Black Mirror's Charlie Brooker on the problem with tech - and people

0:00Peter Kafka:This episode is brought to you by PayPal. You know how a mom's bag has everything? Sunscreen? Snacks? A stapler? The new PayPal app is like that, but for your money. Shop, pay, manage your account, and earn rewards all in one place. And with purchase protection on eligible items, biometric security, and pass keys, you're protected at every step. Download the new PayPal app to get started. See paypal.com slash protection terms. Brussels clean up nicely at Sweetgreen. Maple glazed, roasted, and edges perfectly caramelized. Sweetgreen's fall harvest is back on the menu, and the season's most overlooked little green vegetable is dressed to be devoured.

0:44Peter Kafka:You know what to do. Order on the Sweetgreen app.

0:54Peter Kafka:From the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is Channels with Peter Kafka. That is me. I'm also the chief correspondent at Business Insider. And today, I'm on vacation. Maybe you are too. But I still wanted to give you some content, so today we are going vintage with the help of Black Mirror creator Charlie Brooker. I talked to Charlie Brooker a couple years ago when Netflix was streaming the sixth season of Black Mirror, which was excellent. The show is now on its seventh season, and it is also excellent. And I think this conversation about the way Brooker sees tech and why so many of the dystopian visions he creates on his show seem to be embraced as utopian visions by tech moguls remains as sadly relevant as ever.

1:38Peter Kafka:And also, Charlie Brooker is smart and charming in English, so you're going to like this one. I guarantee it or your money back. Okay, here's me and Charlie Brooker. I'm talking with Charlie Brooker, the creator of Black Mirror. It is one of the all-time great shows. I'm delighted to talk to him. Welcome, Charlie. Hello. Nice to be here. I appreciate it. The newest season of Black Mirror debuted a couple months ago. I'm sure you are exhausted talking about it, but I want to use it as a jumping off point for our discussion. If you've watched any of the new season of Black Mirror, you realize that it's different from other seasons.

2:14Peter Kafka:Many of the episodes are less explicitly about technology and its perils or promise. Is that because you're sick of talking about tech? No, I think, I mean, to be honest, so the season, the order of episodes that this season six appears on Netflix is the reverse order to the order they were written in. And it started out, to be frank, it started out, I was doing, I was almost doing a different season. I wanted to take a bit of a break from doing stuff about just technology because I kind of felt like I was boxing myself in a little. And so there was a deliberate move to set some episodes in the past and do some sort of horror stories and to put out a season called Red Mirror and do it that way, like do a sort of sister reboot in a way.

3:08Then, as is always the case, I think, when you're doing any kind of creative endeavor, as soon as you like cut yourself off from doing something, you're then like slightly pining to do it immediately. So actually, I sort of reverted back to Black Mirror. And you can see that throughout. If you look at the episodes in reverse order, they get steadily more and more Black Mirror as they go. So by the time Joan is awful, it's the first episode in order, but the last one to be made.

3:36Peter Kafka:There's going to be a test on this afterwards. Sorry, yeah, this is very, I made this unnecessarily convoluted. That was the most Black Mirror-y of them all. But I think what it was, was at the time when I started doing that particular season, I was aware that... I was aware, obviously, that Black Mirror had become kind of synonymous for sort of tech dystopia and things of that nature. And I was getting people saying to me, I bet you're going to do... What? Are you going to do an episode about NFTs and the blockchain and stuff like that? And I just think, oh, that's so depressing. because that was never what the purpose of the show was way back when, when it first started.

4:18The idea was not to be, let's satirise the tech pages. You know, it was much more, I want to do this show that's unlike any other show on television and I want to do something that speaks about now or satirises the media and the culture and our society, but is not necessarily, you know, I wasn't thinking, but it's all about technology. So I was slightly, and I was aware that I felt like I trod familiar territory quite a few times in Black Mirror. So I wanted to really shake things up. Also back then, that was in the midst of the pandemic, in the grip of the pandemic. And really it kind of felt at the time, like a lot of the tech was plateauing a bit.

5:04Hence people saying to me, are you going to do an episode about NF? There wasn't that much. It didn't feel like there was that much disruption going on so much as we were stretching for something new. Stretching desperate for anything new. We'd have loved it. But we were sort of the newest thing was using Zoom, like everything happening on Zoom was basically it. And so it was also so it kind of felt like things had slightly plateaued at the time. Of course, then as you start emerging from it, now we're at a point like where everyone's talking about AI. everyone's talking about Elon Musk, everyone's talking about, there's all of, a lot of those things are, are now heating up again.

