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

by Jason Pargin

the two of us, as individuals, in this car, were doing fine. We’ve gone through danger together, we’ve trusted each other, we’ve cooperated on a common cause. But you just talked yourself into a seething rage because you’ve abruptly decided we’re on opposite sides of some culture war. You and I aren’t at war!

most of history’s atrocities were committed by embarrassingly boring men.

In the real world, it’s often those who are the most comfortable in the system who want to bring it down.

The fires of rage must be kept alight at all cost, and there is no justice until everyone has been sufficiently burned.

I have this theory, that everything that happens on our screens is designed to do exactly what’s happening here, to repel us from one another, to create a war of all against all. It’s like a filter that only shows you others’ bad behavior, blocking the pure and letting through the poison, to make you scared of everyone who isn’t exactly identical to you. I think that, long-term, it traps your brain in a prison, that it’s designed to keep you inside, alone, with only those screens for comfort.

The USA had sprouted from soil so saturated with blood that the wells tasted of copper, less a “melting pot” than a meat grinder. It was a land of pissed-off underdogs who couldn’t be governed, simple folk who were polite and generous but with no desire to ever again feel a boot on their neck. They knew what freedom really meant, that liberty produces risk and pain the way a motor produces exhaust, that the spirit of America means not just accepting that fact but amplifying it so that it can be heard coming from six blocks away.

People who had rough childhoods, guys like you and me, you grow up scared of being happy. It don’t feel right. You find yourself sabotaging it, because you’re so scared that you’re gonna lose it that you’d rather just trash it yourself, so at least you can say it was your choice. So, you go hunting for grievances, to give yourself an excuse.”

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.

“So far,” said Abbott from the driver’s seat, “what you’re describing just sounds like the everyday experience of using the internet. Half the people on there are only looking for someplace to off-load their rage.”

I realized there was something truly dangerous about this, the devices, the algorithms. It’s like it reduced us to our limbic systems, turned us into mindless zealots in warring tribes.

Jolene just wanted to be a part of something bigger than herself, to have a war to fight. It’s all anybody wants these days.

Inside, food still tastes good, water is still wet, you’re still alive and in a healthy and strong body. That’s real. And when you focus on real things, you’ll be shocked at how easy it is to make this”—she held up the phone—“not matter at all.”

I think we are falling into the classic internet mirage that makes it seem like everything that happens there is super incredibly important in the real world when, most of the time, it’s nothing.”

If any friends abandon you afterward, if they say you betrayed the movement, they also weren’t your real friends. They just saw you as fellow cannon fodder for this war they decided they’re fighting.”

The wrong friends can make you lonelier than being alone.”

“So, what I’m about to tell you,” said Ether, always unsure of quite where to start, “will trigger in you a reflex. First you will deny it, then you will get angry. What I want you to understand is that this reflex has been trained into you, specifically to block out what I’m saying. When we’re angry, the listening parts of our brains go dark.” “That sounded like a long way to say, ‘Promise you won’t get mad,’ which I think is scientifically the world’s worst way to begin a conversation.”

“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?”

that’s two groups who both believe the world is ending, but for totally opposite reasons. Some say runaway capitalism, some say runaway socialism. Some say it’ll be chaotic lawlessness, some say iron-fisted authoritarianism. It’s like I have one panicked neighbor saying there’s an impending drought and another screaming that we’re all about to drown in a flood. Somebody has to be wrong.”

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.

“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.”

“Grocery stores sell processed junk and fresh produce, but they make all of their money off the junk; it’s higher margins, less waste. Well, the dollar stores were like, ‘Why not just sell the junk and forget the rest of that fresh-food nonsense?’ They run the real grocery stores out of the poorest neighborhoods.”

We make jokes about processed food and drive-thrus, but that stuff is the reason mothers are able to do literally anything other than chop potatoes and knead dough all day. And you can apply that to everything—it used to take much, much longer to shop, to correspond with friends, to travel, to bathe, to wash your clothes, to buy a book. That’s the first thing you’d notice if you went back—how your spare time would evaporate because every single little task takes longer, if you can do it at all.”

If pleasure was a thing that could be measured, the available pleasure to the average person over all of history would basically be a flat line on a graph that then explodes upward right before you and I were born. In terms of timing, we’re fucking lottery winners! Only we know the pleasure of a climate-controlled room, a daily hot shower, of cheap and delicious food and drink, of comfortable shoes and a dazzling ocean of entertainment so vast that we get stressed out trying to keep up.

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.’

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.

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.

because the bomber didn’t trigger any particular raw nerve, there was no media money to be made, so we all just shrugged and moved on.”

they long for conflict because they’ve been trained to believe that conflict is entertainment?

The real world, where authentic beings live, is boring. Or at least, it is boring to the infected mind under command of the parasite that relentlessly demands the next hit of novelty.

You know, all conspiracy theories start from there, a core of truth. But then you make it your religion, and at some point, I don’t know, you forget how to be a person.

So much of a modern life was just sitting back helplessly and watching disaster unfold, in real time and in high definition.

Knowing how you’re dumb is one of the most valuable kinds of smart there is.”

Sock had spent his whole life saying the system was bullshit, but what the money made apparent was that the only thing he hated about the system was that he wasn’t the one running it.

“Jesus, this is an alarming amount of jerky. If this place flooded, it would rehydrate into a stampede.”

you don’t know yourself, Abbott. Nobody knows who they are until they go out and adversity strips away the phony parts, makes a mockery of all the lies you tell yourself. Inside your little cocoon, you can convince yourself that you can do anything, that you could succeed if you were given the right chances. But that’s all just an illusion until it’s tested.

Hunter said, “The way you’re describing this place kind of makes me want to blow it up myself.”

There’s an old saying that a child not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth. I’d update it to say the child not sufficiently entertained by the village will burn it down for the spectacle.”

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. Or, and this is the big one, that their beliefs were popular.

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. And that’s just one example; we’re essentially teaching machines how to hack human insecurity.”

“If you relentlessly attack people’s self-image, they’ll scramble for something, anything to preserve it.

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.’ Phil’s theory is that people want that powerful thing to exist, to take over their lives.

Abbott, how would you feel if tomorrow your dad brought home a seventeen-year-old girlfriend?” “Bad! It would be one of the worst things to have ever happened!” “And yet, you found yourself sucked into an internet debate where you were on the side of Hitler, knowing that the only possible winner was the platform profiting from the engagement. You are all having arguments that are specifically designed to go in circles, forever! Don’t you see the system doesn’t care what you believe, that it only cares that you keep yelling into your screens, getting enraged at strangers you barely disagree with?”

you’re saying, ‘How can I make peace with an enemy?’ and I’m saying that’s the only time you can make peace!

“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.

I don’t think it’s chaos that follows you around; I think your supposedly amazing conflict resolution skills could just use some work.”

Generally, when you find yourself constantly in the middle of drama, it’s because deep down, you want it that way.”

you have this modern thing where the goal is to be totally disconnected from any burdens or obligations. But I think we all need to be needed.”

In the aftermath of chaos, the early narrative is the one that tends to stick, as everyone has usually moved on by the time it gets corrected.

I think that going door-to-door and interrupting folks while they’re trying to have dinner should be considered a mortal sin.