It’s good to be back. After taking a month off from editing my novel trilogy, it feels great to return to it with fresh eyes. The last few months of summer were hectic, and I was running on fumes. As much as I wanted to power through, I knew a break was better than burning out.
Over the last few years, I’ve made a ton of progress — getting drafts of all three books down on paper was a huge milestone. But now I’m deep in the editing phase, making sure each story flows not just on its own, but as part of a bigger arc. Think of it like this: each book has its own beginning, middle, and end — but together, books one, two, and three form one larger story with the same structure.
It’s exciting, but it’s also a grind. I’m chipping away at it day by day while balancing the rest of life. By the end of summer, I was training for my triathlon and working full-time, and something had to give. I believe you can do everything — just not all at once. So, for a while, writing took a backseat.
I’ll admit, I was nervous about stepping away. I worried I’d lose momentum or that this would be the moment my project quietly died — that fear every long-term creator knows: put something down for “just a bit,” and never pick it up again.
But working on this project has been part of my life for five years now — it’s built into my routine, like cleaning the house or tending the garden. When I take a break, it’s not like quitting; it’s more like letting the plants grow wild for a bit. Eventually, I’ll come back to prune and tidy things up.
I didn’t even stop at a neat checkpoint — I was mid-edit, right in the middle of Chapter 3 of Book 2. That actually made it easier to return. There wasn’t a buildup or mental block. I just jumped back in where I left off.
So yeah, it might feel like starting over, but it’s not. It’s more like reconnecting with an old friend. You know that feeling when you haven’t seen someone in ages, and you wonder if it’ll be awkward — but then, as soon as you meet, you pick up right where you left off. That’s what returning to my writing felt like.
And as the saying goes, absence makes the heart grow fonder. I’m more excited about this project than ever. Is it going to be the greatest thing ever written? Probably not — but that’s not the goal. Nobody visits Italy thinking, “I’m going to be the best person to ever visit Italy.” You go because you love the experience. Writing is like that for me. With each revision, I see the story sharpen and come alive. I’m polishing the stone, adding color to the outline, and watching my vision take shape.
So here’s what’s next: to stay accountable, I’m starting a new monthly series documenting my progress — the writing, the challenges, the little breakthroughs.
It won’t be easy, but I’m committed. I feel refreshed, inspired, and ready to keep going. This years-long journey still fills me with an energy I can’t quite put into words.
My name’s Elliot. I make videos about the endurance of creativity and life in this wild, dystopian world.
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Before we dive into the events of Joan Is Awful, let’s flash back to when this episode first aired: June 15, 2023.
In 2023, the tech industry faced a wave of major layoffs. Meta cut 10,000 employees and closed 5,000 open positions in March. Amazon followed, letting go of 9,000 workers that same month. Microsoft reduced its workforce by 10,000 employees in early 2023, while Google announced its own significant layoffs, contributing to a broader trend of instability in even the largest, most influential tech companies.
Netflix released Depp v. Heard in 2023. This three-part documentary captures the defamation trial between Johnny Depp and Amber Heard. The series explored the viral spectacle that surrounded it online, showing how social media, memes, and influencer commentary amplified every moment.
Meanwhile, incidents of deepfakes surged dramatically. In North America alone, AI-generated videos and audio clips increased tenfold in 2023 compared to the previous year, with a 1,740% spike in malicious use.
In early 2023, a video began circulating on YouTube and across social media that seemed to show Elon Musk in a CNBC interview. The Tesla CEO appeared calm and confident as he promoted a new cryptocurrency opportunity. It looked authentic enough to fool thousands. But the entire thing was fake.
That same year, the legal system began to catch up. An Australian man named Anthony Rotondo was charged with creating and distributing non-consensual deepfake images on a now-defunct website called Mr. Deepfakes. In 2025, he admitted to the offense and was fined $343,500.
