Monday, May 07, 2018

The Black Mirror Episode You'll Never

I’m no fan of the TV show Black Mirror – the plots are obvious and the pace is excruciatingly slow. But nevertheless, here’s a story for consideration.

Our tale begins in a world where all data is stored in the cloud. This means people don’t have their own computers but can instead log into whatever machine is handy wherever they go.

All is lovely until our hero one day notices a slight error in some data. This is supposed to be impossible because the system breaks every file into pieces that are replicated millions of times and stored separately, blockchain-style. Any corruption is noted and outvoted until it’s repaired.

As he investigates, our hero finds that changes are in fact happening constantly. The system is infected with worms – we’ll call them snakes, which has nice Biblical overtones about corruption and knowledge – that move from node to node, selectively changing particular items until a new version becomes dominant. Of course, no one believes him and he is increasingly ignored because the system uses a reputation score to depreciate people who post information that varies from the accepted truth. Another security mechanism hides “disputed” items when they have conflicting values, making it harder to notice any changes.

I’m not sure how this all ends. Maybe the snakes are controlled by a master authority that is altering reality for its own purposes, which might be benevolent or not. The most likely result for our hero is that he’s increasingly shunned and ultimately institutionalized as a madman. Intuitively, I feel the better ending is that he ends up in a dreary-but-reality-based society of people who live outside the cloud-data bubble. Or perhaps he himself has been sharded and small bits begin to change as the snakes revise his own history. I can see a sequence of split-second images that illustrate alternate versions of his story co-existing. Perhaps the best ending is one that implies the controllers have decided the episode itself reveals a truth they want to keep hidden, so they cut it off in mid

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