Excerpts From The Black Box of Doom
The following are quotes from a novel, "I'm Starting To Worry About This Black Box of Doom". I highly recommend it.
For 25 years, the author, humorist Jason Pargin, has written articles (notably on Cracked dot com) to help the overly-online avoid getting radicalized. I respect him as one of the foremost people doing that. And his novels are fantastic.
In most of the following passages, Ether is talking to the character Abbot, who is clinging to fatalism, isolation, shame, and suspicion. Want the novel's central thesis, free of spoilers? Here it is.
Emphases in blockquotes are mine.
The Parts About Fatalism
"You're not going to want to hear this," Ether began, cautiously. "But I think some of what you're feeling right now is just sleep deprivation. It makes anxiety worse, and in people like us, that makes the catastrophizing worse. And when you get scared, you get angry. 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."
"We think the world is ending because the world is ending," snapped Abbott.
...
"My grandfather," continued Ether, "who I basically never talk to anymore, one hundred percent believes Christ is going to return to earth at any minute to bring about the apocalypse, due to mankind’s sinfulness. He believes
everything he watches on the news is a sign: encroaching Communism, the Satanic conspiracy to allow gays to marry, race-mixing, debauchery, pornography, drag queens, the QAnon child sex cult, the climate change ‘hoax’ he says has fooled the world. He has a TV on every minute he’s awake, tuned to these ultra-right-wing news outlets ranting about depravity."
"I know old guys like that," said Abbott. "My dad works with a couple. They’re nuts. You can’t even talk to them."
"So we can agree that, purely via the carefully filtered media a person consumes, they can come to fully believe in an apocalypse that is not, in fact, occurring?"
"I mean, the world is on fire, just not in the way your grandpa thinks."
"Are you one hundred percent sure, Abbott, that you haven’t fallen into the exact same trap, just from the other side?"
"Ah, you’re about to tell me climate change isn’t real."
"I am not. I’ve seen the melting ice with my own two eyes. But let me ask you this: When I met you, I asked if you felt like you were cursed to be born when you were, if you felt like you had arrived just in time to see the world end."
...
"Okay, and in my corner of the internet, the harbingers of doom were the opposite: savage patriarchal governments crushing women’s rights, taking us back to the dark ages while overpopulation destroys the environment. 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."
"That wouldn’t make them both wrong."
Ether groaned and put her head in her hands.
"Okay," she said, trying again. "How about this: What do you think the world will look like in the future, post-collapse?"
Abbott thought for a moment as if picturing it. "Uh, terrified people scrounging for food and running from bandits. Rampant disease, infrastructure breakdown. All the stuff from the movies, I guess."
"No internet?"
"I wouldn't think so."
"No electricity? No running water, no sewage? No hospitals?"
"Probably not."
"Got it. So, what I'm about to say isn't an opinion, it's not a matter of personal philosophy or politics. It is an objective fact that what you're describing is how virtually all humans have lived through all of history. Until, that is, about thirty years ago. Just in the time I've been alive, somewhere between two and a half and three billion people got their first access to clean water and toilets. That's billion, with a B. About that same number got electricity in their homes for the first time in their lives. Worldwide, infant mortality has been cut in half, illiteracy has dropped almost as much. Suicides are going up here in the US, but worldwide, they've dropped by a third—again, that's all just in my lifetime. Basically, every positive category has skyrocketed: access to communication, paved roads, motorized transportation, international travel, climate control, medicine..."
"Okay, it sounds like you're talking about a bunch of good stuff that happened in China and India and—I don't know. A bunch of poor countries I'll never visit."
"I'm talking about how your entire life span has been spent in a literal reverse apocalypse. I'm talking about billions of people who lived in what you would consider post-collapse conditions have had those conditions remedied, gaining roofs and lights and safety. A human's chances of dying from famine or natural disasters are as low as they've ever been, ever, in the history of the species. It's been nothing short of a worldwide miracle that makes everything Jesus supposedly did in the Bible look like party tricks.
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.
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."
"That's nice. And again, nothing you said means anything considering the world's scientists have agreed that climate change will wipe out civilization."
"If we don't fix it, yeah. Climate change is a huge deal; it's terrifying. And also, it is objectively true that if we do fix it, the media will only report it as bad news.
All the headlines will be about the oil and coal workers who lost their jobs, birds dying to windmills — they'll only focus on the negative side effects. And don't tell me we never clean up our messes. There used to be oil slicks on our rivers that would literally catch fire. Sulfur dioxide used to choke the air—when's the last time you've heard about acid rain? Or the hole in the ozone layer? Go read about how previous generations all had lead poisoning or how food contamination used to be a nightmare. I'm not saying everything will be fine; I can't predict the future. 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."
"Or maybe it's hard for people to care about toilets in India when another maniac is shooting up a school every week."
"You think that happens every week?"
"I bet you have a whole bunch of stats to dump on me about that, too. I'm sure the parents of those dead kids would love to hear them."
"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."
"And this is an ... alien worm?" asked Abbott. "Is that what's in the box?"
"No, they're from Earth. They've been infecting people for millennia. They're called Guinea worms. In the 1980s, more than three million people a year were infested with them. Last year, it was fifteen."
"Fifteen million?"