Around the world, banks and cybersecurity experts raised alarms as AI manipulation began to breach biometric systems, leading to a new wave of financial fraud. What started as a novelty filter had become a weapon capable of stealing faces, voices, and identities.
All of this brings us to Black Mirror—Season 6, Episode 1: Joan Is Awful.
The episode explores the collision of personal privacy, corporate control, and digital replication. Joan’s life is copied, manipulated, and broadcast for entertainment before she even has a chance to tell her own story. The episode asks: How much of your identity is still yours when technology can exploit and monetize it? And is it even possible to reclaim control once the algorithm has taken over?
In this video, we’ll unpack the episode’s themes, explore real-world parallels, and ask whether these events have already happened—and if not, whether they are still plausible in our tech-driven, AI-permeated world.
Streaming Our Shame
In Joan is Awful, we follow Joan, an everyday woman whose life unravels after a streaming platform launches a show that dramatizes her every move. But the show’s algorithm doesn’t just imitate Joan’s life; it distorts it for entertainment. Her friends and coworkers watch the exaggerated version of her, and start believing it’s real.
The idea that media can reshape someone’s identity isn’t new—it’s been happening for years, only now with AI, it happens faster, cheaper, and more convincingly.
Reality television has long operated in this blurred zone between truth and manipulation. Contestants on shows like The Bachelor and Survivor have accused producers of using editing tricks to create villains and scandals that never actually happened.
One of the most striking examples comes from The Bachelor contestant Victoria Larson, who accused producers of using “Frankenbiting”, a technique of editing together pieces of dialogue from different times to make her appear like she was spreading rumors or being manipulative. She said the selective editing destroyed her reputation and derailed her career.
Then there’s the speed of public judgment in the age of social media. In 2020, when Amy Cooper—later dubbed “Central Park Karen”—called the police on a Black bird-watcher, the footage went viral within hours. She was fired, denounced, and doxxed almost overnight.
But Joan is Awful also goes deeper, showing how even our most intimate spaces are no longer private.
In 2020, hackers breached Vastaamo, a Finnish psychotherapy service, stealing hundreds of patient files—including therapy notes—and blackmailing both the company and individuals. Finnish authorities eventually caught the hacker, who was sentenced in 2024 for blackmail and unauthorized data breaches.
In this episode, Streamberry’s AI show thrives on a simple principle: outrage. They turn Joan’s humiliation into the audience’s entertainment. The more uncomfortable she becomes, the more viewers tune in. It’s not far from reality.
A 2025 study published in ProMarket found that toxic content drives higher engagement on social media platforms. When users were shielded from negative or hostile posts, they spent 9% less time per day on Facebook, resulting in fewer ads and interactions.
By 2025, over 52% of TikTok videos featured some form of AI generation—synthetic voices, avatars, or deepfake filters. These “AI slop” clips fill feeds with distorted versions of real people, transforming private lives into shareable, monetized outrage.
Joan is Awful magnifies a reality we already live in. Our online world thrives on manipulation—of emotion, of data, of identity—and we’ve signed the release form without even noticing.
Agreeing Away Your Identity
One of the episode’s most painful scenes comes when Joan meets with her lawyer, asking if there’s any legal way to stop the company from using her life as entertainment. But the lawyer points to the fine print—pages of complex legal language Joan had accepted without a second thought.
The moment is both absurd and shockingly real. How many times have you clicked “I agree” without reading a word?
In the real world, most of us do exactly what Joan did. A 2017 Deloitte survey conducted in the U.S. shows that over 90% of users accept terms and conditions without reading them. Platforms can then use that data for marketing, AI training, or even creative content—all perfectly legal because we “consented.”
The dangers of hidden clauses extend far beyond digital services. In 2023, Disneyland attempted to invoke a controversial contract clause to avoid liability for a tragic allergic reaction that led to a woman’s death at a Disney World restaurant in Florida. The company argued that her husband couldn’t sue for wrongful death because—years earlier—he had agreed to arbitration and legal waivers buried in the fine print of a free Disney+ trial.
