“Fifteen Million Merits”: Gamification, Spectacle, and Neoliberal Aspiration

“Fifteen Million Merits”: Gami!cation, Spectacle, and Neoliberal Aspiration

Mark R. Johnson

INTRODUCTION “Fifteen Million Merits” (01.02) is the second episode of the very !rst season of Black Mirror. Where many claimed to be put off by the shocking and explicit nature of the !rst episode—an episode where technology is present, although arguably less central than other concerns—this episode might be a more repre- sentative introduction to the series for many. The technologies depicted in this episode, although extreme, are all extrapolations from technologies we already see, marking this out as an unusual piece. Indeed, across the entire Black Mirror canon, only “The National Anthem” (01.01), arguably “The Waldo Moment” (02.03), and “Shut Up and Dance” (03.03) also feature only technologies we have in the present-day real world. Nevertheless, whether drawing on existing technologies or their near-cousins, “Fifteen Million Merits” introduces us to what will become the norm of Black Mirror: scenarios that are undoubtedly based on our present world, designed to shed light on potential paths that might be followed and the problems those paths could bring. As in many episodes, it is entirely clear neither how far into a hypothetical future the episode sits nor where geographically the episode is set. Instead, the episode is meant to startle us with worrying futures of several ongoing contemporary trends and present a world that is just realistic enough to get under the viewer’s skin, yet just extreme enough, to grab attention and not let go until its bleak resolution. This episode depicts a dystopian world where the overwhelming majority of people perform endless physical work, watching live-broadcast “reality” shows to assuage the dullness of their lives. The main character is Bing (Daniel Kaluuya), a loyal if bored and almost zombie-like worker who performs this

M. R. Johnson () Department of Political Science, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada

© The Author(s) 2019 33 T. McSweeney, S. Joy (eds.), Through the Black Mirror, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19458-1_3 34 M. R. JOHNSON physical work via seemingly endless and life-long use of a cycling machine. During this activity the labourers are able to watch simple television programmes, play simple games, or follow cycling simulations, all while watching their “merits”—the ubiquitous currency of this world—tick slowly upward as a reward for their cycling. One day Bing meets a woman called Abi (Jessica Brown Friday) and, smitten with her, offers to pay for her to join a talent show via the impressive number of merits he has long since accumulated but never spent. Abi is unsuccessful, but is offered a life as an erotic performer instead; under pres- sure from the judges and given the bleakness and monotony of the alternative, she accepts. Devastated by the object of his affections being used in this way, Bing sets out to exact revenge: !nding his own way onto the show, he threatens to kill himself before offering a damning condemnation of their society. Against all odds the judges love it and the “honesty” he displays, and offer him his own show on which he will supposedly speak truth to the masses; he accepts and is last seen broadcasting a show where he rails against the system through its own technologies, from a comfortable apartment. His once-fellow workers laugh and relate and feel Bing really understands them, all while continuing to cycle. In this episode, Black Mirror picks up on two technological systems or practices we see in the present day and extrapolates them to their extreme potential conclusions, arguing in particular that these two systems can be con#ated in ways that encourage increasingly demeaning or extreme activities in order to be noticed, and stand out from a crowd, in a job market that increasingly offers nothing for even the majority of skilled, hard-working, dedicated labourers. Speci!cally, the two practices in question the episode concerns itself with are “gami!cation” and “live streaming.” In the !rst case, we see characters in this episode being persuaded to carry out menial labour through the attraction of fun, light-hearted, appealing computer graphics and simple psychological tricks drawn from game design. “Fifteen Million Merits” wants to examine the growing role of gami!cation in our lives, show us how gami!cation is often nothing even remotely approaching a “game” or even a form of “play” at all, and con- sider where it might go. In turn, gami!cation and the competition it implies are also central to the wider society: it appears that the only way to avoid physical drudgery is via competitions such as the talent show we see in the episode, and the game-like competition inherent in pursuing merits appears central to maintaining the world’s social order. In the second case, the episode explores an economy where creative work appears to be one of the only routes for employment, and yet the saturation of that same economy means that the level of competition for celebrity status has become ever more intense. This dynamic is already emerging in real-world live-streaming platforms, and in this episode Black Mirror shows its fear about how these systems are transforming our ideas of in#uence, importance, and success. In turn, through both of these, the episode has much to say about aspirational labour within neoliberal economies such as our own, and how digital systems of both these sorts can intersect to generate a particular set of highly competitive, exploitative, and unpleasant behaviours and routines. “FIFTEEN MILLION MERITS”: GAMIFICATION, SPECTACLE, AND NEOLIBERAL… 35

