First, in my humble (but always correct) opinion, the quality dropped. Not all at once, and not all episodes, but enough that I found myself checking out.
Second—and this is the big one—I got tired of being told I’m a horrible person living in a garbage society spiraling toward inevitable doom.
Like, okay Charlie Brooker, we get it. We’re all terrible and addicted to our phones and selling our souls to influencers and maybe one day we’ll upload our brains into a microwave and call it progress. Thanks for the reminder.
But here’s where I’ll go full controversial: I love technology.
There. I said it. I love technology. And somehow that feels like a radical statement these days.
Because here’s the truth—technology is the only thing separating us from being naked, cold, and eaten by wolves. It’s not just your phone and your social media feed. It’s your central heating. It’s your clean water. It’s your insulin and your antibiotics and your house made of bricks that lets you sleep peacefully through the night. Technology is civilization.
So why is it that the only stories we seem to tell about it are the ones where it goes completely off the rails and kills us all?
Don’t get me wrong. I get the warnings. I understand the need for cautionary tales. But we’re not lacking those. We’re drowning in them. In fact, we only have them. What we’re lacking is balance. We need a counterweight. We need… a White Mirror.
And no, I don’t mean a show where everything’s squeaky clean and perfect and the robots bring you cake while you sing Kumbaya under a rainbow. I mean a show that acknowledges our problems but dares—dares—to imagine that we could solve them. That technology can be used for good. That humans, despite our many, many flaws, are still capable of compassion, cooperation, and progress.
We need shows that don’t just say, “Here’s what’s wrong.” We need ones that say, “Here’s what’s possible.”
Give me a show that admits we’ll always have problems—murders will still happen, disasters will still strike, people will still be people—but let the future be better, not worse. Let the tech just be there, in the background, like it is in real life. There’s still a killer on the loose, but now the detective chases him down in a self-driving car that can take turns no human could pull off. He’s got a personal AI assistant whispering analysis in his ear, helping him piece the clues together faster than ever. The drama doesn’t go away—it just evolves. Show me that world. A good future, still messy, still human, but one that makes me want to be there.
We’ve had decades of bleak dystopias. Can I get one utopia? Just one?
This is why Star Trek mattered. Not the shooty-shooty space battles—although those were fun—but the vision. It said, “Hey, what if we figured it out? What if humanity stopped being awful for five seconds and used our brains and our science to make a better world?” That’s not naïve. That’s necessary.
Because storytelling shapes our reality. If all you ever hear is that the future sucks, that humanity is broken, and that your toaster might strangle you in your sleep—well, you start to believe it. You start to feel like trying is pointless. That it’s all going down the drain anyway, so why bother?
We don’t need more stories that scold us. We need stories that inspire us.
Right now, it feels like the dominant tone in sci-fi is just nihilism with Wi-Fi. That’s not helping anyone.
I want to see characters who still believe in something. Who use tech to heal, to connect, to build—not just to spy, to control, or to explode. I want to see what the world looks like when we get it right, not just when we screw it all up.
So yeah, give me a White Mirror. Or Hope.exe. I don’t care what it’s called. Just give me something that acknowledges we’re not doomed yet. That it’s okay to dream. That optimism is not a weakness but a fuel source.
Because we’re going to need that optimism if we’re going to build the future we actually want to live in.
