The ludo-musical dystopia of Black Mirror 7

Every time a new season of Black Mirror is released, a debate opens up about how well the series has succeeded in representing the anxieties of our future, which in reality are increasingly close to our present. According to the most widespread opinions among insiders, this new season revives the fortunes of Charlie Brooker's series, which after a blazing start had progressively declined following the move to Netflix, reaching unexpected lows of disappointment especially in the last two seasons. According to critics, a strong point of this seventh season seems to be a closer connection to our present. As always, being an anthology series, there are differing opinions on which episodes are more or less successful in their intent, but this only confirms how the anxieties we consider most concerning can vary from person to person and how Black Mirror manages to cover quite a wide spectrum.

One of the most talked-about and controversial episodes of this new season is Plaything, probably due to its ending left open to multiple interpretations. The plot is rather simple: a man (played by former Doctor Who Peter Capaldi) is arrested for murder, but as the interrogation proceeds, the most disturbing aspect of the case begins to emerge. First, it is revealed that the murderer used to work as a reviewer for a major video game magazine, then an old acquaintance from Black Mirror enters the scene, the programmer from Bandersnatch, Colin Ritman, inventor of a revolutionary new video game that the protagonist is called to preview. Except it is not a traditional video game, but – in Ritman’s own words – the first life forms in history with a fully digital biology. The player must initially take care of these digital life forms, like an evolved version of Tamagotchi, and then let them grow and develop autonomously. The young reviewer establishes a strong connection with the Thronglets (the name of the game), adding more and more technological upgrades until a physical and neural connection is established with them via a USB port installed on the back of his neck, giving the creatures free access to his brain. It is eventually revealed that his real mission is to extend this connection to the entire population of the world to make humans better people, a goal achieved thanks to his arrest, which grants him access to the police central computer.

The fact that all this happens through the propagation of a sound is no coincidence. Throughout the episode, a sound subtext is conveyed that quite explicitly alludes to what Valerio Mattioli provocatively called, in an essay published by Minimum Fax, the musical history of our extinction. Mattioli recounts the rise of three fundamental figures in electronic music over the past thirty years: Aphex Twin, Autechre, and the Boards Of Canada. Except for the latter, the other two are among the musical protagonists of this Black Mirror episode. Experts in the field will certainly have noticed how the episode is filled with musical references related to the so-called IDM (Intelligent Dance Music), both visually and sonically. For example, in terms of visuals, the meeting between game developer Colin Ritman and the story’s protagonist takes place in an office plastered with records, where one can clearly distinguish a giant Aphex Twin poster and cornerstones of the genre like Incunabula (1993) and Amber (1994) by Autechre, Tied Up (1994) by LFO, Blue Room (1992) by Orb, and the two Warp label compilations – the leading IDM label – titled (rather unoriginally) Artificial Intelligence and Artificial Intelligence II. These are just the most obvious ones, but the record hunt for music nerds could certainly go further.

From a sound perspective, the episode is minimal, but we can still hear the famous M-Ziq Theme by Mike Paradinas (also known by the alias μ-Ziq) and at least a couple of tracks – Evil Surrounds and Dystopian Vector, Pt. 2 – by Pye Corner Audio, the retro-futuristic electronic project of British musician Martin Jenkins. The closing credits, on the other hand, are accompanied by the classic We Have Explosive by the duo The Future Sound of London. But the highlight – the moment when the protagonist explains the entire evolution of the digital life forms – is accompanied by a symbolic Autechre track titled Eutow, from their third album Tri Repetae. To fully grasp the deeper meaning of this musical choice, we need to go back to the birth of English cybernetics and the early days of Brian Eno’s ambient music.

In 1977, Brian Eno (who calls himself a “non-musician”) was contacted by Stafford Beer, one of the leading experts in cybernetics, and a successor to British scientist Ross Ashby (author of key texts like An Introduction to Cybernetics and Design for a Brain). As philosopher Andrew Pickering explains in his The Cybernetic Brain (2010), English cybernetics was born in the field of neuroscience and its main area of investigation was the human brain. Even before Ashby, neurophysiologist Grey Walter – who published the successful book The Living Brain in 1953 – had identified the brain's electrical activity and began studying its behavior based on a dense network of "stimulus-response" connections. This led him to develop an electromechanical model of the brain itself – a true synthetic brain – which he called Machina Speculatrix. Essentially, it was a sort of primitive – or perhaps more accurately, alternative – model of artificial intelligence compared to those used today, whose main feature was its total unpredictability.

On a technical level, the cyberneticians—Walter first, then Ashby and Beer—knew their machines and their individual components very well. Yet this wasn't enough to understand the behavior of the whole system, which revealed unpredictable emergent properties, as if it had a life of its own or a kind of artificial intelligence. Based on this theoretical model, Brian Eno developed what he would later call generative music, that is, music that, given an initial input, develops autonomously in an unpredictable way—or in Pickering’s words, «the construction of musical worlds capable of exhibiting unpredictable emergent properties.» It is not, therefore, an emulation of something that already exists—like modern AIs that “feed” on cultural products previously created by humans and rework them combinatorially—but something different. There are no large human datasets to feed the machine, only a few initial inputs. A primitive example of generative music is represented by It’s Gonna Rain and Come Out, two tracks “composed” in the 1960s by Steve Reich, who played two tapes containing the same phrase simultaneously on two different devices: over time, technical differences between the machines caused the tapes to go out of phase, altering the content. Brian Eno based much of his ambient music on these principles and has continued to give interviews and work on these musical forms for decades, as evidenced by his latest album Aurum, released in March 2025.

Students of Brian Eno and at the same time flagbearers of a new musical wave are precisely Autechre, who feature in Black Mirror. The two Manchester-based musicians—Sean Booth and Rob Brown—picked up Eno’s legacy in the ’90s and turned it into their banner in a unique artistic journey, continuously evolving toward the birth of a kind of auto(nomous) music, in which tracks compose themselves, going completely out of control. The essential quality of their music—Mattioli explains in Ex Machina—is its absolute artificiality, its undeniable coldness. To use his words, as evocative as they are unsettling, «each Autechre album is a thermotonal waypoint that, release after release, lowers the temperature by a few degrees, a headlong advance toward the loss of any remaining human warmth, a race that blindly conveys the arctic breath of an arch-fossil from the future.» It is hard, then, to find something more fitting for the playful-musical dystopia depicted in the Black Mirror episode in question.

In mainstream music, the first to hybridize their sound with the electronics of Autechre and other Warp artists were Radiohead with Kid A (2000). But the early signs of musical dystopia were already present, albeit to a lesser extent, in their previous albums. In this regard, some Reddit users noticed a further similarity between the ending of the Black Mirror episode and the ending of the video for Just by Radiohead: often considered the most ambiguous music video in history, the mini-short film directed by Jamie Thraves shows a passerby lying down on the ground for no apparent reason. People start gathering around him, worried, and ask what happened, but the man replies that he cannot reveal why he collapsed, repeating that it's better they don't know. After much insistence, the man eventually reveals his secret, but we viewers don’t hear it; so for the audience, it remains an unsolved mystery. The only thing we’re left with in the end is a crowd of people collapsed on the ground and a question—just like in the ending of the Black Mirror episode. Among other things, the director of the episode, David Slate, is known for having also directed many music videos, including those for several electronic musicians. Coincidence? Maybe not.