I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, Jason Pargin
Kyle reckons Jason Pargin’s I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom (2024, St. Martin’s Press) is likely to be his book of the year, so I’ve made a start on it this morning.
The opening lines are enough to confirm that this will be a delight,
Abbott Coburn had spent much of his twenty-six years dreading the wrong things, in the wrong amounts, for the wrong reasons. So it was appropriate that in his final hours before achieving international infamy, he was dreading a routine trip he’d accepted as a driver for the rideshare service Lyft.
Referring to minor characters by a distinctive trait works really well (emphasis mine),
Abbott was just beginning to rehearse how he would break the bad news to Lupita after his bold proclamation earlier when Tank Top casually said, “That him?”
The best analysis of Reddit outside of Reddit,
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, the sprawling message board of mostly young males armed with a vast arsenal of shallow knowledge and free time, humming with a relentless desire to assuage their boredom by continually ingesting and digesting new morsels of information.
[…] Reddit was divided up into thousands of subreddits, usually by subject, each moderated by volunteers with their own often-inscrutable rules, each sub operating as a parallel reality with its own distinct culture and moral code.
[…] Reddit posts were granted or denied visibility based on votes, specifically the votes of the most bored users who sifted through the slush pile of new submissions.
[…] Reddit, the vast message board that served something like half a billion users a month. This was, to a large degree, where the internet’s unfathomable gush of data was gathered, sorted, and shaped into a satisfying narrative. Redditors half-jokingly referred to themselves as a “hive mind,” a collective of idle brainpower that could solve complex mysteries and generate new hyper-specific porn fetishes at the rate of several per minute.
[…] audiences connected like neurons forming new pathways in a brain.
Interactions […] were becoming less and less fruitful as its population grew; they were now forty hours into the crisis, and news of it had spread well into the sphere of casual observers, though still with little in the way of mainstream press coverage. The sub was now the home of a core group of posters and a sprawling audience of spectators whose demands for compelling news were growing faster than it could be produced. Attention-seekers were eagerly filling the void, and that, friends, is how you build a bullshit machine.
The saga of Abbott and Petey Dumptruck (p.88-89) is sensational, capturing the experience of the anxious introvert succeeding in a social setting and feeling euphoric, unstoppable, “He could do that. He could do anything.” (p.99) followed by a crushing set back, then a resolution, but jaded,
He stood there, the nauseating realizations hitting him in waves.
[…] He was going to puke. Here was another familiar sensation, of being humiliated down to a level lower than he’d previously thought existed. When you’re so far down the social ladder that you’re basically lying on the floor, that’s when they love to stomp you the most, to grind your face into the shit. Ether had seen him coming a mile away because she saw in him what everyone saw: a clueless outcast whose people skills were so poor that tricking him was as easy as kicking an old dog.
[…] how easily he’d been swindled? How stupidly trusting he’d been?[…] He imagined them snickering at him from behind the counter and decided he’d just find someplace else. […] Maybe he should just step into traffic instead.
[…] But then he heard Ether say, “Where are you going? Get in!”
He spun to face her. “Where did you go?”
It was an accusation. Even in this moment, he was absolutely convinced that she’d abandoned him but had just changed her mind.[…] “I’ve been chasing you for several minutes. It was comical. Let’s go, hero!”
[…] he stood there for a moment, still enraged but now struggling to grasp exactly why. He felt his anger begin to dissipate but also felt an inexplicable impulse to cling to it with all his might.
This theme, of intense frustration and of feeling betrayed, jilted by society, and that it is this feeling that the Black Box of Doom amplifies, is really the through line of the novel,
Abbott wasn’t sure if he wanted a passerby to stop and intervene or if he was terrified that would happen. […] But of course he would take everything. This is how it always went. Here was another bully who’d sensed that Abbott was on the verge of actually having some kind of good thing in his life, which could never be allowed. The monsters just took what they wanted, and they got away with it, every time.
