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Comment by anyfoo | Hacker News Reader

While I don't fully agree with the article, I really like this sketch about "Black Mirror in medieval times": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y1aSqZ23ydk

It does show rather well (and rather funnily) how it can be a fine line between warning about technology, and taking it too cynically.

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Thanks for the link - that was great. Yeah, with some exceptions (15 million merits being one, given that it's pure allegory) the show seems to ask, "given some new technology, what is the cruelest most horrifying situation in which it could be used?" This basic premise can indeed be applied to anything, past or present. Personally I'd take the automobile, call the episode "Meat Grinder," reference the ~30k deaths/year in the US from car accidents, noting the ambivalence of literally everyone to that fact.

This is a great idea. Like a 1905 person’s weird vision of the 1950s— getting a bunch of things wildly wrong, like fashion and geopolitics, but strangely accurately describing a fledgling attempt to mandate ‘seat belts’ and criminalize drunk driving, so as to diminish the tens of thousands of preventable traffic deaths yearly, against the lobbying efforts of industry and the insouciance (and even outright opposition) of the public.

Every weapon ever devised by humankind has been used

I must have missed the time we used tungsten telephone poles and cobalt bombs?

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