What makes a house a home? A house becomes a home when it’s warm, loving, and comfortable. A home is a place for growth. A home is a place you care about. When something breaks, you fix it. A home is a place you want to improve by upgrading, renovating, and remodeling. A home is a safe place to hide away when the world becomes too frustrating and horrible. When a house is a sanctuary, it becomes a home.
But creativity can be home too. Creativity gives us a place to go when life is hard. After all, a home is a safe place to practice, where we learn to push through our comfort zone without the public’s prying eyes.
That is how I like to think of creativity. Creativity is not escapism. Creativity is returning to a place where we can rest, recover, and reflect. We don’t escape to our homes. We live in our homes. We grow in our homes. We learn in our homes. We love our homes.
I love my apartment. I do my best living here. The one positive about leaving this place is that I get to experience coming back. That’s what traveling is all about. The best part about traveling is gaining a new perspective and reaffirming that where I live, the life I’ve chosen, is correct.
As a writer, my house is where I do most of my writing, but I can take my home with me when I write. Wherever I am out in the world, I can open my work and be transported home. The process of migrating the story from my brain to the page is a room I can always enter even when I’m far away. Home, in this case, is a mindset. It’s my passion and pursuit that grounds me and gives me comfort. Once again, it may sound like escapism, but I’m not escaping anything. I’m sitting at the coffee shop or a bench in the park, feeling at home.
When we think of our creativity, we get caught thinking of it as a chore we need to check off. While there is a lot of work involved in any artistic venture, there is also a lot of work involved with taking care of a house. But taking care of your home is one of the greatest gifts you can give yourself, because who reaps the reward of your efforts? You.
Therefore, think of creative work as the extra mile we put into making a home more livable. We are editing our story again so that we can make it better, a renovation. We move words around the way we move furniture to get a fresh perspective. We cut sentences out of our work the same way we declutter our closets. Yes, we want to invite people over and have them marvel at our efforts, but even if a project failed to appeal to anyone, we know it allowed us to live a better life.
We create because like doing laundry, we need to clean. While cleaning a house may require us to get rid of stuff, cleaning, in a creative sense, means taking the ideas in our heads and bringing them into the real world, thus freeing them from our minds.
Regardless of what we do, most of us are lucky to go home almost every night. We crawl into our beds and wake up in the morning. But that’s only the physical home. What about our creative home? Are we visiting that place within ourselves often enough? Are we finding comfort and growth in the act of creation? Do we have a way of expressing ourselves? Are we taking care of that home?
Creativity is not a hotel. You don’t just check in, check out, and never return. No, creativity should be a place you can open the door and enter whenever you want. It should be a place where you can feel safe every night. It’s a place you can bring with you wherever you go. Make creativity your home, and you will always have a place to stay, and from there, you can recover and face the sometimes horrible, frustrating, and awful world that doesn’t always feel like home.
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You shouldn’t listen to me. I was a bad student myself. But I’ve managed to get to this point in life, and I have some thoughts. If you are struggling in class. If you cannot get the grades you need. Or if you’re having a hard time focusing, try this:
Teach yourself: Not everyone is blessed with great teachers and mentors—and even when you have them, they don’t stick around forever—so you need to support yourself, build yourself up, and be curious on your own. Read lots of books, experiment with many hobbies, and explore new skills. Lessons will come your way when the time is right, and as the ancient Chinese saying goes: “When the student is ready the teacher will appear. When the student is truly ready… The teacher will Disappear.”
Focus on projects, not grades: Start making and doing a lot. Welcome failure and rejections. Be innovative and creative. Be vulnerable and daring. There aren’t grades to measure those aspects in school; the curriculum rarely teaches students to create prolifically because teachers aren’t able to grade everything. Never mind the grades! Your audience is bigger than your instructor, so do more.
Document your journey: Keep track of what you’re doing, how you’re doing it, and what you learned along the way. Documenting is a great way to reflect on your approach, but it’s also an opportunity to make something tangible to share with others. Sharing knowledge is teaching, and teaching is one of the best ways to learn.
Allow knowledge to fill slowly: School rushes you to memorize information in a short amount of time, butyour brain is a porous container. As you fill it with new knowledge, you’ll find that concepts, formulas, and techniques will leak out. When you can’t retain it all, don’t fret. Knowledge does not happen with a flick of a switch. If it’s relevant, it’ll come up again, and the more you’re exposed to it, the more you’ll recognize it, and the better you’ll be at memorizing it next time. No need to cram; there is no test when it comes to life experience. You know what you know. When the time comes, you’ll be surprised by what’s left in your brain.
Not everyone is destined to be a great student. Some find school boring, some can’t afford it, and some struggle with authority. I understand. I love learning, but I hate being taught. If you’re like me, you probably had someone tell you you can’t do something unless someone certified graciously teaches you. I’m not certified, but whatever it is that you want to learn, I allow you. Go ahead. Be rebellious.
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Nine months. That’s how long it takes to give birth to a baby. Writing a book can take much longer. The commitment to have a child has obvious correlations with creativity; they both bring something new into the world. Additionally, children and art are two ways we find fulfillment in life. However, human life and a creative project should not share the same level of seriousness.
In Elizabeth Gilbert’s Big Magic (Amazon), she references a Truman Capote quote: “Finishing a book is just like you took a child out in the backyard and shot it.”
She then cautions us not to mistake our creative work for a baby. Associating creativity, career, or a personal purist with a living being will cloud our judgments.
As they say, you become too close to it. When you’re too close to your creative work, you don’t know what to change—or worse—you wouldn’t want to change anything. You probably heard the phrase: kill your darlings. This famous quote reminds us that in order to improve our work, we’ll need to cut out the parts we love the most.
If your work is as precious to you as your newborn, you won’t see all the imperfections. You nurture it and nurture it, but it doesn’t get better, and you wouldn’t create anything new because you spend all your time focused on polishing your one gem. You’d be reluctant to build, mold, and transform your work because it’s comforting the way it is, and there’s an expectation to love it unconditionally.
Have you ever seen a mother look at her ugly baby? She doesn’t think it’s ugly. She loves the child and genuinely believes that the hideous thing will grow to be a movie star or a supermodel. If you were to go up to the mother and criticize her infant, she would most likely bite your face off.
If you compare your creative work to your baby, you may not be able to see all her flaws. If you can’t see the problems, you can’t help. When called upon, you won’t be able to cut 30 percent of your work. When someone criticizes or corrects your child, you’d reject their words or go into a guilty, shameful spiral. Imagine someone telling you that your kid needs a facelift before they are willing to buy her.
Parents want to protect their babies; it’s instinctual. And while your creative work needs some nurturing, you may also coddle it for too long. Your reluctance to send it out will hinder your growth as a writer, and your work will never improve. But the reality remains. If you treat your work like a human, you can end up sheltering it in your drawers or on your hard drive for 18 years or more. By that time, you would have missed out on a lot of opportunities.
We give our blood, sweat, and tears to our creative work. We put everything we had into it. We sacrificed and endured to create a piece of art the same way we would for a son or daughter. Describing our work as our baby gives it a deeper meaning. In a way, it sounds endearing. You cast a soft light on your creation. You’ve put a lot of care into it, and that’s how you want to market it. This baby is handmade with love, not manufactured.
But on the backend, it causes too much emotional connection to the piece. Like a helicopter parent, this can end up doing more harm to the child than good.
Elizabeth Gilbert tells us to consider ourselves the baby to the creative work instead. We are not the ones who need to give birth and raise our creativity; it’s the creativity that gives life to us. It’s the creative act that teaches us, helps us grow, and shows us how to live. Each project we work on and complete becomes a snapshot of that moment. We become what we’ve made. We are not giving birth to our creative work; our creative work is giving birth to us—over and over again. As we look back, we see a trail from where we’ve come.
This way of thinking eliminates the pressure of a parent and offers us a chance to explore our childhood desires and express ourselves. We can be curious again. We should treat every project as a lesson, a continuum. It took that piece to get me here and it’ll take this piece to get me there.