5:39So I kind of feel like I got that out of my system. If you see, if you said, I mean, what it meant was I put several, several classic Black Mirror ideas on the back, back burner a little.

5:48Peter Kafka:How do you feel about the fact that people use Black Mirror as shorthand for tech dystopia? I was looking, I was like, I do that all the time. I did it in print in June when, when Apple rolled out its Apple Vision Pro goggles and it had that video of the mom wearing the headset and her daughter's trying to talk to her and it seems terrible, but Apple thinks this is great. What do you think of the idea that I see that and go, oh, that's Black Mirror and everyone else, lots of other people do as well? I mean, I kind of love it, actually. Like I say, as soon as I sort of restricted myself from doing something, I was pining for it and came back to it.

6:22And so doing an episode like Joan is Awful, which is like a sort of AI-generated show is at the heart of that, that yields so deliciously Black Mirror to me. I kind of love that stuff. I mean, I say I love it. I'm delighted, obviously, that it's become shorthand, because on the one hand, that's kind of free publicity for the show, frankly. But equally, it's often depressing on a human level that that's the stuff we're looking at and confronted by a lot of the time. And it's interesting because it's not just, it's not always people, and this was a thing I was kind of leaning into, I guess, this season.

7:03It's not always about technology. When people say that, sometimes they're talking about just a, I don't know if I can use, I'm not, I will use clean language. No, no, curse it up. Oh, okay. A show for adults. A fucked up situation. Basically, people will often sort of use it for, sure, and for a fucked up situation. If you look at our first ever episode with the prime minister and the pig, that's the very definition of a sort of fucked up situation. And so Black Mirror simultaneously, to me, seems to stand in for that, that kind of situation. And also, yes, as you say, if Apple launched their vision, stupid or whatever they are,$500 ,000 flipping icon goggles.

7:43Peter Kafka:What do you make of the fact that you've been making this show for more than a decade? And it's very popular. So, you know, clearly people in Silicon Valley have seen it. And you're saying this vision of the future that I have is bad. This is this is not good. And then they come out and say, we think this is great. We're going to productize this, whether it's VR goggles or AI generated people or whatever it is. And you've been saying, no, this is explicitly bad. And they go, this is great. We're going to sell it. What do you make of that disconnect? I would say, so one thing I would say there is that I don't know that, okay, sometimes clearly in the show, I'm highlighting something and saying this is bad.

8:27Usually, however, the technology isn't actually the villain. We've done an episode, definitely, we did an episode with like autonomous robot killer dogs going around killing people. Positive. Not really a positive read on that, but they were still presumably created by a human in that story. We just don't say. Most of the time, when an episode is what I would class as classically Black Mirror, you've got something that's actually quite miraculous that you can immediately see as a viewer. You can see the desirability of it. You can see why it would be useful. You can see why it would be transformative and in many ways, extremely positive.

9:04And it's usually the human beings, the messy human beings who are using this stuff in the story who managed to balls things up. And I guess that reflects how I feel about a lot of things, because in real life, I'm pretty geeky and techie. I used to be a video games journalist way back yonder in the 90s. And I kind of love all this stuff. I love technology. I love computers. But I'm also a natural worrier. I'm somebody who catastrophizes at the drop of a hat. It may come as no surprise to anyone who's watched the show to realize that. And so I'm often worried about, you know, the power we suddenly at some new development or gizmo will give us, the power and the responsibility that comes with that and how easy it is to misuse that or just unintended consequences or obvious clumsy consequences.

9:56And we see that time and time again with things. But usually all technologies give with one hand and I was going to say take away, sort of slap us around the back of the head with the other. But that's been the case with every, I mean, the printing press, you know, it's like, it's been the case with everything. It's like, you, I wouldn't want to put this stuff. I wouldn't want to delete this stuff from existence necessarily.

10:17Peter Kafka:We were talking before we started taping about, you know, you started the show. This show started airing in the UK in 2011. And I'm remembering, I'm thinking a lot about what that was like back then, how we viewed tech back then. And generally, especially in the tech press, but broadly, you know, we were excited about consumer technology. There was an iPhone or Facebook or Twitter. There were serious people saying that social media could bring democracy to the Middle East, etc. Enormously optimistic about it. Things have swung back dramatically in the opposite direction. Do you think that was always inevitable that we would go from tech is great to tech brings on catastrophe?

