No idea whether or not it’s true, as Forty-Year-Old Grad Student says, that it’s “the apparently least-liked episode of the latest season of Black Mirror”, but anyone who liked “Smithereens” better than “Rachel, Jack and Ashley Too” (Oxford comma, god damn it!) is deluding themselves.
(Hilariously, despite the episode’s ending, it wasn’t until this newsletter that I realized that “On a Roll” in fact is just a “happified” version of “Head Like a Hole”, indicating, I guess, that the very happification tool Ashley O’s corrupt manager uses on a song she dreams up while in a drug-induced coma had been used before.)
Anyway, the reason why “Smithereens” is far worse than the pretty terrific “Ashley Too” is summed up by the Billy Bauer monologue Grad Student transcribes.
It wasn’t supposed to be like this. Our whole platform, I swear to God. It was like, it was one thing when I started it and then it just I don’t know, it just became this whole other fucking thing. I mean, it got there by degrees, you know, they said “Bill, you gotta keep optimizing, you gotta keep people engaged. Until it was more like a crack pipe. It was like some kind of fucking Vegas casino where And we’d sealed off all the fucking doors. They’ve got a department All they do is tweak it like that on purpose. They’ve got dopamine targets and there’s nothing I can do to stop it. I started it. There’s nothing I can do to fucking stop it. I’m like some kind of fucking bullshit front-man now.
Topher Grace’s character here effectively is Jack Dorsey, off on one of his self-absorbed mindfulness retreats or whatever, and this entire monologue lets techbros like Dorsey off the hook for the monsters they created. It’s ridiculous and insulting, and, frankly, it kind of undermines any pretense Black Mirror might have of being truly critical of the impact of social media or the origins of or the responsibility for that impact.
People like Dorsey are not front-men or figureheads. They are the fucking CEOs of major technology and media companies, and to suggest even for dramatic purposes that they’re as much the powerless victim as their users is one seriously epic fail.