Ever thought about having hot sex with your dead boyfriend? Don’t worry, it’s easy—at least in the world of Amazon Prime’s Upload, where physical intimacy with the digitally-preserved deceased is just one of the many normalized activities of the near-future society imagined by the cheeky rom-com series. Looking forward to the 2030s, the humorous show from former Simpsons, SNL, and Parks and Recreation writer Greg Daniels imagines an America that runs on AI, a world where today’s most anticipated tech innovations—fully autonomous cars, 3D printed food, household appliances equipped with biometric sensors—have been fully optimized and integrated into society. But even more than the ubiquitous holographic phones or the “cartridges” that have replaced actual food, perhaps the biggest cultural shift is driven by the influx of competing digital afterlives, where death is no longer a radical break from one plane of existence to another, and more a subtle shift from being extremely online (in life) to exclusively online (in death).
In this version of the future, loved ones on the brink of death are no longer hooked up to a morphine drip in hospice care, but are instead strapped into an elaborate brain-scanner whose data can then be used by one of several companies to create a hyper-realistic digital rendering with the very same thoughts, behaviors, and personality quirks as the biological human on which it is based. This highly sophisticated avatar can then be “uploaded” into one of several simulated heavens—depending on price point and preference—where their interactions with their new body and environment will be nearly indistinguishable from those in real life. Perhaps even more compelling (at least to the living, who are paying for this service) is that these “Uploads” can be visited at any time by their loved ones with the help of sophisticated VR goggles. If the visitors want to supplement video and audio with physical sensation, they need only to rent a full-body “hug suit” from their neighborhood store (and…uh…just not think too hard about how, or if, they manage to clean out all the nooks and crannies between all the silicone “fingers” lining the inside).
The robustness of the digital afterlife is of crucial importance to Upload’s protagonist Nathan Brown (Robbie Amell), who is summarily offed in the opening episode—murdered by a rival company whose costly post-mortem digital preservation services he has been planning to replicate for free. But it’s fine…sort of…because the new Nathan is still every bit as able to enjoy his hot bod, hang with his buddies, and, of course, be eternally available to date his attention-starved girlfriend, Ingrid (Allegra Edwards), who has helpfully uploaded Nathan into her own account (the better to keep tabs on him). What she didn’t count on, alas, was the undeniable chemistry between Nathan and his customer-service “Angel,” Nora (Andy Allo). And what he didn’t count on were the glitches, lapses, and deepfakes arising from his memories being manipulated by the same corporation who killed him, and whose servers now host his afterlife. The deeper Nathan digs into how, exactly, he died, the more evidence he finds pointing to a criminal conspiracy of the highest magnitude, one unperturbed by using millions of regular lives as collateral, whose fallout will shake the core of American political economy as we know it. If you thought our rights to privacy and intellectual property were badly eroded now, the show seemingly winks at viewers, just wait until Big Tech literally owns your brain.
These issues of intellectual property and digital privacy are serious concerns—urgent and alarming in a moment when AI is increasingly training itself on seemingly-infinite, undisclosed sources, individual expression is absorbed into corporate IP, and digital surveillance is steadily on the rise. This is presumably why nearly every other show that takes on these issues—think Black Mirror, Westworld, Severance—tend towards the seriously dark and dystopian. And this is also why it’s so strange that Upload instead seems hell-bent on making us laugh—and not even in a gallows humor, black comedy sort of way, but with a giggly, slapstick, almost pathologically upbeat tone. So, for instance, where it perhaps ought to be deeply disconcerting when Nathan realizes that Nora’s familiar avatar is suddenly being piloted by an entirely different human, the uncanniness is offset by the slapstick humor of her extreme clumsiness, resulting in her crawling around under the dining table at a formal dinner party. (If we compare this to Westworld, we might recall that this same conceit—one character’s brain taking over another’s body—is used as the cue that the AI uprising has reached new and cataclysmic heights, and is now actively engineering the downfall of humanity.)
