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

by Jason Pargin

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 somebody goes mining into your past for stuff to bring you down or embarrass you, they should be treated like the bad guy.” “But you know that’s not how it works, right?” “Oh, trust me. I know.” “Because people are going to preserve that version of you, from the part of your life when they felt the most superior to you.”

If your entire worldview is “Don’t tread on me,” what’s going to happen when a leader tries to impose rules? You’d think they’d learn to put their differences aside for the cause, but that’s hard to do when you’ve been raised to believe there’s no such thing as a minor disagreement. 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.

“Who knows? I mean, that’s the whole point—once they settled on a truth, everything else could be reframed to fit. If their dog had died, they’d have probably blamed it on aliens. That’s just how the brain works: It wants to shape everything into a narrative. Once you realize that, the whole world starts to make more sense. Or less sense.”

“I’m creeped out because none of it happened. The story finally leaked, against their will, years later. Then it became a book, then a movie, spreading around the world to every population with access to mass media, like a thought virus.

There’s this whole reality that people all over the world believe mind, body, and soul and when you trace it back to its origin, you find … nothing at all. Just a story so weird and terrifying that it becomes infectious, with mass media acting as the vector.”

She was wearing one of her old work suits, chosen because it definitely made her look like an FBI agent even though, much to her annoyance, not a single person had ever told Key that it made her specifically look like Dana Scully.

“Do I need an attorney?” The answer to this question is actually yes, every time, regardless of whether you’re being interviewed as a suspect or a witness, as law enforcement absolutely does not have to tell you which one you are.

Abbott had learned early that when his father got angry at someone, the humanity of his target just evaporated from his mind. In that moment, they were an object, an obstacle unworthy of sympathy or empathy.

There is a primal override that shuts off all those feelings, because in moments of maximum peril, they are a weakness that allows the predators and incompetents to do unchecked damage to the world.

We’re goddamned Bonnie and Clyde, tearing ass across America.”

Okay? So, all your life, you’ve been clinging to the side of a swimming pool. On the opposite side of that pool is everything you want: independence, respect, your own career and a home, and maybe a partner. But to get to the other side of the pool, you have to let go of the side you’re on. That lightheaded feeling you’re experiencing right now? Part of it is just that. You’re floating free, like a grown-up. Your own actions, your own consequences. Sink or swim.”

When you live alone, you’re free to decorate the space with your madness.

And inequality—real or perceived—always breeds instability.

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.

Having a support group of friends could maybe have rescued Phil Greene, but he’d chosen isolation, and 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.

“Abbott, what are you talking about? What—what’s just happened here? You just invented a person to get mad at in your head and then declared me to be that person.”

“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.”

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

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

It’s not just you, either—as a country, we’re in a national sleep deprivation crisis, blue light from our phones ruining our natural cycles. We’re a whole society of tired, cranky, anxious people. No wonder we all think the world is ending.”

In sci-fi and fantasy stories, rebellions are usually the oppressed, impoverished underclasses rising up against their wealthy and powerful oppressors. In the real world, it’s often those who are the most comfortable in the system who want to bring it down.

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.

But 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.

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 was a whole country descended from hard-barked frontiersmen and those who’d managed to not get slaughtered by them. The USA had sprouted from soil so saturated with blood that the wells tasted of copper, less a “melting pot” than a meat grinder.

They’d spent the day listening to a podcast about serial killer Edmund Kemper, who’d murdered eight women, mostly students he’d picked up as hitchhikers, since that was the sort of thing you could still do in the more authentic world of 1973.

The world lies to you and says change is hard. It ain’t. You can walk out and do it anytime. Just be somebody else.”

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.

Attention-seekers were eagerly filling the void, and that, friends, is how you build a bullshit machine.

These were the kind of games you learned to play when living on the streets. Or, well, anywhere else.

“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.”

And what I couldn’t get over is that this technology was supposed to broaden everybody’s horizons, you can communicate with people all over the world now, at any time. But for me, the world got smaller.

I felt like living my life through screens had trapped me in this dark little cell, my own black box of doom.”

We all just wanted to feel something real but to feel it without consequence.”

The most important thing to understand about spending your whole life in mortal fear of being in Big Trouble is that it’s not an irrational phobia—Abbott was constantly getting caught.

Abbott didn’t turn around but felt his anger coming back, wondering why he’d allowed it to dissipate at all. 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? Maybe the simpering, apologetic version is the fake one.

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.”

“That makes sense. It’s a physical, tangible place. There’s a little restaurant inside with breakfast food; they have nice bathrooms. Go in, change your clothes, get cleaned up, get some hot food in you.”

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.”

He knew he should be paranoid, but wasn’t certain of just how paranoid to be, which of course is how paranoia works.

because despite what the modern world insists, you can actually get over bad things happening to you.

“That’s another game the cynics play. ‘Because this objectively true thing has been said too many times by unoriginal thinkers, we have to reject it and make ourselves miserable just to spite them.’”

“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.”

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.

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.”

I’m saying that it is a one hundred percent certifiable guaranteed fact that it can be fine. But people like us have decided that we’re never allowed to even acknowledge the possibility.”

“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.”

“Why do you know all this?” “Why don’t you know all this? This is the fundamental context of your life! I mean, you don’t even have to get into the big-picture stuff—life expectancy, infant mortality, literacy, civil rights, way fewer people dying in dangerous jobs—I could spend the next week just listing all of the little everyday improvements we don’t even think about. 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. Th...

“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. 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—” “Oh, goddamn it,” grunted Abbott. “It says these Takis expired a month ago. Shit, I knew they tasted off.”