And Ether gradually drawing him out of himself and into the world, her encouragement, it all elicits the same excitement we have for an underdog story,
this is what an adventure is, just overcoming obstacles. We had a problem […] and we solved it.
Take a moment to stop and appreciate that about yourself.
Listen. What I’m about to say, I know I’m going to sound like a bumper sticker, but this is just me telling you the situation. Okay? So, all your life, you’ve been clinging to the side of a swimming pool. On the opposite side of that pool is everything you want: independence, respect, your own career and a home, and maybe a partner. But to get to the other side of the pool, you have to let go of the side you’re on. That lightheaded feeling you’re experiencing right now? Part of it is just that. You’re floating free, like a grown-up. Your own actions, your own consequences. Sink or swim.
You hate that the world treats you like a loser. Well, here’s your chance to prove them wrong.
The presentation of a villains interior experience is refreshing,
one cop pointed his gun Malort’s direction and screamed for him to get fucking down or get fucking shot. He didn’t normally like complying with cops, but sometimes you have to pick your battles. He tossed the shotgun into the Buick and then got low, thinking that if he were about to die, he was going to go out how he’d lived: with absolutely no idea what the hell was going on.
[…] Malort watched with anticipation, wondering if the kid would manage to take out either of the police before they ventilated his entire torso. At a moment when Malort was certain both cops had started pulling their fingers into their triggers, the girl in the Circle K shirt ran over to the kid, ripping the gun away and clawing him in the face. Then the cops started yelling at both of them, the school shooter now screaming and crying in protest. It was, without question, the funniest fucking thing Malort had ever seen.
[…] Just then, Malort turned his head, and there was the goddamned white Lincoln Navigator, rolling past at a leisurely pace, the girl visible in the passenger seat, some nerdy guy at the wheel. They rounded the corner toward the interstate and were gone. Malort cursed to himself, and also cursed loudly, to everyone in the vicinity.
Chronology and the sense of movement are handled well throughout eg,
It wasn’t even midnight in his native time zone, but it felt like he’d been awake for a week.
The sense that a lot is happening in a short space of time is well conveyed, especially so given that Day 1 (of 5) occupies almost half the book which, if handled poorly, might cause the reader to forget that less than 24 hours have passed.
Similar light touches reinforce this for Day 2,
Ether had bought bathing supplies as well as first aid for the various damage they’d accrued since waking up in Roswell.
— Jason Pargin, I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, 2024, Ch. Day 2, p. 196
This is probably the first internet culture book I’ve read, but I don’t feel I need other examples to note that this one is superb, archetypal.
The knowledge, regardless of its usefulness, would sate his anxiety just enough to let him soldier on through his day. To simply remain in the dark was unthinkable.
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. Zeke always compared it to watching that demon girl crawl out of the TV in The Ring, a barrier of safety and unreality breached and violated right before your eyes. He was now in bed but a million miles from sleep, terrified of missing the next bombshell. So now he was lying there, the room dark aside from the glow of the phone lighting his face.
[…] It was like the time he’d received a letter from his doctor implying there was grave news that could only be shared in-person, then when he’d called to make an appointment, was told the doctor had gone on vacation for two weeks.
In that way it reminds of what David Lodge did in his treatment of academia in Small World: An Academic Romance, 1984, Secker & Warburg.
The story of the story of little grey aliens (p.119-121), an example of a narrative within a narrative, is so tight. It begins and ends in two pages, neatly, and well. Yet it could be a whole other book. Things like that give the book its high pace, are what makes it so captivating, and is perhaps the thing above all that makes it an internet book.
Weaving these short, punchy, irreverent thrills and then distilling the underlying moral into the most reverent dialogue imaginable,
“Who knows? I mean, that’s the whole point—once they settled on a truth, everything else could be reframed to fit. […] That’s just how the brain works: It wants to shape everything into a narrative. Once you realize that, the whole world starts to make more sense. Or less sense.
[…] There’s this whole reality that people all over the world believe mind, body, and soul and when you trace it back to its origin, you find … nothing at all. Just a story so weird and terrifying that it becomes infectious, with mass media acting as the vector.”
