Imagine if Black Mirror, instead of allowing its futuro-tech scenarios to unfold in a world with randomly casted actors of color but never any poverty or systemic racism, depicted a world actually like our own, where emergent and highly volatile technologies of murder, justice, and surveillance resonated (as emergent technologies always do) with racist, structurally reproduced legacies of colonialism, slavery, segregation, and the prison-industrial complex?

Now that would be scary.

A still from Black Mirror’s S3 episode “Nosedive,” in which social media likes and relationships translate to real-world access to credit and loans. Image via The Verge