Black Mirror and the hell of likes in the virtual world

What is the real value of the likes we receive from other people on social media? How much importance do we give to these likes and numbers?

Black Mirror is a television series in which each episode tells a separate story, often through dark satire, about technology and its complex consequences for modern human life. Each story takes place in a parallel world resembling our own or in a near future, inviting us to think about our relationship with ourselves, with other people and with technology.

Because of the distinctive structure of the series, I have decided that whenever I have the opportunity I will share parts of its stories and some of the important questions they place before us. One episode, “Nosedive”, takes us into a world in which social position and class, income, access to services, the home one can live in and even the car one can rent are determined by a social score calculated from the ratings one receives from others.

Everyone can see the score of other people, between zero and five, through a special lens worn in the eye. In everyday encounters people rate one another from one to five. In such a society everyone must guard the persona—the mask and outer shell of personality—with extreme care. Each person’s public profile is visible and available to everyone. When a taxi driver takes you to your destination, for example, you can rate each other. The same occurs when you shop, ride in a lift, encounter someone you dislike, or are bumped by a passer-by in the street.

In this world, people do not merely share the most attractive and carefully selected photographs of themselves and constantly search for the most photogenic food or the most amusing cats. They also wear large smiles in every daily encounter and try to be so pleasant to everyone they meet that nothing less than a five-star rating will come back to them.

Yet each person remains largely confined to their circle of friends, colleagues, service providers and customers—people mostly within a similar social class. To move upward requires gathering large numbers of high ratings from strangers, who usually have little incentive to rate you highly because they have no direct relationship with you, or, more importantly, receiving high scores from people whose own rating exceeds 4.6. Such people do not easily give high scores: they want to keep their social class relatively closed and, because of their popularity and access to wider networks, can easily ignore the efforts of people below them who seek recognition.

The protagonist of this episode is a young woman named Lacie. Her dream is to buy a house that requires a social rating above 4.5, while her own score remains just above four. In order to increase it she carefully manages every aspect of her public life. She posts images of foods whose taste she does not even like, gives five-star ratings to other people’s relevant and irrelevant posts in the hope that they will return the favour, and constructs an increasingly artificial performance of herself.

In the street and at work she offers everyone an exaggerated, artificial smile. She pretends to like whoever everyone else likes and gives lower ratings to people others dislike, all to keep her score above four. Yet even this manufactured life is not enough to bring her within reach of her dream.