It was pretty big news back in September that Netflix has picked up 12 new episodes of Black Mirror, ensuring that we haven’t seen the last of Charlie Brooker’s anthology popular show.

It seems that the eerie and unsettling world is posed for even bigger and disturbing things to come, which is of course why we love it.

Some shows are just too intriguing; the thing that scares you the most is the thing that holds your attention captive. Once the episode comes to a close, the question that remains on any viewer’s mind is: “How close are we really to the type of uncanny technology portrayed in the show?”

Such a technology dependent society doesn’t seem too far off from a lot of what we see already happening now. Cell phones are an extension of our bodies and our communication is increasingly more and more technologically mediated. Even commerce continues moving more online, as e-shops enable us to order almost anything these days.

Indeed current technology and the perpetual removal of human elements and the need for actual human interaction makes a future like that depicted in the 2009 movie Surrogates seem incredibly possible, which is exactly the type of existence being portrayed in Black Mirror, though not quite to the advanced extent of the extinction of genuine human interaction.

The reason this technology is so eerie is because it is all too possible, and in fact is already in development. Computers controlled by hand gestures and eye tracking tech already exist, though are currently only available for the elite few who can afford them.

Moreover, technology like Google Glass, although it is a bit of a flop, has still set the ground work for optical technology to develop to the same kind as seen in Black Mirror.

Ultimately, the uncanny aspect of all of this tech isn’t villainised to the extent of some sort of dystopian sci-fi future like Gattaca or Minority Report. Instead, the tech remains quite common place and completely inescapable, like social media and cell phones, they are just a deeply engrained part of our reality. More than that, the tech seems to still be seductive even in its inescapable nature.

Black Mirror makes our skin crawl precisely because there is too much truth to this science fiction.

[This is a promotional feature.]