In one especially upsetting episode of the third series of Black Mirror, Kenny downloads a malware program called Shrive to repair the laptop his sister screwed up by watching movies illegally. But instead of cleaning up his computer, Shrive ruins Kenny’s life. It activates the webcam which films Kenny when, as happens with adolescent boys, he masturbates over online porn.



And then an anonymous email pops up bearing the caps-lock hallmark of the online loon: “WE SAW WHAT YOU DID.” The “we” has a video of him masturbating. Then another: “REPLY WITH YOUR PHONE NUMBER OR WE POST THE VIDEO TO EVERYONE IN YOUR CONTACTS.”

The rest of the episode, called Shut Up and Dance, consists of Kenny fulfilling a series of texted demands – deliver a cake, rob a bank, fight a stranger – so the video doesn’t go public.

It’s hardly irrelevant that shrive is a Middle English word meaning to prescribe penance. It survives today in the name Shrove Tuesday (once we did penance for our sins; now we make pancakes). Part of what Charlie Brooker offers in Black Mirror is shriving for a social media age, chastening us by showing us the abyss into which we, in 2016, are amorally plummeting.

We should repent for our grubby private online pleasures, our worthless Twitterstorms, our Katie Hopkins-like trollumnists, our technology-facilitated murder of human empathy. But you know what? We probably won’t. We’re like the narrator of the late Leonard Cohen’s song The Future: “When they said Repent! Repent! / I wonder what they meant.” And in this series of Black Mirror, Brooker’s like Cohen too: he has seen the future and, brother, it is murder.

When Black Mirror, which from 2011 to 2014 unflatteringly reflected the Facebook generation on Channel 4, was bought up by Netflix, some worried: could it continue savaging our giddily onanistic online age when sucked up by a big-budget global conglomerate? Could Brooker deliver over six episodes a series as creatively potent as he had for C4 in three?

By means of this genre-hopping series Brooker has overcome those worries. He offered us a chillingly effective police procedural with robo-bees hovering over Britain, mirroring the toxic swarm of online trolls (Hated in the Nation), a haunted house horror tweaked into cutting-edge relevance by dallying with game-playing virtual reality (Playtest) and a war movie in which soldiers in the near future have chips installed in their heads to makes their victims seem less than human (Men Against Fire).

A haunted house horror tweaked into cutting-edge relevance by dallying with VR … Playtest. Photograph: Netflix

But, as often in Brooker’s world, there are nihilistic twists, wrong-footing those hoping he’s supplying straightforward cautionary tales. What, for instance, Kenny doesn’t realise as he scampers from task to degrading task is that he has no leverage: his shaming video will still get posted. To, among others, his mum.

Then comes another twist. What’s that sound? Sirens. The cops are coming to arrest Kenny for looking at pornographic images of children. Maybe Kenny deserves all that’s coming his way. Maybe everybody in 2016, thanks to how technology helps us realise our most shameless desires, gets corrupted. Even you.

Strikingly, we never find out who – or what – is behind Shrive. Possibly it was concocted by wrathful forces beyond human powers – a self-generating algorithm, or a vengeful Old Testament-style God.

Either way, Brooker revels in playing with the idea that us degraded humans in 2016 deserved the punishments he metes out – murders, public shamings, fried brains, unacceptable social media profiles.

If there was a topical moral one might take from Black Mirror, it was perhaps this: put your phones and laptops in buckets of water and go off-grid for your own good. Certainly that was what the first episode in the series, Nosedive, made me want to do. It dramatised a none-too-implausible future in which every human encounter is ranked by participants out of five on their phone, and where your own personal ranking determines such things as which cars or apartments you can rent.

Put your phones and laptops in buckets of water and go off-grid for your own good … Nosedive. Photograph: David Dettmann/Netflix

Like Dave Eggers’ novel The Circle, Nosedive was pitch-perfect satire of the Sisyphean labour of social media in which our heroine, Lacie (Bryce Dallas Howard, channelling a candy-coloured Stepford wife and superbly nauseating omni-niceness), desperately wants to improve her ranking above 4.5 to join the elite.

In Eggers’ novel, the slogan of the eponymous Google-Amazon-Facebook mashup for which the heroine works is an update of Proudhon’s “property is theft”, namely “privacy is theft”. Lacie similarly mines herself and others for anything that can help her ratings. Every encounter – the barista’s “Have a nice day!”, the nodding acquaintance in the lift – becomes reconfigured with game theoretical sophistication to boost Lacie’s ranking. Privacy makes no sense when you can – reader, you must! – commodify everything about yourself to improve your ratings.

Black Mirror thus asked questions that possess us 2016. Are we nice enough? Are we interesting enough? Why don’t trolls like me? How can we blind ourselves to others’ suffering? And if we aren’t nice or interesting, can we use technology to make ourselves seem that way to improve our social capital? What made Black Mirror such compelling viewing this year was that its answers were unremittingly, almost unbearably, dark.