Your creative work is not your baby. Your creative work doesn’t need to grow up to be a doctor, lawyer, or engineer. It doesn’t need to take care of you when you’re old. If you kill it, you won’t go to jail. Nobody will even notice. So lose that pressure. Finish your book, take it to the backyard, and enjoy the outdoors together. Nobody needs to shoot anything.
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The term sunk cost refers to the resources we’ve invested into a project that cannot be recovered. And the sunk cost fallacy is our reluctance to abandon a project because we’ve already put in so much. This mistake can cause us to spend more money, time, and effort on a piece that we have no pleasure working on and with costs continuing to add up.
A common sunk cost fallacy I face is when I start a book and feel the need to read it cover to cover. The thing is, if I’m reading something that I don’t enjoy or get value from, I’m not reading something that can actually benefit me. Persisting through isn’t the best use of my time and energy.
Sunk cost is more painful when it comes to writing. Writing takes much more effort than reading, and therefore, we invest so much more of ourselves into it. I have written so many stories that I kept tearing them apart over and over again trying to make them work. I tell myself one more time, revise it once more and see what happens. At some point, I question why I’m still working on that story. I have a million ideas in my head that I want to get to. When is it time to move on to something new?
Internally, there is a constant battle between reducing sunk cost and persistence. Whenever I return to a project I’ve invested a lot into already, I ask myself why I’m working on it. Am I working on it because I’ve already put in so much work, or am I working on it because I still believe in it? It’s not only a matter of mindset; it’s a matter of prioritization. Is it important for me to keep watering a plant that won’t grow, or is it worth sowing new seeds?
Managing sunk cost is desperately personal because time is so valuable to us. We cannot get more, no matter how hard we try. Investing in the wrong areas can end up killing us slowly. It’s easy to look at our writing and think, “Oh my god, I’ve wasted my life.” But remember, time was going to pass either way. And it wasn’t all wasted. Now you have a few drafts, a snapshot of your life. Go and do something else if that is what you want, but dwell on the sunk cost. You’ve brought it here, it exists, and you can always come back to it when the time is right.
Whenever I’m debating whether to abandon a project—especially a significant one that would only cost me more and more time—I remember all the expensive Hollywood projects that don’t see the light of day. Production companies would often develop a pilot episode to test whether it has any viability in the market before they make more. That is because the networks want to make something that audiences would watch and, more importantly, be profitable if they were to make more episodes.
One recent example is The Game of Thrones spin-off called Bloodmoon. This prequel was supposed to take place 8,000 years before the events involving Jon Snow and Tyrion Lannister—and cost $30 million to produce. Yes, $30 million.
How could HBO abandon such an expensive project? The Chief Content Officer said that the show would require more innovation. Bloodmoon didn’t simply require scripts, actors, and cameras, it required the whole network to figure out how to make it—and then make more. Additionally, this new show had a different feel from the original, which required more setup and may not appeal to some returning viewers. The risk was huge. Who knows how it would have all played out, but HBO decided to focus their attention on House of the Dragon. Which, in many ways, was a safer bet.
That’s how I see my projects now. I work on something, get it to a point where it’s good enough to show someone, and then send it out on a test—like a television pilot. When it comes back to me, with whatever feedback attached, I decide whether I want to take the gamble of revising it or focusing on another project. While it may be frustrating to be losing constantly like someone on a cold streak at a roulette table, I find joy in always having chips to make another bet.
Regardless of what project I’m working on, I’m grateful to be able to play the game. Maybe I won’t bet on the same horse every time, but it’s reassuring that I still have the time and money to do so. I can manage my sunk cost while persisting. I’m doing both. I’m HBO trying to make six different Game of Thrones spinoffs at the same time to determine which one to invest in long-term. It’s nice to know that one day I can make $30 million decisions around my work, but today, I just need to decide whether I want to put my novel on the shelf or return to it for another edit.
I’ll leave you with this. Whether you want to keep going or abandon your work, there is a quote, often attributed to Leonardo Da Vinci that really helps me, and it goes: Art is never finished, only abandoned.
I like it because, eventually, you’ll need to stop working on everything. So don’t feel so guilty when you abandon something. It’s bound to happen in one form or another.
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Before we determine whether the events in Nosedive can happen, let’s look back to when this episode was released: October 21, 2016.
2016 was the year our smartphones completely took over our lives. The rise of Pokemon Go during the summer was a key piece of evidence. In a matter of weeks, people worldwide were wandering around staring at their phones. Some even ventured into dangerous neighborhoods and private priorities to catch them all and ended up losing their lives.
Disappearing videos were also growing in popularity. Snapchat had a big year in 2016, with one in five Americans engaging with the platform. Gaining adoption from an older audience, Snapchat proved that ephemeral content was not only for kids.
Across the Internet, the rabbit holes for obscure, hateful, and extreme content dropped deeper and deeper, creating echo chambers for conspiracy theories. While we were suspicious that algorithms and foreign influence might be involved, we didn’t know Facebook and Cambridge Analytica were using data harvested from the social network to fuel political unrest leading to Donald Trump becoming president and the UK leaving the European Union.
In 2016, the physical world had many problems: political tensions, soaring debt, school shootings, and Samsung phone explosions. Technology companies were making our attention span shorter and our insatiable hunger for attention more vital. And while we may not be able to afford a house in the physical world, at least we could find comfort in a digital one… But slowly that realm was corroding. And there was no rewind button—no eject—we had fallen too deep.
As we longed for a simpler time, our nostalgia was left exposed. And money-hungry executives happily used it against us by selling uninspired remakes and clothing with old logos.
That was where the zeitgeist was in 2016. Technology was pushing us forward while we were looking back longingly. We wanted to be heroes and victims. Masters and influencers. Stars and black holes. And with that, let’s look at Black Mirror season 3, episode 1: Nosedive.
In this post, I will explore three themes of the episode and discuss whether such events or concepts have taken place in some form in the last few years and if they haven’t, whether or not they’re still plausible.
Without further ado, let’s jump into it.
Social Credit Score
In the world of Nosedive, the residents don’t live such different lives from ours. Their hopes and desires are much the same. And we too need to be approved in order to get them. In order to buy a house, start a business, get into a college, or find a job we need to have our credits evaluated.
The story follows a young professional, Lacie, who wants to purchase her own property. But to do so, she needs to increase her rating—which is directly linked to her socioeconomic status—from 4.2 to 4.5.
I remember watching this episode in 2016 and feeling uneasy about the idea of reviewing people. Since then, I’ve signed up for apps such as Uber and Airbnb, so the concept of giving someone a score on a device has all gotten familiar even though it’s still uncomfortable. If it meets expectations, I’m giving it a 5-star. I don’t want to be a critic for everything I do.
Most consumers have a credit score, an objective number that predicts credit risk and informed financial institutions to lend them money or not. A credit score takes account of indisputable aspects of our financial habits, such as how regularly we pay off our bills, how many accounts we own, and how much available credit we use. For example, you’d need a credit score of 680 or over to get a mortgage.
Additionally, there are academic scores, which most of us had suffered through when embarking on our educational pursuits. The grade point average determines whether we qualify for one institution over another. For example, you’ll need a GPA of 4.18 or over to get into Harvard.
However, the eeriest real-life scenario relating to this episode is the Social Credit Score that may or may not be implemented in China.
In 2013, the government of Rongcheng, China, a city with half a million people, implemented a social credit score. Each person began with a rating of 1,000 to start, and good and bad deeds would lower or increase that number.
During this experiment, citizens lost points for spreading harmful information, with one citizen losing 950 points in three weeks for distributing letters online about a medical dispute. Of course, the government decides what’s considered harmful. That’s the main argument for the social credit score: it’s to help enforce existing laws. But when the laws can be twisted, social credit scores become scary and Orwellian. The authorities no longer need to listen to criticism—because criticism is harmful.
