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

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

This book is dark social commentary under the guise of a road trip. Abbot is a reluctant Lyft driver and Twitch streamer who is offered a lot of money to take a woman and a box cross-country. He doesn’t even usually like to go out of the house. Going would mean using his father’s SUV for several days and he knows his dad would hate that. But, he could use the money to move out. He decides to do it. Before they leave he makes a quick video telling his audience what he is doing. His audience knows this is way out of character and they start to investigate.

He knew what he was about to do was dangerous. He was summoning a dark force that, once unleashed, no man or government could contain. But he could see no other options. Zeke was going to take this problem to the hive mind at Reddit…

From here the internet does what the internet does and spins conspiracy theory after conspiracy theory as Abbot and Ether drive east, oblivious to the whole uproar. Abbot doesn’t know at first that Ether is being chased by someone who also wants the box.

Never challenge a man in a Buick. He’s got nothin’ to lose.

A retired FBI agent thinks that this may tie in to a few loose ends that she had at the end of her career. She’s trying to get her friends left in the agency to investigate but they don’t care.

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.

This is the type of book where I’m glad I was reading the ebook so I could highlight long passages.

Key’s tenure had been marred by turmoil, beginning with a mandate to summarize the threat from left-wing extremists, to which she had made the ill-advised comment, “You’re worried about an uprising from a population that needs four different antianxiety prescriptions to order a pizza over the phone?”

Her views deviated sharply from the bureau’s in that she believed all mass shootings were acts of terrorism, even if they didn’t conform to the government’s suffocatingly narrow definition of the term. They believed “terrorism” required a specific ideology, but these modern attacks were a grab bag of loosely held beliefs that secretly all pointed in the same direction: a desire to destroy the ability and willingness of individuals to gather in public and form communities. They were attacks on social cohesion, pushing a vision of the future that, in many cases, not even the attackers were aware of. 

You’d think they’d learn to put their differences aside for the cause, but that’s hard to do when you’ve been raised to believe there’s no such thing as a minor disagreement. If you think that, say, a cashier failing to wish you a Merry Christmas is a sign of impending Christian genocide, you’re probably not the type to hash out differences over brunch.

Key believed the world was full of crazy men who were kept tethered to reality by sane women, though this was the kind of thing that, again, never got a great reaction when said around the office.

There is a lot of discussion dealing with the types of arguments that get blown way out of proportion on social media. The black box of doom is what Ether calls the social media algorithms that controls what people see and how they think.

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.’

“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.

One or more of the characters in this book will have beliefs that will likely be highly offensive to any given reader. But they are all thrown together in the real world and need to deal with each other. They can’t walk away or storm off and get validation from people who are on their side. It is a new experience for some of them. It may be for the readers too.

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.

They’ll search the vehicle and it’ll be scary and traumatic, but then we’ll get over it, because despite what the modern world insists, you can actually get over bad things happening to you.

I was reading this in the days before the election. It was not comforting.

Well, social media algorithms are a twenty-four-seven humiliation machine. That, Phil believed, is how a population is primed for authoritarian rule.

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.’

This book was very funny but it will also make you think deeply.