GAMIFICATION Gami!cation involves the application of game systems to non-game activities, such as exercise and !tness, one’s productivity during hours of employment, or any number of other things which are presented as enhancements to life. For example, one might download an application to one’s phone that tracks !tness activities and then rewards the user for successfully running a certain distance, or lifting a certain weight. These rewards take the sort of trophies, or achieve- ments, or other kinds of rewards of the sort we are used to seeing in video games: something bright, impressive, and loud, to remind the user they have done something desirable. Gami!cation has also found use in working environ- ments, designed to encourage employees to work harder and unlock these vir- tual faux-rewards in exchange for their real-world labour. Gami!cation is thus a process by which a supposed “behaviourist stimulus-response-reinforcement process will”, apparently, “naturally motivate the player to play” (Philippette, 2014, p. 188). Tasks that might otherwise seem unpalatable will supposedly become palatable through adding a game element to them, which is to say a playful element. By adding such a component and masking the unpleasant parts of a task under a veneer of play and the kinds of rewards we are used to getting in play, the idea is to motivate users into performing certain actions. Gami!cation in the real world is not without its critics. I have previously argued that despite the lofty promises of gami!cation to “make life fun” and other such constructions, gami!cation in fact represents the capture of play in the neoliberal pursuit of rationalisation and optimisation (Woodcock & Johnson, 2017). Gami!cation systems are designed around a particular model of time as something to be carefully spent and carefully invested, and something that should be tracked, re#ected on, and consequently optimised. Contemporary digital technology more broadly has already heralded a trans- formation in managers’ abilities to monitor and track work (Moore & Robinson, 2016; Lupton, 2016), and gami!cation, when put to these ends, is another example of this growing trend. Far from making life apparently more playful and therefore enjoyable, gami!cation in this way only enhances the aspects of life that need to be made playful, which is to say, the unenjoyable parts. Managerial classes have always sought new ways to encourage the labour of workers (Chyung, 2005; Taylor, 1967; Townley, 1993), and adding a veneer of play over an unchanged core of work has now become an extremely effective way to achieve this goal. The tremendous success of gami!cation apps, web- sites, and platforms for a wide range of different purposes demonstrates clearly what an effective strategy the application of mode and models we associate with “play” can be. As such, “Fifteen Million Merits” explores an extreme potential future of gami!cation, where all of life’s activities have been subsumed into “fun” systems of this sort, each of which tethers an increasingly fatuous or childish veneer to increasingly crushing drudgery, and serves a purpose of social control in the process. Bing is woken up by a seemingly joyful cartoon of a cockerel 36 M. R. JOHNSON which then leaves the screen in an amusing way, but all it achieves is to wake him, every day, to perform the monotonous cycling labour. When cycling, the workers then watch equally cartoon-like simulations of outside cycling, but it is implied several times in the episode that none of them have ever even seen what the outside truly looks like. The precise value of this cycling is never even explained, yet this seems important to understanding the episode’s world. Given that it consists of physical labour while all the characters we see aspire to a different kind of labour—that of the celebrity or the in#u- encer—this physical labour likely forms some kind of basic role in this society, for the generation of electricity or something comparable. Equally, however, it might just as easily serve no