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

by Jason Pargin

“Marvin Heemeyer was a business owner in Colorado,”

“Oh, the Killdozer guy! Yeah, I heard about that. I kind of like his style.”

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.”

Hunter had no problem believing this, as he had, in fact, driven in LA traffic before. Also, his brief time sitting next to this woman had convinced him that she had surely been involved in, or caused, at least three divorces.

“So you’re saying that regardless of the quality of the bed, your worries would ruin the experience.” “Are you going to try to stretch that into a metaphor for my whole life? That I’m physically comfortable but my brain won’t let me enjoy it?” “Well, it’s not a metaphor, it’s literally what’s happening, right?”

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.

No real woman can give you the frictionless relationship of a media-augmented jerk-off fantasy.”

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.’

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.”

I track radioactive ideas, virulent narratives that develop in insular little subcultures until they burst out onto the scene. One random guy posts a hoax to 4chan in 2017 under the pseudonym ‘Q,’ three years later, weirdos wearing Q T-shirts are storming the Capitol Building. Did you hear about Facebook’s role in the genocide in Ethiopia? And Myanmar?”

“Well, the company had teams devoted to it, as in, ‘They are clearly trying to organize an ethnic cleansing on our website. What do we do?’ They have war rooms set up to discuss which countries are at risk of the same. The USA is on that list.”

It was a relentless barrage of overstimulation and tense standoffs, automobiles having a magical ability to make humans abandon all concepts of empathy and self-preservation.

Life simply wasn’t that exciting. 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. The world is boring, you do your job, and eventually, you die from the same mundane misfires that escort everybody else into the dirt.

In the end, Abbott Coburn had simply not been made for this world. He was one of those extra screws you find in the box after assembling a piece of furniture. He had nothing to offer and was going to get flicked into the garbage at some point, either today or tomorrow or next week or ten years from now. Why draw it out? Why be that curious object that lives in a drawer, always in the way?

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

“Well, in my job, if I don’t assume the worst at every stage, the roof falls in. Maybe not that day, but somewhere down the line. One employee’s mistake leaves a gap that lets water through, and well, that’s all it takes to erode a Grand Canyon. A little water.”

“But you do have a crew. Now imagine if you assumed the worst about people to the point that you were scared to hire anyone, doing every job solo. Not many roofs would get done that way, right? Okay, now imagine if a whole society started operating like that. If there’s no trust, there’s no roofs. No civilization.”

This situation wasn’t gonna pan out the way he’d wanted, that much was clear, but he was a freight train and these were his tracks. Bridge or no bridge, there was nothing to do but keep grinding forward, until the sheer violence of the wreckage finally stopped him for good.

They hit up what seemed like a decently grimy joint and wound up playing pool with the most repulsive category of humans on earth: smug college boys. These were the guys who knew their lives were gonna be one long, freshly paved road, that none of their vices or perversions would get them into hot water, as they were simply too valuable to the system.

“All I’m hearing,” said Hunter, “is that these are amoral dirtbags who suddenly came into unfathomable money and power. That sounds exactly like a recipe for the civilization-ruining nightmare scenario.”

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.

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

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.”

“But the way I see it, America was never really united. In Alabama, the line where the seashore used to be about eighty-five million years ago now marks which counties vote Democrat. That old shoreline created rich soil that was perfect for cotton. That meant slaves; their descendants still live there. That’s America, full of these fault lines, open wounds that never healed. If you head a few miles that direction and cross into West Virginia, the average life expectancy drops five years. The average person born over there dies six years sooner than if they’d been born back in California. Same nation, different worlds.”

“And nationwide, the average life span has gone up ten years since 1960. We’ve gained an entire extra decade of life just in that time, and nobody cares, because apparently progress doesn’t count.

Our whole society is idle and overeducated, and nothing spices things up like conflict. 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.”

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. The Forbidden Numbers strip all that away; your true spot on the social hierarchy is revealed for all to see, in the form of likes and followers. 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. At that point, we will have finally surrendered the entire concept of free will, the one thing that makes us human.”

But Phil didn’t think even that would be enough. What the people want is a cruel, all-powerful being that they can simultaneously obey and also endlessly complain about. He thought it would take the form of an artificial intelligence, one that would spontaneously create itself.” “Ah,” said Key, “I wondered when we’d veer off into Crazytown.”

“Look around you. How many people out there are addicted to internet gambling, or games, or porn, or outrage headlines they compulsively click and share? See, the Forbidden Numbers work on the back end, too, dialing in on exactly what pixels on a screen will subdue the human animal. And we go along willingly because we want to be subdued. The whole appeal of being in a media-induced flow state is that you block everything else out. We want to be zombies. Puppets. So, we’re growing our own puppeteer.”

The universe had been trying to murder Zeke Ngata from the moment he was born, and he took that personally. His parents were told he wouldn’t survive infancy, then childhood. On his eighteenth birthday, Cammy had baked him a cake shaped like a middle finger, which became the annual tradition thereafter: “Fuck you,” it said, “I’m still here.”

What awful weather to die in. Or live in.

Immediately, several people performed what Abbott now recognized as a modern dehumanization ritual: they pulled up their phones and started recording, breaking eye contact to focus on their screen instead. This gesture had a clear meaning: “You are now no longer a person but a vector for engagement. Whatever happens to you from here on out matters only in terms of the quality of content generated.”

If you’ve got your cameras out, then we’re not talking, we’re performing for an audience. And that audience doesn’t want resolution, it wants conflict, purely because that’s more fun.”

then wondered if it was possible that he would fuck this up so hard that he would wind up killing the president and going down in the history books. It would definitely show all of those elementary school teachers who’d insisted he’d never amount to anything, including the woodshop teacher he’d stabbed with an awl.

Don’t mind me, thought Malort, just one more drone buzzing around the hive, making honey for the assholes

Miles had quickly decided that he’d been born into a society that was very much a solvable puzzle. The powerful wanted to hold down everyone else, but they were not clever and could be defied if the clever were willing to break their arbitrary rules.

But Phil was off his rocker by that point, and Malort couldn’t exactly blame him. He, like Malort, had woken up one day to find the sun had left the sky and taken all the stars with it.

Don’t you want to be great at something, to make stuff, to contribute? All I hear is, ‘Your job shouldn’t be your life!’ but why not? I mean, if you get rich, maybe you don’t charge for the work, but don’t you want to wake up every morning knowing that you’ve helped somebody? That you fixed their leaky pipes or cooked them a meal? I don’t care if you’re doing it for a corporation or the government or just for the hell of it—there’s nothing better than doing work that helps somebody. Nothing.”

“People just need to get a taste of it. When they figure out that instability isn’t about cool gun battles on the street but empty store shelves and power outages, that all your credit cards stop working and the hospitals go dark, they’ll come to their senses.”

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.

If you are looking for the final answer on how to solve any societal problem, from chronic loneliness to domestic terrorism, you have a tremendous amount of research ahead of you, and none of it will involve reading novels.