The opening episode of Black Mirror’s seventh series, Common People, is described by its director, Ally Pankiw, as a “couch sitter”. Rather than the mindless entertainment served up to a couch potato, a couch sitter delivers a gut punch so devastating that the viewer is forced to sit and take stock of their life after the closing credits.

Following last season’s foray into the past, series seven sees Black Mirror return to its blueprint: dark and despairing near-future dystopia. Common People follows Amanda (Rashida Jones), a teacher with a terminal brain tumour who finds a lifeline in the form of an innovative neurological procedure. For $300 a month, her brain function is copied to a cloud-based server, letting her live a normal life.

Her husband, Mike (Chris O’Dowd), works extra shifts at his factory and the couple just get by. Then Amanda starts spouting inappropriate adverts to her students, discovering later that her bottom-rung brain function subscription has become ad-supported. Soon the price triples, Amanda sleeps for longer (waking hours are expensive), and Mike is debasing himself on a website called Dumb Dummies to afford the next subscription tier. “Plus is actually now Standard, but it’s better than Common,” explains Gaynor (­Tracee Ellis Ross), the sales rep at the health-tech startup, as she touts its latest top tier, “Rivermind Lux”.

It’s a familiar frustration of today’s tech platforms. Series creator Charlie Brooker says he was inspired by the notion of “enshittification”. The term, coined by sci-fi author and journalist Cory Doctorow, refers to the degradation of tech platforms over time, squeezing subscribers remorselessly. See Elon Musk’s X, once a home of breaking news and pithy jokes, now a graveyard of bots and AI slop. Or even Black Mirror’s own distributor, Netflix, which recently rolled out a cheaper subscription tier, “standard with ads”, before hiking prices for standard users. The irony bashed me over the head as a peppy shampoo advert interrupted my own viewing during the episode’s bleak mid-point.

Brooker has taken a playful pop at his streamer bosses before. Series six opener Joan is Awful featured an SVoD site that mined its subscribers’ personal lives to create a TV series generated by AI. The imaginary streamer, Streamberry, even featured Netflix’s “tudum” intro sound.

But Brooker denies satirising his streamer in the latest series. “Obviously, the joke is in there about ad tiers and subscription tiers, but those are so universal,” he says.

For executive producer Jessica Rhoades, the series opener encapsulates why viewers keep returning to Brooker’s terrifying tales of tech gone wrong. “It underlines one of my favourite things about the tech [Brooker] comes up with – it’s all stuff you’d want to use.” In Black Mirror’s first ever sequel, USS Callister: Into Infinity, Brooker reprises the characters from the beloved series four episode, with Cristin Milioti as Captain Nanette, leading her crew through the infinite universe of an online video game.

The new episode explores the potential human rights abuses of shadowy tech companies having access to users’ DNA. It’s a distinctly Black Mirror concept and could have been ripped straight from current headlines. Series seven launched just weeks after the collapse of biotech ancestry company 23andMe, which left millions of customers’ genetic data at risk of being sold to corporations.

“23andMe just filed for bankruptcy. You should delete your data now,” warned The New York Times.

“If you watch Callister, you’re like: ‘Who would voluntarily give someone their DNA?’ And then, with 23andMe, my mom was like: ‘Everyone swab your cheek’!” Rhoades says.

Brooker adds. “When things like that happen, on one level, you go: ‘Hooray, free marketing for our show!’ And on another level: ‘Oh my God, I’m worried as a human being existing on a planet where that sort of thing goes on.’”

In contrast to the terrifying tech, perhaps the most enviable device appears in Eulogy, the penultimate episode, starring Paul Giamatti as a man who can physically enter old photographs to recover lost memories. With the flip of a switch, his character, Phillip, is instantly transported to a vivid squat party in 80s New York, where he relives meeting the love of his life. It’s one of the most tender, emotionally affecting episodes, rivalled only by Hotel Reverie, this season’s answer to the fan-favourite love ­stories San Junipero and Hang the DJ.

Hotel Reverie sees Issa Rae star as a Hollywood A-lister who is cast as the new lead in a remake of a black-and-white 1940s romance. The production uses AI to construct a virtual film set featuring the original 1940s actors.

“I was really surprised at how much of a love story it was, and how that was the central focus of the episode,” says Emma Corrin, who stars as the spark­ling leading lady, Dorothy. “Black Mirror is always original, but [the love story] felt unusual.”

Dorothy’s character, Clara, falls head over heels for Alex, a fellow guest at the hotel, played by Rae’s character. Chaos ensues as the two characters from wildly different eras stumble over anachronisms as they fall in love. ­Corrin says: “[Issa] is incredible and has a command over comic timing and humour, and I’m very new to that. So it was like watching a masterclass.”.

The episode grapples with an existential threat to film and TV – the use and abuse of AI. For those in Corrin’s profession, films without actors are no longer a dystopian technological “what if” but a fast-approaching reality. “It’s a very real fear. It’s terrifying, the idea that people’s likenesses could be ­recreated,” Corrin says. “I hate it, and I don’t understand why it’s necessary. I think we’ve been doing fine.”

Indeed, the series has launched at a time of rising concern in the UK about technology, including political pressure for a ban on smartphones for under-16s, partly in response to the devastating impact of social media algorithms and their toxic effect on teenagers, as explored in Netflix’s Adolescence.

For Brooker and Rhoades, both parents of teenagers, the online world is a source of huge anxiety. “I’ve got boys of 11 and 13. Of course, I worry about what they might be exposed to,” Brooker says.

Yet there are glimmers of hope. For Rhoades, the next generation’s rejection of the curated, photoshopped lives presented on platforms like Instagram is a positive. “They want to be real with each other. Even if it’s on devices, they want to show each other themselves at their core,” she says of her 13-year-old daughter’s generation.

Nor will Brooker be hiding out in some underground, wi-fi-free bunker any time soon. “Having kids, you’ve unfortunately nailed a stake in the future, so you have to have some optimism,” he says. “They seem pretty amazing, the next generation. So, hopefully, they’ll dig us out of the shit we’ve dug ourselves into.

Series seven of Black Mirror is available on Netflix.