As Mark Johnson points out, while “many claimed to be put off by the shocking and explicit nature of the Black Mirror’s first episode”, the second episode “might be a more representative introduction to the series” because in the first one the “technology is present, although is arguably less central than other concerns”. Precisely, one of the features of the series is to expose some of the technological phenomena that are happening right now in a manner that they would lose their familiar qualities so their sinister edges become more evident. That is something that the series second episode “Fifteen Million Merits” does fully.

“Fifteen Million Merits” shows a society focused on the production of energy that, at the same time, is absorbed by the consumption of entertainment through a regime as violent as the one that forces people to work. But where is the difference between the society that this chapter portrays and reality? The difference resides for example in the fact that in the episode we do not know exactly what energy is produced for, we don´t know what people work for. In other words, what “Fifteen Million Merits” does is overshadow the productive character of the economy to make us concentrate on the most sinister features of its relationship with entertainment.

As the authors of the Frankfurt School pointed out almost one century ago, the relationship between capitalism and the entertainment industry is not a secondary relationship, there lies the essence of capitalism. This relationship is highly complex, and it can be pointed out that the entertainment industry not only socially reproduces the ideology of capitalism but is the basis of the consumption dynamics that give life to global capital. That is why “Fifteen Million Merits” is not only showing the most sinister side of consumerism in the digital age. It shows that the alienation of all the members of society forced to produce continuously without knowing the purpose is exactly the same as the alienation to which they are led by senseless consumerism.

 

In the Black Mirror’s episode, it is possible to identify, among others, two mechanisms that characterize late capitalism. As Chris Byron and Mathew Brake point out, “Fifteen Million Merits” vividly displays the “reified” quality of capitalist social relations. These authors point out that in this episode “people are seen as things, like apps and apples [money]. And things –whether they be people, apps, or apples [money] – take on social relationships”. The concept of “reification” formulated by Georg Lukács in a visionary way at the beginning of the 20th century is very useful precisely to explain the intrinsic relations between capitalism and the entertainment industry in the digital age. The reason is that particularly during this age the fact that individuals have acquired the quality of being living commodities became more palpable.

Among many other fields, social networks, video games, teleworking, or virtual education are based on a concept of competition in which each individual becomes the promoter of himself as a commodity. It doesn’t mean that this has not happened before, but digital systems make it possible to organize and to record these competitions with such precision that was impossible before. This fact is essential to understand “gaming”, a technique developed by new trends in business administration that updates old ways such as “Toyotism”.

In toyotism, workers were urged to produce intensively based on the moral obligation of exalting the group, while gaming has taken that obligation to the individual level, in which competition is presented as a game between equal members. However, these techniques only take from the game its competitive and computable quality, emptying it of its playful content. As Johnson points out,

far from making life apparently more playful and therefore enjoyable, gamification in this way only enhance the aspects of life that need to be made playful, which is to say, the unenjoyable parts.

Those administration techniques based on veiled devices that make the individuals believe that they are doing something good for their group or for themselves are only intended to intensify the productivity of private capital, while the other side of the coin is precariousness: job instability, alienation, isolation, poverty, etc. This is the same veil that characterizes freedom as neoliberalism understands it, where the only real manifestation of freedom is consumption: the individual is free only insofar as he is free to consume.

The People’s Republic of Desire is a documentary directed by Hao Wu that was released in 2018. The film portrays two young “live-streaming” stars of the Chinese app YY, Shen Man, and Li Xianliang. YY is an application similar to YouTube and Instagram where the channels gain popularity through the money they receive as donations from the spectators. This application houses thousands of individual channels in which young hosts film their selves with the aim of getting sponsors and fans that could donate money to their shows and thus increase their popularity.

The documentary is very interesting because it portrays the phenomenon of “live-streaming” from three different perspectives: that of the entrepreneurs who take advantage of this industry, that of the hosts such as Shen Man or Li Xianliang who depend on the donations of the entrepreneurs and that of the millions of middle-class and working-class youth who want to escape their harsh reality by watching those shows. The phenomenon of “live-streaming” is, in fact, the materialization of the type of entertainment shown in “Fifteen Million Merits”, which has not gone unnoticed by director Hao Wu, who has given the documentary a visual aesthetic closely related to that Black Mirror´s episode. However, the fact that the documentary shows us not only the reality of the stars of “live-streaming” but also that of entrepreneurs and consumers illuminates better what was overshadowed in “Fifteen Million Merits”.

In other words, if entertainment is essential for capitalism, this documentary shows the internal mechanisms of that relationship in times of digital technology. The businessman portrayed in the film is one of the main sponsors of Li Xianliang, to whom he donates thousands of dollars in each show. As seen in the documentary, this businessman became involved with the world of “live-streaming” as a Li fan, but throughout the filming, he realizes that he can promote Li and other hosts with his donations in a systematic way. This eventually generates more money and that profit can be shared between him as a shareholder and the hosts as his “freelance” employees.

This type of monetary speculation in the context of the new digital entertainment economies appears in the film as a widely accepted type of business. That adds even more violence to this form of enrichment that basically uses young girls like Li, who generally come from backgrounds of poverty, to exploit their sexualized image while their popularity lasts. In addition, this enrichment is presented to us as something grotesque regarding the poverty of many of the fans of these shows, represented in the film by Jiang Congyong, a Shen Man fan who can barely donate a few dollars from time to time to his idol, since his life constantly borders the complete precariousness.

But if entertainment rather than allowing to escape exploitation and precariousness reinforce them, where can we find the long-awaited escape? It could sound contradictory but maybe we all are interpreting the crisis as the ultimate escape. Maybe beyond the fact that we are living a true crisis, the pandemic is working in our imaginations as a collective desire of “awakening”, as something that is going to take us out of the lethargy in which we were. Maybe that is why, since the neoliberal precariousness or the environmental crisis have not been able to wake us up, we need to fantasize about the following crisis: now is the COVID but tomorrow could be the aliens or a natural disaster, anything that takes us out of this dream, of this lethargy.

“Fifteen Million Merits” shows that the dream we can’t wake up from is actually a nightmare. The People’s Republic of Desire demonstrates that this nightmare is also real. And both show that who we see in the Black Mirror’s episode are us. What is sad is that there is no outside to escape this nightmare, that we have always been awake.

 

Further readings:

“Fifteen Million Merits and Fighting Capitalism: How Can We Resist?” by Chris Byron with Matthew Brake

“‘Fifteen Million Merits’: Gamification, Spectacle, and Neoliberal Aspiration” by Mark R. Johnson