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

by Jason Pargin

Real friendships, real bonds are based on being genuine and vulnerable and flawed around each other, but we’re constantly told that’s dangerous.

Key’s theory, which Patrick had mocked as the “Virgin Apocalypse,” was that all modern hate groups were really just incel grievances in disguise. It’s a historical fact that one of the key precursors to mass violence in a society is simply an excess of young, unmarried men. The really unpopular part of Key’s theory, the one that had caused a lot of colleagues to stop talking to her in the hallway, was that the smart societies knew you could deal with this problem simply by finding some excuse to go to war. Through all of history, wars were a way to burn off your excess young men, like venting heat from an engine.

in isolation, human minds tend to get strange, like a self-portrait painted from memory, in the dark, using a live snake as a brush.

“If I were to tell you that your ratio of evidence to wishful thinking is roughly the same as you’d find in a bottle of a homeopathic aphrodisiac, would that be an example of mansplaining or gaslighting? I’m trying to be something other than a boorish obstacle in your journey while also not following you off a cliff.”

What they had in common, in Key’s view, was aggrieved narcissism, a total inability to put personal affronts into perspective. Why shouldn’t others die for your petty humiliations, when you’re the Main Character of the Universe?

“It’s the same answer for this or life in general: Watch and learn and hope an opportunity presents itself. And pray that this goddamned thing doesn’t go boom in the meantime.”

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.

from then on, yeah, we live our lives in fear of making a man angry, and yes, we develop tools to keep it at bay. You can call it manipulation, but, Abbott, so much of it is just self-preservation.”

“I’m saying, if I listen to you, honestly listen, without judgment, can you do the same for me? Because my experience is that fear of assault hangs over every interaction with a man; it’s not a scheme that all of us women concocted to screw you over. We’re all just stumbling around in the dark, scared.”

feel like,” she said finally, “you quickly tried to search your brain for an opinion I couldn’t possibly agree with or find common ground on. I think instead of communicating, you’re trying to shape your words into weapons to deal maximum damage to your ‘enemy,’ which you have now decided is me.

A friend of mine came up with a name for it, for these algorithms, this media mind prison. We call it the black box of doom.”

It’s just money and repairs, a transaction. Stop piling grand emotional significance onto it. That’s the other thing about living in the black box—you get trained to turn every little thing in your life into a grand fucking psychodrama.”

“And if you should find yourself in a group of friends who are all united under a cause that makes them miserable, then losing those friends wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing. The wrong friends can make you lonelier than being alone.”

“What happened is that just in the time you and I have been alive, a whole bunch of heroes coordinated across a whole bunch of countries in Africa and Asia and elsewhere and wiped out the Guinea worm. Countless millions have lived and often died with horrible, three-foot-long worms in their bodies, including lots of children. But no more. While your news feeds were bludgeoning you with stories of school shootings, pathological politicians, and nonstop outrage, this war against the worms was quietly won thanks to relentless, selfless effort by thousands of strangers.”

“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.”

“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.”

“You know why, right?” said Ether, sucking from a tube of Go-Gurt. “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.”

“But who told you that, the thing about everybody affording a big house with one job back in the good old days? I feel like we’re getting that from old sitcoms or magazine ads. A quarter of those 1950s houses didn’t have indoor plumbing, and almost none had air-conditioning; that wasn’t a common thing until decades later. And those houses were tiny and packed with three generations of family. I mean, none of this is opinion, you can look it up—the average American now has as much living space as an entire family did back then. And no, they didn’t have two cars; they were sharing one, if that. You’re right that they didn’t have student loan payments, but that’s because hardly anybody went to college—hell, in the 1960s, most Americans didn’t even finish high school. So forget about choosing your dream career; back then, people were still just working in whatever factory kept their town afloat. And if you go back a hundred years, you’re in a totally unrecognizable society. In this part of the country, lots of the kids would have goiters from iodine deficiency, illiteracy would be rampant, virtually every adult would be missing multiple teeth. Oh, and it was considered weird if parents didn’t beat their children. None of what I’m saying requires some deep dive into the research, none of it is disputed.

“And then there’s the big one, the one nobody ever thinks about: time. Everybody longs for those home-cooked meals like in the Norman Rockwell paintings, but those meals only happened if Mom spent hours cooking them—most women literally spent most of their time in the kitchen. 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.”

“No! I’ve just scratched the surface! Take sex, for example. For most of history, sex education of any kind was forbidden; it wasn’t even openly discussed, by anyone, ever. Gay kids, trans kids would’ve thought they were possessed by demons, and everyone grew up thinking masturbation was this bizarre, grotesque habit only they indulged in—you had actual medical texts that said that boys were at risk of insanity if they touched themselves. They used to sell little spiked rings for boys to wear that would stab them if they got an erection. And did the average man even know how to perform oral sex on a woman until, like, twenty years ago? If you want to get graphic, please remember that you don’t have to go back that far to find a country that doesn’t believe in regular bathing or use toilet paper. Any horny time traveler would be in for a hell of a shock when it came to hygiene. Oh, and until the 1950s, every third bed was infested with bedbugs.”

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. Like music! Music is magic, it heals the soul, and our access to it is infinitely greater than it ever was before! And literature—the most beautiful works from the most incredible minds are out there to be read on demand, at almost no cost. And then there’s all the little conveniences we instantly took for granted. The ability to read a review of a product you’re buying only goes back to Amazon; before that, for all of history, you were just shopping blind. And think about Wikipedia; the guy who invented that deserves a Nobel Prize—it’s one of the great inventions in history, and the fact that it’s free to use is insane. They didn’t even have that in Star Trek!”

“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. It’s like I’ve woken up in a world where everyone not only believes the earth is flat but they’re really, really angry about it. And they reject any evidence to the contrary because they prefer to be—”

“Why not? You’re miserable as who you are! 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.”

Winning an argument with his father would be like a dropped egg winning an argument with gravity.

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. You’re still new. Nobody’s taken you out of the package yet.”

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.”

FBI.” Ether nodded. “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. At that point, we will have finally surrendered the entire concept of free will, the one thing that makes us human.”

“I can’t make anybody be friends or enemies with me. I learned that a long time ago. But you’ve got to understand that where Mal and I are from, when you’ve got beef, you clear the air, with fists if you have to, but at that point, it’s over, done. That’s probably the only useful thing I ever learned in my wild years.

“That’s why we need to sit, break bread, hash it out! I’m saying we need to make peace, you’re saying, ‘How can I make peace with an enemy?’ and I’m saying that’s the only time you can make peace! Why hold on to anger? Sit! I’m grilling sliced pineapple on the side. You ever had that?”

Joan nodded toward the fireworks. “The original colonies all hated each other. The only reason the USA exists is that they finally united in their even worse hatred of the British.”

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. At least, that’s what Sokolov had told them.

I’ve often thought that what we need to counter what’s coming is a new religion, where the like-minded form bonds through touch and kindness and soft conversations over home-cooked food, practicing human connection as it has been done for tens of thousands of years. I don’t know exactly what rules this new faith would impose on its congregants, but I think that going door-to-door and interrupting folks while they’re trying to have dinner should be considered a mortal sin.