Fifteen Million Merits
Fifteen Million Merits
Film
5 positive2 negative23 neutralfrom 30 commenters
Where to watch
No streaming data for this title.
Hacker Cinema Hacker CinemaFilm
5 positive2 negative23 neutralfrom 30 commenters
No streaming data for this title.
32 comments on Hacker News
It deserves a minor rewrite of the Black Mirror episode Fifteen Million Merits where people do menial labor like folding laundry and washing dishes to earn tokens so that their LLM will dispense their toothpaste and send Studio Ghibli stylized birthday cards to their friends.
A lot of the early episodes, especially, aren’t about hypothetical uses of technology but current ones, or even are barely about technology at all. White Bear, Fifteen Million Merits, The National Anthem, and The Waldo Moment are mostly works of social and media criticism that aren’t predicting much, or even anything, because they’re about people and situations today.
To the extent they employ sci-fi it’s usually to force the viewer into an outsider’s perspective.
Admittedly, the show’s skewed farther into straight five-minutes-in-the-future tech-prediction readings as it’s gone on.
> Leading to notifications being ignored, and not mattering at all.
You found my point! Some notifications may be important, but if one has learned to ignore all notifications, then they won't catch the important ones anymore.
When I get important notifications, I can act on them immediately, because I have not learned to ignore all my notifications, because I don't need to. I have taken care to block any notifications I don't care about, leaving only the ones that I do.
> A well curated set of notifications that only gives you the things you actually need is superb, but incredibly difficult to get right.
Ehh... maybe it's incredibly difficult to fix once you are already drowning in them, but since I immediately nuke anything I don't like from orbit, and have done so my whole life, there are a lot fewer things I don't like than if I hadn't to do that.
> Learning how to ignore all of the noise is probably a more valuable skill for a future where control is slowly wrestled away from the user. A certain Black Mirror episode (Fifteen Million Merits) comes to mind.
I have a really hard time ignoring noise. I think that is because of my autism. Ignoring noise would be a nice skill, I guess, but I feel significantly better when the noise is simply not there in the first place. I'd imagine most would, but for some reason I seem to break a lot more easily when uncomfortable.
> Instead of doing that they just learned to ignore everything
Leading to notifications being ignored, and not mattering at all.
A well curated set of notifications that only gives you the things you actually need is superb, but incredibly difficult to get right.
Learning how to ignore all of the noise is probably a more valuable skill for a future where control is slowly wrestled away from the user. A certain Black Mirror episode (Fifteen Million Merits) comes to mind.
sincere ones, where the author pours out his soul and talks about what he can't keep to himself...
Talking head with big microphone, with no editing.
Relevant Black Mirror episode: [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifteen_Million_Merits
Very Black Mirror indeed: "View Obstructed - Resume Viewing". From the episode Fifteen Million Merits.
Episode was Fifteen Million Merits [1], and might be the most cynical episode of Black Mirror, which is saying something.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifteen_Million_Merits
Fifteen million merits is maybe the least about the future of any Black Mirror episode. It reads best as entirely a comment on the society we already have.
A big clue is that the world in it doesn’t make a ton of internal sense and the episode makes absolutely no effort to smooth that over. The questions it raises and leaves open without even attempting an answer are on purpose. You’re supposed to go “god, bicycling to make little pellets? Just to buy useless trash? God, why? It’s so pointless,” or, “they truly look down on and are mean to the people who get demoted, even though they’re basically guaranteed to end up that way someday, when their health or good fortune run out? Just cruelty for no reason that’s highly likely to hit them some day, too? That’s insane!”
… because actually it’s about now (or, the year it came out) and the point is to get you to connect the dots and realize we’re doing the same crap and just don’t notice. It’s only “sci fi” as some sleight of hand to give you an alien’s eye view of our own actual society as a way to prompt reflection. The core story of the corruption of a “revolutionary” to serve the purposes of the system is some bog-standard media studies stuff pertaining to today, not sci fi. The reveal that they could just fucking stop all this and go outside, it’s not some alien world or a post apocalypse after all is yet another thing that’s supposed to make you go “what’s wrong with them? Oh. Right. It’s us.”[1]
Long winded way to say: we can’t “end up” at Fifteen Million Merits future-world, because it’s just our own world we’re already in.
