Humanity Takes a "Nosedive"

In typical Black Mirror fashion, “Nosedive”, season three episode 1, presents a reality that is conceivable of a not too distant future, that is extremely different from now but at the same time reasonable with the direction our society is moving. In this episode, technology and social media have been taken to such an extreme that a persons standing in life, in all facets not simply social, is based on their score out of a possible five points. Constantly people are judging and rating each other and one wrong move can take someone from a comfortable 4.2 into the average 3’s or to devastating 2’s or 1’s. 

In Brian Christian’s book The Most Human Human, he states, “Existence without essence is very stressful.” Although “Nosedive” is not about A.I. technology, this quotation really gets to one of the heart of the story. The essence of a person is the intrinsic, abstract nature of what makes a human, human. In this episode, people have lost their essence and are simply existing in this alternate reality of social media. Although everyone knows what having a low score can do to a person, down voting is seen as a way to publicly punish someone you don’t agree with. The main character Lacey must come to the realization that her social media life is a complete farce. The only real human interactions she has in the entire story are with her brother, the truck driver, and the man in jail at the end. When it comes to what her brother has to say, Lacey is in complete denial about her situation. She will do whatever it takes to raise her number, not just for the reason that she gives about buying the house, but also because her social media presence has become her sense of self. Nobody is real online, and people can even go as far as hiring consultants to get their scores up. 

Christian also states that “Like most conversations and most chess games, we all start off the same and we all end the same, with a brief moment of difference in between. Fertilization to fertilizer. Ashes to ashes. And we spark across the gap.” Everyone starts out the same and a person’s score means nothing after death, yet everyone still plays into this society that pits people against each other. People do not always give each other perfect scores because they everyone would be the same. In a society with no essence, the only way to feel good about yourself is to make someone else feel bad about themselves.