role whatsoever except keeping the masses of the population docile and content, with a trivial and endless physical activity for them to focus on. Gami!cation also shapes the media consumed in the episode. When Bing buys Abi the “golden ticket” to Hot Shot, the ticket is a shimmering golden graphic which appears on his screen, far more prominent and impressive than anything that had come before. This is an example of what is known as “juici- ness” within game design (Gabler, Gray, Kucic, & Shodhan, 2005), where sounds and graphics and colours and dramatic animations are used to make something appear unusually exciting. Equally, when Bing gifts it to Abi, he does not deliver in person, but rather his “dopple”—the Mii-like avatar—is what delivers it, and her dopple in exchange blows him a kiss. All these game- like elements serve both to motivate their users to particular tasks, to reward them for particular tasks, and also to increase the distance between the labourers and anything “real” (as Bing rages at the end of the episode). We also sharply see the class dimension to the kind of gami!cation in this episode. As above, labourers work their physical tasks in pursuit of merits, which can seemingly be used for a wide variety of purposes. They can be used to purchase items on the video or television consoles, or prevent adverts from running; they are used to purchase food, and although we do not see it, this presumably also extends to the other requirements of life as well. They can also be spent on entering contests or competitions, as we see when Abi and later Bing both enter Hot Shot for the price of “Fifteen Million Merits”. This is an extremely high price, which says something about the wider economy that merits are used within: the price is high so that few people will compete, and even fewer will do so often, but it is nevertheless nominally within the reach of a dedicated worker. This both gives a strong sense of aspirational labour to the workers’ (generally, it seems, hopeless) gami!ed physical activity, while making sure that the normality of the everyday focuses on the bikes, not what one might be aspiring for. Merits are sure enough the only currency we see in the episode: everything must be bought with them, but pricing is controlled in such a manner as to serve clear social, rather than purely economic, purposes. Given capital’s need to continually “co-opt and capture” the potential uses of new technologies (Dyer-Witheford & de Peuter, 2009, p. 5), none of these are especially surprising phenomena. Many of these are already seen to some “FIFTEEN MILLION MERITS”: GAMIFICATION, SPECTACLE, AND NEOLIBERAL… 37 extent in the present day, whilst the others are certainly not beyond the limits of present technology. Gami!cation is an impressively effective tool for getting workers to behave in certain ways, even and especially when they don’t see their activities as being work, but this precise con#ation serves to control populations with even more effectiveness—and in ways the populations in question are very happy to opt-in to. As such, gami!cation is a new mode of governmentality (Schrape, 2014) in both the present-day real world, and the future of “Fifteen Million Merits”. In the real world, gami!cation is put to work ensur- ing that workers behave as intended, or that people successfully pursue an optimised use of their nominally non-“work” hours. In the merits world, gami!cation does all of these things, whilst also successfully masking the drudgery and tedium of everyday work which far exceeds almost any kind of labour we see in the present-day real world—although some “gig economy” jobs (Graham, Hjorth, & Lehdonvirta, 2017) perhaps come close. “Fifteen Million Merits” is one of the most striking depictions of gami!cation yet seen in television or !lm; this is perhaps unsurprising given the relative newness of the phenomenon, and yet, given its impacts on so many aspects of the lives of so many, it is undoubtedly a technological and social issue of the utmost contemporary importance.

