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

by Jason Pargin

This behavior—gruffly shutting down bids for human connection—was something he vividly remembered hating in his father, and he hated seeing it in himself even more, but found himself doing it all the same. Why did she get to move on and be happy? The fires of rage must be kept alight at all cost, and there is no justice until everyone has been sufficiently burned.

“My grandfather,” continued Ether, “who I basically never talk to anymore, one hundred percent believes Christ is going to return to earth at any minute to bring about the apocalypse, due to mankind’s sinfulness. He believes everything he watches on the news is a sign: encroaching Communism, the Satanic conspiracy to allow gays to marry, race-mixing, debauchery, pornography, drag queens, the QAnon child sex cult, the climate change ‘hoax’ he says has fooled the world. He has a TV on every minute he’s awake, tuned to these ultra-right-wing news outlets ranting about depravity.” “I know old guys like that,” said Abbott. “My dad works with a couple. They’re nuts. You can’t even talk to them.” “So we can agree that, purely via the carefully filtered media a person consumes, they can come to fully believe in an apocalypse that is not, in fact, occurring?”

“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.”

“That’s great, when I get back to my phone, I’ll go to Wikipedia and read about how fascists are taking over every government in the Western world.” “Yes! Exactly! And that’s happening because all of those extremists are selling the same blatant lie: ‘The world is falling apart, and we have to get back what they took from us.’ At that point, it’s always just a matter of deciding which vulnerable group to pin the blame on. And it works because their followers are also living in the black box of doom, where screens tell them everything outside their front door is a chaotic hellworld. People become bitter monsters because the box tells them that’s the only defense against a world gone mad, so it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Well, I have this theory that we have been quietly building a society full of Heemeyers, seemingly normal people with middle-class lives and brains full of retribution fantasies. Supposedly mature adults with no sense of scale or proportionality.”

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.

It doesn’t matter how comfortable or well-fed somebody is; if you humiliate them in front of their peers, they’ll want to burn the system to the ground. Well, social media algorithms are a twenty-four-seven humiliation machine. That, Phil believed, is how a population is primed for authoritarian rule.

Every cultural faction has their own scapegoats—the government, their childhood trauma, their mental illness, the evil billionaires, immigrants—and it doesn’t matter the degree to which any of them are valid, because all the system cares about is that you surrender your own agency. ‘I cannot be blamed for the state of my life, because I am at the mercy of this other, more powerful thing.’