Criticizing the government could theoretically lower your rating and rank you as someone who had gone to prison or been bankrupt. This penalization will disqualify you from getting a loan, buying a car, or even traveling abroad. Like in Nosedive, there isn’t a reliable appeal process either. Lacie could beg the authority at the airport all she wants, but whatever the law feels is necessary, it does.
The whole system falls apart when the power goes to those with no qualms about abusing the ratings. That is why any good review platform will have impartial moderators. Otherwise, those with a higher rank can create loyalists by rewarding good behaviors while oppressing those they deem threats or disobedient.
Boosting Social Status
Social media has given us another obsession with numbers: the amount of likes, follows, and comments. We put a numerical value on everything we do. These metrics can give us a hit of dopamine or bum us out, but they can also now greatly influence our income. You don’t even need to be an influencer. Amazon sellers need good reviews, and podcasters need five stars. It’s too competitive. There is just no way to survive without it. And because of that vulnerability, the power can be abused.
One of my favorite parts in this episode was when Lacie goes to this analytics consultant, and he walks her through all her data. As a marketer, this is all too relatable. How many times have I charted the result of a successful campaign? Or reviewed why a piece of content didn’t appeal to an audience?
In this social media world, we all have to be personal brands. We treat ourselves like a business. Like a restaurant on Yelp or an app in the App Store, we need to monitor our influence, measure our performance, and increase our exposure. We need a communication team, a public relations team, and a growth team. If we miss a beat, we can expose ourselves to bad press. We need to know which side to stand on, like when Lacie had to pick sides between coworkers. To avoid being ostracized—or, as we say these days, getting canceled—she needs to join the mob.
We are an investment, a stock trending up and down. Overall we want to go up. We want to stay relevant and increase in value. Marketing is important because it’s how businesses gain positive exposure and present their offerings to the world. When everyone is a content creator, getting married is a media production, a big marketing campaign. Weddings are like the Oscars or the Olympics. It’s where you can really increase your reach and up your score.
While Naomi carefully curated her wedding to maintain her rank, Lacie wanted to leverage the wedding to boost her score. The stakes increased since the wedding would include many high-rated individuals whose scores were inherently worth more. By interacting with them at such a grand event, she’d get the spike in ratings she needed to reach her goals.
When people are only measured by their scores, we get a homogenized world where every action is driven by numbers. This is a dangerous way of living. It creates a constant sense of discontentment. There is always a higher number, and we will always want more. We’d want to upgrade everything. Nothing is ever enough. Not our home. Not our followers. Not our friends. Not our lovers. Not our jobs. We will be stuck on what experts call the hedonic treadmill, where whatever happiness we get from money, accolade, or status would feel nice at first but won’t ever be enough. Eventually, we will return to our default level, wanting more.
Faking It
Another theme of this episode was how Lacie had to be constantly on. She had to present herself in a certain way because the world was a stage. From the posts she published on social media to her interactions with service people, she had to maintain a pleasant persona.
At the start of the pandemic, everyone was locked down, and the only way to see our friends and work was through video calls. Every day we had to sit in front of a camera and put on a show. Being so disconnected from body language, social cues, and physical energy, we needed to channel Meryl Streep so that our viewers—our friends, families, clients, and coworkers—would perceive how we were feeling. Not everyone wants to be an “influencer,” but our ability to perform for the camera is critical if we want to succeed in this new game.
When it comes to increasing a score, it is very much a game. And games are strategic. There is nothing authentic about someone trying to win a game. You don’t reveal your plan to your enemies. Every interaction becomes a move upon a chessboard. This idea was nicely illustrated when Naomi announced that she didn’t invite Lacie because of the kindness of her heart. She didn’t consider her a true friend but rather a deliberate play to earn sympathy points.
We are living in a Photoshopped magazine cover where everything is carefully composed. That’s why seeing our features superimposed into advertising is so dangerous. We are easily manipulated. And few approaches are more effective than appealing to our ego, creating urgency, and evoking our fear of missing out, aka FOMO.
Once we can envision the status we desire, it’s terrifying to lose it. This marketing approach is not so different from trying on clothes, test driving a car, or using 3D AR software to furnish a room. By engaging with it, we’re more likely to purchase. It’s the visualization that drove Lacie to extremes. The holographic images of her beautiful new kitchen with a lover at her side became her north star or a vision board.
While we always want more, we also fear losing what we have. That’s why nostalgia is so powerful. Nostalgia can bring us back to an even ground, a simpler time. When we were children we were all equals, the closest we were to authentic, or so it seemed.
The homely Mr. Rags was a representation of the innocent days before the betrayal, before the days when points mattered. Nostalgia reminds us of a time when we were ourselves, not whatever number represents us now: the ratings, the funds in our bank, or the number of friends at our party.
Wise words constantly remind us to have empathy for others because we don’t know what someone else is going through. However, when we see someone desperately trying to regain footing in front of a crowd—like a celebrity caught in hot water—we can say, “Wow. Glad that’s not me up there”—and enjoy the show.
In an unempathetic world, where everyone is keeping scores the same way Google keeps track of everything we search, we will guard how we truly feel, live in incognito mode, and fake it.
During these past several years, I, like Lacie, just wanted to express my anger, sadness, and frustration. I wanted to be a child and scream. However, as an adult, screaming is not allowed. I cannot scream outside because I’d get arrested. I cannot scream in my home because the neighbors would freak out. There are only a few places for us urbanites to go to express these emotions. We can escape from the city and find a place of our own. Or we could join a protest and start a riot.
Nosedive encapsulates what Black Mirror is all about. A dark reflection of our current existence. Watching this episode feels as satisfying as peeling off a layer of sunburnt skin. The fun is over, the damage is done, we recovered, we are still alive, and even though we know the consequences when the next sunny day comes, we still go outside again to play the game.
So the question remains, can the events in Nosedive happen? My friend, count all the numbers associated with your life. All the followers you have, all the scores the government and financial institutions designate, and all the hours you spend pursuing your virtual goals. At any point, those numbers can drop to zero. And it’ll be devastating.
The event of this episode is happening. Now, how can we stop it from taking over every facet of our lives? How can we still express our feelings without damaging our reputation? How do we be ourselves without exposing our vulnerabilities? I offer no solution except this, besides all the scores the world keeps, maintain an inner scorecard. You get to rate yourself as well. Give yourself a good score. Why not?
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Recently I’ve been super busy and sitting down for a two-to-three-hour movie is difficult. So these short stand-alone episodes from Netflix’s Love Death + Robots were a great way to take a break and watch something without spending too much of my time.
I was happy to hear that Netflix renewed the sci-fi anthology for a fourth season. I look forward to seeing how the different studios innovate on what they’ve already created. I love comparing the storylines, concepts, and art styles.
From the first three seasons, a few episodes stood out. And that’s what I’d like to share with you today. If you haven’t checked out Love Death + Robots, watch these episodes. If you have seen it, then watch them again.
This list is purely my opinion, so if you disagree and I left out one of your favorites, please let me know in the comments.
Okay, let’s count it down!
10. Zima Blue
The first time I watched this episode, I didn’t think much about it. Yes, the art style was cool—a thick-line comic book aesthetic that reminded me of the 90’s cartoon Daria—but I wasn’t sure what the deal was until it got to the end.
There was a time when we were confident that art was the language of humans. We have experiences and emotions, and that’s what makes art meaningful. The sentiment was clear: Robots have no place in art.
Today, with the advent of Dall-E, Midjourney, Lensa, and ChatGPT, AIs are coming closer and closer to creating art. They may only be interpreting our keywords to produce an image or write a paragraph now, but how soon will they be able to take their experiences and design something of their own? And when they do, what will they make? That’s the question Zima Blue poses… and the answer might be too simple for us to understand.
9. The Tall Grass
There is something calming about a man smoking a cigarette and venturing into the tall grass. But the pendulum swings to fear quickly. We’ve been there before. How often do we decline helpful advice and go off on our own? How often do we find our curiosity and hubris leading us to danger?
