In my illustration above, I draw inspiration from the “Upside Down (2012)” and “Inception (2010)” movies, where realities are warped, two cities upside down simultaneously, which the main character is split between a digital fragmented reality, in glitch pixels — suggesting a “cookie” copy breaking away from the original.
In Black Mirror’s 2014 Christmas special “White Christmas,” Jon Hamm’s character cheerfully tortures a copy of someone’s mind by speeding up her perception of time. Minutes in the lab become months in her virtual prison; years tick by in what, to the outside world, is just a coffee break.
It’s a nasty little thought experiment, wrapped in tinsel: what happens when simulated reality and the human sense of time come apart?
This episode aired in December 2014, just as virtual reality, wearables, and “smart” everything were being sold as the next great wave of tech optimism. Facebook had just paid $2 billion for Oculus VR. Microsoft was teasing holographic headsets that promised to paint digital objects onto your living room. Time and Business Insider were running upbeat features about wandering around Seinfeld’s apartment or the Star Trek: Voyager bridge in VR.
Against that backdrop, White Christmas lands like a bucket of ice water. It takes ideas from philosophy, neuroscience, and consumer tech, then asks a question most companies’ launch keynotes avoid: if we can bend reality and time for digital minds, should we?
Simulated reality, Christmas edition
Critics at the time recognized “White Christmas” as unusually bleak even by Black Mirror standards. The Guardian called it “sentimentality offset with wicked wit,” noting how its three interlocking stories explore the “techno-paranoid” side of holiday cheer. Wired’s review described it as “the grim Christmas TV you need,” singling out its everyday plausibility: livestreamed dating, real-world blocking, and fully sentient digital servants.
In one story, Hamm’s character Matt works for a company that installs “cookies”: tiny devices containing a perfect digital copy of a client’s mind. The copy wakes up inside a sterile, white void, believing it is the original person, until Matt “breaks” it by manipulating time. He cranks up the subjective speed so that weeks or months pass alone in the void while only seconds elapse outside. Eventually, the copy will do anything to avoid more loneliness — including obediently running the client’s smart home.
This is simulated reality at its most intimate: not a generic NPC, but you, copied. Philosophers had been playing with that idea for years. In 2003, Nick Bostrom’s “simulation argument” famously suggested that at least one of the following must be true: almost no civilizations reach posthuman tech levels; almost none of those civilizations run ancestor simulations; or almost everyone like us is living in a simulation.
For most readers, that was an amusing, slightly unsettling thought experiment. But around 2013–2014, the surrounding culture began to catch up. Oculus Rift’s long feature profile in Wired read like a manifesto for reality-hacking: VR “hacks your visual cortex,” one engineer said, making your brain treat virtual experiences as if they were real. The Verge ran a personal essay titled “Virtual reality made me believe I was someone else”, describing how a headset and clever software could induce a powerful sense of embodiment in another body.
Put those threads together and White Christmas feels less like science fiction and more like a brutal extrapolation. If we can build convincingly immersive VR for entertainment, and we buy the simulation argument’s premise that consciousness might emerge in software, then a “cookie” isn’t magic — it’s our logical endpoint.
Now add time.
When seconds become centuries
The horror in the cookie scenes isn’t just that Greta’s mind has been copied into silicon; it’s what Matt does to her perception of time. To “soften” her up, he leaves her alone in the white void for weeks of subjective time, then months, then years. From his perspective, he’s just tapping a keyboard and waiting a few seconds for each acceleration cycle. From hers, the silence lasts long enough to break her.
That’s a familiar move in science fiction — think of prison planets or stasis gone wrong — but cognitive science hints at why it resonates so deeply. Research on time perception suggests our brains track duration using internal “pulses” or ticks; when this internal clock speeds up, we experience time as dragging, and when it slows, time seems to fly. Guardian science coverage has highlighted how even flies experience the world in a kind of bullet time; their visual systems process more information per second than ours, which means their subjective world has more “frames,” stretching moments out and making our swats easier to dodge.
Meanwhile, psychology and popular writing on aging remind us that our sense of time is elastic even in ordinary life. Writer William Leith describes how years appear to speed up as we get older, weaving together subjective impressions with research on memory and novelty. The upshot: time is not a neutral backdrop; it’s a constructed experience, partly neurological and partly psychological.
“White Christmas” just weaponizes that plasticity. By giving an operator god-like control over a digital mind’s clock speed, it turns the nervous system’s quirks into a torture interface.
In doing so, it also literalizes something many writers were already saying about the internet era: that our collective sense of time was coming unstuck. A 2013 Guardian column on time and modernity noted how new technologies constantly promise acceleration and efficiency while quietly altering “every corner of human life.” New Yorker pieces about “living on internet time” and “how the internet gets inside us” described days dissolving into a blur of pings and links, changing the “texture of the age” rather than just our schedules.
If that’s what networked screens do to biological brains, what happens when the brain itself is software, and we can dial its speed to taste?
Time as punishment, time as labor
One of the most chilling details in the episode is how mundane time-torture becomes. Matt treats it like a workplace productivity hack. Crank the dial, go make a sandwich, come back to a broken, obedient copy willing to run the toaster and set the lights forever.
The episode’s reviewers were quick to point out that this is basically slavery with extra steps. Den of Geek called the special a set of “nightmarish tales of isolation” that ask us to consider “the kind of world we’re building for ourselves.” The AV Club zeroed in on the cruelty of leaving a digital Joe screaming in the worst moment of his life for what amounts to eternity, remarking on how a few interface decisions can erase any possibility of mercy.
