Blowing Raspberries at Disney Ads

I love the Black Mirror series on Netflix. 

If you haven’t seen it, each episode takes a crappy aspect of humanity (which is usually but not always linked to our use of technology) to its logical, disturbing, dystopian conclusion. The show’s imagined future developments are by some measures far-fetched, but they still cut close enough to home and our lived realities in the present day to make for uncomfortable viewing. The discomfort is the point as each episode projects a dark reflection of the face of today’s society (hence the series’ name). 

Last year, I watched “Common People,” an April 2025 episode, starring Rashida Jones and Chris O’Dowd as Amanda and Mike. The working-class couple’s life takes a turn when Amanda is diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor. While she is unconscious, a Rivermind Technologies company rep approaches Mike at the hospital and offers him an experimental solution. The company can neurally clone Amanda’s brain and then stream her consciousness back into her head from a cloud server. Faced with the choice of that or his wife’s certain death, Mike agrees, swayed as he is by the company’s promise of relative affordability: a free initial surgery and a $300 per month subscription to the brain streaming.

To cut a long story short (and to not spoil the episode for you - you really should watch it), Rivermind increasingly limits the couple’s subscription, changing the initial terms of the deal. At first, Amanda and Mike – she a public school teacher and he a welder – pay more for an expansion of geographic coverage so that Amanda can safely leave the city without losing connection to the server. The company continues to create more and more expensive membership tiers while bumping down their existing one. Meanwhile, company reps pressure clients into upgrades. 

Before they know it, Rivermind adds ads to the couple’s subscription. This turns Amanda into a live-streaming advertisement machine, with the company beaming commercial promotions out of her mouth (without her consent or conscious awareness of doing it) in a variety of social situations. The couple can’t afford the ad-free upgrade. Horrific things happen. It’s dark stuff.

“But what has this got to do with blowing raspberries at ads?”, I hear you scream. Okay, okay! I’m getting to that.

By a creepy coincidence, a couple of weeks after watching Common People, I was “Riverminded” by Disney! We’ve had an ad-free subscription to DisneyPlus for years. Then all of a sudden, we were subjected to 5 ad breaks in a 30-minute episode of The Mandalorian. Our subscription was downgraded by the company without our knowledge or consent. All we had to do to go ad free (again) was pay more for the new, more expensive, no commercials tier. 

After a frustrating week of bearing with the ads, we paid for the upgrade. Of course we did. What choice did we have? I didn’t want my six-year-old twins’ brains to be cloud-server-streamed non-stop commercial messages from the outside in every time they watched Inside Out. Disney knows that. 

Sounds familiar? It’s an example of financial practices companies employ to squeeze more profit once you’re hooked into their products or services. If you can’t afford the new subscription tier, you’re paying twice anyway: once for your now downgraded subscription and once again with your attention to the ads.