wedding of an old friend.
The harder Lacie tries, the worse things get—until eventually, Lacie’s carefully crafted persona falls entirely to pieces.
A Perfect Track Record: Social Media, Ratings, and Credit Scores
With the rise of social media, our online presence has become a very important part of our identity. In many ways, we equate our success on social media to how well we’re doing in real life, despite the fact that social media is a type of collective delusion.
Central to “Nosedive” is the way we tend to present the most perfect versions of ourselves on social media. While the social credit system in the Black Mirror episode may be more advanced than a Facebook or Instagram feed, we use social media in much the same way.
We’re all very concerned with social capital, how many likes we get, and how many followers we have. According to CBC News, 86% of young Americans claim that they’d like to become an influencer on social media. It seems we’re either blind to the harm of these platforms or simply unwilling (or unable) to quit our social media addictions.
On top of that, we live in a society where rating other people has become a part of our everyday lives. We might not realize it, but as customers, we rate people in the service industry on a daily basis. From Uber drivers to restaurant waiters, a customer can seriously impact a worker’s life simply by clicking a star rating on a certain app.
Finally, our financial credit scores determine where we’re allowed to live, how we can insure ourselves, and much more.
Black Mirror’s “Nosedive” shows us what could happen if we were to merge each of these factors.
Science Fact or Science Fiction: How Real is Black Mirror’s Nosedive?
There are a couple of key topics that “Nosedive” explores. As always, I use a Science Fact to Science Fiction scale to check whether we’re living in a Black Mirror future already. Here’s what I’m looking at today:
- Social media
- Ratings in the gig economy
- Financial credit scores
- Social Credit System (China)
Our Entire Lives Online: Living on Social Media
When it comes to social media, sometimes I wonder: what am I even getting out of this? Sure, it’s fun to see what friends and family are up to. But why am I scrolling mindlessly through ten-second videos created by people I don’t even know? Why do I keep coming back?
About a month ago, I set a time limit on a couple of social media apps to see if I could limit my screen time. Two things happened.
One, I realized that fifteen minutes on Instagram were over in a blink. Two, once I had reached my limit, I would simply satisfy my need to scroll with a different app—any app. Goodreads, Letterboxd, my local supermarket’s recipe app, it didn’t matter as long as I had something to scroll through.
Why are we living like this?
A new kind of intimacy
Social media has brought us closer together, hasn’t it? Almost all social networks have a design that focuses on connecting people, whether through photos, texts, or shared interests. At the height of COVID-19 isolation, according to Statista, social media use increased since people were desperate for connection.
We are convinced that social media helps us feel less alone—or at least makes us think we’re less alone. Because ultimately, social media is all about individualism. Research shows that nearly 80% of all social media posts are self-presentation: positioning yourself exactly how you want others to see you.
And if we get it right — that is, if we show ourselves in a way that gets us likes and followers — our social currency goes up. Increasingly, social media is designed in a way to stimulate this exact process.
The power of the algorithm
Social media’s main focus is to be exciting and unpredictable, to serve us small bits of information, and to have clear reward cues. Each of these factors stimulates dopamine, a chemical in our brain that creates want and desire. On top of that, social media gives us little boosts of oxytocin, hormonal spikes that make us feel good.
The reason that social media is so addictive is because it uses algorithms in a way that makes us most likely to stay engaged. The more a social network knows about you, the more they’ll be able to tweak your feed to your own preferences, often without your knowledge or awareness. TikTok’s infinite For You page is a clear example.
We end up craving social media so much that it’s actually harmful.
The Black Mirror future: Harm of social media
Black Mirror’s “Nosedive” shows how far-reaching our obsession with social media and status can go.
Our desire for connection through social networks has an overall negative effect. As Maria Konnikova, writing for The New Yorker, already put it in 2013: “We want to learn about other people and have others learn about us—but through that very learning process, we may start to resent both others’ lives and the image of ourselves that we feel we need to continuously maintain.”
Ten years later, Scientific American reports that social media, indeed, has only been making us unhappier. Insomnia, lower life satisfaction, and damaged self-esteem are just a few of the negative consequences.
For young people who have grown up with social media as a permanent presence in their lives, the effects are even worse. Cyberbullying is common. On top of that, social media have made teens more vulnerable to cybercrime and online sexual predators.
Big tech companies don’t seem to care much. In the leaked Facebook Papers, whistle-blower Frances Haugen showed how Meta deliberately exploits young girls’ mental health for the sake of corporate power and making a profit.
Ruining Your Uber Driver’s Life With a Click
In the gig economy, rating other people for their labor has become common practice. Unsatisfied with your Uber driver? Just give them a low rating. Ordered something on Etsy, but it arrived a day too late? One star.
