Two thoughts struck me when I first saw the trailer for Ctrl starring Ananya Pandey, now streaming on Netflix. I felt the film looked like a mashup of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, where Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet undergo a procedure to erase their memories of each other after a breakup, and the Netflix series Black Mirror, which successfully scared us about the dark side of technology and social media. But more importantly, it got me thinking about whether social media has become the villain du jour for OTT content targeting Gen Z audiences.

Kho Gaye Hum Kahan and Ctrl, which were released recently, have social media and AI either directly playing the villain or the agent of misunderstanding and misrepresentation. However, they aren’t the first Indian shows to dwell upon the dark side of technology and the impact of social media on our mental health. Escaype Live on Disney Plus Hotstar, Hacked, which streamed on Zee 5, and Jamtara on Netflix have all touched upon how rapidly developing technology has made our lives both convenient and complicated.

There seem to be three major concerns when it comes to online services, social media apps and artificial intelligence. First is its impact on our physical and mental health as we correlate our self-worth or worthiness to our popularity online. Second is the way social media companies use our personal information, purchasing patterns, and content viewing choices to tailor the advertisements we see and the information we have access to. The third is the rise in cybercrime and cyberbullying whether its trolls making vicious personal attacks, bank and social media accounts getting hacked, or AI being used to morph faces and voices to create controversial content.

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But at a time when casting decisions are determined by an individual’s social media following, are Indian filmmakers and content creators genuinely worried about the impact social media and AI will have on our future population? Take Kho Gaye Hum Kahan and Ctrl for example. There is more in common to these pieces of content than Ananya Panday playing a damsel in social media distress. In fact, it won’t be far-fetched to say that Panday’s character’s Nella in Ctrl could be a friend or simply a darker version of her character Ahana in Kho Gaye Hum Kahan. If Ahana had gone over the edge, she could have turned into Nella. Both characters have bad breakups, following which they turn to technology on the rebound and even accuse their boyfriends of breaking up because they were bored.

In both the films, all the characters are city-dwelling, educated, English-speaking youngsters who come from middle-class to wealthy families and aren’t struggling to make ends meet or shouldering the responsibility of a larger family. They have not had to suffer poverty, hunger, lack of educational opportunities, or caste and class discrimination. English is their first language and the language they use while communicating on their smartphones and laptops. Like most city-bred youngsters, they have an active social media presence and are constantly sharing or oversharing moments from their lives. Whether they are struggling to figure out their work lives or love lives, there is always plenty of time to hang out at fancy bars, attend parties, dress well and have a good time.

The problems they deal with in their lives like career pressures or breakups aren’t unique to a new generation. These problems get magnified or complicated because of the need created by social media to constantly project success and happiness online. When nameless followers quantify your worth as an individual and nothing means anything till a thousand people give you their approval, it is fertile ground for insecurity, anxiety and constant comparisons.

Truth be told, every decade or couple of decades, Bollywood gets a new villain. From class-conscious toxic parents, corrupt politicians and figures of authority, capitalistic factory owners, social evils or taboos, and of course, terrorism and cross-border tensions, we have had many human and metaphysical forces of evil in our cinema. Madhur Bhandarkar made a trilogy of films, Page 3, Fashion and Corporate, that were aimed at revealing the dark side of glamour, fame and success. We have had a string of cop films made by Rohit Shetty and Salman Khan where corrupt goons and complicit politicians are single-handedly pummelled by super cops. Stereotypical bearded villains spouting religious rhetoric have populated innumerable films where chest-thumping patriots take on homegrown and cross-border terrorists with josh and jingoism. Filmmakers like Rajkumar Hirani and actors like Aamir Khan and Ayushmann Khurrana have made and/or performed in films where a defunct or dysfunctional way of thinking is the villain that needs to be conquered. There has been an avalanche of biopics where self-doubt is the ultimate villain that needs to be defeated. One can go on and on.

While films like Ctrl and Kho Gaye Hum Kahan can issue statutory warnings like the ones on cigarette packets, as the Gen Z folks would say, the threat isn’t threatening. Social media cannot be erased from our lives, nor can the advances in technology be reversed. How will films be promoted, trailers be released, actors be cast, or products be sold? So, while their intention may be right, content portraying social media and technology as the villain seems to be largely cashing in on an ongoing trend rather than aiming to affect real policy change or frighten people into abandoning their smartphones and other devices.

Also Read | CTRL: Ananya Panday plays the world’s most clueless social media influencer in Vikramaditya Motwane’s wildly uneven Netflix movie

People with social media accounts are called users, the same word used for drug addicts. So perhaps the only solution then is to build awareness about its negative effects, offer realistic solutions through far-reaching media like cinema on how to deal with social media addiction, anxiety or depression, increasing avenues for people to seek help for their mental health and constantly safeguard one’s privacy and data using the options available to us. Seek Ctrl whenever and wherever we can, and just hope a morphed version of us doesn’t get the real us into trouble someday.

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