The best Black Mirror episodes tend to feel like an inevitability rather than something in a far flung future. This one felt a bit obvious to me at first, but as I've thought on it over the past year or so I feel it actually had a lot of nuance to it that makes it stand out pretty well. Some stray observations:

1. This episode is very similar in content to an episode of Community called "App Development and Condiments" (which is worth watching to follow this up) but played quite serious.

2. The use of pastels in this episode is fantastic and a real sign of the power that social stigma can have as a form of control. Rather than valuing uniqueness, it seems this can be a world where people rather wear something neutral as being found to be to desperate to move up is off-putting and can have the inverse effect of getting you moved down. This guides people to a level of conservative dressing and styles that really paints the world they are in.

3. One of the most sinister things about the episode is that it seems to be a environmental construct that isn't forced on the characters, but something that was slowly adopted over time and I think that is the part that hits closest to home here. I think of this episode in conjunction with a recent movie called Ingrid Goes West (which is worth a watch as well) and you get a sense of how some aspects of this already exist and how we have already bought into this concept. The way we carefully curate content on here to project the most ideal version of our lives or how we can ruin someone's life in an instant over a Tweet or video. The spiral that exists in this episode is just an exaggerated version of what already exists and I think in that it is the most effective.