Similarly, the bleak living quarters of the “2-gig” Uploads (that is: avatars on a “pay-as-you-go plan,” who are allocated only 2 free gigs of data each month) are legitimately upsetting, if one pauses to consider how they are effectively confined to this fluorescent, linoleum prison for eternity. Unlike Nathan, coasting through the afterlife on Ingrid’s family plan (“three generations of unlimited data on both sides!”, as her father boasts), the “2-gigs” are effectively blocked from partaking in society, as any sort of recreation requires “in-app purchases” (where the “app” is their digital existence), and any kind of critical or imaginative thinking runs out their limited data almost instantaneously, freezing them in place until their data cycle resets at the start of the next month. When Nathan surreptitiously gifts extra data to a 2-gig friend, she gushes: “I’m going to think so hard with this! I might even daydream!” (In one memorable episode of Black Mirror called “White Christmas,” a strikingly similar corporate manipulation of the experience of time is explicitly used as an interrogation and torture technique.) But in Upload, the temporal tomfoolery is more funny than sad. We chuckle, despite ourselves, as faces freeze in bizarre grimaces when data abruptly runs out; we groan, but only in mock anguish, when we learn that the 2-gig dining hall serves only LeanCuisine’s new experimental recipes. And it’s hard to focus on the food, anyway, when a man wanders into the cafeteria completely devoid of clothing…and genitals. Those, too, apparently require paid upgrades—as does anything more than the first five pages of a book, or a shower, or a view of the sky. Faced with a fully-grown man sporting only a flat, Ken-doll expanse between his legs, Nathan protests that data company Horizon “should just give anybody a penis, or clothes, or an entire book!” But this hint at a genuine capitalist critique is undercut by the silliness of Nathan simultaneously realizing that “Penis-less man” is not, as Nathan had thought, crafting makeshift clothing out of discarded LeanCuisine boxes, but rather, a makeshift…appendage. Horizon Industries has engineered an entire system where the worst-off literally don’t have the bandwidth for criticism or protest—but that systemic horror fades in the wake of a well-placed dick joke.
When we’re not dealing with the plight of the 2-gigs, we’re looking at the plight of the gig economy—which, equally, ought to be more disturbing than it is. As human workers scramble to fill the last gaps left by AI, everything from hobbies to hookups becomes a rateable experience (reminiscent of yet another Black Mirror episode—this one called “Nosedive”). This makes the experience of Horizons’ customer service “Angels” particularly fraught, as the living workers are continually rated, berated, and tattled on by their dead customers, while the dead can be manipulated, tormented, or even over-written by their Angels, as long as they don’t get caught. The power dynamics are a mess…but before we can tease it apart, this, too, is made into a kind of crass joke, as when Nora’s colleague Aliesha reveals her propensity for (digitally) ripping off the appendages of clients who annoy her, dragging them to her desktop “fingers and dicks” file until she decides they’ve learned their lesson and replaces them (though not always in the original location). This cavalier attitude towards amputation seems like it should be particularly triggering to Army veteran Luke, who voluntarily uploaded (“sui-scanned,” to use the show’s parlance) after losing both his legs in the Iraq war. But because they’re just digital dicks, it is, apparently, all in good fun. At least, he doesn’t seem to harbor any ill-will when he later invites Aliesha to join in a game of “teenis” (a game he has invented, much like tennis, except that points are only scored by hitting the opponent in the crotch). And the show as a whole seems to take on Luke’s easy distractability: each time it gets close to a genuine critique, it turns instead to a round of “teenis,” offering up a laughable penis, a play on words, or both, in a clever two-for-one.
The lexical combo-pack is as much a mainstay of the show’s humor as the sexual humor; nearly every episode offers up a jingling handful of cleverly coined puns and portmanteaux. In addition to the name of Horizon Industries—a clear play on both Verizon and Amazon—Upload features “Prototykes” (the prototype of the new AI toddlers Horizon is working to roll out), Little Xerox (what happens to Little Caesar’s when all the pizza is 3D-printed), and a memorable meal of “hamburkey” (ham meat that has been 3D printed into the shape of a turkey). The latter, a jokey answer to the “turducken,” is surprisingly prescient: as industries have conglomerated across market categories, ontological divisions become similarly soupy. Objects are no longer graduated—nested, like a chicken inside a turkey inside a duck—but flattened into a single plane of existence, where meat and mind meld into one. Hence, the proliferation of new institutions merging the pursuit of knowledge and the production of food: Panera UPenn, Mount Taco Bell Sinai, Cinnabonpedia, and of course, Horizon’s greatest rival, Oscar Meyer Intel (“pushing the future of meat”).
