Black Mir­ror is The Twi­light Zone for the mod­ern age, minus the reas­sur­ing pres­ence of Rod Ser­ling. Its main writer, Charlie Brooker, has spent a life­time bur­ied in social media, pop cul­ture and the worst advert­ising tat our gen­er­a­tion has been able to spew out into the world, so it’s not that sur­pris­ing that the stor­ies Black Mir­ror tells are a twis­ted, dis­turb­ing but pain­fully accur­ate reflec­tion of mod­ern times.

And one of the things it has a lot to say about is the way mar­ket­ing works now. If you work in mar­ket­ing then you’d be right to feel insul­ted by Black Mir­ror – it’s abund­antly clear from the six epis­odes that have been made so far that Charlie Brooker doesn’t like you one bit. How­ever, he’s also got a lot of use­ful things to say that could actu­ally help you under­stand your industry.

It’s not a mir­ror, it’s a lens

The name of the show, Black Mir­ror, refers to screens. It doesn’t mat­ter what the screens are. It could refer to your TV, your laptop mon­itor, your iPad, your phone, the screens show­ing adverts that you pass on the tube or the screen by your hos­pital bed play­ing a looped greet­ing by the health sec­ret­ary. To be a human in West­ern civil­isa­tion in the 21st cen­tury is to spend your life look­ing at a vari­ety of dif­fer­ently sized glow­ing rect­angles, as Charlie Brooker him­self has poin­ted out.

But in Black Mir­ror the screens don’t just reflect ourselves back at us. Instead the tech­no­logy is the way we see the world. In White Bear the crowds of spec­tator zom­bies view everything through the screen on their phone, a sight that you know not to be sci­ence fic­tion if you’ve been to a live gig recently. In The Waldo Moment the main char­ac­ter is bet­ter known as the blue, CGI bear he plays than he is as a per­son. In Fif­teen Mil­lion Mer­its the protagonist’s bed­room walls are simply huge screens, and he leaves that room to go and ride an exer­cise bike in front of other screens dur­ing the day – he’s more likely to see his friends’ car­toon­ish Wii Mii style avatars than the real people. As someone who has intro­duced myself to people at parties only to dis­cover I speak to them daily on Twit­ter, I can identify with that.

What does that teach us?

Basic­ally, we now live in the Mat­rix. From a busi­ness per­spect­ive the vir­tual world is now every bit as real to people as the phys­ical world. The lines are get­ting blur­rier all the time, with video­games build­ing eco­nom­ies that can match some coun­tries, and products like Google Glass aim­ing to bring aug­men­ted real­ity into the main­stream (which you can be sure mar­ket­ing will take advant­age of). Right now what this means is that your online pres­ence is very much how people see your com­pany, which means if you ruin your social media cam­paign, it’s going to hurt.

Your life exper­i­ences are now a commodity

Two of the Black Mir­ror stor­ies deal with this dir­ectly. In The Entire His­tory of You, every­body is con­stantly record­ing everything they see and hear, with the abil­ity to refer back to it at will. Your employ­ers can ask to have a look through your record­ings as part of a job inter­view, and then after­wards you can replay the job inter­view over and over, lit­er­ally. Secur­ity guards at air­ports can check over your memory before let­ting you on the plane. If you’re hav­ing an argu­ment with your part­ner about some­thing you said last week, you can go back and review the footage.

It’s sci­ence fic­tion, but not quite as sci­ence fic­tional as it could be in a world where people reg­u­larly pho­to­graph their meals and upload them to the Inter­net, and employ­ers think it’s accept­able to ask to see your Face­book login inform­a­tion.

It goes a step fur­ther in Be Right Back, how­ever, where com­pan­ies are offer­ing to take all your social media inform­a­tion and use it to cre­ate a com­pu­ter­ised ghost of you, who talks exactly like you would while gently up-​selling your griev­ing loved ones from a text chat inter­face up to a fully real­istic robot rep­lica. Oh, and there’s already a real com­pany offer­ing the same ser­vice.

What does that teach us?

There’s a pop­u­lar say­ing about people who use social media. They aren’t the cus­tom­ers – they’re the product. Social media sites acquire vast num­bers of users, who will­ingly pour all their inform­a­tion into the site, then they sell that inform­a­tion or use it to dir­ect mar­ket­ing at their cus­tom­ers. And their reach is broad­en­ing – with sites like Foursquare and Facebook’s check-​in option, com­bined with smart phones, these sites have access not just to your likes, demo­graphic inform­a­tion, friend­ship net­work and rela­tion­ship status, they can also track your move­ments and routines. With Google Glass on the way, the reach of these sites is going to go even fur­ther, to the point where ser­vices like the one in The Entire His­tory of You aren’t entirely implausible.

Dis­sent is a mar­ket­ing tool

There’s a lot to be said for George Orwell, but you’ve got to admit the guy thought small. In 1984 the gigantic evil dysto­pian gov­ern­ment deals with rebel­lion by lock­ing it in a room and tor­tur­ing it until it doesn’t want to rebel any­more. In Charlie Brooker’s uni­verse this is seen as an awful lot of unne­ces­sary effort. In 15 Mil­lion Mer­its the prot­ag­on­ist is driven to des­pair by the soci­ety he lives in, and ends up burst­ing onto the stage of a Britain’s Got Tal­ent style show with a shard of broken glass pressed up against his neck. He then launches into a speech about all the ter­rible things that are wrong with the dysto­pia they’re stuck in. The judges respond by giv­ing him his own show.

In The Waldo Moment the main char­ac­ter doesn’t even want to rebel against the powers that be, he just wants to make lots of knob gags, with the people around him shov­ing him onto the polit­ical stage, where his CGI bear becomes an icon for the dis­en­fran­chised. Soon shad­owy Amer­ic­ans are talk­ing about what a great polit­ical product the bear could become, and by the end of the show an Orwellian dysto­pia has been cre­ated – with blue bear pic­tures everywhere.

In Brooker’s world you don’t crush dis­sent, you repack­age and sell it.

What does that teach us?

A huge part of the mes­sage the gen­eral mass of advert­ising gives us is “You’re spe­cial. You’re unique. Oth­ers might fol­low the crowd and do as they’re told, but you’re a free thinker, a rebel who doesn’t play by the rules. Buy hair gel.” We all want to think we’re Luke Sky­walker (okay, Han Solo) and nobody wants to be one of the anonym­ous storm troop­ers. This isn’t new. Hell, in 1984 Apple was using 1984 to sell com­puters. See also this example of an ad where eat­ing at McDonald’s for lunch is por­trayed as the first chapter of Das Kapital.

Even bet­ter, take this very art­icle, which takes some of the most bit­ing satire writ­ing in the last couple of years and meta­morph­os­ises it into a list of hints and tips on how to be a bet­ter mar­ket­ing man­ager. The world is becom­ing more and more like an epis­ode of Black Mir­ror every day. Which is some­thing David Cameron should worry about.

Attached Images:

• License: Image author owned

Sam Wright is a freel­ance writer who always pre­ferred The Outer Limits.

Be Soci­able, Share!

•