Critics called the move outrageous, pointing out that Disney was trying to apply streaming service terms to a completely unrelated event. The case exposed how corporations can weaponize routine user agreements to sidestep accountability.
The episode also echoes recent events where real people’s stories have been taken and repackaged for profit.
Take Elizabeth Holmes, the disgraced founder of Theranos. Within months of her trial, her life was dramatized into The Dropout. The Hulu mini-series was produced in real time alongside Holmes’s ongoing trial. As new courtroom revelations surfaced, the writers revised the script. The result was a more layered, unsettling portrayal of Holmes and her business partner Sunny Balwani—a relationship far more complex and toxic than anyone initially imagined.
In Joan is Awful, the show’s AI doesn’t care about Joan’s truth, and in our world, algorithms aren’t so different. Every click, every “I agree,” and every trending headline feeds an ecosystem that rewards speed over accuracy and spectacle over empathy.
When consent becomes a view or a checkbox and stories become assets, the line between living your life and licensing it starts to blur. And by the time we realize what we’ve signed away, it might already be too late.
Facing the Deepfake
In Joan Is Awful, the twist isn’t just that Joan’s life is being dramatized; it’s that everyone’s life is. What begins as a surreal violation spirals into an infinite mirror. Salma Hayek plays Joan in the Streamberry series, but then Cate Blanchett plays Salma Hayek in the next layer.
The rise of AI and deepfake technology is reshaping how we understand identity and consent. Increasingly, people are discovering their faces, voices, or likenesses used in ads, films, or explicit content without permission.
In 2025, Brazilian police arrested four people for using deepfakes of celebrity Gisele Bündchen and others in fraudulent Instagram ads, scamming victims out of nearly $3.9 million USD.
Governments worldwide are beginning to respond. Denmark’s copyright amendment now treats personal likeness as intellectual property, allowing takedown requests and platform fines even posthumously. In the U.S., the 2025 TAKE IT DOWN Act criminalizes non-consensual AI-generated sexual imagery and impersonation.
In May 2025, Mr. Deepfakes, one of the world’s largest deepfake pornography websites, permanently shut down after a core service provider terminated operations. The platform had been online since 2018 and hosted more than 43,000 AI-generated sexual videos, viewed over 1.5 billion times. Roughly 95% of targets were celebrity women, but researchers identified hundreds of victims who were private individuals.
Despite these legal advances, a fundamental gray area remains. As AI becomes increasingly sophisticated, it is getting harder to tell whether content is drawn from a real person or entirely fabricated.
Her lifelike digital persona was built using the performances of real actors—without their consent. The event marked a troubling shift. As producers continue to push AI-generated actors into mainstream projects.
Actress Whoopi Goldberg voiced her concern, saying, “The problem with this, in my humble opinion, is that you’re up against something that’s been generated with 5,000 other actors.”
“It’s a little bit of an unfair advantage,” she added. “But you know what? Bring it on. Because you can always tell them from us.”
In response to the backlash, Tilly’s creator Eline Van der Velden shared a statement: “To those who have expressed anger over the creation of our AI character, Tilly Norwood: she is not a replacement for a human being, but a creative work – a piece of art.”
When Joan and Salma Hayek sneak into the Streamberry headquarters, they overhear Mona Javadi, the executive behind the series, explaining the operation. She reveals that every version of Joan Is Awful is generated simultaneously by a quantum computer, endlessly creating new versions of real people’s lives for entertainment. Each “Joan,” “Salma,” and “Cate” is a copy of a copy—an infinite simulation. And it’s not just Joan; the system runs on an entire catalog of ordinary people. Suddenly, the scale of this entertainment becomes clear—it’s not just wide, it’s deep, with endless iterations and consequences.