The totality of this flattening creeps up on us, slowly shifting from amusing novelty to bemusing predictability. In the first season, much of the humor works by surprising us with moments of incongruous equivalence, catching us off-guard when domains we imagine as separate suddenly collide. Cartoon mascots, like the obnoxious floating taco head of Taco Bell’s latest “Gordita Crunch” campaign, show up as unwelcome guests at social gatherings. Nathan’s actual memories, live-streamed at his funeral, are presented in the random order familiar to us from the “On This Day…” memories our phones are forever ineptly “curating” for us, complete with vague, elevator-ish soundtrack. Each of these conceits is genuinely amusing the first time we encounter them: when Uploads have to physically swipe advertisements off of their walking trails, or tell over-eager salespeople to bugger off, we laugh as we realize that the ad-bots and pop-ups perpetually spawning across our screens are, of course, appearing in seemingly “real” three-dimensionality all over the Uploads’ simulated digital space. The strange blending of physical and digital arenas lends itself to surprisingly amusing takes on what is, ultimately, fairly crass body- and potty-humor: Uploads can choose the scents of their farts from an array of Febreze-inspired options; they can pay extra for a really satisfying knuckle-crack; they can dance and shimmy while urinating without ever worrying about a mis-aimed splash. It’s hard to innovate on bathroom humor, which normally loses its novelty for audiences beyond the age of about three—but by taking jokes which depend, more than anything else, on the sheer fact of embodiment, and reimagining them for the disembodied crowd, Upload might just actually succeed.
As the show tries to apply this same tactic more broadly, however, it experiences diminishing returns. As we meet new upgrade rollouts in the simulated sphere (more tastebuds! Better bagels!) and new connected devices in the real world (Ingrid’s talking toilet, sex-crazed vacuum Monique), the Internet of Things continues to intertwine with the thingliness of the internet, all of it shot through with perpetual advertisement and espionage. But we’ve come to expect this; the way everything infiltrates everything else stops being surprising and instead turns stale. The show loses its way a bit here, and the middle seasons experience a kind of genre dysmorphia parallelling the perpetual body dysmorphia we see among its characters (how, after all, can any amount of plastic surgery or Pilates in the real world compete with digital bodies who never get older or fatter, who can inflate their biceps or trim their thighs with the ease of a single click?). The show toys briefly with the idea of becoming a spy thriller, adding in bursts of implausible action-style combat; it mulls over whether it wants to be a survivalist story, dallying with a Luddite farm commune hidden in the Adirondack woods. But ultimately, it comes back around to its opening gambit, deciding that if laugh-out-loud comedy is no longer quite landing, it will cling all the more tightly to romantic comedy.
Yes, bad things, sad things happen—but as the somewhat truncated fourth season winds down the series, it largely shifts its focus away from experimentations with genre and flirtations with social critique to set its sights most squarely on wrapping up its romantic arcs. Yes, this is still the same world with no worker protections, no intellectual privacy, no bodily autonomy. It’s still the playground of corporate giants like Horizon, whose “DreamHub” app streams the unconscious fantasies of their uploaded clients to social media, whose “mindfrisk” search platform allows them to eavesdrop indiscriminately and hunt down perceived thoughtcrimes. It’s still a minefield for America’s ever-more-exploited working class, for whom losing a finger (for real, not just to Aleisha’s digital “fingers and dicks” file) seems like a reasonable price to pay for a day off, where employees will literally die for a free donut. But, ultimately, that world fades away, receding into a hazy background while our focus tightens in on the central couples. To drive the theme home, the writers even pop in a reference to classic rom-com film Fifty First Dates, cleverly looping back to the film Nora watches in the very first episode of the series. We start (rom)comic; we end (rom)comic.
