“Joan Is Awful,” the primary episode of the brand new season of Black Mirror, was impressed by The Dropout. Specifically, as creator Charlie Brooker told WIRED this week, it was sparked by seeing the deluge of content surrounding Elizabeth Holmes and the Theranos scandal—a ebook, a TV present, a film, round 800 podcasts—and interested by how bizarre it should have been for individuals to see themselves portrayed by Hollywood actors in occasions that “feel like they happened about 10 minutes ago.”

The content material machine does appear to be catching as much as individuals’s actual lives: The hole between an enormous monetary scandal and the announcement of the inevitable Michael Lewis ebook about it was once years or months; now it’s days. In the UK, Sky produced a dramatization of the British authorities’s dealing with of the pandemic whereas Covid-19 was nonetheless tearing by means of communities. (Spoiler alert: They blew it.)

The logical conclusion of that narrowing of the hole between inspiration and dramatization—by means of Black Mirror’s twisted, worst-case-scenario lens—is what viewers see in “Joan Is Awful”: customized content material, generated by synthetic intelligence, utilizing deepfakes of well-known actors as stand-ins for normal individuals. Joan—a mid-level govt at a generic startup performed by Schitt’s Creek’s Annie Murphy—will get residence after a troublesome day on the workplace to search out the occasions of that very day have been changed into a slick tv present starring Salma Hayek because the titular character. Things spiral from there—there are layers upon layers, content material all the way in which down.

Society has been transferring on this path for years. Social media algorithms began by exhibiting individuals stuff their buddies have been sharing however quickly morphed into prioritizing issues they’ll interact with, whether or not that’s what they need to see or not. TikTok enjoys success as a result of customers don’t curate their very own feeds: Instead of the stuff you suppose or fake you’re concerned about, it exhibits you what you’re truly into, tapping into your basest needs. (That’s why my feed is usually recipes for Korean fried hen.)

This additionally explains why Twitter now defaults to the For You tab of algorithmically decided tweets from individuals it’s possible you’ll or could not have chosen to observe. “It’s designed to keep the viewer in a state of mesmerized horror,” says the CEO of Streamberry, the Netflix-like platform behind Joan Is Awful, at one level within the Black Mirror episode. “It’s great for engagement.” These guidelines apply whether or not you’re watching Netflix or tweeting about it.

Of course “Joan Is Awful” (the episode, not the present within the episode) takes this to excessive lengths, however one of many supposed advantages of generative AI is that it’ll allow customized content material, tailor-made to our particular person tastes: your individual algorithmically designed hell, so horribly well-targeted which you can’t tear your eyes away.

But as a content material producer (we’re not referred to as editors and writers anymore), I’m actually concerned about what which means for this type of article—the content material concerning the content material. What occurs to cultural commentary when everyone seems to be consuming completely different stuff?

The irony is that whereas hyper-personalized content material could be nice for engagement on streaming platforms, it might be completely horrible for web sites like this one, which draw a few of their foreign money from shared cultural moments: Game of Thrones, Succession, Black Mirror (hopefully).

Like a whale carcass rotting on the ocean flooring, landmark exhibits like Black Mirror and Succession help a complete ecosystem: We siphon off a portion of the search curiosity in these subjects, capitalizing on individuals who have simply watched one thing and need to know what to consider it. This helps clarify the media feeding frenzy across the Succession finale and why I’m scripting this story about Black Mirror regardless that we ran an interview with the creator yesterday.