On Netflix, the second episode of the first season of Black Mirror, the brilliant “Fifteen Million Merits” still haunts me. The wikipedia synopsis is accurate and I agree with the excerpts from the reviews that are included. I take it as an allegory for how “the System” works by rewarding people with superficial satisfactions.

But those excerpts did not address what most disturbed me. When the protagonist cleverly manages to confront the game show judges who brutalized the woman he loved and, with the audience intrigued by whether he will kill himself on live television, rants at them about “how unfair the system is and how heartless people have become,” the judges co-opt him by offering him a slightly higher status and allowing him to rant on his own regularly scheduled 30-minute show, during which he repeats his clever threat to kill himself.

What disturbs me is the truth that the System, without making any fundamental changes, has proved quite able to absorb rebels by offering minimal rewards. And it takes great imagination to see an exit.