[1] Some read the final scene as depicting yet another viewscreen, but this is such a wildly weaker reading as far as the how effective the scene is that I can’t believe it’s intended that way.
> It is also interesting to note that the first use case listed is about ensuring that interactions with ads are genuine.
That's just the beginning. Attestation will eventually allow advertisers to demand that user is present and looking at the screen like in Black Mirror episode Fifteen Million Merits.
obligatory: fifteen million merits https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2089049/?ref_=ttep_ep2
This is called recuperation, and it's fairly common. Rather than censoring ideas, capitalism just turns them into another commodity and dilutes their potency.
The Black Mirror episode Fifteen Million Merits shows exactly how it works.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recuperation_(politics)
Yea, it seems every year we are moving closer and closer to some dark mixture of Manna, Fifteen Million Merits [1] and Elysium [2], where regular people no longer serve any purpose, and are simply warehoused somewhere to keep them out of the hair of the few rich elite.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifteen_Million_Merits
2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elysium_(film)
Correct. This episode in particular https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifteen_Million_Merits
Black Mirror episode Fifteen Million Merits. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifteen_Million_Merits
None of those are the behaviour of a master to their slave. They're merely inconveniences.
Your definition of punishment is odd to me. The barrier to entry seems spectacularly low. Watching advertisements, though universally loathed, is not actually punishment, by any broadly accepted definition. The generally accepted notion of a punishment, the important one here to our discussion, is an imposition that cannot be stopped.
If I get an unskippable advert on youtube I can always close youtube.
Nobody is forcing them to keep the TV, or even buy it in the first place. People would be up in arms quickly about awful TVs like that and nobody would buy them.
Those laws are assault and/or battery laws. Here's a clip from Hamurabi:
http://45338297.weebly.com/laws-on-assault-and-battery.html
Without doing any research I can guarantee you every Country has laws against assault. It's called the "Monopoly on Violence" and one of the most important cornerstones of civilization. Only the state can injure or murder people without repercussion.
There's no such thing as a punishment (in the literal sense) advertisement. It's fiction. See Black Mirror Season 1 episode 2, "Fifteen Million Merits".
Similarly, the Black Mirror episode "Fifteen-Million Merits" is sometimes described as being about some kind of possible future, but I'm pretty damn sure it's just depicting now (or, "now" when it was made a few years ago, anyway) through the lens of a kind of heightened sci-fi allegory.
Haha, no problem, but it's mostly just practice. The key thing seems to be recognizing that there's anything worth picking out in a piece of art to begin with—those with little practice don't notice it anywhere, or else will see it everywhere because of course it's possible to bullshit deep themes into an average episode of NCIS if you're so inclined—then questioning why for various decisions. If you're not sure what something means in a thematic or thesis sense, look at which possibility or possibilities go best with the rest of what you've seen (or read, or heard—works for books and music, too).
FWIW I find most of the rest of Black Mirror a lot less rich than Fifteen Million Merits, though I like most of it. I couldn't write as much on most of the episodes as that one, because I'm just not sure there's as much there. Most are a fairly straight route up to usually some kind of twist, with a little worth saying about the relation of the twist to the rest but mostly what they're up to is pretty on the surface. Nothing wrong with that, and that fact that it consistently tries to say anything at all puts it above most TV, so far as that goes.
To expand a little into other episodes, though, to give some more idea of what I mean by asking why about choices creators make in art: take The National Anthem, for example. When a Certain Pivotal Scene (you know the one) happens, the creators could have depicted it several ways without changing the actual story. A few possibilities: 1) actually show it, entirely, 2) show it but crop out the worst of it, 3) keep the camera nearby, say on people in the room or in the next room over, or on the fictional production crew "shooting" the event, 4) any of the above but show only a little and cut away, 5) just skip straight to after, don't have any footage that takes place during it at all, among other options. There was a choice to make, and the one that was made isn't exactly revolutionary, but also isn't one of the most obvious ones: keep the camera going for all of it (or maybe just most? I can't recall for sure) after showing us every moment at the scene of the event leading up to it, but only show the faces of people watching it on TV. Why? It wasn't the only way they could have avoided putting the event itself onscreen, why do it that way?