10:56Peter Kafka:Or do you think there was another way to have gone about this? I mean, whether it was inevitable that we went from... It's certainly that we were clearly looking at it through extremely rose-tinted goggles at the time. And you're absolutely right. I remember that was the thing in a way I was tapping into in my head in some... It's certainly in some of those early episodes, it launched against the backdrop for me. I would watch adverts. there would be adverts for like most Apple adverts looked to me like, have you seen Soylent Green? Of course. So you know there's a scene, is it, who is it? Is it Ernest Borgnine?

11:37Who plays the old guy? Or is it Burgess Meredith? I think it's Ernest Borgnine plays the old guy.

11:42Peter Kafka:All I remember is Charlton Heston at the end, Frank. Right. Well, of course. Well, we all remember the punchline, but there's a bit where somebody is euthanized, an old guy is euthanized, and he's taken into a sort of euthanasia clinic and shown the last thing he's shown is images of the natural world which has now been destroyed and it sort of moves him to tears and then he's like killed and turned into food basically um which someone which someone in silicon valley thought would be a good brand right oh yes exactly yes which is amazing yes so i mean well there you go i mean that i mean that's the ultimate but sort of example that, but that's the imagery there, the sort of pleasant imagery that this guy was shown against this extremely dystopian black backdrop.

12:27That was the sense I was always getting from sort of Apple ads at the time was they just seem to be showing everybody having fun and dancing and smiling. And you just think, well, hang on a minute. Things usually aren't this positive. And if we suddenly have extremely powerful tools at our disposal, we will do incredible things. we will also make incredible fuck-ups. So that seemed to me a well-founded concern I had that I felt wasn't reflected. The time wasn't being reflected necessarily. And I remember the Arab Spring. I was doing it. My background in the UK is in comedy and stuff like that.

13:04So I was doing stuff for a topical comedy show at the time. And I remember the positivity around the Arab Spring and people feeling that Twitter was bringing, exactly as you say, democracy to the Middle East. and now that all seems extremely naive. I think it was always inevitable that we were going to cock things up a bit. You know, we all have also, I wouldn't want to be just completely cynical. I do always, the analogy I always use is that, especially something like social media or a lot of this stuff, it's like we've suddenly grown an extra limb, you know, which is amazing because it means you could juggle and scroll through your iPhone at the same time.

13:42But it also means that we're not really sure how to control it yet and we're clumsy. You know, we're not knocking things over all the time. We're still grappling with sort of butterfly effect consequences of this stuff all the time. So the problem is it probably wasn't inevitable, but I think a lot of it was probably hard to foresee, do you know what I mean, without necessarily putting things completely back in the box and being a total Luddite. I do get frustrated sometimes when sometimes people sometimes characterize the show as, you know, the tech is bad show sort of thing. And I think sometimes I react to that probably too much.

14:16There's probably something I was doing this season. There was a deliberate sort of like, I'm not going to do that for a while. But I don't know. I'm trying to think what we could do. What could we have done between 2011 and now to mitigate against things? Well, I guess we could have all been a bit more suspicious.

14:35Peter Kafka:We should have all been more paranoid. I don't know how we could have. I mean, you know, so much of the backlash was so directly tied to Donald Trump's election. And I believe our desire to pin that on something and someone other than ourselves and our citizens who said, I want to vote for Donald Trump. So lots of us wanted to blame Mark Zuckerberg or Facebook. Some of us wanted to blame Fox News and they all have some responsibility. With Brexit here, there was a definite desire to pin it on Cambridge Analytica and pin it on that this is a sort of psyops campaign that people have somehow been magically persuaded by machines to think like this.

15:15But I kind of, I mean, essentially, things like Brexit, well, actually, Brexit was something I didn't see coming. I just didn't, I didn't see that coming. Donald Trump, I felt like I saw that coming. Like, he seemed obvious to me really early on that he was going to win. But I was there was something clear as day to me. I don't I just thought, well, of course he will. He's like, of course he will. He's he's a celebrity who's interesting and is pissing people off. And is is is of course there's a huge number of people are going to vote for him.

15:46Peter Kafka:Yeah. In retrospect, it seems like an obvious culmination in things. I know you get this question all the time. But when you have Donald Trump's in the world, when you have Elon Musk's in the world, these crazy outsides. people who are characters you know what does that do for you as a creator do you do you think i i can't touch this stuff there's literally nothing else you could say these things are beyond parody or do you go this is this is something i really want to mine or none of the above i don't know i mean so it's interesting because with say trump and there's a lot of parallels between trump and boris johnson here in the uk um it's just messed with my head boris Johnson by buying a giant mansion in this tiny village that I grew up in, by the way.