File in the collection of unexpected wisdom from unlikeable characters,
Pedro had been Hunter’s business partner for seventeen years, a case of two perfectionists who were fortunate to find each other because no one else could tolerate them. Hunter would rather rip up a brand-new roof and start over rather than leave imperfect work in the world; he’d lost six figures on jobs that he’d redone for reasons that weren’t visible to anyone but him and, invariably, Pedro. His partner hadn’t started as a roof guy but a tile guy, which was perfect—tile guys tended to see themselves as artists, surgeons. Hunter believed with all his heart and soul that guys like them were part of a dying breed of masters, leaving behind work that would baffle generations of mediocrities.
There is no correct view of the world. Hunter (however insufferable) and Pedro found something they needed in each other, and came to an agreement to collaborate. I guess I’m primed to notice this now by the emerging plan to follow Kyle and Avvai (definitely not insufferable) back to Vancouver, Canada, and see how deep the rabbit hole goes1.
That’s the missing key for a lot of us: when a person who sees you as you are arrives in your life, find a way to say “hey, I think you have something I need”. That we so often let that opportunity pass us by has the essence of the Parable of the drowning man,
A storm descends on a small town, and the downpour soon turns into a flood. As the waters rise, the local preacher kneels in prayer on the church porch, surrounded by water. By and by, one of the townsfolk comes up the street in a canoe.
“Better get in, Preacher. The waters are rising fast.”
“No,” says the preacher. “I have faith in the Lord. He will save me.”
Still the waters rise. Now the preacher is up on the balcony, wringing his hands in supplication, when another guy zips up in a motorboat.
“Come on, Preacher. We need to get you out of here. The levee’s gonna break any minute.”
Once again, the preacher is unmoved. “I shall remain. The Lord will see me through.”
After a while the levee breaks, and the flood rushes over the church until only the steeple remains above water. The preacher is up there, clinging to the cross, when a helicopter descends out of the clouds, and a state trooper calls down to him through a megaphone.
“Grab the ladder, Preacher. This is your last chance.”
Once again, the preacher insists the Lord will deliver him.
And, predictably, he drowns.
A pious man, the preacher goes to heaven. After a while he gets an interview with God, and he asks the Almighty, “Lord, I had unwavering faith in you. Why didn’t you deliver me from that flood?”
God shakes his head. “What did you want from me? I sent you two boats and a helicopter.”
For the last forty years, everything has been built around getting into a car, going to an appointed place at an appointed time, and driving back. There’s no chance for adventure, to run into new friends, new situations. It’s all planned, supervised.
So much this. This synthesising of broad cultural feeling into literary sound bites. And that it occurs in the dialogue is key to its power, it sidesteps the instinctive aversion we all have to moralising. At least I think so, but he’s preaching to the choir in me so maybe there’s a rose tint.
If aliens landed, they’d think only cars lived here.
Endless highway scrolled under the dashboard. Around them was a lifeless expanse of grass and shrubs and power lines, the same nothing for mile after mile. Abbott had left an empty life and entered a void.
And man, the interplay of inner and outer dialogue is just so flippin good,
Abbott was still enraged but wasn’t totally sure who to be angry at. Maybe everyone. The goblin, Ether, himself, that guy in the truck with his tiny goatee. Fuck him and the horse that rode in on him.
[…] Abbott scrambled to think of a fake name at the exact same time his mouth went ahead and said, “Abbott.”
Like all of us, they’re just
dazed, feeling clumsily around with their hands and trying to figure out why the world had suddenly flipped on its head.
I’m losing steam for annotation, which is a shame because the thread of the black box with its Forbidden Numbers warrants words,
“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.”
He was bored by everything normal but lacked the tools to survive excursions into the dangerous and exotic.
“It’s just money […], a transaction. Stop piling grand emotional significance onto it. That’s the other thing about living in the black box—you get trained to turn every little thing in your life into a grand fucking psychodrama.”
