Wife insisted on watching an episode of the new season, and I’m just left… whelmed?

First, as a Netflix original series the “Oh, we added ads to your tier, but you can upgrade to ad-free” felt super hypocritical. Ads started playing on our previously ad-free subscription at the beginning of the episode, so thanks for reminding me I guess.

Secondly, I feel like the heart of Black Mirror is that [insert technological development here] is supposed to be the central conflict which causes problems. This episode was about people bad with money suffering because they’re bad at money.

They could’ve downgraded to a smaller place, their house was huge. Welding has pretty significant upward mobility if you train a few particular skills. And they were trying for a baby? Their budget was way too tight for that.

Most importantly, how do you not game Lux? You can dial up Tennis, or Parkour, or Nonchalance, or Serenity. Surely you can dial up something that can earn you at least an extra $1000 a month to justify it. If you can’t figure it out, just get a booster to dial up Intelligence or Strategy so you can figure out a plan, then dial up Programming or Art or whatever your megabrain thinks of to generate more income. It seemed like Lux was straight monthly, not load based. It shouldn’t be that hard to leverage your subscription to not only cover the cost, but turn a profit.

In fact, I think the premise would have been way more interesting if it went in like a Limitless direction: she uses Lux to be wildly successful, both causing conflict with her normal husband and generating a class gap between ubermensch Lux users and the Common users who subsidize their success.

It just felt like the tech didn’t really cause problems itself. I mean, a person that would’ve been dead or comatose can be alive for $800/mo, or superhuman for $1800/mo. The subscription model is scummy, but it can easily be gamed. The tech just felt like a bolted-on afterthought in a story about people budgeting poorly. That’s not poignant commentary on the relationship between tech and modern life, it’s just a depressing vignette about dum dummies being dumb.