Common People in Black Mirror S7: A Ritual Autopsy of the Mass Mind

Episode 1 of Black Mirror Season 7, titled Common People, isn’t about the future. It’s about the now — stripped of makeup, raw and disquieting. It’s a ritual cross-section of a society that has ceased to be itself and has become content. It’s not about people being "ordinary" — it’s about people whose very normalcy marks their surrender to the System.

🧬 Why “Common”?

The word common in the title doesn’t just point to “ordinary folks.” It unfolds across multiple semantic layers. In this episode, “common” is not a class — it’s a condition. A psychological architecture. A soul-state.

🜁 1. Common as the Unconscious / Familiar

“Common people” are those who live inside preset structures — daily routines, inherited norms, cultural templates. Their behavior is not willful, but reactive. They do not ask why something is “normal.” They simply comply.

🜂 2. Common as the Mass / Indistinguishable

Common is the opposite of singular. It blends. It conforms. It leaves no trace. The common is what fills the feed but never fractures the surface.

🜃 3. Common as the Commons / Shared — but not Sacred

This layer connects “common” to “the commons” — a shared resource. Yet in the late-capitalist algorithmic reality, this has been inverted: emotions, lives, and pain have become communal content, not shared in solidarity, but distributed as spectacle.

🔻 In the episode:

Someone’s private suffering becomes someone else’s subscription. Tragedy is rebranded as experience. The intimate becomes collective — not through care, but consumption.

When the shared becomes commodified, ethics reverses: we get connectedness without communion, empathy without cost.

🜄 4. Common as the Absence of the Question

At its core, to be common is to not ask. To accept the shape of the box. To live within systemic walls and call it sky. To operate inside a given mythos, never knowing it was written by someone else.

“Common” is not a social tier — it’s a depth setting.

Common people act within a script they didn’t write, and don’t know they’re performing. They are not wrong — they are written.

🧬 Translating “Common” beyond English

In Russian (or other non-Anglophone contexts), there’s no direct one-word equivalent to “common.” Instead, we get a cluster of archetypes — a semantic constellation:

1. The Bourgeois Ordinary

🔹 Not just “ordinary,” but one who lives within prefab structures, who does not question the scaffolding of reality. A comfortable inhabitant of default settings.

“He doesn’t know the world can be rewritten — he simply lives in the already-written.”

2. The De-personalized Unit

🔹 A person becomes a behavior. A face becomes a placeholder. The individual dissolves into function.

“Their faces changed, but not their essence — they moved like one recurring shadow.”

3. “Common” → “Nobody’s”

🔹 What should be shared becomes ownerless, then monetized. “The commons” mutates into a product for those who never built or belonged to it.

“They took what was everyone’s, acted as if it was theirs, and left nothing behind.”

4. Templated / Pre-scripted

🔹 Common people repeat. Not as creators, but as end-users of someone else’s design. In the episode, they enter another’s suffering without disturbing their internal code.

“You can be in hell and still follow the manual.”

5. Simplified — not in clarity, but in dilution

🔹 Common as the flattening of depth. Not revelation, but reduction. A digestible substitute for meaning.

“You had an experience but lost yourself. That’s not experience — that’s export.”

💠 The composite identity of “common people” might read as:

A depersonalized, scripted consumer of other people’s pain — one who simulates feeling without inhabiting it, a user inside a mass-scale simulacrum, a traveler through someone else’s hell… with a return ticket.

🧠 1. How “Common” Sounds in English?

In everyday English, “common” carries largely neutral or even positive connotations:

• Typical, standard: “That’s a common issue.”
• Accessible, popular: “Common knowledge.”
• Shared, collective: “Common sense,” “common ground.”

Pop culture often frames “common” as relatable or romantic — especially in the track *Common People* by Pulp, the inspiration behind the episode title.

"I want to live like common people / I want to do whatever common people do..."

— a biting satire of privileged voyeurism, where slumming it becomes a fetishized lifestyle choice.

📉 2. But There’s a Shadow Layer — Class, Colonization, Control

Historically and socially, “common” carries undertones of:

• Low-status — the “commoner” as opposed to nobility.
• Non-sovereignty — no power, no voice.
• Utility — not a subject, but an object within a system.

In terms like:

• Commoner — the ruled.
• The Commons — land that belongs to everyone, thus to no one — and eventually to the highest bidder.
• House of Commons — where “the people” reside, in contrast to the elites upstairs.

🧨 3. In Radical Theory?

In leftist, anti-corporate, and post-structuralist critique, “common” is often:

• A stand-in for the erased individual.
• A code for scalable behavior — the average, the aggregate, the data-point.
• A proxy subject from which systems derive legitimacy, but which has no real agency.

“Common” is the ideal customer, the invisible citizen, the programmable soul.

Final Cut:

“Common” is a linguistic decoy. It hides the machinery behind words like “simple,” “normal,” “typical.” It makes the mass mind seem benign. But underneath: it is the architecture of compliance.

To be common is to be known — and therefore, predictable, and therefore, useful — but never sovereign.