Black Mirror: Fifteen Million Merits

In this episode of Black Mirror, the dystopian reality shown requires citizens to cycle in order to power everything around them. Each person cycles and earns “merits” which they can use to purchase things. Each person lives in a small cell, where the walls are comprised of digital screens. Merits can be used to skip the advertisements that play on the screens. The premise depicted here is of a future technological dystopian. In comparison to our society right now, it is a bleak outlook on what our society could become.

However, I think that this dystopian reality has a small chance that it will occur because in my opinion, it seems very farfetched. This episode of Black Mirror satirizes society’s obsession with social media, their online presence, and consuming media. I don’t think that this dystopian reality is very plausible because all of the citizens are essentially trapped in this “bike-land” and can only get out by purchasing a ticket, which costs an exorbitant amount of merits, for the game show. The way the dystopian society is set up is problematic because I don’t think we can really go from a free and democratic society to one controlled by an unseen government.

This episode really reminded me of George Orwell’s novel 1984. Particularly the fact the citizens are subdued or controlled through certain means and it basically keeps them compliant with society’s structure and order. There are many elements of Fifteen Million Merits (as well as George Orwell’s 1984) that seem to already be present in our society. Although, I think that Fifteen Million Merits is much worse than 1984 because in 1984, compliance was forced. But in Fifteen Million Merits, we see that Bing complies with the Judges by accepting their offer of his own talk show. He chose his own prison and the system still won. This goes to show that forcing compliance is not even needed in some cases as long as the prison offered is comfortable enough.

I think that there are many actions that we can take in our present day to avoid this dystopian future. One example is to make more and deeper, real connections with other people in-person, and not online. The fear and feeling of being lonely can many people turn to technology and social media. This obsession with social media, online presences, and consuming media can be mitigated if we do not place a high value on our online presence. We also have to be careful consuming media because our society feeds on the emotions and feelings of others through storytelling. I think that so many people, especially young people, spend a large amount of time on social media, news and other online platforms, that it really interlocks with their lives and has a significant impact on their physical and mental health. Thus, it is really important to be able to step away to think and reflect about what media and information we are consuming and how we are doing that.