Common People
Common People follows the tragic story of B2C SaaS subscribers who happen to be a couple. The lady in the couple (Amanda) suffers from frequent migraines and ends up being diagnosed with a tumour that can’t be removed safely without the risk of her losing her consciousness. Now, I’m no medical doctor but what exactly does it mean to lose your consciousness? Isn’t that just dying?
Anyway, the (sorta irresponsible; sorta empathetic) doctor tells Mike (the other half of the couple) that there is a consumer startup with a SaaS product that could help them out. Surely, there’s no way this could go wrong…
Enter Rivermind. A startup that backs up your consciousness to the cloud and streams it to your brain “like cell service”. The sales rep (Gaynor), approaches Mike when he is at his most desperate and offers this magical solution while giving the illusion that there are no strings attached. Just sign up, at $300 per month, and get your your brain streamed to you with 0 latency, making it virtually impossible to distinguish from a real life human being.
Mike signs up (it’s his wife FFS) and she is brought back to life, and everything seems fine until they go on vacation for their anniversary and his wife turns off on the way there. Turns out the tier they signed up for has been downgraded and they need to pay more money to get better coverage. Then she starts running ads, then starts sleeping for 12 hours… At this point you already know everything is cooked and we are already a couple loops deep in the death spiral.
What’s crazy to me is that the idea of Rivermind isn’t that far-fetched. Desperate people will do anything, especially when it involves their loved ones. And that includes signing up to a subscription that “keeps them alive”. Now, I’m not entirely sure about the technical details of how a product like this would work. How do they store new memories? Can you save your memories to the cloud and transfer them to a new body? You could extrapolate this idea in a number of directions. What struck me about the episode how feasible all this is.
Advancements in brain-computer interfaces like Neuralink have moved faster than we all thought. It took less than 10 years to make a chip that can make you control a computer purely with brain signals. It certainly won’t take that long to hook that up to the cloud and transmit all brain signals to it (and back). And maybe throw in the ability to send some thoughts to the GPT-4 API.
Once technology like this is polished, it will be democratized and people will start making their own Neuralink Max in their garage. Neuralinks (blanket term for BCIs incl. Rivermind) will become a platform, and they will sooner or later need a return on investment, which will likely involve onboarding developers to make applications. They will find a way to tap into your sensations and emotions and charge you for extra brain signals. One obvious economic implication that comes to mind is that there will be a decline in demand for antidepressant pharmaceuticals (which you can argue is a positive given the incentives but that’s an argument for another day), among other drugs.
Obviously, technology like this will face immense pushback, and will likely be subjected to copious amounts of scrutiny by the FDA before any kind of commercial use. But the FDA is probably the only line of defence for the general public. And once a few Chinese hackers go viral for being overpowered because of using these interfaces, the floodgates will open.
The subplot about Mike humiliating himself on the internet for money feels a little stale and is kind of an abused trope in the Black Mirror universe. It is probably, however, a somewhat accurate representation of what sells on the dark corners internet. Maybe the reason this trope has been so successful is because it is sort of a mirror (a black one perhaps) showing how depraved and desensitized the internet has turned our generation.
What Black Mirror manages to do so well is to mix reality (like the internet humiliation sites) with not-so-improbable fiction (often sci-fi) to create a nauseating vision of all the increasingly disturbing ways the future could go wrong.
Overall, really good episode, as expected. Very on brand for Black Mirror, enjoyable original story. 7/10.