Charlie Brooker Q&A: the drug of tech has us hooked. What's the side-effect?

Charlie Brooker's Black Mirror asks: if the drug of modern technology has us hooked, then surely there must be side effects? Side-effects, of course, that we are yet to find out.

Tonight, his thought-provoking series returns with Be Right Back, an episode in which internet presence such as social media can be used to replicate the dead -- tragic in the hands of a grieving partner. Following on from that is political-satire, The Waldo Moment, and White Bear, which takes aim at camera phone voyeurism.

Here, the man himself takes us through the looking glass.

Wired.co.uk: Hello, Charlie. So, from watching Black Mirror in the past, you would assume that you were quite cynical about the future of technology, but is that true?

Charlie Brooker: I like technology, but Black Mirror is more what the consequences are, and it doesn't tend to be about technology itself, it tends to be how we use or misuse it. We've not really thought through the consequences of it. You know, it may all be good, but we're not quite prepared for them

I spend an inordinate amount of time going from one black rectangle to the next -- whether it's a smart phone or a TV screen or a laptop -- and it kinda wasn't the case six years ago. The way you spend a lot of your time, the way you connect with other people, the way you communicate with other people, that's fundamentally changed in a short period of time.

One of our models of our shows was the original Twilight Zone. It came out at a time of uncertainty, and so I just think were trying to do something similar what's affecting us now. What I enjoy is doing dark "what if?" stories, you know. Obviously the way my brain works, I'm quite paranoid and I worry a lot. It usually comes from ideas I find amusing -- and it's sort of more fun to play them out in a bleak way. I kind of felt like this technological uncertainty wasn't being studied in other drama serials. It felt like an untapped massive resource for creepy, dark stories.

But generally, you know, I think technology is a force for good.

Wired.co.uk: When you say that technology has changed in such a short space of time, what's your personal experience of that?

CB: Well, when I got my first TV writing job, which is like 1999 or so, I was sort of the nerd of the office. I remember I had an MP3 player, and I remember kind of explaining to people about how amazing this was, and no-one gave a shit. And then it cut to a few years later and everyone's raving about iPods and I felt slightly aggrieved.

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Charlie Brooker Q&A: the drug of tech has us hooked. What's the side-effect?