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

by Jason Pargin

the world has trained you to be afraid of being fully and truly perceived.

The mechanism is simple and the operation identical in the micro or macro, in animals or humans: a burst of short-term pleasure will blind the subject to its long-term well-being and cause it to function as little more than a puppet.

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.

the world was full of crazy men who were kept tethered to reality by sane women,

“Listen: I fully believe that I would think the way you do, if I had lived the life you’ve lived and consumed the media you’ve consumed. 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.”

I’ll tell you something else, the only thing I learned from therapy: 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.”

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.

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

“Maybe you won’t hear this,” said his father, “because I know I definitely didn’t listen to my dad at your age, but I have to at least try to say it: 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. 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.”

“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.”