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

by Jason Pargin

Every fantasy blockbuster has the same premise: A reluctant nobody is finally put into a position where he or she has to go on an adventure. Luke’s aunt and uncle are dead, Harry Potter’s homelife is a shit sandwich, Neo’s job sucks, Bruce Wayne’s parents got eaten by bats. The dream isn’t that the chance for adventure will come along—you can do an adventure any time you want—but that circumstances will line up just right so that you simply have no more excuses.

That was the Joint Terrorism Task Force, a program created so that local police wouldn’t feel left out of FBI counterterrorism operations, despite often having minimal experience with the subject.

My man, what are you doing?

Nobody has people skills, because they stay home all the time, so they’re scared to do anything but stay at home because they’re afraid of being weird in public or getting caught on camera and mocked by millions of strangers. It’s an isolation vortex.”

This is America, taking a road trip without a gun is like putting a sign on the rear windshield that says, FREE CAR WITH DOCILE POTENTIAL SEX SLAVE AT THE WHEEL.”

Reddit, the sprawling message board of mostly young males armed with a vast arsenal of shallow knowledge and free time, humming with a relentless desire to assuage their boredom by continually ingesting and digesting new morsels of information.

“I think that the odds are high that there will be some huge news or a disaster somewhere, considering we now average one of those every few hours.

Key believed TikTok was possibly the most addictive piece of software ever created, and she understood why multiple countries had already outlawed it.

Reddit, the vast message board that served something like half a billion users a month. This was, to a large degree, where the internet’s unfathomable gush of data was gathered, sorted, and shaped into a satisfying narrative.

Bureaucracies by nature don’t move quickly and, well, that’s exactly what the B in FBI stands for.

what was life but a series of hard jobs you had to endure because you’d screwed up the easy ones?

But nothing ruins your view of the world like getting your dream job.

it turned out that Key’s actual favorite hobby was buying supplies for hobbies.

Today, you’re almost as likely to be totally alone as you are to have a big squad of friends like teenagers have in the movies.

When you’re so far down the social ladder that you’re basically lying on the floor, that’s when they love to stomp you the most, to grind your face into the shit.

You know those postapocalyptic zombie shows where they have to cross the wastelands and they’re like, ‘We can’t trust anybody out here! We’re on our own!’ Well, that’s a geek fantasy for indoor kids. Out here, in the real world, in the actual desert, this is when you have to be willing to trust people. You don’t have a chance otherwise. Trust is the only advantage humans have as a species, that millions of us can all get together and trust one another.

I think that should be a basic human right, don’t you? To denounce your past? Even if there are records of it online, you should be able to say, ‘I’m sorry and I’ve grown,’ and everyone should judge you based on how you act from then on.

If you think that, say, a cashier failing to wish you a Merry Christmas is a sign of impending Christian genocide, you’re probably not the type to hash out differences over brunch.

it was a rule of the internet that any efforts to censor content only gave it credibility.

“That ‘stranger danger’ paranoia came from the suburbs, parents in perfect neighborhoods terrified that child-trafficking rings would steal their kid if they let them out of their sight for ten seconds.

You know how cats are, they spend their whole lives looking at humans the way diners look at the lobsters in a restaurant aquarium.

You just invented a person to get mad at in your head and then declared me to be that person.

I’ve dealt with a lot of domestic terrorists in my time, and not a single one of them was smart.

We call it the black box of doom.”

As for his politics, he was an extreme Libertarian in the way that both bikers and tech guys tended to be, seeing the rules of polite society as a burden that only prevents the strong from separating themselves from the weak and mediocre.

He went back in, found some terrible but wearable shoes, and felt the harsh, silent judgment of the cashier at the sight of a visibly one-shoed man buying cheap sneakers minutes before closing time—the ultimate sign of an individual whose life has gone off the rails.

“Jolene lived in Virginia, which is the good Virginia of the two Virginias,

Why do people get mad and then later apologize by saying, “That wasn’t the real me”? Why can’t the anger be the real you?

any friend who abandons you over a baseless internet rumor wasn’t your real friend.

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.

There was a time in this country when you could afford a big house and two cars on one job, with the other parent staying home to raise the kids. Now everybody has to work two jobs to afford one apartment and their student loan payments.

I swear if the black box of doom had a slogan etched across its door, it would be, ‘We hate ourselves and will kill anyone who asks us to change.’ Who told you that no partner who demands compromise is worth it? Can’t you see the conclusion they’re leading you to? ‘Unless I somehow get this perfect, effortless relationship, I’m better off alone, with my screens.’ The box doesn’t train you to do anything but remain in the box.”

They don’t put disabled people in jail; it’s against the law. There was a Bond villain like that. They had to just keep letting him go.

The world was full of sad sacks thinking they’re going to die in the Revolution, or Armageddon, or in the throes of civilizational collapse at the hands of sentient AI. Statistically, almost all of them were destined to pass quietly in hospitals with tubes sticking out of every hole, or on the sofa while sleepily watching a baseball game, or in a head-on collision after deciding they were fine to drive home on sixteen beers.

Nearby was a giant sign that said, RESTROOMS: WORLD FAMOUS! which sparked many questions in her mind.

What the people want is a cruel, all-powerful being that they can simultaneously obey and also endlessly complain about.

“Mountain Dew was invented as a whiskey mixer,”

A single enemy is the only thing strong enough to unite us.”