Showing people watching a screen, especially something sensational that's been teased from the very first scene of the episode, and holding the camera on it that long does a couple things, I think: in the general case, it invites identity with or comparison between the real life viewer and the viewer in the show; in this particular case, I think the show is also delivering on a kind of implicit promise of horrible spectacle by showing us the most disgusting thing that's happening in that moment, by the creator's judgement. Anyone watching the show, even if they hope the event won't happen or that it won't be depicted at all if it does (which is hopefully most people?) was still held in suspense and to some degree entertained by that will they/won't they dynamic. The result is that this choice both casts judgement on the viewers-in-the-show and prevents the real-life show watcher from casting them as Other and distancing themselves from those voyeurs. This option was chosen by the show's creators because it conveys a message different from what others would have (most of the other options above wouldn't convey much at all, without some further effort, but would advance the plot just the same) and does so effectively. That single choice causes multiple effects on and messages to the viewer, working toward one end.
To take that a step further, both reinforcing the likelihood that this was intentional and possibly adding insight into other episodes, the show repeatedly returns to themes along these lines, of the viewer-as-complicit. White Bear's a huge one, obviously, featuring punishment essentially for the act of watching a crime (and filming! The show also loves to jab at itself and its creators pretty viciously, as Fifteen Million Merits manages to also do in addition to everything else) with a kind of Greek hell of... having crimes done to them while "normal people" watch and record, which is called justice. A couple others tread similar ground—Shut Up and Dance, notably.
Moving into more tenuous territory: Jan Junipero may also be doing something like this, forcing the viewer into more direct confrontation with some message in it by identifying them with some element of or character in the show, at the end, just a bit. The long sequence of server farms and robot arms at the end definitely adds a sense of melancholy and unease over the happy ending and neatly reframes our own emotions about the episode, which is probably the main thing it's intended to do, but that also looks an awful lot like any modern-day server farm. Like where Netflix episodes come from. Like the episode you just watched, finding temporary joy in this fiction while sitting, apparently lifeless... and oh look it's suggesting another show or movie, how nice, this could just go on forever, couldn't it? And that's the season Black Mirror transitioned to Netflix, I'm pretty sure.
That's quite stretch from the pretty clear use of those themes and mechanisms in other episodes and I wouldn't say I'm anywhere near as sure of it as some of the other stuff, since it's pretty abstract and there are other, stronger ways to explain why the scene is there and why it looks the way it does... but then again Bandersnatch came out a few years later and hits some of the same notes explicitly, which makes it just a tad less likely that that wasn't on the creators' minds when they decided how the end of San Junipero should go, and a little more likely that that connection was intended.
Fifteen Million Merits is one of their episodes that's not about the future at all, the way I read it. More of an allegory about now (or, now in 2011, anyway).
On the other hand it looks like his channel has plenty of videos with same theme: he is sitting in dark room, looking straight into camera and bashing evil corporations with broken voice and apparently broken hearth. It's almost like episode from Black Mirrow tv show ("Fifteen Million Merits") manifested in real life.
Obligatory reference to Black Mirror season 1 episode 2, "Fifteen Million Merits".
Cue black mirror episode: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifteen_Million_Merits
That sounds like the Black Mirror episode: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifteen_Million_Merits
As an iOS developer who constantly needs to reunlock test devices, I simply cannot be required to face each one each time to use FaceID, that’s an ergonomic nightmare.
It also reminds me of the Black Mirror episode where people live in those small rooms with walls and ceilings lined with TV displays, and it would pause ads while it detected they weren’t actively watching. (S1E2: Fifteen Million Merits, probably NSFW)
Maybe Apple will eventually “catch up” to Android and put a TouchID on the back of the phone :D H*ck, make it Apple shaped!
