A fourth season of “Black Mirror” crept onto Netflix in late December and began to squirm through viewers’ heads already dizzy with the exhaust fumes of the outgoing year. The six roomy new episodes of Charlie Brooker’s anthology series play like a Rod Serling snack pack of dreadful speculation. The season tells tales of love in the age of asexual reproduction, about lives patterned by artificial intelligence, and about consciousness as a carceral state.

From 2011, when the first season of “Black Mirror” aired on Britain’s Channel 4, the show has figured media culture as a site of thorough depravity. In the conceptually perfect début, a Prime Minister of the United Kingdom is obliged, by kidnappers holding a princess hostage, to fornicate with a pig on film. The man behind the monstrosity turns out to be an artist bent on illustrating the evil of screen-culture circuses. In the following episode, Daniel Kaluuya plays a prole who, like all members of a teeming class that unavoidably consumes omnipresent junk culture, works a daily shift to earn his keep by pedalling a stationary bicycle to generate power. The character spends his nest egg to pay the fee for a pretty girl with a lovely voice to enter a reality show. On air, she is systematically diverted from this “American Idol” fantasy into captivity as a sex-film starlet; he, striving to avenge her subjugation by getting time on the show and speaking truth to power, is likewise led to commercialize his outrage, as if Howard Beale in “Network” signed a long-term contract hosting kitchen-gizmo infomercials. Elsewhere, in a second-season episode titled “White Bear,” the narrative line emerges from a blur of cleverly withheld context, and we see that we have watched the torture of a woman who, convicted as an accomplice to a gruesome murder, spends her days in a state of forced amnesia, running for her life from armed assailants while unaware that the hunt is a popular spectator sport.

Throughout, “Black Mirror” sizzles with skillful unpleasantness, conveying its dim view of human nature in a way that implicates the viewer. On the one hand, the show indicts the daily dissipation of our real world. On the other, it is not above catering to our dissipated tastes by administering bumps of the old ultraviolence. With the new season, the spectacle of sadism has seeped into the background, where it emits noxious compounds essential to the atmosphere. Witness, if you will, the season-opening episode titled “U.S.S. Callister.” Here, an affluent tech schlub scavenges the DNA of his co-founder and their employees to create digital clones who exist in a personalized private-server edition of the company’s successful online game. The spaceship of the episode’s title is an alternative-universe model of “Star Trek” ’s Enterprise. The antihero at his helm behaves like a Captain Kirk who has degenerated into Colonel Kurtz: playing a boy’s game of beaming down to distant planets to defeat pulp villains, he behaves with the cruelty of a slave master, inherently, as each clone possesses a self-awareness tantamount to having a soul. The power trip is intrinsic to his pleasure; the episode suggests the universal show-biz complicity in romancing myths of domination, galactic and otherwise.

The series, with its insistent eye for sinister impulses, can be too much to take. This is partly a credit to its psychological acuity, partly a consequence of its tonal intensity when unspooling morality plays. Though “Black Mirror” covers all the capital vices, there is no God in its moral universe, just human souls with their bare hands tapping at smooth machines and hearts lusting for the blood of seeming justice. Its strongest ideas and images are so on the nose that they might as well be your glasses. When a storyteller imagines, as series creator Charlie Brooker did in 2013, an insolent computer-animated bear from a TV show running for Parliament and ultimately emerging as the face of an authoritarian state, he is not so much spinning a yarn as spreading the news.

Dozens of times, when watching a violent film, I have covered my eyes with my hands. However, I had never physically turned my back on a television set until I withdrew from the sixth episode of the new season, titled “Black Museum.” The episode presents, among its cabinet of curiosities, a sci-fi fable about an E.R. doctor. A Cronenbergian implant—a sort of empathetic mind-meld gizmo—enables the doctor to feel his patients’ pain in his own nervous system. Experiencing death, he returns to the mortal plane addicted to agony. It was not the gore of the story—of the doctor, cut off from his supply of other people’s suffering, entering a self-mutilation phase—that revolted me, though there was that. What made the scene unwatchable is the same element that inspires me to recommend it: the way the gore laced with the nausea (inspired by the fiendishness of the dramatic device of the implant) probed pain and destruction so exactly as to feel invasive. My turn away from the show maybe shares its posture with an unease some viewers feel for the new season. When the moral arguments of “Black Mirror” grow strident, and overbearing klaxons ring about corporate surveillance states, an episode can weigh like a ponderous cyberpunk parable, and the effect is off-putting. Still, the series’s lively futurist premises and tight production design combine to supply shocks of recognition. Suspense stories about violated memories and surveilled minds transmit the queasiness of everyday alienations.

We live in the best of all possible worlds for dystopian fantasies to flourish. “Radical pessimism is a dismal trend,” Jill Lepore wrote in this magazine last June while surveying the golden age of dystopian fiction. Adaptations of novels by Philip K. Dick and Margaret Atwood will continue to flow on small screens. Ads touting new paranoid thrillers will continue to aim at consumers across all their media devices, according to algorithmic decree. And, because this virtual weather won’t let up anytime soon, I’d like to propose classing the precise dystopia of “Black Mirror” as a cacotopia, by way of putting a name to the sensation it delivers.

Cacotopia is a synonym for dystopia coined, in the eighteenth century, from the Greek kakós, meaning “bad.” It shares that root with kakistocracy, a word that denotes government by the worst persons, and which therefore has gained unprecedented prominence in the past year. Anthony Burgess, discussing “Nineteen Eighty-Four,” favored the term on account of its gagging acrid sound: “I prefer to call Orwell’s imaginary society a cacotopia—on the lines of cacophony or cacodemon. It sounds worse.” Some academics differentiate between dystopian fictions as those that primarily contend with political oppression and cacotopian ones as those that foreground moral decline, and the distinction has its uses.