"Joan Is Awful," the first episode of the new season of Black Mirror, was inspired by The Dropout. Specifically, as creator Charlie Brooker told WIRED this week, it was sparked by seeing the deluge of content surrounding Elizabeth Holmes and the Theranos scandal--a book, a TV show, a movie, around 800 podcasts--and thinking about how weird it must have been for people to see themselves portrayed by Hollywood actors in events that "feel like they happened about 10 minutes ago." The content machine does seem to be catching up to people's real lives: The gap between a huge financial scandal and the announcement of the inevitable Michael Lewis book about it used to be years or months; now it's days. In the UK, Sky produced a dramatization of the British government's handling of the pandemic while Covid-19 was still tearing through communities. The logical conclusion of that narrowing of the gap between inspiration and dramatization--through Black Mirror's twisted, worst-case-scenario lens--is what viewers see in "Joan Is Awful": personalized content, generated by artificial intelligence, using deepfakes of famous actors as stand-ins for regular people.