A Murmuration of Robot Bees

Not a honey bee.

There’s this throwaway conceit in the current season of Black Mirror that keeps tugging at me, and it’s Friday, so I thought I’d think out loud about it.

In Episode 1, “Common People,” the protagonist, a school teacher, is lecturing her young pupils about pollination. She casually explains how robotic bees have taken over for their organic ancestors, buzzing from flower to flower and, one presumes, keeping the world’s agricultural ecosystem from crashing. The exchange is meant to contextualize the episode as happening sometime in the near future — most of us know that the bee population is crashing, and the concept of autonomous insect drones doesn’t feel that far off. It’s also an elegant reference consistent with one of tech’s most fundamental beliefs — don’t worry, kids, technology can and will save us from ourselves!

It’s a ten-second exchange in an episode that is otherwise concerned with the ethics of a life-saving surgical procedure. Unfortunately for the teacher and her husband, the procedure takes over the teacher’s brain, and is in turn controlled by RiverMind, a corporation whose business model eerily mimics the subscription and advertising models of present-day capitalism. Forced subscription upgrades, creepy and unavoidable advertising, monopolistic rent seeking — it’s all there. I wasn’t a huge fan of Season 7, but there’s a reason that “Common People” is…