The Tall Grass is an episode where as a spectator, it’s so obvious the passenger was going to get lost. From our perspective, we’ve seen this a thousand times.
After saving him, the conductor tells the passenger that out in the middle of nowhere, a door opens to another world, and those monsters coming through were once lost humans. That explanation is somehow terrifying and assuring. We are not immune, and we may be one bad decision from getting lost ourselves.
8. Pop Squad
As a child-free person, this episode felt like an attack. In our current world, we are facing overpopulation, but there will be more older people than young. According to the US Census Bureau, in America, the fastest-growing population are people above 80.
Depending on how you look at it, it can feel selfish to have children and selfish not to have children. While immortality is still fiction, the moral decision is worth debating.
It’s well-documented that Elon Musk wants everyone to have more children, and he’s leading by example, but how will he feel when there is no more room at the party? What if someone needs to go for someone else to join? Do I believe Elon Musk love himself enough to want to live forever? Yes, I do. Is he seeing the world through the children’s eyes, or does he see them as resources for the future? Expendable like Twitter employees.
7. Jibaro
Telling a powerful story without dialogue is tough. The soundscape, musical score, and audio mixing must be on point, and when it is I feel chills. It’s hard to find words to describe this episode. You can even say that at the end, I too was speechless. What did I just experience?
This twisted episode is a feast for the eyes as well. The surreal mix of Spanish conquistadors, South Asian-inspired costume design, and the North American wilderness presents a story full of symbolism while leaving plenty of room for interpretations.
Fear and anger drive this episode, but the temptation is navigating. Both the siren and the knight wear armor, one of steel and the other of gold and jewels, but neither can protect what’s within. Jibaro blends interpretive dance, operatic performance, and a hostile assault to tell a story about humanity’s true disabilities, not our inability to speak and hear but our sins: greed and lust.
6. Life Hutch
There are several episodes in Love Death + Robots about malfunctioning machines going on a killing spree, including Mason’s Rats and Automated Customer Service. It also brings to mind that famous episode of Black Mirror: Metalhead. So what separates Life Hutch from other attacking-robot stories?
This episode built tension and then held it. At no point does this feel repetitive, which can’t be said about some of the other examples. Whenever the momentum was on the verge of slipping, it cuts to a back story about surviving an army of aliens, space debris, and a crash landing on the rugged planet. It goes to show that in space, there is always danger. After all he’s been through, it’s so satisfying when he finally beats up the robot with its arm.
HM: Lucky 13
Before we carry on with the countdown, here’s an honorable mention, Lucky 13. While the number 13 being unlucky is a bit cliche, I did enjoy the idea of superstition in a futuristic world.
Whenever chance is in question, a bit of faith is required. In a dangerous situation, nobody wants to run out of luck. Yet, how much does a break in pattern matter? Good luck after a string of bad luck. Is it all in our minds? People want to feel like they can control the uncontrollable, whether they do or not, it’s the stories they tell themselves that will keep them going.
Now back to the countdown…
5. Beyond the Aquila Rift
The award for the most intense sex scene goes to Beyond the Aquila Rift, and that’s enough to get it into the top five. Okay, but seriously the episode about how an error in the routing system caused ships to overshoot their destination by hundreds of thousands of light-years away is a tragedy. A combination of Groundhog Day, the Matrix, and Interstellar, Beyond the Aquila Rift poses many questions. The twist at the end is a horrifying reminder that if something is hidden from us, it might be for a good reason. And so it goes with everything out there in space.
What this episode does great is show the significance of space travel and the power of technology. We, humans, should be careful where we wander, but the fact of the matter is that we may already be trapped. If you ever feel that life is a simulation, that’s okay because this reality may be the most ideal version.
4. Sonnie’s Edge
Just failing to make the podium is Sonnie’s Edge. This gritty, gruesome, and erotic Pokemon-esque episode has everything I want in a sci-fi/fantasy short, including an epic battle between giant monsters.
On the surface, this episode appears to be a feast for our obsession with violence and sex, but beneath, it has a powerful message about the corruption of men. Driven by overconfidence and pride, the upper class feels secure when they shouldn’t, for there is an edge that those living below have. Fear. A story about feminism and the strength of women, Sonnie’s Edge is layers upon layers deep.
3. Helping Hand
If you enjoyed the movie Gravity, Moon, or 127 Hours, you’d like Helping Hand. Nothing captures my attention like a survival story. I consider what I would do in that situation. What would I sacrifice to save my life? They say there is no will more powerful than the will to live, and until you stare death in the face, you will never fully know how you’d respond.
Small debris causes the greatest devastation. And no instrument of destruction is more powerful than our thoughts. Can we break free of the inertia that will carry us deeper and deeper into darkness? Or will we be able to throw what we hold most precious and change the momentum? Helping Hand is an incredible short because it hits on something real: the perseverance of humans and the coldness of space.
2. Bad Traveling
This episode might be about a giant crustacean taking over a ship and causing havoc but it’s also about the deceit of democracy, the power struggle within a workforce, and the negotiation with an enemy. The theme of Bad Traveling is so relevant to the world we are currently living in. Are we making cowardly choices because we fear the enemy or mistrust those who are in charge?
What makes a good leader? Is it someone who can manipulate the monsters we’ll face? Or is it someone who can see the evil within ourselves? Perhaps it’s both. In which case, how will he make choices when theoretically there is nobody on his side? Taking action for the greater good is as isolating as being alone on the ocean.
1. The Witness
The Witness is an incredibly stimulating experience with the topsy-turvy comic art style, the titillating performance, and the claustrophobically tall buildings combined with a disorienting soundscape and fast cuts. The story starts with a sex worker witnessing a murder in the apartment across the street, then a chase through a populated city that doesn’t seem to care about anything but itself, and concludes in a chaotic struggle.
This mind-bending story about infinite loops is so brilliantly done that I don’t know if I can ever get the visuals out of my head. The way the characters breathe, so realistically, right onto the camera lens—I can feel it. The insanity of the situation. The need to know, the need to save ourselves, the fear of being caught. In such a diverse collection of stories, The Witness stands out on its own. And the open-ended conclusion leaves us wanting more, almost daring to chase it down ourselves, drawing our conclusions like the characters in the story.
There you have it! Those are my top 10 episodes of Love Death + Robots. What do you think? Did your favorite episode make the list? Let me know in the comments below. As I mentioned, I’m excited that the sci-fi anthology was renewed for another season. I can’t wait to see what other trippy, scary, and bizarre stories creator Tim Miller and his contributing filmmakers will have.
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Is a scene not working? Are you failing to create intrigue, establish tone, or captivate an audience? Consider what narrative mode you’re using to tell your story.
If words are the building blocks then narrative modes are the design of your story. Whichever ones you pick will yield a different construction, and therefore, a different experience for your readers.
There are five narrative modes: description, dialogue, action, thought, and exposition. Today we will look at these five forms and how you can experiment while editing to determine which works best.
To put it in context, we’ll explore how different authors use varying narrative modes to start their stories—but this approach works anywhere: beginning, middle, or end. If something isn’t working, change the narrative mode and see what happens.
Let’s get into it!
Description
Descriptions are great for establishing a setting or character.
It’s most effective if it’s an intriguing image. If you waste too many words describing something obvious or mundane, you won’t hook your audience or keep them turning the pages. To write effective descriptions, activate the senses: what do you see, hear, smell, feel, or taste? What’s unusual?
Alternatively, you can use descriptions to establish context, for example, a before or after image. Take the beginning of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams (Amazon). He starts the story with a description of an average house before the chaos and destruction:
The house stood on a slight rise just on the edge of the village. It stood on its own and looked out over a broad spread of West Country farmland. Not a remarkable house by any means — it was about thirty years old, squattish, squarish, made of brick, and had four windows set in the front of a size and proportion which more or less exactly failed to please the eye. – The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
Dialogue
Starting a story with dialogue can grab the reader’s attention. It jumps right into the middle of a scene, introducing a character and building a connection. Hearing a character speak makes them more personable and is often more engaging than having the writer paraphrase what’s been said. When it’s well-written, dialogue can give a sense of who the character is, where they are, and what they want.
