San Junipero and some others mentioned are definitely gems. But I've gotta defend one of the episodes that the piece was picking on: "Playtest." Playtest is the horror episode where the guy demoing the VR implant ends up living a perceived nightmare fusing his life experiences with the horror video game.
That episode really stuck with me.
I always figured that technologies like VR implants, cognitive enhancement implants, consciousness upload, etc would come to exist. My general opinion about that was excited and positive. But this episode emphasizes the loss of control that comes with that. Once your cognition has been interfaced with or uploaded/simulated, you can no longer trust reality. You have no way to be able to definitively prove whether you're experiencing the real world or a simulation or modification again. Freaky stuff.
That other episode, "Hang the DJ" has some of that same existential dread in it, though it's played off more bittersweet. The characters are completely simulated and are "killed" at the end of the episode. Their entire existence was essentially for the purposes of a dating app genetic algorithm to determine matchmaking compatibility for the real people equivalents in the actual world.
Westworld S2 and beyond dabbled a lot with these topics too.
It can all really hamper your enthusiasm to participate in digital consciousness. San Junipero was a rare example of it being portrayed positively in Black Mirror. Who knows, perhaps we're already in such a simulated reality?
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