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

“He felt a weight roll off him, the exquisite relief of canceled plans that extroverts will never know.”
― Jason Pargin, I'm Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom

“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.”
― Jason Pargin, I'm Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom

“We're all just babies trapped in God's hot parked car.”
― Jason Pargin, I'm Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom

“it turned out that Key’s actual favorite hobby was buying supplies for hobbies. She didn’t really get any joy out of the next part, and it was starting to get expensive.”
― Jason Pargin, I'm Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom

“The wrong friends can make you lonelier than being alone.”
― Jason Pargin, I'm Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom

“Knowing how you’re dumb is one of the most valuable kinds of smart there is.”
― Jason Pargin, I'm Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom

“Placebos work better when they cost more; it’s science. Seriously.”
― Jason Pargin, I'm Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom

“I felt like living my life through screens had trapped me in this dark little cell, my own black box of doom.”
― Jason Pargin, I'm Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom

“but what was life but a series of hard jobs you had to endure because you’d screwed up the easy ones?”
― Jason Pargin, I'm Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom

“So that’s two groups who both believe the world is ending, but for totally opposite reasons. Some say runaway capitalism, some say runaway socialism. Some say it’ll be chaotic lawlessness, some say iron-fisted authoritarianism. It’s like I have one panicked neighbor saying there’s an impending drought and another screaming that we’re all about to drown in a flood. Somebody has to be wrong.”
― Jason Pargin, I'm Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom

“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.”
― Jason Pargin, I'm Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom

“nothing ruins your view of the world like getting your dream job.”
― Jason Pargin, I'm Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom

“...Once I was disconnected from it and looking back, it was clear that everything we were doing was insane. It was the first time I realized 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.... 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 neglected everything else in my life-my family, my business, my health, everything else just went away in the name of arguing with these total strangers about the lives of other total strangers. I felt like living my life through screens had trapped me in this dark little cell, my own black box of doom....”
― Jason Pargin, I'm Starting to Worry About This 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.”
― Jason Pargin, I'm Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom

“Well, social media algorithms are a 24/7 humiliation machine. That 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.”
― Jason Pargin, I'm Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom

“We all just wanted to feel something real but to feel it without consequence.”
― Jason Pargin, I'm Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom

“I promised to listen without rebutting or disagreeing, but from my point of view, you’re painting me and all women as sly, evil schemers, when the reality is that we spend every second of our lives tearing ourselves apart with insecurity. And, yeah, even before I’d bought my first bra, I was taught that the wrong encounter with an angry man could get me killed. Not that I had to be told—I think every girl remembers the first time she was wrestling with a boy, just playing, and suddenly realized how incredibly strong he was in comparison, that almost every man is stronger than almost every woman—that bell curve barely overlaps. So 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.”
― Jason Pargin, I'm Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom

“He was bored by everything normal but lacked the tools to survive excursions into the dangerous and exotic.”
― Jason Pargin, I'm Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom

“No, you just opened a beverage and took a drink without a second thought. That’s trust! You don’t know any of the thousands of strangers in the supply chain, and yet you took a drink with absolute certainty that it wasn’t poison, or tainted, that there weren’t metal shavings or dead insects in the can. You trusted every one of those strangers so thoroughly that you didn’t even devote one second of thought to it. And you did it because a lifetime of experience has taught you that they can be trusted, almost without fail.” “They don’t do their jobs because they’re trustworthy, they do it because they don’t want to get fired or sued.” “Is that the only thing stopping you from poisoning somebody?” “No.” “That’s what you’ll find out here in the wastelands. Almost all of these people are just like you. They want to do the right thing, and every morning, they wake up and go do it. Every. Single. Day.”
― Jason Pargin, I'm Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom

“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.”
― Jason Pargin, I'm Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom

“Real friendships, real bonds are based on being genuine and vulnerable and flawed around each other, but we’re constantly told that’s dangerous.”
― Jason Pargin, I'm Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom

“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.”
― Jason Pargin, I'm Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom

“That’s what you’ll find out here in the wastelands. Almost all of these people are just like you. They want to do the right thing, and every morning, they wake up and go do it. Every. Single. Day.”
― Jason Pargin, I'm Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom

“They were attacks on social cohesion, pushing a vision of the future that, in many cases, not even the attackers were aware of.”
― Jason Pargin, I'm Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom

“I think we are falling into the classic internet mirage that makes it seem like everything that happens there is super incredibly important in the real world when, most of the time, it’s nothing.”
― Jason Pargin, I'm Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom

“despite what the modern world insists, you can actually get over bad things happening to you.”
― Jason Pargin, I'm Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom

“Maybe one day, you'll sit down with your own grandkids in some burned-out building and tell them what the country used to be like, that you could get drunk & eat ice cream & watch fireworks, & nobody would bother you. And they'll say, 'Damn, that sounds real nice. What happened?' and you'll have to try to explain how everywhere, all at once, everybody lost their fucking minds.”
― Jason Pargin, I'm Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom

“[His] wife had moved out, taking the dogs with her, begging him to get help, to please see someone about his depression, to get medication. As if somebody makes a pill that un-fucks reality.”
― Jason Pargin, I'm Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom

“Immediately, several people performed what [he] now recognized as a modern dehumanization ritual: they pulled up their phones and started recording, breaking eye contact to focus on their screen instead.”
― Jason Pargin, I'm Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom

“He was oddly soothed by the sensation of having others in charge of the driving & navigation, even if they were heading toward some kind of doom.”
― Jason Pargin, I'm Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom