You’re okay, Computer — it’s the corporations that aren’t.
Black Mirror, TV’s best-crafted tech-dystopian anthology series, is back with a sixth season, just in time for a new wave of horrifying real-world concerns: crypto crashes, data breaches, and, most urgently, a horde of capitalists foaming at the mouth to replace human labor with generative AI.
The first episode of the season, “Joan Is Awful,” takes on this trend toward automation within the entertainment industry in particular, a concern the Writers’ Guild of America (WGA) have been protesting through their ongoing strike, with the Stage Actors’ Guild (SAG-AFTRA) poised to join them. Over the last decade, streamers have tilted industry development and payment standards toward unsustainable volumes of content for watchers and unsustainably low wages for writers. Now industry executives are staking claim to actors’ voices, writers’ stories, and user data for future automated entertainment too. Netflix, the industry-defining streaming service that airs Black Mirror (and outbid the network that originated the series for that right), is one of the biggest targets of the strike — and Black Mirror’s latest season takes aim at the streamer, too.
Black Mirror lobs sideways shots at Netflix in a few episodes, but the target in “Joan Is Awful” is direct and timely; a distinctively red logo-ed service called Streamberry uses a glittering quantum computer to transform a generative AI thought experiment into TV programming, ruining lives along the way. But while the episode does a humorously vivid (and star-studded) job of imagining a future where anyone’s life could become IP for prestige TV, and any actor’s face (and less ready-for-primetime parts) could be contracted as digital puppetry, the show’s usually incisive arrow ultimately misses the heart of the issue. Streamberry’s “Quamputer,” as the AI machine is named, holds the blame for the episode’s disasters, and destroying its magic light show yields a happy ending. In the real AI story, however, the villains are human, not miraculous machinery — which is exactly why so many writers and actors are counting on collective action to make a difference.
The episode, written by Black Mirror creator Charlie Brooker, sidesteps the fact that it’s tech, media, and entertainment industry executives who are choosing a Black Mirror-esque future for us all, not some faceless computer. Any satisfying conclusion to this concern will be the result of human, not technological, transformation.
In “Joan Is Awful,” Joan (Schitt’s Creek’s Annie Murphy) discovers she’s become the main character of the day writ large: Streamberry has created a show based on her life, starring an AI-generated Salma Hayek (played by the real Hayek), whose likeness the company has contracted from the actress. Each episode airs shortly after Joan’s real day, turning her secrets into plot points and her screw-ups into laugh lines. As a result, Joan’s life falls apart and she attempts to gain Hayek’s attention so they can leverage the star’s power to shut down the series.
It works, to a point: After Joan makes a disgusting scene that Hayek’s digital version is compelled to repeat, Hayek commands her lawyer to get her out of the Streamberry contract. But the star’s agreement is ironclad (page 39, paragraph 8 includes all acts up to and “beyond defecation”), as are the user terms and conditions that allowed Streamberry to make content out of Joan’s life events in the first place. If this story is a whodunnit, the company’s lawyers and executives have blood on their hands — but they remain offscreen. There’s nothing cutting-edge about a deal with the devil. (In fact, the last episode in the season, “Demon 79,” set in the late 1970s, begins with just that biblical contract.) Black Mirror gets that part right.
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Nick Wall/Netflix
When Joan and Salma Hayek arrive at Streamberry headquarters, they find their way into the computer room, where a beautifully Apple-styled and sized “Quamputer,” or quantum computer, is running the show. Joan grabs a handy ax to smash the computer, and turtlenecked Streamberry CEO Mona Javadi (Leila Farzad) begs for mercy for the artificial lives and shows that would evaporate without the machine’s fairy dust. (“We don’t know how it works!” she screams. “It’s basically magic!”) Joan destroys the machine anyway, freeing herself and all the generated Joans contained within.
Skipping a couple of twists, the episode ends with Joan in a new job and a new life, content to figure out how to be the protagonist of a much smaller story. It’s a hopeful conclusion and a human one, in line with the rest of the new season of Black Mirror, which offers the unmistakable impression that Charlie Brooker is as sick of writing about tech’s dark reflection as the rest of us are of living in it.
But what about that Streamberry CEO? What about the system that compelled her to delegate creativity to ones and zeros? In the episode, Javadi tells a cowed reporter that the machine prefers negative storylines to positive ones for higher engagement. But who pressed the button to operationalize that strategy in “Joan Is Awful”? (We know who made an eerily similar choice in the real world: Facebook’s and Twitter’s executives.) Brooker has said that when it comes to AI, “you can’t put the genie back into the bottle.” In “Joan Is Awful,” smashing one glass iBottle seems to fix the problem. Won’t the fictional CEO and others like her rebuild the same tech with the same goals for the same paying customers? AI is made of people. So why are the people in power let off the narrative hook?
In real life, the move toward AI wasn’t triggered by a serendipitous technological discovery like a “Quamputer,” and it hasn’t been deterred by a single point of failure, either. Corporations and research institutions have been working on machine learning and large language models for decades, and the decision to pour more money into AI development is a business one. The bet is that AI will increase productivity, scale markets, and decrease costs enough to justify an estimated $154 billion in global spending on AI by the end of 2023. Prominent AI researcher Timnit Gebru has called the current AI craze a “gold rush” and argued that the industry needs better regulation to escape the controlling “profit motive” powering development. A machine that can generate personalized content for every person on the planet is not magic; it’s what happens when tech advancement meets late-stage capitalism. But Black Mirror’s “Joan Is Awful” is uncharacteristically silent on that distinction.
Of course, Charlie Brooker can’t solve capitalism. A high-budget show paid for and hosted by the second-largest streaming service in the US cannot bring down generative AI or deliver a win to entertainment industry unions. But popular art does play an essential role in the cultural conversation about technology and its all-too-human puppet masters. For over a decade, Black Mirror has been one of our sharpest critics of the dark side of innovation, sparking discussions around technology’s influence on politics, creative industries, personal privacy, and society’s shifting moral lines. Through Black Mirror’s sensitively drawn portraits of people and relationships trapped in crises of faith, the show’s title — a reference to the way a screen, be it smartphone, tablet, computer, or television, looks in the off position — has even become cultural shorthand for the unsettling sensation of living in a future not quite designed for the more complex realities of the human condition.
Since the show first aired in 2011, the tech industry has only grown in power and influence, as companies embed technology even more profoundly into our culture and economy. (For context, Uber launched in 2011, Zoom in 2012, Doordash in 2013. Apple released the iPad in 2015, and Google put out the Google Home in 2016.)
Today, AI might be the most pressing industry concern — but not because the singularity is on its way, as many AI thought leaders warn. Murphy, who portrays Joan in “Joan Is Awful,” recently said it “hurts her guts” that “we are alive in a time when people are having to ask and beg for their jobs … not to be replaced by computers.” It’s the begging that’s gut-twisting, not the computers. And it’s the humans hearing those pleas who are turning the knife. That’s a Black Mirror tale if I ever heard one.
Prime Minister Modi visits the White House, and arms deals follow.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi arrived in Washington for a state visit this week. Beyond the black-tie dinner at the White House and a speech to Congress, there have been a lot of arms deals.
Jets, drones, cyber capabilities, and more.
It’s a significant list, and builds on an expanding military partnership. The US has partnered with India more and more in response to China’s rise, seeing New Delhi as a valuable counterweight. This is happening as India advances grievous human rights abuses against minorities, against journalists, and against political critics — all in contradiction of America’s stated values.
And yet this week, the White House is promoting a “next generation defense partnership” with India. This includes the co-production of cutting-edge technologies like jet engines and semiconductors, the prospect of new arms sales, and agreements that would allow the US to have its navy ships repaired in India. The country will also purchase 31 advanced drones from General Atomics in a deal that will cost some $3 billion. And the Pentagon and the Indian Ministry of Defense have established a new military-tech incubator called INDUS-X.
Experts point out that India under Modi increasingly does not share American values, and some of the advanced military technologies that the US is providing the country could be used against dissidents or journalists.
“If we’re just going to go full-on countering China with India as a realist approach to things, that can come back and bite us,” says Derek Grossman, a defense analyst at the RAND Corporation. “Because, as we saw during the Cold War, a lot of the dictators or semi-authoritarian regimes that we cozied up with, they were not our friends in the long run.”
US-India defense cooperation, very briefly explained
India built a relationship with the Soviet Union during the Cold War, and to this day, most of the Indian military’s weapons come from Russia. It wasn’t until the mid-2000s that India started buying arms from the United States, growing from around nothing in 2008 to $8 billion of US sales to the country by 2013, and to $20 billion in 2020.
Now, the new agreements will help create capacities for India as an arms producer. The Pentagon’s top Asia official, Ely Ratner, says the US was helping modernize the Indian military. The US Embassy in New Delhi described an initiative to “fast-track technology cooperation and co-production in areas such as air combat and land mobility systems, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, munitions, and the undersea domain.”
India wants to manufacture military and aerospace products. In this respect, the prospective General Electric engine deal represents a major change. Export controls and trade regulations have previously been a challenge for forging advanced production lines in India. “Engine technology is pretty sensitive,” says Vikram Singh of the United States Institute of Peace and the consulting firm WestExec Advisors. “This is a big, ambitious agenda.”
Both countries are eyeing China’s growing military and technological prowess, and the US is particularly concerned about the perceived threat of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan.
But Grossman, who previously spent a decade working on China policy at the Pentagon, says that the US goal of bolstering India’s defense is less about creating a partner who would actively participate in any US-China confrontation and actually more about India providing safe harbor on the continent. “What the United States is really looking for is access to India, in the case of a conflict against China,” he told me. “But the hope is that over time, as we continue our security cooperation, India will kind of bend a little bit, to be more flexible and maybe allow us access at certain times to certain places that can help us conduct operations.”
The US Navy established ship repair agreements with India that would enable the US to service its boats in Indian shipyards, with more agreements forthcoming, according to the White House. Grossman also emphasized that, in 2020, US Navy aircraft refueled on India’s base in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. “They’re letting us do that in peacetime; why wouldn’t they let us do that when the stakes are much higher?” he said.
But even beyond the democratic issues, there are limits to how close this partnership could get in the near term. India remains non-aligned: It hasn’t taken a side in the Ukraine war, nor signed on to the sanctions against Russia. While India is a member of the “Quad,” an informal partnership with the US, Japan, and Australia, it is not a treaty ally of the United States. Grossman said that many in the Defense Department would like to see the US move toward a formal alliance with India.
That would be messy, notably because Pakistan is India’s prime rival and Pakistan is a close partner of the United States. Both countries have nuclear weapons, so if the US were to establish a treaty with India, the dynamics of a potential India-Pakistan conflict would be staggeringly complex for the US and dangerous for the world.
Nevertheless, the US military partnership with India has become a pillar of the Biden administration’s policy toward Asia. Interestingly, the US goes out of its way to not say it has anything to do with China, although analysts uniformly agree that it’s all about China. “The strategic environment that we’re facing in the Indo-Pacific challenges to peace and stability, I think those have animated a sense of Indian purpose more generally,” a senior US official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, told reporters.
The defense sector, unsurprisingly, is thrilled. Just ask the Asia Group, a consulting firm that advises clients like General Electric, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and Raytheon and was founded by Kurt Campbell, who’s now the Biden White House’s point person on Asia policy.
Campbell’s former firm says the time is now to invest in India. “Companies that postpone entry or expansion in India might miss opportunities to maximize their long-term returns,” Gopal Nadadur, an Asia Group executive based in India, wrote recently. “Defense and aerospace companies like Airbus, Boeing, Dassault, General Electric, General Atomics, Raytheon Technologies and Pratt & Whitney have boosted their engineering and manufacturing operations in India.”
Will defense innovation make Asia safer?
Bringing in military-tech startups and investment firms has been a core strategy of the Pentagon in recent years, and that’s also now going to play a part in the US-India relationship. On Wednesday, the Chamber of Commerce hosted what it called an “innovation bridge” — the INDUS-X event.
US and Indian startups that focus on the military, aerospace, and satellites attended, alongside venture capital firms and major defense contractors like Raytheon and Boeing. The proceedings were sponsored by General Atomics, Lockheed Martin, and one of the big Indian companies, Mahindra Defence. The INDUS-X joint initiative will be “a catalyst for India to achieve its target of $5 billion in defense exports by 2025 and for India to diversify its defense supply chain,” according to the Chamber.
One of the keynote speakers, Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall, told attendees that he expected “huge growth,” in the two countries’ defense partnership, “the hockey stick curve that all entrepreneurs dream of.”
Participants did not directly discuss China, according to Pushan Das of the US-India Business Council, but it was the impetus for the gathering. “The reason why we’re doing all of this — the reason why there is the US-India defense-industry road map — it is because both countries have a common threat. They face a common challenge,” he told me. “And that’s pushing the defense relationship forward.”
But the focus on business interests has often meant that less attention has been paid in the commercial community to how increased military production and surveillance technologies in India could embolden Modi.
Modi is a Hindu nationalist leader who journalist Fareed Zakaria says is responsible for the decay of Indian democracy. His attacks on political rivals, the press, and minorities call into question the strategic benefits of growing military cooperation with the country. To cite a recent example, India arrested Vivek Raghuvanshi, a contributor to the US-based outlet Defense Times, in May.
Senior Biden administration officials told a press conference that raising human rights concerns would be part of President Biden’s private conversations with Modi, but declined to provide specificity. Human rights concerns did not come up in the conversations at INDUS-X, according to Das, and Air Force Secretary Kendall did not raise them in his remarks.
Singh, who worked in the Obama Pentagon, says that pragmatism is necessary to counter China. “We look at Prime Minister Modi, like a lot of other complicated partners, be it in Southeast Asia, like Vietnam or Thailand, or in Europe, like Poland, or Hungary, or Turkey,” he told me. “But I think we’ve reached a point where American leaders are able to talk to Indian leaders about these sorts of concerns.”
There’s also another risk of flooding India with arms that Campbell, who served in the Obama State Department, warned of in his 2016 book The Pivot: The Future of American Statecraft in Asia.
“China and India both remain under 2 percent of GDP for defense spending, while, for comparison, between 2009 and 2013, US Defense spending averaged 4.4 percent of GDP,” he wrote. “If Asian powers were to devote the same proportion to defense spending as the United States, the region would quickly become even more dangerous.”
The Latino surge for Republicans in the Trump era is real. Democrats need to adjust.
Among the questions that stumped strategists, journalists, and pundits in the aftermath of the 2022 midterm elections — one in which Democrats surprisingly overperformed — was one big mystery: What happened to the much-hyped “red wave” of Latino Republican voters that was supposed to realign American politics?
In the wake of Donald Trump’s success with Latino voters in 2020, analysts expected a continuation of the same in 2022. But early clues suggested a more complicated picture. Republicans won Latino voters for the first time in 15 years in Florida; close races in the Southwest ended up tipping toward Democrats; and most of Texas’s majority Mexican American border districts did not flip.
Half a year later, we have even more answers — and they confirm something that some establishment Democrats and many party operatives need to wrestle with: Republicans did make gains in 2020 with Latino voters, those gains did stick in 2022, and they could still grow in 2024.
In other words, Democrats did better than expected in 2022 despite signs that their Latino support could continue to erode — signs they can’t afford to ignore heading into an election year.
Last week, Equis, a progressive research organization focused on understanding Latino voting trends, released a 130-page midterm postmortem analyzing the “Trump-era shift” of Latinos to the right in battleground states like Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Nevada, and Wisconsin.
What they found: Republicans held on to the gains they made since 2016 (the recent low point of GOP Latino support) but did not exceed their 2020 high point (aside from Florida, which stands out as the national exception in all of this analysis). Democrats, meanwhile, didn’t do worse than they did in 2020 (and managed to improve in places like Arizona and Pennsylvania).
It’s a nuanced portrait but one in which Democrats may have more to be worried about. The hangover of the 2020 rise in Latino support for the GOP even after the Trump years still haunts many Democratic Party officials, strategists, candidates, and campaigns. Some seem unwilling to accept that a new Latino political landscape has emerged, one that requires a different campaign strategy and platform from what we saw in the last presidential election.
Equis’s report shows that despite the unique political environment of 2022 (high inflation, gas price shocks, and an unpopular president), Democrats were able to out-campaign and outspend Republicans to win competitive elections — but still weren’t able to push beyond the new baseline of Republican Latino support (about 40 percent). Meanwhile, Republicans failed to turn out Latino voters who sided with them on the issues. It’s those nonvoters that should worry Democrats looking ahead.
“Those who didn’t vote in 2022 are the biggest wildcard this next cycle,” Equis’s team writes. “Swing Latinos still seem to default to [Democrats] but are open to individual Republicans, with greater support possible when there is a major shift in the issue environment, imbalanced campaigning, or a weakening of identity bonds.”
These findings are important for the parties, their candidates, and their supporters to understand just how much the electorate and political environment have changed since the start of the Trump years. Some in the Democratic apparatus have questioned how real the Latino shift is and how much of Democrats’ losses can be ascribed to “misinformation” (spoiler alert: not much). A better picture of just how fluid these voters are can help Democrats fashion a new playbook — one that sees a much bigger role for persuasion than past campaigns.
How Latinos voted in 2022
The Equis postmortem is the third analysis of its kind that the progressive research firm has published to try to explain how Latino voters behaved in major elections. The first two, released in spring and winter of 2021 respectively, confirmed the rightward shift of Latino voters after the 2020 election, despite debate over where those shifts happened and how big they were.
