2. Black Mirror, “White Christmas”
This episode—styled as a pair of co-workers on some snowy, isolated outpost swapping stories one lonely Christmas—is about mind control. However, it also contains one of the most bone-chilling takes on a smart home ever—as you’d expect from Black Mirror. Over the course of the evening, Jon Hamm’s character divulges the details about the career he enjoyed before his gross hobby (serving as a high-tech wingman for would-be pick-up artists) necessitated a pivot to the ends of the earth: setting up smart-home AI devices for high-paying clients that seamlessly manage everything, from temperature to darkness of toast, according to their exact preferences. Only, this isn’t your typical AI; it’s a “cookie” copied from the brain of the client (Game of Thrones’ Oona Chaplin, in this case), so faithfully that the cookie believes she’s a real person, and the fact of being contained inside a sterile, boring virtual world feels like actual torture, especially since Hamm’s character can manipulate time to make a minute feel like six months. Of course, there’s a twist at the end of “White Christmas” that echoes back to this—again, as you’d expect from Black Mirror—but the idea that a person would clone their own consciousness for convenience purposes, trapping it into menial servitude despite the very painful fact that it’s fully self-aware, is an undeniably nightmarish concept.