16:31Now he's a notable resident on the Wikipedia page, really messing with me. But we kind of covered that there was something that I didn't, I didn't feel I got the script right. There's an episode of Black Mirror called the Waldo moment in, in 2013 where I was trying to get at something that was very much, I was looking at Boris Johnson, who was mayor of London and was a TV personality. Like he'd been on comedy, satirical, he'd been a guest on comedy shows and things like this. And he was widely regarded as a sort of bumbly, like Paddington Bear, like a sort of prototype Paddington that's posh and slept outdoors in a field for a couple of days.

17:19But I was slightly fascinated by the fact that he seemed bulletproof in terms of the fact that he fucked up and was bumbling and kept... Was built into the character. Was built into the character and was a definite plus. And that he appealed to people on the basis of him being a sort of disruptive personality because there was a widespread sense that all politicians were these bland cookie cutter. I guess in the UK were kind of echoing Blair, basically. But they all seemed a bit like they could have been from The Sims or something. Do you know what I mean? They all seemed like a bland neighbor in bad dramas.

18:03Peter Kafka:Yeah, I think of them in the US as news anchors, news presenters, you would call them there. Yeah. And kind of, and daytime news, like doing a sort of like coffee morning type show. So he was so clearly a different flavor. He was unique. And so, and there was something about the thought that a lot of people would find that attractive. And it was obvious why they would find that attractive because all the politicians they had weren't really speaking to them and didn't appear to be representing them. and that there was something very, I found very frightening about that situation that hopefully we covered in that episode.

18:42And I think, like I say, at the time, I felt like I didn't get the script right. I didn't get the stakes in the story right. And I could have written it a lot better. That actually should have been a miniseries, weirdly, that particular episode, I think. But it looked more prescient come 2016, come Trump getting elected or Boris getting elected. It looked, it suddenly seemed quite prescient. And I think now it is difficult because in a way, the new cliche is for the sort of like a tech bro boss to be an Elon Musk type person who, you know, probably rides into the office on a little e-scooter and, you know, with tattoos on his face and pissing in the corner and like crazy.

19:22Peter Kafka:Yeah. Elon Musk posted a photo of himself with a T-shirt yesterday. And the joke is if the T-shirt, the way he's got his jacket over, it says, I love anal. right that's the joke he put that up and he's you know one of the richest men in the world i mean maybe he does i i don't i don't i don't judge that i just the idea that like it seems beyond like he's and he wants to be funny right but he's so he's beyond really wants to be funny that's the boris johnson held his own actually on sort of comment like it was a it was a on comedy panel shows people clearly warmed to him because they thought he was a but he came across a bumbling eye.

19:58Trump is sort of, I guess, inadvertently funny, but also more terrifying. Elon Musk is trying very hard to be funny a lot of the time, isn't he? As far as I can tell.

20:08Peter Kafka:As a professional funny person, when you see that, what's your reaction? It's just not very good. It's like, it's a bit Rupert Pupkin, isn't it? In one respect. It's weird, isn't it? Because if he was genuinely very funny, I'm just querying myself here if he was genuinely very funny would I like him there's something I think I don't know I don't I don't know I always used to say I don't think right wingers are funny except for oh no it's not true that right wingers aren't funny have you ever seen that picture of Mussolini hanging from the lamppost that's fucking hilarious but Trump actually has some he's not a comedian but he's got some of that performer in him.

20:56Peter Kafka:He's definitely a consummate performer. Yeah, he's a consummate performer. Do you get feedback from Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg or Tim Cook or their underlings? Do they reach out to you with fan mail? Do they reach out to you and say, hey, don't make fun of me? No, I haven't heard from any of these people actually that I'm aware of. I occasionally get asked to do like events or something like that. I'm trying to think. But no, no, I'm not. No. We'll be right back with more Charlie Brooker, but first, a word from a sponsor.

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22:34Peter Kafka:This episode is brought to you by PayPal. You know how a mom's bag has everything? Sunscreen. Snacks. A stapler? The new PayPal app is like that, but for your money. Shop, pay, manage your account, and earn rewards all in one place. And with purchase protection on eligible items, biometric security, and pass keys, you're protected at every step. Download the new PayPal app to get started. See paypal.com slash protection terms. Brussels clean up nicely at Sweetgreen. Maple glazed, roasted, and edges perfectly caramelized. Sweetgreen's fall harvest is back on the menu. and the season's most overlooked little green vegetable is dressed to be devoured.

23:17Peter Kafka:You know what to do. Order on the Sweet Green app.