But why is Upload invested in being so doggedly upbeat, in refusing to stray more than half a step from its well-trodden comic path? One obvious answer comes down to the means of production: the series is an Amazon Prime original; that is, it is produced by the very same big data corporation so thinly veiled as Horizon Industries in the show. (While not all elements of Horizon map neatly onto Amazon, and there are several other real-life companies it resembles, there is nevertheless an obvious attempt to link the two—for instance, through the episode featuring the new national holiday, “Cyber Discount Day,” clearly a fusion of real-life “Cyber Monday” and “Prime Day,” where piles of arriving boxes feature a logo almost identical to the blue Amazon swoosh). Rather like Nathan, unable to break up with Ingrid in case she decides to “delete” him from her account, we can see why the writers might prefer to keep their commentary in the vein of light parody, rather than full-throated critique, in case their sponsor decides not to stream their show after all.
But the other answer lies less with production and more with reception: perhaps the lighter-toned comedy is genuinely more in line with viewers’ experiences; perhaps the romantic throughline that keeps on running, despite the unspooling of the world around it, is actually more “relatable” than techno-dystopia and climate collapse. That is: we’re not idiots; we can see democracy dissolving around us; we know we can be tracked online through IP addresses and on the streets through facial-recognition technology; we can feel climate disaster coming for us as we breathe in the latest wildfire smoke. It’s troubling, it’s untenable, and one tries to confront and protest it when one can. But there’s a disjoint between the global scale of these problems and the experience of the individual life; the singularity of apocalypse with the repetition of quotidian tasks. It’s hard to imagine ourselves as leads in a dystopian disaster film—and frankly, who wants to? It’s easier, more pleasurable, and far more intuitive to imagine ourselves in a rom-com series. We all have a little main-character syndrome, no? And who wants to star in the end of the world?
And this, finally, brings us back around to the bizarre optimism of Upload: its humor, trading on its obvious relatability to our own experiences, and its refusal to dwell too long in the dark shadows of artificial intelligence, is what, counter-intuitively, might make it an even better diagnostic of our current relationship with AI than the more overtly ominous series taking up similar themes. After all, despite all the serious concerns that AI presents (environmental, intellectual, financial…), most of us would work pretty hard to keep living life in a rom-com rather than a Black Mirror hellscape—a fact which Upload makes concerningly apparent.
I’ve been thinking a lot about this dissonance between the state of the world and the state of my mind as I write this. I badly want to admonish the series for being so coy in its social critique, for riding off into a romance-tinged sunset instead of digging deeper into the problems it presents. But who am I–watching the series through my Prime membership, acutely aware of the stack of Amazon boxes in the corner, while Microsoft pesters me with continual chatter (no, for the millionth time, I do not want AI to rewrite this)—who am I to complain? I don’t want to forfeit all optimism to dwell in the eternally ominous. I don’t want to sacrifice the tiny loves of my own small world—my cats, my plants, my forest friends—to the churning tide of global doom. At the end of the day, I want to come home to glowing windows and set the table for a hot meal of hamburkey with my husband. I want to flop on the couch and flip through the channels; I want to land on a nice rom-com.
And I don’t think this is wrong, per se—to mold our lives around happy genres, to seek out spots of humor and light against ever-darkening skies. But if Upload, in that sense, does parallel my life, I am increasingly conscious that I am very much not its main character. In fact, by the end of the final season, most of the main characters aren’t even main characters anymore—a few remain, still working for the major digital and media corporations, but others have died or been terminally deleted. In their absence, we begin to suspect that Horizon and its rivals (Oscar-Meyer Intel, Panera Aeon) have been the real protagonists all along. In this world of corporate domination and privacy decimation, I am, at best, a sacrificial extra: the sidekick tossed in the torrent, lost in the basement, over-written by an update. Upload may have it right; the AI revolution is a comedy. But the more seasons I watch, the more strongly I suspect: I won’t be the last one laughing.