However, bad dialogue can confuse readers because they don’t know who’s talking or why they should care. Don’t begin with your characters making small talk or a boring conversation that the reader may have in their own life. If you’re opening your story or maintaining narrative momentum, make sure the dialogue is compelling. If you want to hit your reader with something unexpected, dialogue is a great way to do it. Check out how Douglas Coupland opens his novel Jpod (Amazon):
“Oh God. I feel like a refugee from a Douglas Coupland novel.”
“That asshole.”
“Who does he think he is?”
“Come on, guys, focus. We’ve got a major problem on our hands.”
– Jpod by Douglas Coupland
Action
In medias res is Latin for “in the midst of action” and that’s what you should consider when writing an action scene. Start your scene in the middle of an event and create stakes, tension, and strong pacing that will hook your reader while still giving them relevant details like time and place. It doesn’t mean you begin at the climax or the most intense part. It means you place your readers at a link in the continual chain of cause and effect: Because this is happening, this is happening — and because that happened, this is now happening.
In an energetic action sequence, use active voice and remove filter words, such as saw, felt, and thought. Writing a good action scene doesn’t need to include characters, although a goal or a conflict is necessary. Action is great, but always ask: Why should the readers care?
The trawler plunged into the angry swells of the dark, furious sea like an awkward animal trying desperately to break out of an impenetrable swamp. The waves rose to goliathan heights, crashing into the hull with the power of raw tonnage; the white sprays caught in the night sky cascaded downward over the deck under the force of the night wind. Everywhere there were the sounds of inanimate pain, wood straining against wood, ropes twisting, stretched to the breaking point. The animal was dying. – The Bourne Identity by Robert Ludlum
A story that opens with a thought, is a story that opens in the past, a reflection, a flashback. How is this effective?
Thoughts allow the readers to understand a character. By seeing how they think or relive a significant memory, readers learn about their motivations and personalities. We view the conflict from their perspectives. Thoughts allow the author to convey the theme quickly. With thoughts, you can establish a pivotal scene, like a murder, a love loss, or an important lesson, and have that guide the character for the rest of the story.
A great example of this is The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald (Amazon). The narrator, Nick Carraway’s thought has nothing to do with the plot directly, but it shows his principles. The opening gives him the integrity he needs to tell the story and for us to trust him.
In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since. ‘Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone,’ he told me, ‘just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.’ – The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald
Exposition
We are told that expositions should be avoided because they’re info dumps. Unskilled authors use them to give the readers all the information they need to understand some convoluted plot. Think of the opening crawl of any Star Wars movie where the floating text sets the stage for the galactic confrontation. Phantom Menace literally begins by explaining the details of space tax and trade routes.
While exposition has a bad reputation for pushing the readers out of an emotional or visceral experience, it’s a reliable mode for explaining a character, a historical event, or a critical mission. With that said, here are a few notes to consider when using expositions for your story:
Make sure the details are intriguing: don’t share information that the reader can assume.
Create a sense of place: ground your story and connect it with a specific scenario.
Pay attention to the tone and mood: Just because it’s an info dump, doesn’t mean it should take the reader out of the story. When writing ask: how do the characters feel about these details? Is it dark and scary, or is it hopeful like at the beginning of The Five People You Meet in Heaven by Mitch Albom (Amazon)?
This is a story about a man named Eddie and it begins at the end, with Eddie dying in the sun. It might seem strange to start a story with an ending. But all endings are also beginnings. We just don’t know it at the time. – The Five People You Meet in Heaven by Mitch Albom
Whether you’re editing the beginning, middle, or end of your story consider the narrative mode. Remember, you are not tearing down your house, you’re redesigning it so that everything works better together. If you’re stuck and a section isn’t working, consider changing how you deliver the information. Switching the narrative modes can give strength to different aspects of the story; you change the pace, mood, and intensity. Practice each one, because you never know when a dialogue scene can work better as an exposition, or an action can become a thought.
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2022 has been a tough year. One of my saving graces has been my creative projects. If you’ve been following my channel, you’d know I’m deep in some pretty big projects, including my novel and short stories.
However, even my passion project comes with its struggles. As with all daily grinds, some days it feels like I’m making progress, and other days it feels like I’ve wasted my time, regressed in my skills, or even set myself up for embarrassment. When this happens, I want to shut it all down and give up.
Now, I’m no expert in overcoming struggles. As much as I appreciate stoic philosophy, it’s not easy to practice it in real life. Sometimes I find myself frustrated and confused, but I always get myself back onto the metaphorical horse. In this article, I’ll share my most notable writing fears and struggles and what I might do to overcome them.
Comparison with Others
As I follow more and more artists, writers, and all-around successful people on social media, I often notice the jealousy that brews beneath the surface of my cheerful exterior. Every day, I see writers celebrating their milestones, showing off their book covers, and getting profiled by publications, while for the past few years, I’ve been in the weeds with my work.
Seeing others celebrate while I’m still in the middle of the grind is painful. I’m putting in all this effort, but where is the payoff? This is, of course, a dangerous mindset. When these feelings bubble to the surface, I repeat a quote that has always stuck with me, and that is: your success is your success, not my failure.
We can sometimes see life as a zero-sum game. For my team to win, the opposition needs to lose. If someone buys their book, then they won’t buy mine. When they win, I lose. But when it comes to creativity, that is not true. When people read, when people watch videos, and when people appreciate others’ creative work, it elevates all of us.
I try to hold onto that whenever I see others achieving their goals. I want to be someone who rises and meets them at the top, not someone who tears others down so that they are in the pits with me. None of us will succeed that way.
Comparing yourself with others is dangerous, especially when you think they are stealing from you. They are not, they are on a different journey, and their work doesn’t impact yours. Don’t compare your work in progress to someone else’s finished product. It’s all a distraction. I could be jealous, or I could be inspired. Examine their work, see how they did it, and maybe we can learn something.
Fear of the 1-Star Review
While I struggle with the success of others, I also struggle with my failures, and nothing epitomizes that more than the fear of getting a one-star review.
This fear is irrational because I haven’t even completed my novel yet, and here I am, anticipating the criticism and haters. Jumping to a conclusion can lead to a lot of anxiety, and that can throw me off. It creates unnecessary pressure that causes me to second-guess every word I write and every piece I publish.
Here’s the thing, I’ve yet to get a one-star review for my work. One day I will, but for now, I have no real experience. While I’ve gotten negative comments from instructors and on social media and can imagine a similar pain, I don’t know what I’m dealing with. It’s that unfamiliar negative feeling that scares me. It’s like anticipating a car crash while your friend is driving; nobody feels good about that.
We, as humans, put more value on negative comments than on positive ones. We’ve all been there. We share our work with someone, and they praise us for this and that, but end with one thing that they didn’t understand or a suggestion. All the nice things they said disappeared, and now we’re fixated on that negative comment. What hurts the most is that there is truth to that comment. But I try to look at it this way: isn’t it kind that they gave you any feedback at all?
Reviews are important for creative writers, especially in a saturated market. It’s painful to work on something for so long only to have someone trash it. But as Gary Vee would say, ignore all of it. Good and bad. None of it matters. Take constructive feedback when it’s offered, but when it’s unsolicited, criticism is a gift you don’t need to accept. You don’t need to apply it to your work.
Fear is not a bad thing. The fear pushes me to work hard, do everything I can, and make sure it meets my standards. Once it does then it doesn’t matter what other people say because I approve of it. I stand behind it. I can’t make everyone happy, but I can hold my head high. There are bound to be people who hate my work. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. It sucks that they have to give me a one-star and hurt me, but hey… it wasn’t made for them. But here’s the good news, they chose to engage with it, and that’s worth celebrating.