SPECTACLE AND STREAMING The idea of “streams”, and the cult of digital celebrity that can go with them, is also essential to “Fifteen Million Merits”. In the present day, live streaming is rapidly becoming a major site of media consumption by hundreds of millions of viewers around the globe, and a major site of media production by millions of amateur content producers. At time of writing the market leader in this area is Twitch.tv, on which around two million people regularly broadcast. In this way live streaming enables “anyone to become a TV provider” (Pires & Simon, 2015, p. 225) by broadcasting content from their own homes, taking part in what appears to be a highly democratic and open market for content—which is to say, the most compelling broadcasts should rise to the top. Given the ability to communicate with streamers whilst they stream, live streaming is what Cunningham and Craig (2016, p. 5412) have called a “protoindustry” of “social media entertainment”. This means a kind of media production which blurs the lines between entertainment—media content produced generally by professional individuals for public consumption—and social media. Although individual live-streaming channels are almost all smaller than any major traditional television channel in terms of viewership, live streaming as a whole brings in an audience able to compete, in size, with almost any global television channel. In turn, the fact that well over ninety-nine per cent of live streamers are amateur content producers lends a very different feel to watching live streams as opposed to traditional television. These are broadcasts more akin to being in the home of the streamer along with them, playing along with whatever they’re playing or otherwise being a slightly more active participant in the activity, 38 M. R. JOHNSON rather than a merely passive spectator. Streamers are skilled at playing up this sense (Woodcock & Johnson, In Press) and have developed a range of tech- niques for optimising the income they can get from these viewers (Johnson & Woodcock, In Press). However, live streaming is not without its issues, many of which “Fifteen Million Merits” examines. For example, despite the appeal of simply broadcasting content on camera from one’s home as a source of income, streaming is an extremely demanding job in terms of labour (Johnson & Woodcock, 2017). Streamers in the real world often work for eight to twelve hours per day on stream, not counting all the time they also spend off-stream, and often stream every day a week, with some going as far as to carry out “streaming challenges” where they broadcast, say, every single day for two years without a break. In a space of relatively open competition where there are few rules over what broadcasters do, broadcasting more is almost always better for any streamer who might want to make a living from their practice. In turn, we also note the existence of many streamers doing other extreme things, as well as lengthy streaming challenges, in order to be successful (much like Bing’s suicide-threat “stunt”). At the milder end of the spectrum, many streamers deliberately brush up against the edges of the terms of service of streaming platforms when it comes to, for example, what they wear (unusually revealing clothing), or what they say (controversial or “edgy” opinions). For aspirational streamers these are all at least in part attempts to make themselves stand out within an extremely crowded marketplace. At the more extreme ends of the spectrum, we note the existence of one broadcaster who was “caught out” pretending to be a wheelchair user—and soliciting donations as sympathy—when he stood up on stream, apparently forgetting the principle his broadcast had been built on (Phillips, 2013). Another broadcaster, known for 24-hour, 48-hour, and even 72-hour streamers, revealed after a long period of speculation that he was only able to maintain such a schedule through consuming amphetamines in order to stay awake for such large blocks of time (Kollar, 2015). The allure of becoming a digital celebrity through live streaming in the real world is encouraging broadcasters towards sometimes quite extreme activities, and consequently leading to some potentially shocking outcomes among its strongest aspirants. What, therefore, can this episode show us about the potential dangers of streaming? We only see relatively few streams in “Fifteen Million Merits”, but all of the television channels are explicitly called streams, and all are led by single, charismatic personalities, who seem to have risen to the top of a hyper- competitive broadcast ecosystem we glimpse throughout the episode. Some are based around personalities, some are based around creating a certain kind of content, whilst many are based on “shock” or extreme spectacles. Given what it takes Bing to get his own stream—the meticulous acquisition of merits, the foregoing of food, the scrounging for scraps—even if that is not his intent, it is clear that aspiring streamers in “Fifteen Million Merits” must commit every moment and every action to the goal. In this way streamers and aspiring streamers see themselves as “companies of one”, for whom every last action is “FIFTEEN MILLION MERITS”: GAMIFICATION, SPECTACLE, AND NEOLIBERAL… 39 an “investment in human capital” (Read, 2009, p. 30; cf. Foucault, 2008). This is re#ected in the optimisation of time that real-world streamers perform and throughout “Fifteen Million Merits”—the practising singers and dancers in the Hot Shot waiting room, Bing’s dedication to squeezing out every last merit he can from his time in the second half of the episode while earning his own ticket, and so forth—the same is the case. Nevertheless, these remain creative workers, whether through producing their own content or managing the “content” produced by others. In the present day, we live in a society where creative workers are often being framed as superlative entrepreneurial citizens (Gill & Pratt, 2008, p. 1), able to strike out on their own (Freeland, 2012) and pursue enterprising careers. This is the precise framing that programmes like American Idol (originally Fox, 2002–2016) and Britain’s Got Talent (ITV, 2007–) reinforce—the idea that with suf!cient talent and dedication, one will be able to secure a career in the creative sector for oneself. This is the hope that Abi goes in with, but upon being told by the judges that they have seen far too many singers recently to add another, the only “creative” work left available to her is in adult entertainment. Nevertheless, any such job on-stream, even if a demeaning one, seems more appealing to a desperate worker than the tedious alternative. Although rarely presented as the focus of the episode, “Fifteen Million Merits” is a sharp assessment of some of the excesses that live streaming and its sense of independence and personal achievement can lead to, and what it can do to young aspirants.

