Black Mirror’s 15 Million Merits — the Illusion of Choice in a Techspace of Coercion
Since 2011 the dystopian futures of the anthology series Black Mirror have been unlocking new fears, shining a spotlight on insidious developments in technology, and sometimes simply delivering a middling “it’s cause you be on that phone.” Its first season is one of its most powerful and to this day episode two, Fifteen Million Merits, remains one of the series top rated on IMDb, Vulture, Rotten Tomatoes, and amongst its fan base. Daniel Kaluuya’s ability to be quiet and steadfast in one turn and so passionate he’s falling apart in another landed him his role in Jordan Peele’s hit, Get Out. Get Out launched an era of more thoughtful horror and more success for Jordan Peele and his company, with another Kaluuya led film, Nope. Arguably, that flavor of Kaluuya performance- an almost Western hero held between his outward stoicism and inward strife- was born here. That would be enough of a boast for any one off in an anthology but the boasts don’t end there. Fifteen Million Merits is a story that resonates more with each watch.
That resonance highlights just how good Fifteen Million Merits is… and just how badly our relationship to technology as a tool of coercion and control is becoming. It’s damning that it should grow more relevant over time.
In 2011, the episode offered parallels to changing algorithms, the way performers would cater to an audience, the way shame, fatphobia, sexuality, and more were all eagerly used by employers, governmental bodies, and peers to coerce and control. Every few years, a Black Mirror rewatch or speedrunning a friend through my favorite episodes increased my unease. In 2024, the similarities between this cautionary tale and our media landscape are nauseatingly bleak.
Everything from “people who liked apple also liked banana” recommendations after a vending machine purchase to the frightening unskipability and sheer volume of intrusive advertisements to the variety of judgemental personalities that all seek to put you in your place for the sake of their (and their boss’s) bottom line hits too close to home. In an age post adpocalypse, peak influencer boom, and amidst the death of “following” giving birth to the almighty algorithm telling you who you’re like, the oppressive annoyances of the episode feel dizzyingly real . Nestled in all that dystopia, of course, is a story about sex work, social mobility, dissociation, & the cruelty of capitalism.
On the outset, Fifteen Million Merits is a bleak beginnings romcom of the manic pixie dream girl variety. Bing (short for Bingham) meets be-bang’ed beauty Abi in the gender neutral bathrooms, charmed firstly by her soft, classic voice as she sings “Anyone Who Knows What Love Is (Will Understand),” a choice we later learn is less about whimsy and more to try and stop people from hearing her go pee pee. You see, Abi is new to the capitalist labor commune. She is newly 21, the age at which we can infer young people are sent to these modern workhouses, and struggling with more than just the shared bathrooms of this new life. Abi keeps turning the trash from her vending machine fruits into little origami penguins. This is a violation, of course. All trash must be trash, to the severity of the cleaning crew taking it away from her even as she holds it on her exercise bike. The penguin motif haunts Bing into the end of the episode. Manic pixie throw away or sacred totem, either of the real made artificial, or perhaps a nod to penguins mating for life? We don’t know. There’s no invitation to muse. They both have work to do.
It takes some convincing but ultimately she agrees to accept a gift of “merits,” the in workhouse currency, from Bing who inherited six months worth of merits after his brother’s passing. Together, they go forth so Abi can offer up her soft, sincere voice to the judges (Judge Wraith, Judge Charity, and Judge Hope… subtle) and avatar-only audience of Hot Shot.
This is where the episode introduces its first obvious violation of consent. Abi is offered Cuppliance™. When she declines it’s made clear it’s required. She’s told it’ll settle her nerves. She relents. Immediately, she feels light-headed, disoriented, dizzy. She’s shoved on stage in seconds.
Before she ever sings, Judge Wraith sexually harasses and degrades her, demanding to see her breasts until she cries and until many in the audience join him in delight and laughter. This positions the other judges, Charity and Hope, to be softer, kinder, though not necessarily safer or genuine. Thanks to Judge Wraith, the bar is in hell. In fact, it becomes clear that the shades of severity the judges use are ultimately just roles serving the same goal. Authenticity is a heaven Abi is offering up and this is what they’re doing to it. Her performance is simple but moving, greatly juxtaposed to the Hot Shot winner that has played in the various ads earlier in the episode, belting overly poignantly about nothing in particular.
Judge Charity and Hope flip their stance, emphasizing how unremarkable Abi is, even as she is beautiful. They tell her it’s sex work or the bike. They shame her for wasting merits, wasting electricity, and making a mockery of those on the bike at any moment she hesitates to accept a new position as Sexy Baby. The escalation is terrifying, even as it is expected. The results are heartbreaking. In reality, more than Cuppliance was involved in Abi’s caving. Abi, Bing, and everyone in the commune are robbed of consent and groomed to not even consider it before this moment in a myriad of small ways.
