Black Mirror: 10 Times It Creepily Predicted The Future
I don't want to live on this planet anymore.
With its focus on how we interact with and are affected - both on a personal and societal level - by technology, Black Mirror has always felt like a very contemporary show with its finger on the button. Little did we know when it first began, however, that the series is so keyed into the modern world nearly every episode acts a blueprint for the near-future.
After five years of foreseeing new inventions, political scandals and shock elections, Black Mirror now has a reputation for being the TV series that predicts the future (alongside The Simpsons, of course). Most of its 13 episodes so far have ended up pre-empting some strangely specific event or unforeseen trend. It has got to the point where the show's title seems misplaced. It's not like looking into a dark reflection of the real world anymore. It's like staring into a crystal ball.
We are heading towards an inexorably heady and uncertain future, my friends. At least thanks to Black Mirror, we now know of some of the terrors that await us.
Listed here for your horror are the 10 times (at current count) that Black Mirror has creepily predicted future occurrences. Well, either that or Brooker is selling his ideas to governments, tech developers, cybercriminals et al. The monster.
10. The Pig And The Prime Minister
The Episode: Black Mirror's first ever episode The National Anthem saw the UK Prime Minister forced into having sex with a pig on live television, in order to fulfil the demands of a terrorist who has kidnapped a member of the Royal family. The event naturally tickles the users of social media, who have a field day with porcine puns.
How It Came True: You'll no doubt have heard of this one. Four years after the episode aired, a biography about David Cameron was published which made the claim that, as part of an initiation ceremony into a students' dining club at Oxford University, Cameron inserted a "private part of his anatomy" into the mouth of a dead pig.
Though it was an uncorroborated report, the notion ran riot on Twitter. Workplace productivity even went down in the wake of the story. British news outlets also bent over backwards not to explicitly state the facts of the accusation. Exactly as it happened in the episode.
Brooker himself obviously couldn't resist commenting on so-called #Piggate.