I'm Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom

by Jason Pargin

But I am very poorly today and very stupid and hate everybody and everything. —CHARLES DARWIN, in a letter to a friend, 1861

Sure, you don’t want to do the work right now, during the hard part. Nobody does! But the real ‘you’ doesn’t exist in the moment; you exist in the long term. That you, the whole you, will be glad you did this.”

Numbers have been unlocked, they are not the numbers of the devil, they are the devil, the codes that override a Homo sapiens’s will and turns it into livestock. This devil does not tempt man to evil but rather to a state of sedentary pleasure-seeking, to become a drooling blob capable of conceptualizing nothing beyond the next empty distraction to avoid reflecting on its own wretchedness.

reminds me of ziz's blog

Did you know that placebos still work even if you tell the patient it’s fake? I feel like that says something really important about humans, that performing a belief in something is the same as believing it.

This required her to have a detailed knowledge of the social media landscape, something she would not wish on any woman her age, or any man her age, or any person of any gender or age. Dozens of platforms with largely identical functionality served radically different populations with diverging cultures and use patterns, often overlapping the same users who switch personalities based on which app they have open. This dizzyingly complex landscape changed so quickly that it felt like trying to track the exact position of every locust in a swarm; entire online ecosystems seemed to appear overnight and evaporate just as quickly.

Twitter, with its character limit that required all thoughts to be boiled down to a sentence or two, was frequently cited as a cancer on democracy and society in general, as it rendered detail and nuance all but impossible (this is why a large portion of the posts on Twitter were about how Twitter should be destroyed). Also, it was technically no longer called Twitter—these platforms frequently rebranded for no discernable reason. And then there was TikTok, which was the new kid on the block, a video version of Twitter that fed users a stream of clips mostly less than fifteen seconds in length, just enough time for a striking visual or a single thought before the user swiped up to the next, and the next, consuming literally hundreds of them in a session. Key believed TikTok was possibly the most addictive piece of software ever created, and she understood why multiple countries had already outlawed it.

losing battle to try to keep up with sm in fiction

Multiple other bystanders could be seen filming the tantrum as part of a new public ritual in which humans are captured at their lowest in order to cement that as their public face forever.

Glowie was slang for an undercover fed who’s being too obvious about it (to the point that they stick out so much that they “glow”).

Which means ninety-nine percent of the ‘toxic’ masculine behaviors the feminists like to bitch about are enforced by women. Who do you think we’re trying to impress

hopefully this is not like the thesis of this book

No matter what I say, you’ll just come back and say women have it worse, and that’s the male experience in a nutshell. When you complain, people actually give a shit.

idk if I can take much more of this

it. I said it then, and I’ll say it again: I’d rather be raped fifty times than be falsely accused once. And so would anyone else. So, no, you don’t get to throw down your collective rape phobia as a trump card.”

what

“I’m talking about how your entire life span has been spent in a literal reverse apocalypse. I’m talking about billions of people who lived in what you would consider post-collapse conditions have had those conditions remedied, gaining roofs and lights and safety. A human’s chances of dying from famine or natural disasters are as low as they’ve ever been, ever, in the history of the species. It’s been nothing short of a worldwide miracle that makes everything Jesus supposedly did in the Bible look like party tricks. And people like you and me and others in our demographic describe that state of affairs as the world being ‘on fire.’ I think that’s a bizarre mass delusion and that there’s a very specific reason for it: we’ve been trained to cling to a miserable view of the world to the point that we think that not seeing the world as miserable makes us bad people. When I spent those months doing hallucinogens, I didn’t suddenly see the beauty and harmony of nature; I saw that humans everywhere were working really hard to make life better for other humans and that almost none of us appreciate it. I’m not crediting this miracle to capitalism or socialism or any other kind of ism but to the fact that it’s what humans do, because humans are amazing. And it’s all invisible to us because the progress occurs behind these dark walls of cynicism, outside the black box of doom.”

I’m not saying everything will be fine; I can’t predict the future. I’m saying that it is a one hundred percent certifiable guaranteed fact that it can be fine. But people like us have decided that we’re never allowed to even acknowledge the possibility.” “Or maybe it’s hard for people to care about toilets in India when another maniac is shooting up a school every week.” “You think that happens every week?” “I bet you have a whole bunch of stats to dump on me about that, too. I’m sure the parents of those dead kids would love to hear them.” “And there’s the anger. People hate it when you threaten their nihilism! That’s the black box, drawing you back in. Can’t you see that it wants you to be afraid to do anything but cower in front of your screens? It only has one trick, one card to play, which is this idea that bad news is the only news you can trust. I’m telling you, if you just allow yourself to step outside of it, you’ll see it for what it is: a prison where the walls are made of nightmares.”

really hard to buy incel dude being understanding about parental grief re school shootings

So, as a white woman, yeah, you’ve been on this winning streak that promises to continue. But all I hear is how my life needs to get worse.

jfc

I don’t have a degree or any skills society deems useful. I’m not strong enough for construction—you can ask my dad. I tried to learn to code and couldn’t wrap my mind around it. Everything else is either bottom-of-the-barrel stuff—janitors and plumbers, or women’s work—customer service, nursing.

wow that ending makes this cartoonishly dickish

What she’d learned about Abbott was that he was the most comfortable in conflict, mainly because that was the only time he knew what to say. Maybe arguing was the sound of his childhood, and it soothed him.

That little paradox of ‘If you have to ask, you don’t deserve to know’ is what makes us blow our brains out.”

oh gfy

crying, and honestly, I don’t know why I said what I said. I think I’ve always had a meanness in me, and I worry I’ve become too sick to keep it reined in.

Key imagined all of them capturing a police shoot-out and subsequent bomb detonation live on stream before perishing with their phones in their hands, their surviving loved ones seeing the engagement stats and weeping a single tear of pride.

slipping on the wet and creamy grass,

gross

gawdy

“Creamsicle moonshine,” grumbled the man who’d tried to smash her skull on the pavement a few days ago. “In the pot is a gallon of orange juice and a pound of sugar. Bring it to a boil, add a bottle of vanilla coffee creamer, a splash of vanilla extract, and a bottle of vodka. We had a version of this we used to make in prison with juice and creamer packets. It was a special-occasion thing.”

“Mountain Dew was invented as a whiskey mixer,” said Sokolov, who was pounding through bottles of Michelob Ultra at a stunning rate. “Couple of brothers from Knoxville came up with it in the forties, for that specific reason.

They drove toward Richmond, figuring that would be a big enough place to have a decent fireworks display, and wound up parking outside a stadium that boasted it was the home of the Flying Squirrels.