Digital Dystopia

Black Mirror: a show, a museum, a prison and a video game with no discontinuity between outside and inside, self and other, organic and inorganic. This is our world, where technology, AI, algorithms and social networks prevail over individuals, annihilating the foundational autonomy, rationality and anthropocentrism of Western culture. The society of the future described by the British TV serial with gloomy, visionary premonitions, expresses in a paroxysmic way what we already experience: everyday dystopia. It is science fiction that is more real than reality. Scrutiny permits the perception of our time as catastrophe, but crucially also the understanding of what emerges from the ashes of humanism and modernity: trolls, sexting, cancel culture, predictive analytics and surrogates of the human. We are in the heart of tragedy, but something endures, is born and proliferates among the fragments of the past. Like it or not, Charlie Brooker's Black Mirror reveals the first glimpses of the digital dawn.