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

by Jason Pargin

“And that’s the kind of thing you spend your retirement worrying about? The bureau’s reputation? You know what a lot of retired feds get into? Alcoholism. It’s not just for the boys anymore. I went to Whole Foods the other day—they’ve replaced twenty percent of their floor space with shelves of mom wine. You should give it a shot. They call it a disease, but the sufferers seem to be having a great time.”

“Ha! You know when that started, the era of flavors that don’t exist in nature? With Dr. Pepper. A pharmacist brewed it. Before that, drinks were flavored like things that actually existed—vanilla, cinnamon, grape. But he was like, ‘No, this will taste like fun medicine.’ Now we’re drowning in fun chemicals twenty-four hours a day.”

There’s a feeling that there is no word for yet, because no one had ever experienced it prior to the internet era: the dizzying sensation of seeing an online drama escape into the real world.

I am now the most miserable man living. If what I feel were equally distributed to the whole human family, there would not be one cheerful face on the earth. Whether I shall ever be better I cannot tell; I awfully forebode I shall not. To remain as I am is impossible; I must die or be better, it appears to me. —ABRAHAM LINCOLN, in a letter to a friend, 1841

“He went from running meth to becoming a get-rich-quick finance guru? Sad to see someone fall off like that.”

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.”

“You say so much that sounds like it came off some housewife’s inspirational Facebook meme.” “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 it’s all invisible to us because the progress occurs behind these dark walls of cynicism, outside the black box of doom.”

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.”

“Nope,” said Key. “The TSA can search private planes, but they almost never do. The aircraft and passengers are considered low-risk on account of being fabulously wealthy.”

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.”

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?”