Time here becomes a currency of domination. If you can speed up a worker’s subjective experience, you can extract centuries of labor in a long weekend. If you can slow down a prisoner’s time, you can turn a short sentence into a life-long ordeal. This isn’t totally alien to us: solitary confinement already plays on our temporal vulnerabilities, and victims of trauma often describe moments of crisis as stretching out into “slow motion.” But in a simulated reality, that qualitative metaphor becomes a quantitative slider.
The tech press of 2014, writing about VR’s rise, rarely went that dark, but the building blocks were clearly visible. Longform pieces in Wired and The Verge gushed about VR’s ability to create a sense of “presence” so strong that people forgot they were in a lab, whether they were floating through abstract geometries in Oculus demos or inhabiting another person’s body in experimental setups. VR cameras, drone-linked headsets, and zero-point documentaries were hailed as new ways to “increase immersion” and make you feel there.
What White Christmas asks, implicitly, is: who controls the knobs? If presence is easy to dial up, then so is suffering.
Everyday time warps
Of course, most of us don’t live in sci-fi interrogation rooms. We live on phones, in feeds, in little algorithmically curated bubbles. But the same themes — simulated reality and warped time — show up in quieter ways.
Writers in mainstream outlets spent the early 2010s trying to understand why hours online vanish without trace. Guardian essays on family life and digital parenting described teenagers who “had no time to think their own thoughts” after evenings saturated with screens, prompting parents to impose “computer curfews” just to create offline space. Scientific reporting on time perception pointed toward tasks that encourage flow states — like games — narrowing our focus so much that we lose track of clocks entirely.
Meanwhile, VR-adjacent reporting painted a picture of increasingly convincing micro-worlds. Time documented fan-made Oculus experiences like walking through Jerry Seinfeld’s apartment or the bridge of the Voyager, emphasis on nostalgia and presence. Business Insider highlighted the first full VR documentary, touting how it could make viewers “feel like they’re actually there” as they look around freely inside a 360-degree scene.
These are baby steps toward the kind of reality White Christmas takes for granted: environments where the line between “real” and “virtual” is less important than how convincing the experience feels. The Verge’s multi-part VR special, running through the history and promise of virtual reality, explicitly framed the medium as one that could “modify” real life by giving access to otherwise impossible experiences.
When you put that alongside cultural coverage of Black Mirror — from Vanity Fair’s amused horror at Jon Hamm’s “Yuletide techno-paranoia” to Vulture’s description of his character as an “evil Don Draper” in a world where blocking people happens in the real world — you start to see a feedback loop. The show exaggerates emerging technologies; journalists then use the show as a reference point when those technologies actually ship.
We’re not yet torturing cookies, but we are spending more and more of our waking hours inside carefully designed digital environments that can, if they choose, shape how time feels.
Moral physics in simulated worlds
Up-to-date, the sense that Black Mirror was capturing something essential about our tech trajectory was widespread. Critics ranked “White Christmas” among the show’s most disturbing episodes, praising how it ties together live-stream voyeurism, AI servitude, and social blocking into a single, icy narrative.
Philosophically, the episode sits right on top of the simulation argument’s most uncomfortable implication: if simulated beings can be conscious, then our moral circle has to expand beyond biological brains. Bostrom’s original paper treats simulations mostly as a probability puzzle, but popular coverage of the idea — along with later commentary in outlets like The Atlantic and The Guardian — has increasingly focused on the ethical stakes: what responsibilities would simulation-runners have toward their simulated minds?
White Christmas answers by example: if you create a mind and subject it to centuries of isolated torment, reassuring yourself that “it’s just code,” you’ve done something monstrous. The cruelty isn’t softened by the fact that it took you three minutes on your lunch break.
Neuroscience-flavored reporting on time perception reinforces this intuition. When Guardian science editors explain that the subjective length of time depends on the rate of the brain’s internal pulses, or that different species live in different temporal resolutions, they’re implicitly saying that subjective experience is what counts.
A fly’s short life may contain more temporal “frames” than ours; a terrified person in a car crash may experience a second as a lifetime. If consciousness is what matters morally, then artificially stretching that consciousness out — even in software — only amplifies responsibility.
Designing mercy into our simulations
Since White Christmas aired, VR and related tech are growing up along the hopeful path charted by those 2014 features: better headsets, richer worlds, experimental therapies, new art forms. The pessimistic timeline of the episode — cookies as house slaves, time dilation as torture, blocking as social death — remains fictional.
But the episode is still useful, not as prophecy, but as a design spec for what to avoid.
The media landscape around 2014–early 2015 was already sketching the tools: high-presence VR that “hacks your visual cortex,” social platforms that compress the world into an endless now, neuroscience that treats time perception as tunable pulses, and philosophical arguments that take simulated minds seriously. Black Mirror simply drew the moral line in the snow.
If we ever do build digital minds — or even just ever more immersive simulated spaces for ourselves — the questions from “White Christmas” will still be waiting:
- Who controls the clock?
- What does a “sentence” mean in subjective time?
- How do we ensure that simulated environments can be escaped, paused, or refused?
- And how do we keep our tools for presence from becoming instruments of cruelty?
The episode answers in its own bleak way. But the rest of us — designers, engineers, lawmakers, users — get to answer differently. We already live with small, everyday time warps in our phones and feeds. The more powerful our simulations become, the more important it is that we build mercy into their physics.