From the start, people have told me that there isn’t a lot of money in creative writing. Only a small percentage are lucky enough to make a comfortable living, while others need to hustle or subsidize their creativity with other jobs. This is the reality all writers need to understand when they pursue this craft. The reward at the end may not be a pot of gold. The reward may be just more creative work.
While that may sound fruitless to some, and money causes stress, it can also be a positive. If you’re a writer chasing fame and fortune, good luck. However, if you’re a writer who wants to be able to write consistently for your whole life, then you should reframe your mindset.
You’re not writing to make money, you’re making money to keep writing. The act of writing is the reward. The fact that you get to wake up every morning and work on something you’re passionate about is something you should be grateful for. Everything else: the money, the accolades, the fans, the New York Times bestseller ranking, the movie adaptation, and the lifetime achievement award — all that is a bonus. Don’t deny it when it comes, but don’t put those expectations before your work.
When I get caught focusing on what writing can bring, I don’t pay enough attention to what writing does. The act of writing is a friend. Our friend is there with us through good and bad times. Our friend is kind and reliable. What our friend isn’t is someone that pays us regularly for showing up to hang out with them. We don’t expect anything in return for chilling with our friends. We should be so lucky to spend time with them. And so it goes with writing. At least, that’s how I try to see it when my word count increases, but my bank account stays the same.
We, writers, are vulnerable, optimistic people. We put our hearts on the line every time we sit down to create in the hope of impacting our audience. With that pursuit come fears and struggles beyond story structures and typos. These are things I deal with daily, if not on an hourly basis. It’s easy to get caught up in our heads. Of course, it is! We are writers… we live in our imaginations.
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Before we discuss White Christmas, let’s take a trip back to the past, all the way to when this episode was first released: December 16, 2014.
In 2014, with over 70% of all internet using Facebook, it was the most popular social media platform. However, it was also reaching its peak as other platforms such as Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, and even Pinterest saw significant growth in the past few years.
On May 15, 2014, Google Glass and its $1,500 price tag were introduced to the world. With cost and privacy regulations in question, the consumer market simply wasn’t ready for such a “cool” piece of technology.
On November 6, 2014, the first generation of the Amazon Echo was released. This voice-activated device was anticipated to change how we interact with our homes and all the technology in them, and not merely be a glorified speaker system.
2014 was the year Kanye West and Kim Kardashian married. The wedding cost $12 million, which included a Bespoke Calacatta Vaticano marble table worth $478,000 for the reception.
In October, comedian Hannibal Burress called out Bill Cosby on stage for not only being smug but also being a rapist. That act opened the door for a slew of victims to accuse Cosby of drugging and sexually assaulting them.
8 months earlier, 15-year-old, Breck Bednar was murdered by 18-year-old, Lewis Daynes, a boy he met playing online video games. Breck’s family claimed he was a victim of grooming — how his personality changed over the last few months — before he traveled to Daynes’ flat. There he was stabbed in the neck, and the photos of his death were shared in a gaming group on social media.
In 2014, abortion was a key issue in American politics. Republicans began to shift their focus from implementing outright bans to attacking the resources. These initiatives include limiting health coverage for abortions and driving clinics out of business.
Now that we recall the state of the world during Christmas 2014, we can start our discussion on Black Mirror, episode 4 of season 2: White Christmas.
How did this episode age? Are the themes still relevant? Have any of the predictions come true? And if they haven’t, are they still plausible?
Let’s find out.
Bad Conversations
White Christmas is an anthology within an anthology: three separate tales loosely tied together with one central storyline. In the first, we hear Matt’s story about his former role as an online consultant, who used a live streaming technology called Z-Eyes that allowed him to see and hear everything his client was experiencing.
On this night, he followed the POV of an insecure man named Harry as he searched for a date at a work party. Matt’s advice to Harry reminded me of The Game by Neil Strauss (Amazon) and the techniques that pick-up artists would use to seduce women. One approach was to pay attention to the less attractive individual or the person you’re not as interested in. In doing so, you appear more appealing to your “target,” thus making it easier for you to seduce them later. Published in 2005, The Game is still regarded as a reliable resource for 17-year-old bros and the desperately hopeful.
Only in 2019, did the rise of the term “toxic masculinity” reach the mainstream, and cis-gendered straight men had to relearn proper etiquette, including the need to stop negging and gaslighting women. Rather than manipulation and dominance, this new education was focused on respect.
In 2017, Alyssa Milano shared a tweet encouraging all women who have been sexually harassed or assaulted to post “Me Too” as their status on social media, in an effort to end the stigma and silence. This act led to The Me Too Movement, which raised awareness of sexual assault and brought down powerful offenders: Harvey Weinstein, R Kelly, Kevin Spacey, and many others.
However, while the waves were crashing around all the rapists and our beloved idols were getting canceled, a few incidents made us question the severity of each individual accusation. Every case is unique, and therefore, the level of outrage and condemnation must be determined after we hear both sides of the story and carefully assess the evidence. The allegation around Aziz Ansari is a good example.
In a blog post titled, “I went on a date with Aziz Ansari. It turned into the worst night of my life”, posted on Babe.net, a woman with the alias “Grace” allegedly went on a date with the actor from Parks and Rec. During the course of the night, she felt forced into having sex. According to Ansari, it was all consensual, and there wasn’t much to prove otherwise.
This incident fueled debate: while many women could relate to what Grace had gone through — interacting with a man who was only in tune with his own desires — many also wondered if attempting to destroy someone publically was the proper way to respond to an uncomfortable date.
With the change in the technological landscape, dating was evolving as well. In a way, it was becoming dangerous: more automated, addicting, and riskier. In the summer of 2018, Danueal Drayton used Tinder to lure Samantha Stewart on a date to the race track and eventually to her apartment, where he sexually assaulted and then strangled her to death. After his arrest, the authorities linked Drayton to at least 6 other murders, where he also used the dating platform to prey on women expecting to find love.
One core theme of this episode is the challenge we have with communication. While it’s not easy speaking from our hearts — or with our minds — we are called to raise our voices more than ever these days. Whether trying to seduce, convince, or condemn, we must speak up. But how will these new methods of communication change the things we say and the way we say it?
A Copy of You for You
The second act in this episode follows Matt as he describes his former role as a technician that instructs digital clones called “cookies”. Like having presets for every household technology, these digital copies are designed to help the original humans live more convenient lives by understanding them without any instructions. Gone are the days of machine learning; your clone already knows.
However, this episode brings up some old philosophical questions: what is consciousness, and what does it means to be alive? When our minds are replicated and transferred into strings of code, does that constitute creating life? Do the “cookies” have a say in how they should live?
The Internet of Things is a concept that describes physical objects with the ability to connect and exchange data via sensors, enabling them to gather information from a network and provide a wide range of services. The Internet of Things has already revolutionized the commercial, healthcare, and transportation industries.
For wealthy consumers, one area that has benefited from the Internet of Things is recurring tasks like grocery shopping. Samsung recently released the Family Hub refrigerators that recognize when you’re running low on an item and order it for you before you are out. Imagine all the arguments you’ve had in the past about dinner; wouldn’t it be great if all your appliances knew what you were craving and ordered it for you?
Currently, all the data collected are stored in a network and require the devices to pull it out when necessary. But what if the network is just a clone of you?
There are two major steps to the process known as mind transfer, where we reproduce the contents of our brains onto computers. That’s turning 86 billion neurons interconnected by 100 trillion synapses into code.
The first challenge is building an artificial brain that can simulate neurons, and the second is to scan the brain, measure all the neurons and how they are connected, and then copy the patterns to the aforementioned artificial brain.
The first step is achievable today. We have built artificial neurons connected through synapses before; tools like Siri and self-driving cars already operate on this system, but Siri does not have 86 billion neurons. In fact, Siri only has an IQ of 23.9, which is well below a human toddler.
The second step in mind transfer is still decades, if not centuries away. The ability to extract the contents of someone’s brain without possibly killing them is not currently available. Unlike software like Siri, our brains have amazing plasticity.
