chat

I watched the first season or two.

It was pretty fun and often the social commentary was decent.

At its best it does a what-if with regards to the direction society is moving towards, except in typical sci-fi fashion it's a bit ostentatious (which is built in because every[?] episode is a single, self-contained story so you can't engage in world-building or narrative arcs or much character development and it's naturally going to lack the subtlety that longer-form shows have the privilege of developing because it has to draw you right in from the get-go, at the risk of being hamfisted.)

At its worst it's just "phone bad, society bad".

It's mostly just the media version of a carnival ride - it's a short affair that provides some amount of thrill and you go for the experience, not to get some life-changing insight from it.

I think that people who say it's the stupid person's idea of a profound show are mostly responding to other people's overly positive response to the show and not necessarily to the show itself; does the show intend to be a deep, serious philosophical meditation on things as they might be in the near future? I don't really think so, at least not for most of the stuff I remember watching.

Do some people get overhyped about it and start engaging in a pissing contest with others to see who is the biggest fan and who can rhapsodise about it the best, just like what happens Elon Musk fanboys get together? Yep, sure do.

I think a lot of people either wanted it to become something more than just satire vignettes or otherwise they fell into that common trap of glamorising what could have been, rather than evaluating what actually exists. (Pick your favourite musician, author, or comedian who died young, that band that only released one great album before breaking up, that game that got stuck in development hell and was released half-finished... whatever it happens to be, some people just fall madly in love with unrealised potential and it's that same psychological effect that a decent proportion of people fall prey to with this show.)

I don't think it ever really had much potential for being a critical text (easy to say from thr comfortable position of speaking retrospectively, no?) because by its nature it was too disparate and so there was never going to be any unifying thesis that underpinned the show, just some broad thematic similarities that most of the episodes shared in.

Idk, it's just the Simpsons Treehouse of Horror Halloween specials except it's near future sci-fi, adult, and engaging in satire and deconstruction of society with a focus on how technology might amplify the worst aspects of it.