Everything 'Black Mirror' has correctly predicted

Over the course of six seasons and an interactive special, Black Mirror has been celebrated for many things. Whether it’s the writing, direction, performances, or socio-political commentary, Charlie Brooker’s fantastical anthology has been a hit since the very beginning.

However, the longer the show carries on, the more it’s being treated as an episodic Nostradamus of sorts. What was once fantasy often has a funny habit of becoming reality eventually, and no matter how far-fetched it may have seemed at the time, there are more than a few instances of Black Mirror eerily predicting the future.

The first season’s ‘The Entire History of You’ unfolded in a reality where people can record their actions in real-time and review the memories. It was definitely the stuff of sci-fi, at least until technology equipped with an AI assistant hit the market, allowing users to record every minute of their waking life and offer helpful reminders of what happened, as well as issuing reminders to complete pre-assigned tasks.

‘Be Right Back’ introduced the capability of bringing loved ones back from the dead via AI, which is hardly the stuff of a fever dream when dead actors are being deep-faked into movies and holograms of dead performers are collaborating onstage with their very much alive counterparts. ‘Striking Vipers’ echoed the increasingly competitive and unsettling world of the metaverse where lives can be lived digitally and in full, and ‘Nosedive’ being predicated on a rating system for all social interactions is hardly a million miles away from a modern society increasingly reliant on the validation of strangers as a sign of status.

The fourth season’s ‘Arkangel’ wasn’t exactly gazing into a far-flung future to explore what happens when a woman implants her young daughter with a health-tracking system, because there’s plenty of people out there who’d rather consult with their Apple Watch or Fitbit than a registered physician.

‘The Waldo Moment’ came before the rise of animated avatars and bitmojis, ‘White Bear’ is evocative of every single incident in almost any walk of life being captured by at least one person using a recording device, the technology exists to power an entire community through human-generated power as seen in ‘Fifteen Million Merits’ albeit not through a bicycle-generated hub, and ‘Hated in the Nation’ tracking a user-determined vote to see who gets executed is only several steps removed from cancel culture.

Of course, no summation of Black Mirror‘s predictive powers would be complete without mentioning ‘National Anthem’, where the Prime Minister shags a pig on live television as part of a twisted ransom demand. That’s not to say it has any real-life basis, but people know exactly what rumours emerging from a certain ex-PM’s time at a certain educational establishment began making the rounds not too long after.