Black Mirror Creator Charlie Brooker on Drones, Rabbit Holes, and Broligarchy

Black Mirror creator and professional pessimist Charlie Brooker has turned our collective anxieties into prestige television, conjuring dystopian futures that always feel just a few doom-scrolls away. Through his hit Netflix show, which released its seventh season earlier this month, the former journalist and cartoonist has skewered everything from surveillance states to social media apps—A Twilight Zone for our tech-addled nightmare. While doing press for the six-episode new season, Brooker took a moment to offer up his immediate takes on some pretty freaky stuff. 

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FACIAL RECOGNITION

“Useful, but depressing. I mean, to have your Apple photo catalog assessed by some sort of virtual Stasi is sort of weird and depressing.” 

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JEFF BEZOS

“Not the fucking Starman Bowie was thinking of.” 

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DRONES

“If you’re talking about the little ones that buzz around and film you when you’re in your garden—irritating. If you’re talking about the ones that fly in and bomb you—terrifying. I’m expecting the drones of the future to be about the size of a matchbox, and to be able to knife you in the eye while you are trying to eat a sandwich. So I’ll go with terrifying.”

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ARTIFICIAL GENERAL INTELLIGENCE

“Am I right in thinking that’s kind of the singularity moment that we’re all, within an afternoon, obsolete? And we’re all suddenly outwitted by this fucking brain box? Maybe that would be better than what’s happening now. I don’t know.”

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AGING

“It’s the fucking worst. I’m 54 now, I went for a medical, and apart from then having to go for a colonoscopy, which is its own form of indignity, the guy said to me, ‘You are going to have to work on your upper body strength.’ I was like, ‘I know, my fitness really fell off during the pandemic,’ and he went, ‘It’s going to mean whether you can or can’t get out of a chair unassisted in 10 years time.’ So I went and bought a set of dumbbells which I haven’t really used.”

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RABBIT HOLES

“That’s half of a phone’s function these days, isn’t it? An information coma, and I’ll do it about fucking anything. The problem now is that the algorithm does the rabbit hole for you. You just sit a child in front of a machine and it will radicalize them by 3:00 PM.” 

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BROLIGARCHY

“How did nerds go from being beaten up by jocks to beating everyone else up? I don’t know what the fuck happened, but it’s sort of depressing.”

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PUBS

“Delightful. A good pub is a useful British institution.”

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REALITY

“Under assault. It feels like we’re in an era where there’s competing visions of reality, and you are being forced to pick a side. And that’s really destabilizing, and not good for anyone’s brain. I don’t know how we get out of that.”

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TRANSHUMANISM

“I read a book once called Great Mambo Chicken and the Transhuman Condition, which was about how we’ll ultimately use nanotechnology to re-knit ourselves, effectively, into new creatures and consciousnesses. And that ultimately, we’ll end up being a sentient gas that can go out and explore the universe. Maybe that’s how we’d get out of it.” 

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SAM ALTMAN

“I really don’t know much about him. He just looks like a fucking bloke walking past the window, doesn’t he?” 

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CORRUPTION

“There’s certainly a sense that the pie isn’t being sliced fairly, and that seems to be an overarching theme as to why everyone’s so fucking angry. How much of that is down to naked corruption, how much of it is down to being in a system that we don’t know how to change, and how much of it is down to incompetence? I don’t know.” 

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NOTES

“A necessary part of the process. Netflix, it pains me to say, has not really ever given me a dumb note, which is almost annoying because you’d like to feel like you’re a swashbuckler who would ignore it. But I try not to read notes on a phone when that email comes through because if you scroll, it goes on for 100 years. And then if you look at it later on a desktop computer, it’s like, ‘Oh, that’s two sentences.'” 

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SECOND SCREENING

“I think my brain probably formed itself too early in life to be able to do it efficiently. I was being interviewed on a radio show, and I noticed that the other guests were all on their phones in between questions being asked. Clearly, I was being fucking boring. I thought “How fucking rude,” in the moment. And then I kind of felt like, “Oh, maybe they’re just younger, and they can do that.”

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SURVEILLANCE

“London has had CCTV in every nook and cranny for as long as I can remember, and I’ve got an Alexa device in my house, so I must’ve given up.”

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