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

by Jason Pargin

“You know why I think that is? I think we hate being reminded that this is how we spend all our free time. We want our fictional characters to go out and do things in the real world. If they show the protagonist zoning out on the sofa with their phone, it’s always portrayed as pathetic, like, ‘Look at this poor sap.’

So, just to be clear, you’re nervous without your phone because you’re afraid that if you’re not mentally on-call every waking moment of the day, you may miss, what? The president ordering you to go broker peace in the Middle East? Think about the load of anxiety you’ve taken on there, and for what practical purpose? It kind of seems like a superstition to me, like a sports fan who thinks his team will lose if he doesn’t watch the games.”

“See! This is what I’m talking about! What’s wrong with silence? Think of all the thinking you’ll get done. This is why good ideas occur to you in the shower and why you can’t sleep because

The box doesn’t train you to do anything but remain in the box.”

This is everything.

“No, seriously. It was just a silly idea somebody had. It took them a week to code it, but it was objectively the most important and influential website ever created. Mark Zuckerberg started Facebook to be a HotOrNot ripoff, YouTube was launched to be a video version of it—that’s a trillion dollars’ worth of market cap right there. That’s because they’d stumbled across a world-changing concept: applying a numerical value to human behavior that had never before been quantifiable. Up until then, for all human history, any individual could lie to themselves, could secretly believe they were more attractive than they are, or smarter, or more creative, or nicer, or richer.

Well, social media algorithms are a twenty-four-seven humiliation machine. That, Phil believed, is how a population is primed for authoritarian rule. And that’s just one example; we’re essentially teaching machines how to hack human insecurity.”

Bombshell

Immediately, several people performed what Abbott now recognized as a modern dehumanization ritual: they pulled up their phones and started recording, breaking eye contact to focus on their screen instead.