The new report confirms much of what the Democratic data firm Catalist, another reputable source for election analysis, found earlier this year, and it matches the trends reported in exit polling from last year.
Equis’s report breaks down three ways to understand what happened with Latino voters in battleground states last year: the issues dominating the national conversation (inflation, abortion, immigration, democracy), the way candidates campaigned, and the brand strength of the two political parties going into and emerging from Election Day.
It also identifies what might be the two most important types of Latino voters for campaigns to think of going into 2024: the swingy, “highly conflicted” voter, who supports Democrats on some issues and Republicans on others; and the non-voter, who might have only voted in 2020 or who voted in 2020 and the 2018 midterms but sat 2022 out.
Those first three factors — issue environment, campaign efforts, and party brand — explain why the support for both parties remained stable from 2020 to 2022. Republicans may have had an edge on inflation and the economy, but they failed to turn it into actual votes. Meanwhile, Democrats managed to not just turn out those voters who trusted Democrats with the economy, but also convince those who were divided in their trust to pick Democrats at the voting booth.
Democrats also won big with voters primarily concerned with abortion and the future of democracy. And, outside of Florida, Democrats also won more swing Latino voters: those “highly conflicted” voters who are less engaged with politics, less ideological, and have low allegiance to either party.
This all happened as Democrats outspent and out-campaigned Republicans (again, everywhere except for Florida), and as Democrats continued to be seen as the party that “cares about people like you” and was “better for Hispanics.” Issue selection and candidate quality mattered hugely. In Arizona, Sen. Mark Kelly won over a significant number of conservative and moderate Latinos, while his rival Blake Masters just got more unpopular as he became better known.
In Nevada, meanwhile, Democratic Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto outspent her Republican opponent Adam Laxalt, despite his significant investments in Spanish-language media throughout most of the campaign, and picked the more effective issues to highlight (gas prices and health care costs over Laxalt’s focus on crime).
“What sticks out among conflicted voters is what sticks out across every kind of ‘swing’ voter,” the report reads. “The enduring sense that Democrats care more and are better for [Hispanics/Latinos] … [seems] to win out even as Republicans gain ground on other dimensions.”
This Democratic brand proved resilient everywhere except Florida — and this data point is emblematic of just how difficult it will be for statewide Democrats to be competitive in a state that feels less like a true battleground with each passing year. Among all kinds of Florida’s Latino voters in 2022, but especially among non-Cuban Americans and Puerto Rican Latinos, Democrats were viewed less favorably than they were outside of the state. That negative brand should give national Democrats pause when deciding just how hard they should try to contest the state in 2024.
The 2022 lessons for 2024? Persuasion matters.
But amid the good news for Democrats holding their own in 2022 (beyond Florida) are warning signs about what looms in 2024 and potential clues as to how the party should approach that election.
Those voters who sat out 2022 will be among the majority-makers for 2024. They hold mixed values (likely to trust Republicans on inflation but perceive the party negatively on abortion and as favoring the rich), and may now be tilting toward Republicans. Equis’s post-election polling shows Republicans have a big advantage with 2020 voters who sat out the midterms, and plenty of room to grow with GOP candidates who aren’t Donald Trump.
Should those 2020 voters who sat out 2022 vote in 2024, they would break for a Republican 54 percent and 34 percent for Biden, according to Equis. Adding to these early warning signs is a recent Axios-Ipsos/Telemundo poll further showing erosion in the positive branding and allegiance Democrats have enjoyed from most Latinos, driven mostly by economic and public safety concerns. This all means that even if Trump is the nominee, he could still improve on his 2020 showing.
This analysis is only the latest contribution in a long-running debate in Democratic politics: whether turnout or persuasion will win elections. The turnout camp suggests that there’s an untapped well of voters out there; Democrats just need to find them and get them to the polls. The persuasion side argues that Democrats need to convince uncommitted voters and those loosely affiliated with the GOP to cast a ballot for them.
The Equis report notes both are important, but comes down firmly on the latter side. Those 2022 non-voters and the “highly conflicted” swing voters who ended up backing Democrats are persuadable voters who need to be engaged early on and who might not hold the same views on key issues that Democrats might assume from their generic base of voters.
For Equis, that means 2024 might create different imperatives for presidential and down-ballot races — but both kinds will have to put a bigger emphasis on persuasion.
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