At the 2025 Runway AI Film Festival, the winning film Total Pixel Space exemplified how filmmakers are beginning to embrace these multiverse-like AI frameworks. Rather than following a single script, the AI engine dynamically generated visual and narrative elements across multiple variations of the same storyline, creating different viewer experiences each time.
AI and deepfake technologies are already capable of realistically replicating faces, voices, and mannerisms, and platforms collect vast amounts of personal data from our everyday lives. Add quantum computing, algorithmic storytelling, and the legal gray areas surrounding consent and likeness, and the episode’s vision of lives being rewritten for entertainment starts to feel less like fantasy.
Every post, every photo, every digital footprint feeds algorithms that could one day rewrite our lives—or maybe already are. Maybe we can slip the loop, maybe we’re already in it, and maybe the trick is simply staying aware that everything we do is already being watched, whether by the eyes of the audience or the eyes of the creators that is still seeking inspiration.
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Skydiving was something I always wanted to do. And this summer with the encouragement of my mother. We went and did it.
It was a lot of fun, and the best way for me to describe that experience was that it’s like a dream, where you wake up and you still have fragments of that memory, and you are just trying to piece it all together and feel that same feeling again. I definitely see how it can be addictive.
I felt pretty calm the whole time. The night before, I fell asleep listening to a podcast about D-Day and about how the paratroopers had to drop into France in the dead of night. I found that to be quite comforting as it allowed me to put that into perspective and come to terms with my own courage and how I’m doing it recreationally and not dropping into a war zone.
My approach when it comes to doing something stressful like that, whether it’s bungee jumping or skydiving, is to turn my brain off. Once you do that, you just remember what you have to do. This is actually really easy for me, because as a job, I’m a marketing strategist. So I spend a lot of time during the workday thinking about things. A lot of things.
So when I get an opportunity to turn off my brain, I enjoy it. When I get an opportunity, to follow some simple instructions like once the door to the airplane opens, pull your leg over, and just hang there. That’s easy. So yeah.
Once I got flung out and into the free fall, that was a rush. It’s very windy, and the world feels so distorted and strange — it doesn’t even seem real. That’s the biggest difference from bungee jumping, because when you’re bungee jumping, the world comes right at you, and that feeling of plummeting toward the ground is so real and raw. When you’re falling from 10,000 feet, you don’t get that same experience.
When I was bungee jumping, especially when it’s your first time, my instincts just took over, and I started reaching out and grabbing things to stop myself, but there is obviously nothing. Doing that kind of pulled me off balance, and as you can see, I got twisting out of control. So fun.
So yeah, back to skydiving. You’re just free-falling for a few seconds — probably between 10 and 30 — not long, before the parachute deploys. And that’s such a relief. It’s kind of the same feeling as when the bungee cord catches you and you don’t splat on the ground. There aren’t many feelings like that in life, so that was great.
From this point on, the experience is actually quite similar between skydiving and bungee jumping. You get this second ride — a second experience. With bungee jumping, you’re bouncing up and down, and the second bounce is almost as high as the first drop. That’s great because now you know the cord will hold you. With skydiving, it’s more like sightseeing — I was just trying to soak it all in.
But what really made me want to do it again was that my tandem partner, the instructor, gave me the handle to control the parachute, letting me steer. I didn’t know how to do it properly, but when you really pulled on it, it felt like a rollercoaster drop — you get swung sideways and really feel the Gs. That was awesome, and I would love to feel that again. I don’t get to go on too many rollercoasters these days, but that was incredible.
When it comes down to it, skydiving and bungee jumping often get clumped together, but they’re actually very different experiences. I’d say if you really want that “I’m going to die” feeling, bungee jumping is for you. I’ve done bungee jumping both forward and backward, and I’d recommend going forward so you can see the world coming at you — although backward is really scary too.
If you want more of a rollercoaster ride, then go skydiving. I don’t know if I can explain it any better.
Both are so much fun, and I recommend giving both a try it’s so worth it!
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Elliot Chan 