When I say it starts small, I mean it. The Cuppliance might be the first thing that shakes you, but it’s the vending machine that begins the illusion of choice. In the bike-led workhouse there is no DoorDash. No one has McDonald’s money for there is no McDonald’s money. Only merits. To boot, the only real social sphere are the decidedly uncozy tables across from the vending machines. The offerings are strictly healthy, strictly synth fruit. Apple or banana? Would you like to choose the banana that looks the freshest? Too bad. Like the useless nightmare screens that don our real world Walgreen’s, a screen of digitized fruits gaze down at the user.
Make your choice but remember — you don’t have a choice.
This illusion of choice feels exciting when paralleled to the endless task of biking each and every day. Biking to allegedly power their surroundings, the Hot Shot talent competition, and presumably the world. Every day the same wake up routine, the same sweat suit, the same bike. Apple or banana? Bike while watching a provincial landscape you’re not a part of or watching a show shaming fat bodies for existing with cruel pranks? Perhaps you’d like the high fantasy of going on talent show Hot Shot? And don’t forget — you can always watch explicit pornography in the shared space if that’s what motivates you!
Each of these shows- Botherguts, Hot Shot, WraithBabes- serves to dehumanize every one not on the bike. To stand outside of uniformity is to be ridiculed. To be used. To be humbled. It’s the only way out but is it worth the cost?
Botherguts mirrors the lack of accountability for being cruel to the serving class and is only a sneeze away from our already deeply fatphobic culture that dehumanizes any body not striving for perfection or at a minimum not taking up space.. Hot Shot is of course what facilitates our plot, the ads showing only one successful contestant in its history. WraithBabes is dehumanizing in a very different sense. It not only sets up the male gaze as one of the only ways out, it sets up women to be pieces of meat, the worst guy you know watches it out in the open, forcing every person around him to experience to some extent those fantasies.
Each of these shows is of course found in the unskippable without fees ads in this world. From laying in bed to brushing your teeth, you will be advertised to. And unless you have the will and the means to pay to skip it, you will consume pornography. Sanctioned dehumanizing sexuality. Your body, your existence, your perceived desirability or value, are not just there to be ridiculed. They are there to be consumed.
So when Abi is cat-called her shock, dismay, and visible discomfort read as naive and foolish to an audience whose boundaries are worn down daily by hardcore pornography. More sinister, that shock, dismay, and hurt is something new, something different, to the required pornographical tastes of the masses. Her softness, her unwillingness, her tears- what one judge calls “Pure Beauty”- is a guaranteed turn on.
Do you want to watch the two heavily tattooed, filler’d, raunch queens feign dominance or do you want to watch a heavily drugged, submissive ingenue be slowly coerced before you? Choose. You MUST choose.
Abi must choose.
To return to that small workhouse, forever biking among peers who witnessed her public shaming, likely participated in it, and may now view her as selfish (a judge even calls her so for taking up the spotlight her peers must power), stupid, or worse… or drink the Cuppliance, exist in a haze that includes some privacy, some luxury, some concept of success. In being made a dish for the masses to devour, she builds a wall between herself and those masses.
Bing’s vengeance is received much the same, the coercion tailored to his rage, his vulnerability, even his masculinity. Where Abi is naive, Bing has seen a great truth. We all feel it — even us judges. We swear.
There is specificity in their yin and yang of newly middle class oppression. Despite what to many in a 2024 audience that sadly might include a foaming-at-the-mouth TERF appeared as a progressive choice in the gender neutral bathrooms, clear lines are drawn by gender. The feminine and the masculine divided into Coquettes and Seers. The only pornography we witness is from the POV of the cis-hetero masculine. The emotional response Abi has to sexual harassment is immediately used to fetishize her, controlling her by framing her consumption as the stronger thing to do, the empowering thing to do. The emotional fall out Bing experiences in response, weaponized as retaliation, is a harness by which the system goes on to hold him. His righteous anger and astute observations are now tools of the machine.
And what does it get them? Trading their cognizance and humanity to be a sex object? Manufacturing and repeating a swing at the oppressive nature of the commune and the entertainment industry around it as a form of entertainment itself? A whole lot of nothing, really. What Abi and Bing seemingly gain in a “private” residence, square footage, and better furnishings is simply another tier of isolation and depersonalization. They have traded their small, dark cube bedrooms surrounded by screens for empty, white halls full of cameras. They have lost their community. They have lost each other. Bing still sees the beginnings of WraithBabe ads where an overly Cupplianced Abi dressed for something like a confirmation at a strip club shyly blinks her way into dubious consent as a man’s fingers enter her mouth. He stands at a window and looks at a generic view. Is it real? A glimpse of nature outside his window? Or is it simply another screen, another black mirror — premium programming selling the idea of a world outside?