Consider the cocktail party effect where you enter a noisy party: everything sounds chaotic, and then after a moment, your brain rewires to focus on individual voices and sounds. This plasticity is where voice-activated technology still has trouble. How many times has Siri registered the wrong sounds? How many times has Siri not understood the context of our request?
I found this segment of the episode fascinating and relevant today. How do you punish someone with infinite time? How do you motivate someone who has a slave to operate everything? What kind of heaven will we create with convenience? What kind of inescapable hell are we constructing? Much like how religion can motivate us to be kind, can this alternate reality motivate us to be better humans? Or would it lead us to corruption, cruelty, and hunger to control what we can? Us.
Blocking and Confessing
A major conflict in the episode is Joe’s argument with his fiancee, Beth, regarding her pregnancy. While at first Joe was excited to be a father, Beth insisted that she wanted an abortion.
The two go back and forth, and eventually, Beth blocks him, turning him into a grey, static distortion, unable for him to see or hear her. Estranged, Joe discovered that Beth had gone ahead with her pregnancy and ended up giving birth to a baby girl. But because he was still blocked, he couldn’t see Beth or the baby.
After spying on the family for a few years, Joe learned that Beth had died in a train accident. Her death lifted the block, and Joe attempted to reconnect with his child — only to find out that she was Asian and Beth had an affair.
Enraged, Joe killed Beth’s father, leading to the little girl dying in the snow. In a twist ending, we learn that Matt had been manipulating Joe so that he would confess to his crime; and that all this time, Joe was a digital clone, a cookie.
The right to have an abortion is a political fault line in America, splitting Republicans and Democrats. While it may seem like society was moving towards respect and understanding, the unwavering force of the religious rallied on and on, preaching morality while overlooking women’s rights. Persistent and relentless, the conservatives knocked a progressive future two steps back on June 2022, when the Supreme Court of America overturned Roe v Wade, a landmark case that had set precedence since 1973.
This push and shove showed how fragile our rights actually are. As of summer 2022, abortion is now illegal in 11 states, including Texas, Tennessee, and Idaho. These laws mean any person who gets an abortion or helps someone get an abortion could be criminally charged and face jail time. The loss of the right to choose puts the lens on other brittle regulations including same-sex marriages and contraceptives.
As soon as a child is involved in a couple’s dispute, the complexity increases tenfold, often extending the length of the conflict and leaving one party at the mercy of another, whether by withholding the right to see their child or financial repercussions.
Take, for example, the ongoing Brangelina saga. In September 2016, Angelina Jolie filed for divorce from Brad Pitt after two years of marriage, alleging that Pitt had assaulted her. They have six children together. As of the fall of 2022, the custody battle continues as Jolie demands sole custody, while Pitt is unwilling to give up the fight.
The rise in social media has also led to an increase in abuse. In a study conducted by Pew Research Center, 41% of US adults have experienced online harassment, and half of those groups have experienced more severe behaviors.
Since its inception, social media platforms have been figuring out how to effectively ban users that violate their terms. Hate speech, bullying, and threats are as hard to eliminate as cockroaches; when they remove one account, two more take its place.
Twitter has been a prime example of a platform struggling to balance freedom of speech and the toxicity of a branch of users. From shadow-banning an individual to flat-out blocking the whole account, Twitter experimented with many forms of moderation. But the questions persist: What does it even mean to block someone? Does it block them from seeing your content? You from seeing their content? Can they not send you messages but still see your account? Does limiting amplification mean the same thing as censoring?
A few high-profile blocks have included Donald Trump, Kanye West, and the misogynistic kickboxer, Andrew Tate. But since Elon Musk took over Twitter in the fall of 2022, those bans have been lifted, and all three returned to the platform in varying degrees. As of December, Kanye West is the only one to be banned again for his anti-Semitic comments.
Should you ever find yourself in a scenario where someone accuses you of doing wrong, you may discover that evidence doesn’t truly matter and that it all comes down to your confession. The world is always looking for a scapegoat. That is why you see police officers forcing people to make false confessions through tactics such as those Matt used on Joe, including isolation and wearing the subject down through lies, intimidation, and trust-building stories.
While fingerprints and DNA have been reliable evidence in trials, our digital footprint may be more damning. One day when our minds are transferred onto computers, we might not only need to protect our physical beings but also our separate digital entities.
In 2020, weeks before the US presidential election, the New York Post reported that a laptop allegedly belonging to Joe Biden’s son, Hunter contained emails with evidence of corruption. As of spring 2022, the details of the computer’s content are still unclear. But consider this, what if Hunter Biden’s computer could speak on its behalf? What if Hunter Biden’s computer was actually a clone of Hunter Biden?
Black Mirror episodes are already loaded with many concepts to discuss, but this one was definitely a stocking full of mind-bending ideas. The twist and turns this episode takes us on is still a fun ride. With references to prior episodes, these easter eggs and callbacks make it feel that all of Black Mirror is taking place in one universe.
As we approach this holiday season, coming close to the end of a pandemic, and emerging from nearly three years of trauma, White Christmas is as comforting as looking at an old album of friends and families. While we may often recall details through rose-tinted glasses, we also remember the arguments we had back then are very much the same ones we are having now. Like days and years in a cookie, time will pass, the world will change, but the holiday season will still feel the same. Cold.
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Before we discuss The Waldo Moment, let’s take a trip back, about a decade ago, to when this episode was first released: February 25, 2013.
On January 21, 2013, the United States inaugurated Barack Obama for his second term as President. In March, China appointed to power Xi Jinping, who was set to turn the page and regain a sense of national greatest.
Donald Trump was only speculating about running for the 2016 election. And in the coming weeks, The Apprentice season 13 would air on NBC.
A year prior, Sasha Baron Cohen released his political satire The Dictator. And in 2013, the first Netflix hit, House of Cards proved original series created by streaming services could succeed. Kevin Spacey wasn’t canceled yet for sexual assault but rather acclaimed for his role as the power-hungry Frank Underwood.
Jon Stewart was reaching the end of his tenure as the host of the Daily Show. In June 2013, he stepped away from the desk to direct a political drama, Rosewater, allowing John Oliver to fill in for a couple of months.
In January 2013, the first video episodes of the Joe Rogan Experience were uploaded onto YouTube. These videos would get hundred of thousand to a million of views regularly.
While it may have felt like it was all fun and games, someone was bound to get hurt. The Kony 2012 online campaign fooled many. Cyberbullying became ever more prominent in the news, including the story of Amanda Todd’s death in October 2012. Eight months earlier, Trayvon Martin’s fatal shooting by vigilante George Zimmerman, fueled tribalism and demonstrated the ineffectiveness of social media as a communication tool.
The flowery utopia we were hoping for was wilting. The joke was over. The systems were breaking, and no one was capable of fixing them. According to the political online magazine AlterNet, 1.4 million Americans voted for Jesus Christ as the president in the 2012 write-in ballot to show their displeasure for both Obama and Mitt Romney.
So that’s where we were in February of 2013. A simpler time, when we have only started to divide, forced to pick between two unsatisfactory options on all levels. With all that said, let’s get into our discussion of Black Mirror episode 3 of season 2: The Waldo Moment.
Did this episode age well? Are the themes still relevant? Did any of the predictions come to fruition, and if not, is it still plausible?
Let’s find out.
The Jester King
The Waldo Moment follows Jamie, a comedian who plays Waldo, an animated blue bear that makes vulgar jokes on television. Set during a political campaign, his opportunistic producer, Jack, convinces him to run as a member of parliament under the guise of Waldo. This episode mirrors modern political satire and its power to reflect important talking points in an approachable way, while being implicit in sparking its own misinformation.
Satire can be used to raise awareness without the drabness of journalism and public records, and it’s an effective method to criticize factors in a society without applying the full weight of the problem. In another word, satire is the sugar that helps the medicine go down.
Many young people of my generation got news from comedians as opposed to reporters. There was often more truth in the comedy, and that’s what made The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report so influential.
