It all started with the Walkman. I was forty years old the first time I saw one, a kid in downtown LA wearing headphones and blasting music from a cassette player on his belt, shutting out the world. This technology had literally invented a new kind of human behavior never previously observed in the species, closing off sense organs to intentionally block out face-to-face social interaction. That was the first time I understood that technology could put the individual in a mental cocoon, replacing the nutrients of tangible socialization with the sweet, processed slurry of passive mass media. When the internet came along a decade later, I knew we were counting down the days until we had the internet version of the Walkman, a portable device that would relieve the individual of the burden to function as a member of society. Only now, instead of the hypnotism of music, it is the parasite of the Forbidden Numbers, rewiring the brain, altering the subject’s very ability to perceive the universe itself. All around me are youths under the grip of cluster B personality disorders that used to be rare but now are the norm, minds totally unable to process physical reality. They transmogrify sensory input into a simplistic technicolor melodrama, the only reality they’ve been trained to understand. I need groceries. I don’t know if it’s safe for me to drive in my current state of health. The meds are making me sick. I don’t want to ask her to take me. She told me they have services now, through your phone, where you can pay a stranger to do your shopping for you. But of course that exists; in a world in which we have all been robbed of the friendships we’d previously have relied upon for such favors, corporations have stepped in with algorithms tuned to the Forbidden Numbers. I feel them calling to me, their promises of eternal frictionless convenience and distraction. A warm, wet, comfortable pod, customized to fit me like a glove. I will not succumb. I will die a free man. I will die fighting.

— Phil Greene in Jason Pargin, I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, 2024, St. Martin’s Press, Ch. Day 3, p. 227-228