At first glance, this may seem a harmless practice. As a customer, you pay for a service, and depending on how good that service is, you rate the person who performed it. But as “Nosedive” shows, lower ratings can be arbitrary. You might be in a bad mood when you rate a delivery rider. Maybe something happened outside of their control that you don’t know about, and now they’re punished for it.
What’s worse is that social ratings in the gig economy can actually have serious consequences on workers’ lives.
For people working in food delivery, a higher rating means more orders. This drives up inequality between workers. This is then exacerbated by a need for even more approval in order to keep up the flow. Uber drivers with a higher rating will be able to offer their customers more perks—free water and snacks in the car—while lower-rated drivers won’t be making enough money to do the same.
Moreover, it creates a constant state of terror that a minor slip-up will lead to a loss of customers. Of course, this financial instability, as a result of a seemingly harmless rating system, in turn, affects all sorts of other aspects of the worker’s life.
What Can You Afford: Credit Scores and Inequality
Black Mirror’s “Nosedive” focuses on the premise that your socioeconomic status should determine how you’re allowed to live and what benefits and opportunities are offered to you.
In the United States, your credit score is one of the most important numbers in your life. It will determine the interest rate you might get on a loan or a mortgage and more. Landlords can deny you housing based on your score, phone companies decide if they will give you a new contract, and employers often run a credit score check on new employees.
Once your credit score falls below a certain number, it’s almost impossible to bring it up. How can you get a high score if no one is willing to extend you credit? The system is meant to be unbiased, but in reality, there are huge racial divides, as well as discrimination on the basis of sex, marital status, and religion.
In “Nosedive,” the system works in more obvious ways than in reality. However, this doesn’t mean that the U.S. credit score system doesn’t operate on a similar basis. Once you lose your job, credit score checks can make it more difficult for you to find a new one. If you struggle to pay the bills, a low credit score will make it more difficult to get help, and you’ll end up in an increasingly worse position.
It’s a kind of system that will only become worse over time.
Real-Life Black Mirror? The Social Credit System in China
Since the release of Black Mirror’s “Nosedive,” many comparisons have been made between the episode and China’s social credit system (SCS).
Chinese authorities exercise a high degree of censorship and control over the internet and over social media. At the moment, the government is experimenting with different types of monitoring systems. Contrary to popular belief, though, there is no centralized system, and the fragmented programs mainly focus on businesses rather than individual citizens.
In reality, the SCS is an extension of the financial credit system that already existed in China, which was actually modeled after the United States. There has been a lot of misreporting on the issue, as well as sensationalism surrounding it.
From 2017 onward, different cities have implemented various trials. As of 2022, local governments have initiated over 62 pilot schemes. These pilot programs have different systems in place, some meant for businesses, others for individuals. It is mainly a financial risk assessment tool, not an Orwellian surveillance nightmare carried out by A.I. tech.
The highest controversy has been about a type of Civility Code introduced by Chinese authorities in Suzhou in 2020. The program received criticism for increased monitoring of residents’ lives as part of the trial. In response, the program was made voluntary, meant to be an incentive for people to receive rewards rather than surveil their every move.
Looking at the different pilot programs, punishments for a low credit score may include exclusion from private schools, high-prestige work, and registration on a public blacklist. Rewards include discounts on energy bills, being able to rent bikes, and better interest rates at banks.
In a way, while perhaps a bit more advanced, the system isn’t so different from the financial credit system in the United States. In 2022, Diana Fu and Rui Hou actually noted that comparisons to “Nosedive” have helped the persistence of misconceptions, as has Donald Trump’s anti-China campaign.
This is not to say that the system isn’t flawed. Governments and companies are harvesting data in ways that seriously violate privacy, people’s socioeconomic ranking excludes them from certain opportunities in society, and credit systems keep people trapped in inequality.
However, the system in China is not actually the Black Mirror reality that it’s often painted as.
So, What’s The Verdict?
Black Mirror’s “Nosedive” is one of the more realistic Black Mirror episodes that exist. While no exact copy of the system exists anywhere, elements of it are very real for most of us.
Social media shapes the world we live in. It’s very tempting to portray the best version of ourselves online, and the number of likes and followers can have a very big impact on our lives. On top of that, due to the gig economy, we rate each other for all kinds of things. The power dynamics between customers and workers create a lot of inequality.
Finally, credit systems certainly affect our position in society and what is and isn’t available to us. In the United States, credit scores amplify inequality, also because they carry a high discriminatory bias. In China, a social credit system has been on trial for a few years now. While often misrepresented in media, it does pave the way for a more invasive surveillance society.
What’s your favorite Black Mirror episode? Leave a comment down below, and maybe your episode will be up next!
