Black Mirror of Democracies

The king of Spain gets mud in his face in one of Valencia’s flood-hit towns. People were too angry to tolerate celebrity visits. Even his great-grandfather Alfonso III, who had to go into exile after the proclamation of the Second Spanish Republic, was not in such an uncomfortable situation as Felipe VI. But the King of Spain was not alone; he was accompanied by the head of the government and the president of the region. And that was their salvation, because in the days of the Black Mirror (1), it doesn’t matter how much dirt citizens pour on them. The key is to master the story, and the king and queen had better reflexes than their fellows. They held on, and eventually the king spoke to some good-looking young men who wore Nazi symbols on their clothes. And the queen ended up crying, touched by the pain of her people, but the president instead fled and ended up having his car windows shattered. Little was known about the president of the region, as if he was still mentally consumed with food (or with something else) that kept him from his government’s crisis cabinet when people were already starting to drown in Valencia. “If I end up there,” Ivan Redonde must have thought, “if I end up there, the president will remain tied to the king even if the bombs fall.” Rule number 1 for political leaders from the Black Mirror era: pay more attention to your political strategist than your bodyguard. Trump demonstrated this with a slightly smaller ear by raising his fist and saying “fight.” This is why sexting triumphs, because in the Black Mirror era, what is seen and said matters more than anything else.

Opinion polls in Spain are already showing that the king had best get out of the sordid episode; the story won, and if he were running for election today, he would do quite well. But of course, the man is king for not running for election. That doesn’t change the fact that every day citizens vote for their favorite candidate with the remote controls of their televisions and cell phones. And the participants in the battleground chapter were the king, the president of the government, and the regional president. And everyone voted and participated in cyberdemocracy. This time the king won, but everything is ephemeral in the Black Mirror societies.

Misery on all TV channels, fake news on almost all TV channels that point to social media as generators of hoaxes, which are then commented on and spread on TV. And Trump wins, sweeps away, humiliates Kamala Harris, whose government program, whose answer to all questions was something like “I’m not Trump,” “I’m not as bad as Trump,” “Things would be much worse with Trump than they are with me.” Dear Kamala, Dear Pedro Sanchez, the lesser evil is becoming less and less prevalent in the stock market. Europe knows this.

Meanwhile, Israeli rulers and military officers savor the genocidal orgy of Trump’s victory with even more pleasure, while talking about Israeli babies beheaded by Arab human beasts. “You are all anti-Semites,” Israel shouts to the world, while its hooligans scream in the streets of Amsterdam that there are no more schools in Gaza and ask Mossad for help as their faces are broken, and they scream in terror, “Free Palestine!” as they are surrounded by Dutch anti-fascist youth. And Biden responds to Harris’s defeat by giving Zelensky permission to bomb Russia. And Putin says if they want World War III, he wishes Germany good luck. And Scholz is toppling his “traffic light” government and turning to the CDU, which will hold his hand, while Alternative for Germany continues to rise in the polls. And Le Pen is preparing to win and expel all Arabs from France. And Trump is holding his genitals and showing his government: an anti-Castro Cuban in charge of foreign policy, an antivaxer in charge of health care, Elon Musk himself saying that the US government will no longer be the board of directors of capital, but rather that capitalists will rule directly, without intermediaries, even if it is done through X.

And China has been waiting, calculating for decades, decades for its moment, but both Koreas may be ahead of China’s time. And in Africa, leaders are emerging who claim to be defending Pan-Africanism, while Iran calculates that its desire not to wage nuclear war with Israel may not serve to appease Israel’s desire to wage nuclear war with Iran. And the BRICS countries tell Putin he is not alone, and Claudia Sheinbaum breathes as she thinks about the six years that await her at the head of the Latin American left and the four years of resistance to Trump.

The authors of Black Mirror could never have scripted such events. Their scripted plots always keep the minimal liberal order jumping in the air.

The technological antics of the other heartfelt episodes of Black Mirror retain a certain connection to the middle-class world (bourgeoisified, individualistic, but more or less comfortable), but what the news broadcasts today is the atmosphere and aesthetics of a climactic and political collapse in which liberal democracies have been the most obvious victims. Black Mirror doesn’t have that. And there is no liberal democracy that supports the military regime, climate collapse, and hegemonic transition of a capitalist world-system in which the dominance of European civilization exported to the USA is in question. Will the populists win? Those who are best able to wage ideological and geopolitical warfare with unpredictable consequences will win. Wars and stories that in dystopian times produce political monsters.

(1) Black Mirror is a British science fiction television series created in 2011. It addresses contemporary turmoil by presenting dystopian stories, post-apocalyptic scenarios, and the Orwellian landscape of technoparanoia.