Capitalist Realism, Black Mirror, and Capitalist Realism Again
Black Mirror is a British T.V. show which, as Netflix describes, is a “series of stand-alone dramas — sharp, suspenseful, satirical tales that explore techno-paranoia — ‘Black Mirror’ is a contemporary reworking of ‘The Twilight Zone’ with stories that tap into the collective unease about the modern world, particularly regarding both intended and unintended consequences of new technologies and the effect they have on society and individuals.” Essentially exacerbated depictions of modern bourgeois technological society.
This article will be intent on demonstrating that in an attempt to critique modern society, the writers of Black Mirror fall into the same cultural traps that they attempt to highlight. The most accurate depiction of this phenomenon has to be what is seen in the episode, 15 Million Merits.
15 Million Merits presents a dystopian future in which “everyone is confined to a life of strange physical drudgery.” This seems like a future that will never actually happen, a future we will only see in fiction because “we wouldn't let that happen.” This is ironic because the life of 15 Million Merits is a mirror to what we have now. Capitalism only functions when people are controlled. When they are put in routines.
We wake up, we work a 9–5 job, we go home, we eat food, we waste time, we go to sleep, and repeat. This is our entire life. We know this from our childhood when we are sent to job fairs and told to be excited about work. We are taught that we are free yet we can't break substantially from the social norm. The only perceived break for people is switching positions within society. Joining the media or joining the “capitalists”. In the episode, people woke up, rode a stationary bike for hours, ate food, went home, wasted time, went to sleep, and repeated. The only break for these people is to join the media or join the “controllers”. We are controlled just as they are controlled. Our freedom is an illusion for the prolongation of capitalism.
With the realization of the illusionary nature of our freedom, everything should change, right? That is the assumption and the deduction from what has been established. People seem to realize this all, so why hasn't it changed. Well, there are plenty of reasons for this and they all stem from the cultural logic of capitalism, more specifically capitalism realism. “Capitalist realism…is…a pervasive atmosphere, conditioning not only the production of culture but also the regulation of work and education, and acting as a kind of invisible barrier constraining thought and action.” It is this capitalist realism that allows us to realize that we are constrained, that we are enduring inhumanities, yet let us continue on with it. We let ourselves believe that there is no alternative and let ourselves be subsumed by it.
In the episode, a character named Bing gives a speech surrounding the nature of society:
I haven’t got a speech, I didn’t plan words, I didn’t even try to. I just knew that I had to get here, to stand here and I knew I wanted you to listen; to really listen, not just pull a face like you’re listening, like you do the rest of the time. A face like you’re feeling instead of processing. You pull a face and poke it towards the stage and la-di-da we sing and dance and tumble around and all you see up here, it’s not people, you don’t see people up here, it’s all fodder. And the faker the fodder is the more you love it because fake fodder’s the only thing that works anymore, fake fodder is all that we can stomach — actually not quite all. Real pain, real viciousness, that we can take. Yeah, stick a fat man up a pole and we’ll laugh ourselves feral cause we’ve earned the right, we’ve done cell time and he’s slacking the scum so ha ha ha at him. Cause we’re so out of our minds with desperation we don’t know any better. All we know is fake fodder and buying shit. That’s how we speak to each other, how we express ourselves is buying shit. I have a dream? The peak of our dreams is a new hat for our doppel, a hat that doesn’t exist. It’s not even there, we buy shit that’s not even there. Show us something real and free and beautiful, you couldn’t. It’d break us, we’re too numb for it, our minds would choke. There’s only so much wonder we can bear, that’s why when you find any wonder whatsoever you dole it out in meager portions, and only then til it’s augmented and packaged and pumped through ten thousand pre-assigned filters, til it’s nothing more than a meaningless series of lights, while we ride day-in, day-out — going where? Powering what? All tiny cells in tiny screens and bigger cells in bigger screens and fuck you. Fuck you, that’s what it boils down to is fuck you. Fuck you for sitting there and slowly knitting things worse. Fuck you and your spotlight and your sanctimonious faces and fuck you all, for taking the one thing I ever came close to anything real about anything. For oozing around it and crushing it into a bone, into a joke, one more ugly joke in a kingdom of millions and then fuck you. Fuck you for happening. Fuck you for me, for us, for everyone, fuck you.
At this moment, Bing says what everyone felt. He explained and articulated the meaninglessness of life under that system, how everything is fake, how anything that’s real is consumed by the fake. Now what Bing didn't realize at the time was he was essentially prophesizing his own “death”. It becomes his job to speak of the failures of his system. He attempted disruption and became integrated. And this is the epitome of capitalist realism.
We all realize that we feel the same way Bing does, we occasionally leave our bedrooms and workplaces for a protest then the next week things are back to normal. These disruptions are now part of the aforementioned patterns. People are tired of the same old thing and eventually, they’ve come to the realization that these protests will produce no real results. This is perfectly highlighted in Nadia C’s “Your Politics Are Boring as Fuck”
The truth is, your politics are boring to them because they really are irrelevant. They know that your antiquated styles of protest — your marches, hand held signs, and gatherings — are now powerless to effect real change because they have become such a predictable part of the status quo.
as well as in Mark Fisher’s “Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?”
Protests have formed a kind of carnivalesque background noise to capitalist realism, and the anti-capitalist protests share rather too much with hyper-corporate events like 2005’s Live 8.
These protests no longer do anything substantial, they simply become a part of and reinforce the status quo.
From there, it somehow gets worse for us. The show highlighting capitalist realism only reinforces it. As Fisher so graciously puts it:
anti-capitalism is widely disseminated in capitalism. Time after time, the villain in Hollywood films will turn out to be the ‘evil corporation’. Far from undermining capitalist realism, this gestural anti-capitalism actually reinforces it…this kind of irony feeds rather than challenges capitalist realism...what Robert Pfaller has called ‘interpassivity’: the film performs our anti-capitalism for us, allowing us to continue to consume with impunity.
In an odd way, Black Mirror has demonstrated the reality put forth by capitalist realism, presenting a near-perfect depiction of it in episode two, yet its very existence is proof that capitalist realism isn't going anytime soon. It is itself an example of capitalist realism.
