Last night, after dinner, I started the new season of Black Mirror.

The first episode didn’t leave me indifferent.
Not because of the technology.
But because of how familiar everything felt.

Life, on a payment plan 

I won’t spoil it.

I’ll just say this: the central product in the episode keeps someone alive, but it does so through a subscription. And in order to keep paying for it, someone starts giving up things they didn’t know could be negotiable.

What’s unsettling isn’t the future it imagines.
It’s how easily it passes as the present.

For years, Black Mirror positioned itself as a series about what was coming.
Today, it works better as a critical reading of what’s already here.

The product is well designed.
It’s friendly.
It has a calm voice.
A carefully crafted interface.
Microinteractions that inspire trust.

Nothing about it feels violent.

And yet, its entire business model rests on a form of coercion.
Not explicit.
Not aggressive.
But constant.

It improves your life, yes.
But in exchange for something that shouldn’t be for sale.

Soft products, hard outcomes

We’re surrounded by products like this.

Systems that present themselves as neutral,
while participating in deeply dehumanizing dynamics.

Algorithms that optimize engagement while normalizing violence.
Platforms that talk about connection while extracting data for purposes they’d rather not name.
Soft interfaces wrapping hard decisions.

Design doesn’t create that violence.
But it doesn’t stop it either.

It disguises it.

As a designer, this puts me in an uncomfortable position.

Because design never happens in abstraction.
It always works for someone.
It always serves specific interests.
It always operates within a political, economic, and social context.

And still, we talk about our work as if it were neutral.

“I only design the interface.”
“I don’t decide the business model.”
“If I don’t do it, someone else will.”
“I’m not responsible for how it’s used.”
“That’s a business decision.”
“The model needs to be profitable.”

Comforting phrases.
Efficient ones.
Very easy to repeat.

There’s a well-known experiment by Stanley Milgram that shows how far people are willing to go when an authority legitimizes their actions.

Not because they’re cruel.
But because responsibility is delegated.

Sometimes I wonder if design works in a similar way.

We don’t make the final decision.
But we design the path.
We don’t press the button.
But we decide where it is and what it looks like.

I’m not writing this from a position of moral superiority.

I don’t work for any of the large tech corporations currently at the center of these conversations.
But I don’t know, with absolute certainty, what I would do if I did.

We need to work.
We need income.
We need to pay rent.
We need to justify our choices.

The line isn’t as clear as we’d like to believe.

The role that protects us from the question

What I do know is that work changes us.

It adapts us.
Shapes us.
Teaches us to call “our company” something that isn’t ours.
To defend decisions we didn’t make.
To confuse prestige with ethics.

Little by little, we stop talking to each other as people and start talking to each other as roles.

Product designer.
UX researcher.
AI specialist.

Clean titles.
Comfortable identities.

Maybe the biggest risk isn’t designing problematic products.

Maybe it’s what happens to ethics once responsibility is spread across teams, roles, and roadmaps.

Once decisions become abstract.
Once consequences feel distant.
Once ethics stop being a question and quietly turn into someone else’s problem.

Design plays a role in that system.

Not as the villain.
But as the layer that makes things feel acceptable.
Reasonable.
Even human.

And maybe that’s the uncomfortable part.