When Black Mirror’s “Common People” Made Me Question Every Subscription I Pay For
I recently started watching Black Mirror, and honestly, I wasn’t prepared for what hit me. The first episode I watched was “Common People” from the latest season, and it left me staring at my TV screen long after the credits rolled.
The episode follows Mike and Amanda, a working-class couple trying to start a family. When Amanda collapses from a brain tumor, a tech company called Rivermind offers hope through an experimental procedure that can save her life. The surgery is completely free, they promise, with just a small monthly subscription of $300 to keep her cognitive functions running through their cloud servers.
What starts as a touching story of love and desperation quickly transforms into something that felt disturbingly familiar. As I watched Mike pick up extra shifts to afford the monthly fees, the parallels to our lives were too real to ignore.
But the moment that truly shocked me was when Amanda started unconsciously reciting commercials mid-conversation. Picture this: she’s talking to her husband about their day, and suddenly, without any awareness, she launches into a cheerful advertisement for breakfast cereal. The eeriness of that scene sent chills down my spine because it felt like a twisted version of what we already experience. How often do we find ourselves humming jingles from ads we never consciously chose to watch, or repeating phrases from sponsored content that somehow embedded itself in our minds?
That scene made me realize that Rivermind isn’t really science fiction at all. It’s a business model analysis disguised as entertainment, and the model it’s analyzing is already here.
Think about how subscription services work today. They start with a generous offer that seems almost too good to be true. Remember when Netflix was $8 a month with no ads? Or when Spotify promised unlimited music for a small fee? The pattern is always the same: hook users with value, then gradually introduce limitations that can only be bypassed by paying more.
In the episode, Rivermind follows this playbook perfectly. Amanda’s inability to travel outside her coverage area suddenly requires upgrading to a $500 monthly “Plus” subscription. But here’s where it gets truly insidious: the company doesn’t wait for customers to complain about limitations. Instead, they proactively introduce new restrictions. Amanda starts sleeping even longer hours as the system demands more from her body. Then, without warning, their “Plus” tier becomes downgraded to include advertisements — Amanda begins unconsciously reciting commercials mid-conversation, making it impossible for her to keep her teaching job. To remove these ads and restore basic functionality, they need to upgrade again to the “Lux” tier. Each “upgrade” isn’t solving customer needs; it’s solving problems that Rivermind deliberately creates to force customers up their pricing ladder.
I found myself mentally calculating how many subscription services we currently pay for. There are streaming platforms, cloud storage, productivity apps, news subscriptions, AI tools, fitness tracking, music streaming, and probably a few I’ve forgotten about. Each one started small and reasonable, but the costs have crept up over time. Some now show me ads despite being paid services. Others have locked features I used to have behind higher-tier subscriptions.
What makes the Rivermind model particularly sinister is how it exploits the fact that Amanda’s life literally depends on the service. This isn’t about entertainment or convenience anymore. When someone’s survival is at stake, traditional market dynamics collapse. You can’t simply cancel your subscription or switch to a competitor.
And this dynamic already exists in various forms around us. In India, we see it with essential services like digital payment platforms that started free but now charge for premium features. In the US, it’s visible in healthcare apps and medical devices that require ongoing subscriptions for full functionality. Patients with diabetes rely on continuous glucose monitors that require monthly subscriptions for data access and smartphone connectivity. Even life-saving devices like insulin pumps now come with ongoing software subscription costs. Some patients have reported being unable to access their own medical data when they couldn’t afford the monthly fees for device connectivity.
The episode takes this trend to its logical extreme, but the foundation is already there. What’s particularly concerning is how quickly India might catch up — or may have already caught up — as our healthcare system increasingly digitizes and privatizes. The infrastructure for subscription-based essential services is being built right now, often marketed as innovation and convenience.
The most disturbing part of Amanda’s journey is how she gradually loses agency over her own mind and body. She becomes a walking advertisement platform, unconsciously marketing products to anyone within earshot. Her sleep increases to conserve server resources. Her emotions become app-controlled features that can be boosted for a fee.
This reminded me of how we already see traces of this in our daily lives. Social media algorithms shape our moods and opinions. Recommendation engines influence our choices. Smart devices collect intimate data about our habits and preferences. We’re not quite at Amanda’s level of direct manipulation, yet, but the infrastructure is being built.
What struck me most was how the episode depicts people pushed to increasingly desperate measures to afford basic necessities. Mike eventually resorts to humiliating himself on live streams, pulling his own teeth for money to afford Amanda’s subscription tiers. While extreme, this reflects a reality many recognize: the gig economy’s race to the bottom, where people sacrifice dignity and privacy for income.
I’ve seen friends drive for ride-sharing apps late into the night to afford rising rents, or create content they’re not proud of because it pays better than traditional work. The subscription economy doesn’t just change how we pay for services; it changes how we earn money to pay for them.
The episode’s creator, Charlie Brooker, has described this process as “enshittification” — the way tech companies start with wonderful opportunities for users, then gradually make the experience worse as they pursue profitability. It’s a term that perfectly captures what I’ve experienced across multiple platforms and services over the years.
Watching “Common People” made me realize that we’re living through a massive shift in how essential services are delivered and monetized. The episode serves as both warning and mirror, showing us where current trends might lead if left unchecked.
The subscription economy isn’t inherently evil, but the episode highlights what happens when it’s applied to essential services without proper safeguards. When companies can hold basic human needs hostage behind paywalls, when they can degrade service quality to force upgrades, when they can reprogram human behavior for profit — that’s when convenient innovation crosses the line into exploitation.
As I finished watching the episode and looked at my own phone, filled with apps that know more about me than I sometimes know about myself, I couldn’t shake the feeling that we’re already further down this path than we’d like to admit. The question isn’t whether the Rivermind future is possible — it’s whether we’ll recognize it before it’s too late to change course.
The most haunting part of “Common People” isn’t its technology. It’s how familiar its business practices feel, and how little distance there is between Amanda’s world and our own.