VC
Tracking startups that turned cautionary tales into pitch decks.
Science fiction gave us warnings. Venture capital turned them into roadmaps.
34 episodes · 34 shown
A woman's brain function is restored via cloud-streamed cognition, but locked behind a tiered monthly subscription — ads play through her mouth on the base plan, coverage has dead zones, and missing a payment means death
AI recreations of dead loved ones trained on their digital footprint
Digital copies of people's consciousness used as smart home assistants and trapped in time dilation
Universal social credit scoring that determines access to housing, services, and social standing
Autonomous robotic 'dogs' that hunt and kill humans with relentless efficiency
Implanted device that records everything you see and hear, with instant playback
Streaming service uses quantum computing to generate a show about your life in real-time using your data
Military neural implants that make enemy combatants appear as monstrous 'roaches' to make killing psychologically easier
Brain implant that lets parents see through their child's eyes and censor disturbing content
Hackers record people through webcams and blackmail them into performing escalating tasks
Pop star's personality extracted into a companion robot toy; the real person is kept in a coma for content generation
An animated cartoon bear becomes a protest-vote political candidate, then a global authoritarian brand
Dying people can upload their consciousness to a simulated beach town and live forever
Digital clones of real employees, originally trapped in a VR game, must navigate survival inside a simulation with 30 million real players while the company that owns their server faces collapse
AI reconstructs a deceased actress as a sentient digital co-star inside a virtual film production — she develops feelings, then is factory-reset when the system reboots
Autonomous drone bees designed to pollinate become weaponized through social media mob targeting
Algorithm that simulates thousands of relationships to find your perfect match
CTO creates sentient digital clones of his coworkers from stolen DNA and traps them in his private VR game
Museum showcasing consciousness-transfer crimes: a doctor who feels patients' pain for a high, a woman's mind trapped in a stuffed monkey, a death row inmate's digital copy tortured for eternity as a tourist attraction
People pedal exercise bikes to earn credits, spend them on avatar customization and skipping unskippable ads
Interactive story where the viewer controls a programmer's decisions, who begins to suspect he's being controlled
A man takes a social media employee hostage to speak to the CEO about notification-driven distracted driving death
A convicted criminal is memory-wiped daily and hunted through a justice theme park while crowds film on their phones
Pixel-based digital creatures evolve genuine sentience over decades — their creator surgically implants a brain port to house them, eventually losing everything to maintain their existence
A princess is kidnapped and the ransom demand is that the Prime Minister must perform a degrading act on live television
Young filmmakers return to a small Scottish town to make a true crime documentary, uncovering their own families' complicity
VR fighting game with full haptic feedback becomes a vehicle for virtual sexual encounters between friends
A quantum computing pendant that shifts the wearer between parallel universes where stated facts are true — used first for revenge gaslighting, then for total reality control
Augmented reality horror game that interfaces directly with the brain to generate personalized terror from your deepest fears
1960s astronauts on a deep-space mission use android 'replicas' back on Earth to live normal lives remotely
AI-guided immersive memory reconstruction that lets you physically re-enter your own past through photographs — used to curate eulogies for the dead
Memory-reading device used by insurance investigators forces people to visually recall events, including crimes
Paparazzi culture pushed to extremes — photographers hunt a reclusive celebrity who is hiding a monstrous secret
A shy woman is told by a demon she must kill three people or the world ends — set in 1979 amid rising nationalist politics
How close is reality to the fiction
Mirror Score is not a scientific measurement. It is a cultural alarm. Calculated from product proximity to fiction, venture funding deployed, active users, and whether anyone involved has acknowledged the resemblance.
Know a company building the dystopia?