CONCLUSION This episode is a valuable site for exploring two highly contemporary concerns—gami!cation and live streaming—and how they connect to existing trends of aspiration within neoliberal economies. The world shown within the episode is unusually adept at using features of play, games, and simulations to mask the working relations and everyday conditions of its labourers: instead, they are made to look fun, to rate and judge and reward “players” for pursuing the desired actions, and mask the dullness or vapidity of what leads to those same rewards. In turn, individuals in this work compete to host, or at least be part of, successful live “streams” under the control of single charismatic !g- ures, examining some of the pressures that real-world live streamers face to stand out and be noticed. More generally, it also proposes that live streaming will become the media form of the future, where the competition of individual creative labour intensi!es to the point that other possibilities for such individuals seem impossible. “Fifteen Million Merits” is an impressive narrative explora- tion of both gami!cation and live streaming, their positions within a broader neoliberal economy, and the potential directions they might take in the future.1

1 Looking at the series as a whole, four episodes stand out as having commonalities, although none are especially close. In “The Waldo Moment” (02.03), we see a “gami!cation” of the political process, which undergoes something akin to a Situationist conversion into play, into a farce, 40 M. R. JOHNSON

A !nal note on the writing team behind the episode is worth making: speci!cally, that of Charlie Brooker as the overall creative lead on the series, and his partner, Kanak Huq, being responsible for the writing of “Fifteen Million Merits”. Brooker’s own rise to fame was in large part on the back of being an angry and often controversial television critic, known for his acerbic views on a range of topics. Even when explicitly criticising the media through which he was viewed, he nevertheless found signi!cant success as someone willing to speak truth to media power. At time of writing, however, his career has expanded far beyond this role as an explicit critic, with an impressive level of newfound in#uence. As such, this could also be seen as having an biographical component as written, re#ecting Brooker’s concerns with his newfound ability to use the same media systems he once criticised to get a message across. Indeed, by the end of the episode Bing’s new role in the hierarchy is even somewhat akin to the role of Black Mirror itself: it critiques technology while using technology, just as Bing critiques the system through the social and technological rules of that same system. Of course, for example, this is a common observation made about many anti-capitalist bands who distribute their records through large companies; to which the response is that when only capitalistic or digitally mediated forms of idea distribution exist, there is no alternative, even for criticism of those same systems. From this episode, we might therefore suggest that Brooker’s partner Kanak Huq (who co-wrote the episode) and Brooker are aware of this challenging duality, and looking to explore it in the episode. Just as Bing’s resistance to the gami!ed labour ecosystem, he lives in becomes co-opted back into the same (re)production of the material conditions he fought so valiantly (and genuinely) against, one might well say the same of Brooker, and in this regard the episode displays a level of (auto)biog- raphy rarely otherwise found in the series.

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