🪞 White Mirror - Reading Guide - Pt 0
White Mirror is officially out today. Where the TV show Black Mirror is a collection of stories about what’s wrong with our world, White Mirror is stories about what our world could be.
I’m VERY excited about this, because I’ve been trying to write this novel for the past year1. But now that someone else has gone & done it, I’d like to now use it. The work is not done, it’s just begun. Someone is describing a beautiful, feasible future for humanity, but we still need to understand it, and make the choices needed to bring it to fruition.
To that end, I’m putting together a reading guide. I’d love for people to read this book with me and write their takeaways from it. This guide be structured like a series of exercises. There are 31 short stories in White Mirror, and I’ll write questions weekly for 1-3 stories until we’re done. I’m writing these with the idea that you can read them ahead of time, so I’ll try to minimize spoilers. Even if you don’t have the book I think the questions & analysis will still be useful, because it touches on a lot of the ideas I try to cover on this blog.
I plan to read & respond to all submissions2.
If you’re not sure if the book is worth it, I am happy to buy it for you! And then if after reading it, you decide it was worth it, you can pay it forward and we can keep this going.
At the time of writing there are still open slots for this offer! See How to claim your free White Mirror copy3.
Also, White Mirror has a puzzle inside. The first person to solve it gets a cash prize, plus 2% of the royalties from the book.
I started putting together this reading guide before I knew about the prize. Not to sound corny, but I think the real prize is the insight. But if the person who ends up winning happens to have read my guide, I will feel validated. I have some theories on what the puzzle is but no insider knowledge.
Ok, below is the guide for the first story in the book.
The overall frame I recommend approaching the book with is NOT that it is prescribing a utopia, but that it is giving us the necessary pieces that will help *us* recognize it, and adjust our own course, if we choose to. Similar vibe to this tweet:
Reading Guide for “Story Zero”
1. What does “Fact imitates fiction” mean? In context of the previous paragraph, can you find a real example of this happening in your world4?
2. “The LLM was trained on a Borgesian corpus” -> this refers to Jorge Luis Borges. What is he known for? Why would Lucilius train an LLM specifically on this one author?
3. If living in fear is a self fulfilling prophecy, and we know that, why can't we just NOT do that anymore? What's the bottleneck?
4. “an arms race of the imagination” -> do you see in what way this is a statement about our world? Can you point to an example of one person on each side of this arms race5?
This is what I was trying to do with “Our Story So Far” (June 2025), where I start with David’s plea for us to imagine a future we’re excited about. I still think my best attempt at this was August 2024, where I said “Someone wrote a book about what happens in 2025, and parts of it came true, and it went viral”
If we get too many I might ask some of you to help me review other people’s writing. The way you “submit” will just be to write it somewhere publicly and leave a comment here, so that we can all see each other’s write-ups. If you don’t have a blog, I recommend hooking up your Obsidian to GitHub for a free, super easy way to go from notes on your computer to a personal blog on the internet.
Leave a comment to let me know if you’re interested in this! The idea is I am buying you the book in exchange for your attention, for your honest opinion on the book. My goal is to buy it for people who will get something out of it. It’s win win either way for me, because if I think the book will blow your mind, but it does NOT, then I learn something new that helps me predict this better in the future. Same vibe as the “good faith protocol that never loses”.
Another piece of art that depicted this really well for a lot of people is Nicky Case’s “We Become What We Behold”. In many people’s minds, this idea is coined by visakan veerasamy as “focus on what you want to see more of”.
I would put current day Yudowsky, with his upcoming book about how AI will kill us all, in the “doom hyperstition” arms race side, and Hank Green with his “book of good times” on the other side. Who are yours?
Just found! Am i too late to accept your offer of a free copy of White Mirror? :) Sounds intriguing
I'd love to take you up on the offer! Huge Black Mirror fan and love to prophetise about a digital future that's less harmful.