Black Mirror is not dark dystopia, it’s the reality where ads make your life nightmare

The seventh season of Netflix’s dystopian anthology, Black Mirror, has landed, and the impact from the very first episode seems to be more than the streaming service bargained for.

The first episode, Common People, follows a working-class couple, Mike and Amanda, who find themselves having to pay a steep $300 monthly subscription fee to keep Amanda alive after she receives a devastating diagnosis. The fee is for a groundbreaking experimental medical treatment that can restore her brain function to what it was before.

Freebie with a catch

The entry barrier to receive the tech is deceptively low. The life-saving surgery needed for the cutting-edge tech to work is actually free! And while it may sound too generous, think of big screen TVs getting cheaper than ever, with manufacturers offsetting the costs through the selling of users’ data and bombarding them with ads in more places than ever. Some of those TVs are even free — but as you can imagine, there’s a catch, and this is even less privacy and even more ads.

But while with big screen TVs the price is (merely) your privacy and peace of mind, the stakes are way higher in the Netflix episode. As time goes by, the company behind the brain tech raises subscription prices and starts rolling out a new ad-supported tier. The parallels are hard to miss — it’s difficult not to see how this (black) mirrors Netflix’s own strategy.

Living in the Black Mirror episode

It’s been over two years since Netflix introduced its ad-supported tier while steadily raising prices on its standard ad-free plans. And the gap between the two just keeps growing. This March Netflix hiked the price for its standard plan without commercials from $15.49 a month to $17.99 in the US, while the ad-supported plan went from $6.99 to $7.99. That’s a $10 difference — hardly something you can shrug off, especially when you zoom out and look at the yearly cost: that’s $120 more.

The skyrocketing subscription prices is another issue that Black Mirror highlights if only in a slightly exaggerated manner. In order not to receive ads, Amanda needs to upgrade to a new ad-free tier, which costs a whopping $500 more a month. It may seem extreme and it is, but not so much if we look at some real-world pricing trends. Take YouTube TV, for instance. Its monthly cost has risen by about 137% over the past decade, jumping from $35 in 2017 to $83 in 2025. If the price had only kept pace with inflation, it would be sitting closer to $53 today.

And there are more similarities between the episode and the current reality of subscription services. In the episode, the brain tech company, Rivermind, automatically enrolls users into the ad-supported tier. It brings to mind another tech giant: Amazon. In 2024, Amazon introduced an ad-supported version of Prime Video and made it the default — meaning customers who previously watched videos without ads suddenly found themselves seeing them. To keep their ad-free experience, they had to pay extra — and only about 20% actually did.

Introduce an ad-supported tier, hike the price of the ad-free one, and nudge more people into watching ads — it’s a well-worn playbook. Companies who go down this path often argue that ads are not that bad, and that they almost give users a favor by allowing them to cut costs.

What they don’t mention is how much worse ads make the overall user experience — even so-called “contextual” ads, which are supposed to feel less intrusive and more relevant, still disrupt and degrade it. The episode takes this to the extreme: Amanda becomes a literal vehicle for ad delivery. Without realizing it, she begins interrupting her own conversations to voice ads fed through Rivermind’s advertising system. The ads aren’t just intrusive — they’re deeply inappropriate. One promotes a dating service to her superior; another pushes religious counseling to a student at school. Her only way out? Pay for an ad-free subscription (now rebranded as the “standard” plan), or risk losing her job and souring her relationships with the people around her. There’s a saying that satire is just exaggeration wrapped around reality — and this episode proves just how thin that wrapping can be.

Hits too close to home

Speaking to Tudum, Black Mirror creator Charlie Brooker said he drew inspiration for the episode from podcasts where the hosts would suddenly shift gears and slip into ad mode mid-conversation.

“The adverts came from a funny place because I’d been listening to a lot of podcasts where the hosts would suddenly break off and start pitching products and then go back to the rest of the podcast.”

The fact that the episode’s core idea is lifted almost directly from real life — with just a slight imaginative twist — is what makes it so unsettling. One viral Reddit post, which racked up over 3,100 upvotes, summed it up perfectly, describing the episode as a mirror “held up way too close.” The poster went on to say that they used to pay for premium subscriptions specifically to avoid ads — only to find that wasn’t enough. Streaming services and platforms keep shifting the rules, constantly redefining what “ad-free” actually means, and pushing users to “upgrade” yet again for the experience they thought they were already paying for.

Like it wasn’t just warning us — it was showing us where we already are. Frankly, I AM SO FED UP WITH ADS. I availed premium services just to get rid of it especially with my favorite apps. They are everywhere. Every app wants you to upgrade. Streaming platforms keep raising prices just to give you an ad-free experience. It’s draining.

After the post went viral, the OP posted an update, saying that he’d cancelled his YouTube Premium subscription.

Another popular post mentions that even if you’re tech-savvy, it takes a considerable effort to limit your exposure to the ad-riddled world. The poster said that they curb apps’ access to data by managing permissions, delete apps they no longer need, use privacy-focused browsers, and block ads and trackers at the DNS level (which we also recommend doing).

I watched the episode as well and it was stuck in my head for hours after. I hate this whole subscription model that is exactly what the companies are doing to us. Hulu and Amazon adfree subscriptions are not adfree anymore and some content will still contain ads. We are already there…

Cars… printers, ovens? Ad-supported subscriptions go physical

The one thing that the episode viewers probably found less believable is the fact that the ads were carried by a device you expect to purchase once and for all, and not be merely subscribed to. We’re used to that idea when it comes to essential tools and tech, whether it’s a hearing aid, a home appliance, or even a car. These aren’t products we expect to come with pop-ups or monthly fees. But the line between product and platform is quickly blurring. More and more, companies are finding ways to bake in subscriptions, paywalls, and yes — even ads — into things we once assumed were ours.

One of the most recent and jarring examples comes from Jeep. Some of their cars began showing pop-up ads on the infotainment screen whenever the car was stopped. In some cases, the pop-up ad promoting a premium warranty covered the whole screen, and was reportedly shown multiple times during the day. After the inevitable social media backlash ensued, Jeep said that ads were “part” of customers’ “contractual agreement,” but promised to work on reducing their frequency. Later, Jeep’s parent company, Stellantis, referred to the recurring pop-up a glitch, claiming that it was supposed to be shown once and should have come with an instant opt-out option.

But it’s not just cars. Printers are also becoming a subscription. Last year, HP rolled out its ‘All-In Plan’ where you no longer own the printer but merely rent it. And while they have not announced (yet) any plans for ads to be printed across your documents or merely on the back side of the page unless you pay extra, the idea is floating around and does not sound that far-fetched anymore.

And then there are ovens — yes, ovens. Some smart ovens are locking features behind subscription plans — the same premise as BMW’s now-dropped plan to charge a monthly fee for heated seats: you’re paying to unlock functionality your device already physically has.

At this rate, a future where your oven refuses to preheat — or shut off — until your subscription is renewed and won’t stop blasting ads until you upgrade to premium is not dystopian satire. It sounds like a Black Mirror episode, only this time, we’re all the main characters.