We are addicted to gadgets - but what are the side effects? In its new drama series, Black Mirror, Charlie Brooker explores the dark side of our love affair with technology

life includes key milestones: the first kiss, his first work, the murder without being detected first. Maybe it's just me. Anyway, last week saw the first one and more alarming. My first conversation with a machine

unironic

I was using the new iPhone, which Siri, the integrated personal assistant to speak. Hold a button and mumbled something like "set an alarm for eight o'clock," or "Remind me Gordon ring later," Siri and answers, "OK, I'll do it for you," his voice Jon Briggs, better known as the voice of the weakest link. And sets all the way I wanted.

Siri is a scoundrel - a servile arselick with zero self-respect - but works well boring. So last week I spent time this pool for the first time I spoke to a portable device without irony. Not for a laugh, or experience, but because I wanted to help me.

So that's it. Now I can expect to speak of machines for the rest of my life. Today is Syria. Tomorrow will be a speaker car. The day after that I will be trading jokes with cardboard milkshake funny. For now I have 70 years to be in talks with synthesized imitations rip people I met who later died. Maybe I'll hear your voice in my head. That may be how it will be.

today is no less crazy. We regularly do things that just five years ago would have been logical for us. Tweet us with the reality shows, share videos of cats falling into containers strange to dance in front of the Xbox that we can see and judge us, and we are sorely lacking. It is difficult to think of a single human function that technology has not changed in any way, except perhaps belching. That's all we have left. Just yesterday, I read a story about a new video game installed above urinals to stop customers getting bored: control the flow of urine splashing on the left and right. Proofread and ask you if you live in a healthy society.

When I was in the TV series, I ruined your life, it came out and asked viewers to comment on a new invention that claimed it was true: a mobile phone that allows call over time, so I can talk with people in the past or the future. Many people thought was real is not so much a testament to the gullibility, but rather an indicator of how technology has become magic. We assume miracles on a daily basis.

However, I love these things. I coos on gadgets, they revel in each application the new miracle. As an addict, I can check my Twitter history at the time I wake up. And I often wonder: is it really good for me? For us? None of these things have been imposed on humanity - we are pleased adopted. But where is this all leading? If technology is a drug - and feels like a drug - then what exactly are the side effects

this area - between joy and pain - this is where Black Mirror, my new drama series is set. The "black mirror" of the title is the one you find on every wall, on every desktop in the palm of each hand: the cold, bright screen of a television screen, a smart phone. The series was inspired indirectly by the Twilight Zone, Rod Serling TV series hugely entertaining 50 and 60 years late, sometimes wrongly dismissed as a field exercise at the turn in the history of science fiction. It was much more than that. Serling, a brilliant writer, created The Twilight Zone because I was tired of his provocative television movies on contemporary issues often censored to appease corporate sponsors. If you have written about racism in a southern town, had to fight to the network through each line. But if he wrote about racism in a metaphorical, fictional world almost -. Suddenly, we can say everything I wanted

was sometimes very cruel, very cruel than most TV shows today, dare to be. In one famous episode, the protagonist, a poor bookworm, walks through the rubble after a nuclear holocaust. Discover is the last man on Earth, decides to commit suicide, only to detect the remains of a nearby library when you raise your gun at his temple. Suddenly, he raised the fact that, finally, you can read all the books you want, without interruption, meets a year of joy reading. But when the first book, his glasses fall and break on the floor. Finish the episode crying and alone.

Serling In the days of the atomic bomb, civil rights, McCarthyism, psychiatry and the space race was of paramount importance. Today would be written on terrorism, economy, media, privacy and our relationship with technology. Or try to, as well as the current television series may be subject to less censorship, but also less likely to explore ideas. Most are dramas along the entire length of the vote or pieces of genre - novels, dramas of time, etc.. It's as if there is constant pressure to reassure a nervous spectator, to say look, it's episode 89, which has the same faces as last week, in the same enclosure, with the problems themselves . You know like this -. Because you saw

For me the joy of shows like The Twilight Zone, Tales of the Unexpected, or Hammer House of Horror, or old "window slots," as Play for Today was precisely that he had already had seen. Each week, he plunged into the world a little differently. There was a firm tone to the story, the same coating of dark chocolate - but the filling is always a surprise

today, the national anthem, with Rory Kinnear and Lindsay Duncan, tells what happens when fictional Susannah is kidnapped the Princess Royal and Prime Minister Michael Callow is presented with a unusual - and obscene - the request for help. Traditional media can not even discuss what the demand is, while the foam Twittersphere to speculation and cruel jokes. As the deadline approaches rescue, events begin to earn their own motion, surreal. This was partly inspired by the mess in superinjunctions, and partly abroad out of sense of control as a grip on some new - as the day, Gordon Brown, was ordered to apologize about Gillian Duffy rolling out new channels. Who was in charge that day? Anyone and everyone.

2. Fifteen million of Merit