"No. Fifteen."
"I don't get it."
"What happened is that just in the time you and I have been alive, a whole bunch of heroes coordinated across a whole bunch of countries in Africa and Asia and elsewhere and wiped out the Guinea worm. Countless millions have lived and often died with horrible, three-foot-long worms in their bodies, including lots of children. But no more. While your news feeds were bludgeoning you with stories of school shootings, pathological politicians, and nonstop outrage, this war against the worms was quietly won thanks to relentless, selfless effort by thousands of strangers."
The Parts About Isolation
"No, listen. I think you find it draining to deal with anyone face-to-face. And I think it's specifically because you can't control it. Online, you can duck out of any conversation, you can say anything you want, you can calibrate how you come across. Not here."
"The ability to block people yelling death threats and making racist jokes is a net positive, in my mind."
"Sure, but I think our interactions could be totally great the whole time and you'd find it just as exhausting because the world has trained you to be afraid of being fully and truly perceived. We're social animals; that's the equivalent of making a fish afraid of water! We evolved in tribes where everybody could see everybody else, all the time; we didn't even have separate rooms or beds. Just by evolution, you should find personal contact comforting, and the fact that they've burned that out of so many of us is apocalyptic."
"You know what we're missing," said Ether, "is gathering places. All those people killing themselves by various means fast and slow, I'm telling you, part of that is that we just don't gather anymore. We've stopped going to church, we've built suburbs where people don't have that third place that isn't work or home, where everybody can go hang out. You can't do that at a chain restaurant; they want you out of there so they can seat the next customer. Young people don't go to bars or clubs like they used to. But in general, there's just no profit in providing a public place where we can all just go and be together. All the money is in, I don't know, getting us addicted to some piece of software. You talked about people gambling on their phones; think how sad that is—going broke from blackjack from your sofa without even a cheap casino buffet to cushion the blow."
...
"I heard that the average number of close friends has dropped over the last thirty years ... It used to be that the number of loners who literally had no friends was tiny, like three percent of the population. That's quadrupled since then; now twelve percent of us have nobody. Today, you're almost as likely to be totally alone as you are to have a big squad of friends like teenagers have in the movies. I'm telling you, it's a crisis. Humans need friends every bit as much as we need food. But because this kind of starvation is invisible, and because we're all physically really fat, nobody sees it. Then, every ten minutes or so, somebody sticks a gun in their mouth."
"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."
The Parts About Shame
"What's the worst that can happen, you'll do it wrong and it'll be awkward? It's weird how scared people are of that these days, the kids call it cringe, like that's the worst thing that can happen, messing up a real-life interaction. Nobody has people skills, because they stay home all the time, so they're scared to do anything but stay at home because they're afraid of being weird in public or getting caught on camera and mocked by millions of strangers. It's an isolation vortex."
"I don’t even know what you’re talking about right now. I may have just blown up my whole life here."
"It's important, it ties into our whole mission, this atomization cloud that's swallowing up everybody. Real friendships, real bonds are based on being genuine and vulnerable and flawed around each other, but we're constantly told that's dangerous. Ask yourself, who benefits from that? Who wants a society where there are no strong bonds between individuals?"
"[AmIHotOrNot dot com] was just a silly idea somebody had. It took them a week to code it, but it was objectively the most important and influential website ever created. Mark Zuckerberg started Facebook to be a HotOrNot ripoff, YouTube was launched to be a video version of it—that’s a trillion dollars’ worth of market cap right there. 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. ... 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 ... 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.’ ... 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. ... What the people want is a cruel, all-powerful being that they can simultaneously obey and also endlessly complain about.”
...
"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 [process works] 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.”
... “Yeah, I think he’s convinced me that we should find this thing and destroy it.”
“No! There’s nothing to destroy! That’s just another lie the system tells
us, that the only solutions worth considering are the ones that are exciting to
think about. Spectacle..."
The Parts About Suspicion
"...the two of us, as individuals, in this car, were doing fine. We've gone through danger together, we've trusted each other, we've cooperated on a common cause. But you just talked yourself into a seething rage because you've abruptly decided we're on opposite sides of some culture war. You and I aren't at war! We want the same thing, to get this stupid box to its destination."
...
"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."
"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. ... Now, what was supposed to hold all this together was religion, that we'd put aside our differences because we're all children of God and so on. But half of us don't go to church anymore, so now that's your biggest fault line. Abortion, gay marriage, trans rights, the War on Christmas—it all boils down to old-school religion versus new-school secularism, and both sides secretly believe that, eventually, the other will have to go. Now add to that the fact that we're all just bored. 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."
"You know those postapocalyptic zombie shows where they have to cross the wastelands and they're like, 'We can't trust anybody out here! We're on our own!' Well, that's a geek fantasy for indoor kids. Out here, in the real world, in the actual desert, this is when you have to be willing to trust people. You don't have a chance otherwise. Trust is the only advantage humans have as a species, that millions of us can all get together and trust one another.
"I'm not going to say that those friendships aren't real," said Ether. "I'm not an asshole. But any friend who abandons you over a baseless internet rumor wasn't your real friend. Whether you knew them in person or on a screen."
"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.'"
"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. I watch my videos from back then and - I don't know. It's like watching a stranger. 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."