Occasionally, of course, Hollywood does dig deeper. “Blade Runner,” “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” “The Matrix” and “Battlestar Galactica” all stand out as excellent cautionary tales about the way humans can lose control over their inventions. But each is at least a decade old. It’s as if film producers caught a prophetic glimpse of the rise of Facebook and Snapchat and iDevices and realized that lecturing audiences about the perils of wasting time online wouldn’t be huge box-office draws. (They were probably right.)

“Black Mirror” falls somewhere in between its predecessors, equal parts horror and wonder, somewhere in the uncanny valley between our world and one dominated by Skynet. It looks like a future we might actually inhabit, making the show a lot more effective as a critique of the tech industry’s trajectory — one that might make you think twice about which devices you buy and which services you use.

In this way, it makes sense that “Black Mirror” came from outside our borders. Europe and Britain have a richer tradition of lashing back at emerging technologies, especially those they (rightly) view as American technocultural imperialism. Germany, for example, has long warred with Google, Amazon and Uber over business practices, data-collection habits and freewheeling growth tactics that often circumvent regulation and longstanding rules. Technology is one of America’s most important exports, and, as the Snowden disclosures revealed, the widespread adoption of Silicon Valley products allowed our government to surveil the world’s communications. In the aftermath of the exposure of the National Security Agency’s extensive spying network, lawmakers in Brazil, Japan, India and Russia pushed for new laws and cyber infrastructure intended to thwart American snooping.

In America, we treat the release of each new Apple product with the reverence usually reserved for pop icons. The sly ingenuity of “Black Mirror” is that it nails down our love for the same devices we blame for our psychological torment. Brooker understands that even as we swear off tweeting and promise to stop Googling our exes, our phones are still the last things we see before falling asleep and the first things we reach for when we awaken.

To that end, the gadgets in “Black Mirror,” including the creepy memory-recording devices, look sleek enough to want, which is perhaps the show’s cleverest trick. It is impossible to watch the show and not idly fantasize about having access to some of the services and systems they use, even as you see them used in horrifying ways. (You might not feel this way about, say, “The Terminator.”) Most television shows and movies can’t even correctly portray the standard interfaces that we use to browse the Web, send a text message or make a voice call, let alone design them in a desirable way.

“Black Mirror” resonates because the show manages to exhibit caution about the role of technology without diminishing its importance and novelty, functioning as a twisted View-Master of many different future universes where things have strayed horribly off-course. (This is an advantage it has over the movies: a blockbuster must settle on one convincing outcome and stick with it.)

But those futures, or ones like it, loom on our own horizon. Real-world events like the Snowden leaks and even the Sony email hacks may give us the chills, but they weren’t enough to persuade us to change our behavior or demand more from the companies we rely on to send risqué photos and store our personal communications. And perhaps that’s the true appeal of the series: It does more than blame technology for our woes. It deals with the reality that, no matter what gadgetry we may possess, our problems remain human. It reminds us that technology probably won’t enslave us, but it definitely will change us.