To stay relevant, Black Mirror has to change how dystopian fiction works

Dystopian science fiction has spent more than a century in the popular imagination, but the more popular it gets, the more it confronts a major existential dilemma: making people fear a dark future is no longer a useful tool in preventing it. Dystopian futures have never been more piercingly relevant. We live in an era when many of the genre’s most far-reaching prophecies have come true, from radical inequality and authoritarian doublespeak to irreversible climate change and unsettling breakthroughs in AI. Dystopian fiction is inherently political, but it also gained steam because it was good entertainment, an escapist adventure into the frightening hypothetical consequences of human frailty. But when the real world is so thoroughly...

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