"Fifteen Million Merits", an episode of Black Mirror, went pretty much half-way there.
I believe the parent poster is referring to the second episode [0], where people must earn credits for cycling on exercise bikes.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifteen_Million_Merits
And really, Fifteen Million Merits wasn't all that great either --- it was kind of all over the place narratively, and once you get the intrusive ranking trope, there's really not much more interesting about it. It felt sort of like badly plotted Vonnegut.
Again: if you haven't seen the MeowMeowBeenz episode of Community: it's a pretty good chaser to either of those episodes.
A lot of what's great about Black Mirror is what it doesn't show you. It's great at showing you enough of something to know what's going on, but not hammering it home to make sure you got it like a lesser show might.
As an example, in the first episode of Season 3 (no spoiler here I think) a character leaves an area where there's a billboard with her and a guy on it, and her image fades from it. Personalized images in ads are something we've seen in other media so I'm not claiming the idea is novel, but a lesser show might still have felt the need to show someone else walking up and their image appearing on the billboard, replacing the one that had been there. Black Mirror is content to show the image fade, then cut without replacing it. This is good taste and confidence, and it's one of the show's greatest attributes. It manifests in many small choices like this in every episode.
Similarly, it sometimes uses what it doesn't show us to carry most of the weight of an entire episode's central theme (Fifteen Million Merits does this, for instance). It may also throw sensation at the viewer as a bait, as it pointedly does in The National Anthem, revealing this when the camera chooses to entirely ignore the sensational event toward which the episode has been building to instead show us something both more mundane and far more disgusting in every way that matters. The subjects of that scene push the viewer to reflect on themselves—showing us the watchers when we are watchers—which is one hell of a smart gut-punch.
There are a couple bad episodes, though (well, there was one, but now season 3's out and by my reckoning there are now three), and if I were walking a n00b through the series I'd probably show them the series' first episode last because it's both structurally different from all the rest and I think easier to appreciate when you've got a better feel for what the show's doing. It's a bad introductory episode, IMO.
Relevant: The Black Mirror episode ["Fifteen Million Merits"](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifteen_Million_Merits)
Wonderfully done. Both this and the Domestic Robocop one they did six years ago linked by 'Karunamon. I appreciate the density. Lots of detail to read into.
Two pieces this was reminiscent of and I'd suggest, if you're interested, are:
Black Mirror especially Series 1 Episode 2 "Fifteen Million Merits" and Terry Gilliam's Zero Theorem
The implication you'd have to pay to not have your wallpaper be made of ads is by far the most depressing part of this video.
Reminds me of this episode of Black Mirror (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifteen_Million_Merits) that takes place in the future. In your room there are ads everywhere, and if you're not looking it stops and yells at you. To not see them you have to pay money.
This episode of Black Mirror says it all IMO.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifteen_Million_Merits_%28Black_Mirror%29
That is, I think it says more true things (that are more an analogy than an exaggeration) than we're generally able to admit or even process. Our plates are so full that our tiny spoons sometimes strike me as fig leaves rather than eating utensils.
To address your point about Fifteen Million Merits, the way I had the excercise bikes framed coming into it, the "system" being presented is a prison (a microcosm of the larger society outside), and riding the bikes is part of their punishment/sentence.
This is what the episode all the more disturbing to me. This would be the far-west's answer to a demand for less retribution-oriented prison designs, like a virus becoming less deadly so that it can infect more people. (How many on Hacker News would tout the virtues of free services as "you only have to watch ads, you're not forced to buy anything"?) You have "free choice", but it is only within a heavily curated model of illusory flavors; yet the vast majority of prisoners in this system are content, even euphoric, within it.
As Eddie Izzard put it:
> I know a lot of people who'd love to be under house arrest! They bring you your food... "Just stay here? Oh, all right. (laconically) Have you got any videos?" You know, you just sit there all day...