[lamasery]

I don't read San Junipero as happy.

Black Mirror likes to show us the most-important thing as a kind of punctuation or statement of message even when it's not what the episode has encouraged us to believe is the most important thing (see also: the focus of the camera in the very first episode during A Certain Event—we've been primed for a grand, disgusting spectacle, and the camera chooses to show us none of that, and instead shows us something much more disgusting: the faces of people watching it, which is the actual show, and the point of the "artist" in the episode).

San Junipero ends by showing us the entirety of what is actually happening, for-real, which is an automated computer-maintenance system keeping itself running. It's highlighting the unreality of the virtual world, I think suggesting that even the apparent experiences we've been watching aren't happening in any real sense.

What's really happening? 100% of what's really happening? As you see. A computer system maintaining itself, to keep electricity flowing through its various circuits. Doing what? Doesn't matter, could be endlessly calculating digits of pi, that'd be just as much a "real" experience as what you've been so invested in. This is all that's really going on.

[antisthenes]

San Junipero is a SAAS hedonistic treadmill for your mind, for perpetuity, designed to siphon all your estate into corporate profits.

Maybe it's not so bad after all, I think one can interpret it positively or negatively depending on your current state of mind.