Click Here to Discover the Dreadful ‘Joan Is Awful’ Installment of ‘Black Mirror’

The new season of Black Mirror has an episode that explores what happens when content becomes too personalized and tailored to individual tastes. Joan Is Awful, the first episode, questions what occurs when personalized content generated by artificial intelligence uses deepfakes of famous actors as stand-ins for regular people. The story was inspired by the Theranos scandal, and how quick the turnaround was from the scandal to its dramatization. The episode wonders what would happen if people could watch day-to-day events as a TV show, with deepfake actors playing them. The content machine seems to be catching up to people’s real lives; the gap between a scandal and its media representation used to be years or months, now it is days. The episode imagines a society with algorithms showing users what they will engage with, instead of what they want to see, creating a state of mesmerized horror. However, hyper-personalized content would be terrible for websites that rely on shared cultural moments like Black Mirror and Succession. It helps explain the media frenzy around the Succession finale—it is capitalizing on people who want to know more about the show after viewing.