Recently, satire and the freedom of speech in these realms have been under attack. With the rise of fake news, including the Russian-backed stories shared all over Facebook during the 2016 election, the role of satirical publications was placed under the microscope. A rising concern occurred when various third parties began citing The Onion as a real news source, including such gems as “Kim Jong-Un Named The Onion’s Sexiest Man Alive For 2012″ and “Planned Parenthood Opens $8 Billion Abortionplex.”
On January 2015, two Islamic terrorists stormed into the French satirical newspaper, Charlie Hebdo and killed 12 people and injured 11 for publishing a cartoon of the prophet Muhammad.
Our trust in politicians and the press were decreasing, and we wondered if we could reign in satire without limiting freedom of speech. And that’s what makes The Waldo Moment so interesting. This episode shows that given the right circumstances a joke can take a life of its own.
Comedians running for government is not a new concept even during this episode’s time. In 2007, Stephen Colbert, playing the role of his well-intentioned, poorly-informed character, ran for office during the 2008 Presidential Election. Although Colbert ended up dropping out, the Facebook group “1,000,000 Strong for Stephen T Colbert” surpassed its one million member mark in less than ten days, making it the fastest-growing Facebook group in the site’s history. Did Colbert ever intend on becoming President or was it all for the show?
Comedy and politics share a lot in common; they’re show businesses. While both may seem like it’s a one-person performance, there are many behind the scene pulling the strings. The figurehead ends up being the puppet that protects the party.
Jamie can make Waldo say whatever he wants because the blue cartoon bear protects him. Characters and personas can create invisible shields. A politician can protect himself as long as he plays himself up as a character that’s defending a group of people or an ideology.
Donald Trump did that during his first impeachment, which incidentally involved an allegation that he withheld military aid from Ukraine, attempting to influence them to investigate Joe Biden. Of course, we are now familiar with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. So in that exchange, we had Trump, a former reality television star in negotiation with Zelensky, a former comedic actor.
See the wild ride we’ve been on this past decade? You’d think we’ve learned our lesson, but no. Voting an animated blue bear to a leadership role seems plausible, and the scary thing is that it might not even be the worst option.
Democracy is a Joke
A key marker in this episode was when candidate Liam Munroe explained why he wanted to run for the position. He answered that he wanted to make the world a fairer place, and that’s the role of a politician.
This brings up the question, why do people want to run for office? While they might say all the right things in front of the voters, we can sometimes see their underlying reasons.
In 2011, during the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, Barack Obama gave a speech commenting on the “birther” movement, a conspiracy theory where Donald Trump, along with other Republicans, demanded to see the President’s birth certificate to prove he was actually born in America. In a mic-drop moment on stage, Obama roasted Trump, bringing all the influential people in the room together with laughter.
Trump’s anger likely fueled his campaign in 2016, and the rest is history.
While a grudge can be one reason to run for government, another reason is for fame and notoriety. Munroe’s competitor, Gwendolyn Harris was using the campaign as a “stepping stone” to build her showreel.
This is a common practice in politics these days. Running for the government doesn’t need to pay off in having a seat in the House, because public appearances, keynote speeches, and book deals can make up for that investment over time. Not all the numbers are disclosed, but according to a report by Insider, members of the US Congress earned $1.8 million in 2020 from book advances and royalties, with at least 26 members earning a large amount in their side projects.
We can often feel cynical looking at the democratic process. Gerrymandering, the electoral college, and other nonsensical procedures can make one feel like their votes don’t matter.
Trash votes have long been a protest against a dysfunctional system. This act of wasting votes can take form in two ways. It can be a high-profile celebrity running to steal votes from a challenging party, like in 2020 when Kanye “Ye” West ran for president as an independent. What caused suspicion was that he was getting support from former Republican Party operatives. Who knows what Ye’s real reason for running was? But if nothing more, it distracted us from real talking points and swayed a few undecided voters to waste their votes for a laugh.
The other way is by spoiling their votes right in the ballot or not filling it out at all. In a primary election in Finland and Sweden, Donald Duck earned a significant amount of votes. In Ukraine, the Internet Party nominated Darth Vadar. In the 2017 French presidential election, 4 million blank or spoiled ballots and 12 million abstentions won Emmanuel Macron the position. Protest or absenteeism in voting are symptoms of dissatisfaction with the political system. When society sees a rise in this, they must question their candidates and their processes.
The responsibility of a politician is to make the world a fairer place. That’s a tough order. And we no longer believe that is something our leaderships are capable of, not with the system in place at least. While it may be scary, many are choosing instead to tear it all down. In 2019, Joaquin Phoenix played Joker, a character that encapsulated that feeling. It makes us all feel like clowns when, in reality, it’s the ones in power that are jokes.
The Vote for Violence
At the end of the episode, Jamie abandons his role as Waldo. As he doesn’t own the right to the character, his boss, Jack ends up taking over. When Jamie tries to destroy what he’d built, under Jack’s control, Waldo incites the public to attack Jamie. This type of violence occurs again when Munroe wins and Waldo tells the crowd to riot and strike Munroe.
This call to violence brings back recent memories, most notably the January 6 incident on Capitol Hill. On the day Joe Biden’s presidency was to be certified, in an attempt to overturn the election, more than 2000 Trump supporters broke into the Capitol Building. The result was five deaths and a black eye for democracy visible around the world.
This event was not spontaneous. For a few months, Trump stoked his loyalists, sowing mistrust, and giving permission to prepare an insurrection.
Politicians have the power to embolden people, giving them a sense of righteousness and a feeling of immunity if they take action into their own hands. Much like how people listened to Waldo, people listened to Trump. All they needed was a symbol to band together on.
But this amplification of violence is not only available to politicians anymore. Misinformation and validation for hate can come from anyone who has a platform. Take, for example, the criticism against Joe Rogan these past few years. With the largest podcast in the world, millions of people hear his words. That’s why when he questions vaccination or repeats conspiracy theories, even with a frame of innocent curiosity, he divides people. Despite claiming, on multiple occasions, that he’s not a doctor and he’s a “fucking moron”, his words can rouse other morons to act dangerously.
A repercussive example was on July 14, 2022. On his podcast, Rogan joked about shooting homeless people in LA. The joke itself wasn’t particularly funny, but what was most surprising was that it came during a time of crisis. In 2020, over half a million Americans were unhoused. While we can all defend a joke in a society where everyone is of sound mind, we, unfortunately, live in a world where all a crazy person needs is a spark to unleash violence on others. Therefore, we, like Rogan, must examine whether there is a relation between crimes around us and what high-profile individuals say.
Six days after Rogan’s joke about homeless people, I woke up to an emergency alert on my phone. The message warned me that a shooter killed three homeless people in my neighboring city of Langley, BC. Whether Rogan’s words had any influence we will never know for the suspect was shot dead by the police, but the fact remains.
Recently, the news has been about “Ye” and his antisemitic comments on social media. When one of the loudest voices of our generation starts spewing hate, the world notices. Many condemned the message, while some flew banners on the Los Angeles freeway saying, “Kanye is right about the Jews”.
Violence does not begin with gas chambers. That’s where the story ends. Violence begins with hate speech and blame aimed at a group of people. Whether we are trying to bring down a government or clear out vermins, violence has always been effective. But what happens after? What happens when a government is overthrown and the so-called vermins are gone?
At the end of The Waldo Moment, we find Jamie homeless in an Orwellian world ruled by Waldo. Out of all the episodes I have rewatched so far, this episode felt real, almost cutting too close to home.
The ridiculous theater of politics is more ineffective than ever. Any attempt to improve it creates more risks of having it crumble completely. In many ways, we are already living with the consequences portrayed in the conclusion of The Waldo Moment. Many are already worshiping a cartoon character and will act violently if called upon.
So how did this episode age? Like the previous political episode, The National Anthem, what seemed to have been preposterous a decade ago had already come true. That is why when watching this episode, we can only laugh and shake our heads. How innocent it must have felt for the Black Mirror creators when conceiving this concept.
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Elliot Chan 