Charlie Brooker is back with a bang in a heartbreaking tirade against private healthcare. Here’s our Black Mirror: Common People review.

“Here is how platforms die”, Cory Doctorow began his now infamous 2023 article – the first recorded use of the increasingly useful term, “enshittification.”

“First,” he continued, “they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.”

In Common People, the opening episode to Black Mirror season 7, private healthcare finds itself in the middle of this cycle. A tech startup has developed a miracle cure for damaged brains – a cloud-based system allows a patient’s neural processes to run from a wireless power grid. “Netflix for your brain” is a phrase the show, for obvious reasons, never says out loud. It doesn’t have to.