“Joan is terrible,” the first episode of the new season of Black mirrorhave inspiration from Dropouts. Specifically, as the creator Charlie Brooker to WIRED This week, it was sparked by seeing loads of content around Elizabeth Holmes and the Theranos scandal—one book, one TV show, one movie, some 800 podcasts—and think about how strange people must have been to see Hollywood actors playing themselves. in events that “feel like they happened about 10 minutes ago.”
The content engine seems to be catching up to people’s real lives: The gap between a massive financial scandal and the inevitable publication of Michael Lewis’s book about it used to be years or months; now is the day. In the UK, Sky has produced a dramatization about the UK government’s handling of the pandemic while Covid-19 is still raging through communities. (Spoiler alert: They blow it.)
The logical conclusion of bridging the gap between inspiration and dramatization—through Black mirrorTwisted lens, worst-case scenario—is what viewers see in “Joan Is Awful”: personalized, artificial-intelligence-generated content using deep fakes of famous actors voice as a stuntman for ordinary people. Joan—a mid-level executive at a joint startup run by Schitt . Creek‘s Annie Murphy—come home from a rough day at the office and discover the events of that very day have been turned into a gripping TV show starring Salma Hayek as the title character . Things started to spiral from there—layer by layer, content always going downhill.
Society has been moving in this direction for many years. Social media algorithms start by showing people what their friends are sharing but quickly move on to prioritizing what they will interact with, whether that’s what they want. see or not. TikTok succeeds because users don’t curate their own feeds: Instead of what you think or pretend you care about, it shows you what you really love, tapping into your expectations. your most basic wants. (That’s why my feed is mostly Korean fried chicken recipes.)
This also explains why Twitter now defaults to the For You tab of algorithmically determined tweets from people you may or may not have chosen to follow. The CEO of Streamberry, the Netflix-like platform behind, said: “It is designed to plunge viewers into a state of mesmerizing horror. Joan is terribleat a time in Black mirror episode. “It’s great for engagement.” These rules apply whether you’re watching Netflix or tweeting about it.
Of course, “Joan Is Awful” (episode, not show within episode) extends this, but one of the supposed benefits of generalized AI is that it will allow for personalized, tailored content with our own personal taste: according to your own algorithm designed like hell, so well targeted you can’t take your eyes off.
But as a content producer (we’re no longer called editors and writers), I’m really interested in what that means for this type of article—content about content. . What happens to cultural commentary when people are consuming different things?
The irony is that while hyper-personalized content can be great for driving engagement on streaming platforms, it will be extremely bad for sites like this, which attract a amount from shared cultural moments: Game of Thrones, heir, Black mirror (hope).
Like a rotting whale carcass on the ocean floor, the landmark shows like Black mirror And heir full ecosystem support: We capture a portion of search interest in these topics, leveraging people who have just seen something and want to know what to think about it. This helps to explain the media feeding frenzy around heir the end and why I am writing this story about Black mirror although we did an interview with the creator Yesterday.
