This article contains spoilers for Black Mirror‘s season 6 episode “Joan Is Awful.”
Black Mirror season 6 debuted on Netflix last week, three years after creator Charlie Brooker said he wasn’t working on new episodes because he didn’t think the world needed more “stories about societies falling apart.”
But what about stories about streaming sites falling apart?
On Tuesday, Netflix rolled out a website for Streamberry, the fake streaming site featured in first episode “Joan Is Awful,” which looks a lot like Netflix. The titular Joan (Annie Murphy) is a tech exec who slowly discovers how and why Streamberry is (re)producing a show about her life, nearly in real time. (This might have been inspired by a real show.)
The answer is that it’s digitally reproducing her likeness (and Salma Hayek’s) and that she signed away that right when she signed up for Streamberry—it’s buried in the Terms and Conditions, which had some viewers apparently panicking and looking up Netflix’s own after watching.
The Streamberry website allows users to create a personalized image, replacing “Joan” with whatever name they like. You would think anyone who saw “Joan Is Awful” would at least look at the Terms and Conditions of this fake site, which pop up after you upload the photo, naturally. It gives the “Netflix entity” the “irrevocable” right to “record, depict, and/or portray you and use.” It also allows Streamberry to collect geolocation data and identifying info.
“READ THE FUCKING TERMS AND CONDITIONS HOLY SHIT HAHAHAHA,” said @BaileyOffFilm. “it’s like there’s a moral to this story.”
Season 6 airs four years after the last Black Mirror, and there’s more of a focus on pop culture and celebrity this time around. The more common reaction online to season 6 has been that Black Mirror isn’t quite resonating like it used to, and while “Joan Is Awful” is obviously trying to say something about the evils of streaming greed and AI, putting out the fake website from the episode and having people still overlook the Terms and Conditions is pretty resonant.
