The Weekly Anthropocene Interviews: Jason Pargin, Cosmic Satirist of Hope
Jason Pargin is an acclaimed novelist, satirist, and social commentator. He is known as the author of the existential cosmic horror/comedy John Dies at the End series, the futuristic cyberpunk thriller Zoey Ashe series, as well several viral essays including the "Monkeysphere" explanation of Dunbar's Number. His new standalone novel, I'm Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, explores themes that are highly relevant to this newsletter’s focus, content, and reason for being.
Where to buy I'm Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom.
A lightly edited transcript of this exclusive interview follows. This writer’s questions and remarks are in bold, Mr. Pargin’s responses are in regular type. Bold italics are clarifications and extra information added after the interview.
This interview is syndicated by both The Weekly Anthropocene and Your Daily Dose of Climate Hope.
Your latest novel, to me, really reads as a combination of your two previous series genres, a mix of cosmic horror/comedy and cyberpunk thriller. So of course it is set in present-day America and it’s about social media. Could you tell me about your new book, and the “Black Box of Doom” concept? I find it to be one of the best, most intuitive descriptions of the major problems with the modern social media - dominated information space that I've ever seen.
Basically the setup in my book, I'm Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, is that a rumor goes around on the internet that there's a domestic terror attack on the capital in progress and that the authorities are not taking it seriously. So you have this ticking clock in which a bunch of extremely online weirdos have to try to get to the bottom of what they believe is a weapon of mass destruction being driven to the capital across the country. And that goes about as badly as you would expect, because if you have followed any recent story as it unfolds on Twitter or TikTok or elsewhere, including multiple recent domestic terror attacks, you see how instantly the facts get distorted to fit some kind of a narrative, because the news comes so fast, but in real time, almost everything you hear is wrong to some degree.
Yeah.
So at one point, a character says that there's a metaphorical black box of doom built around everybody. This media ecosystem basically functions as a filter so that all incoming information is distorted in a particular way. Specifically, it gets shaped into a narrative that leads you to one conclusion, which is that the only safe place for you is at home in front of a screen, because the outside world is dangerous and people encountered in real life are scary.
This is written from the point of view of an author who, me, who is extremely online. I'm required to do it for my job. I can watch how this has shaped my brain and the brains of all the people I interact with. And I don't mean that in a good way at all.
Your book felt to me like a parable about the reasons why I write this newsletter. I’m trying to cut a window in the Black Box of Doom!
When there's amazing good news stories in the world, like the rapid growth of solar energy or the fact that we invented malaria vaccines that could save millions of children's lives in Africa, they get some coverage but they never seem to go viral or become common knowledge.
Last year, Kim Stanley Robinson told me something really striking. The quote is “You have an imaginary relationship with the real situation.” And that just seemed to really encapsulate a lot of what you're talking about. With social media, it seems like everyone's imaginary relationship with the real world has been skewed into this really distorted negative place.
There's a specific reason for it. And I feel like everybody understands it, but it doesn't prevent us from falling for it. Which is that news and entertainment ideally would serve two totally different functions, entertainment ideally would be a form of escapism and fantasy and dreaming, whereas news is just telling you this thing happened over here. But in the human brain, we really don't separate those two things and we gravitate toward news that is entertaining.
And that's a problem because real news does not arrive as a neat narrative the way entertainment requires. With entertainment, generally it's good if you have a clear good guy and a bad guy and a moral lesson and all of that, where most news is just “That's a thing that happened.” The causes of the thing may be extremely technical. There may not be a clear good guy or a bad guy. There may not be a clear ending to the story or a satisfactory one. When the brain tries to contort one into the other, you just get entertainment.
So in this book, my book, somebody says, “Imagine if 50 years from now, it turns out that we have overcome climate change through technology, through whatever we've needed to do to fix it. We've successfully done it. We get the best case scenario. We have reversed the warming. We have avoided the worst of the outcomes. That information will arrive in the headlines only as bad news. The only headlines you will see will be about birds dying in the windmills, or maybe the geoengineering thing we did to reflect sunlight caused some side effect. Everything will only focus on the negative.” And I know this because I've watched it happen over and over again in my life.
Yes! I mean, look at the response to humanity’s massive success on healing the ozone layer. Avoided catastrophes get no clicks.
Climate change itself is the result of us solving previous problems.
Absolutely.
The things that had plagued humanity, such as inability to travel, inability to make and grow enough goods and food, all of those things, it is resolving those problems that resulted in climate change. It is a side effect of having solved a previous problem. Now you arrive at a point where the chance of dying of starvation is lower now than at any point in the history of the species! But that abundance has all sorts of bad side effects, and now that's what we see and that's what we talk about.
That's fine if your goal is to motivate people to try to fix a problem, to say, hey, now we need to focus on this. But that's not the way it gets delivered in the media. The way it gets delivered and the way people who are extremely online see it is, “Things are worse than ever,” which is an insane way to see the world.
It is! It is. Things have gotten really off in our information processing about the state of the world. On your Substack, you once wrote something like “I saw my friends sitting around a table full of food and showing each other funny things on their pocket supercomputers, and they were describing this situation as a literal apocalypse.”
Yeah, because the challenge that we're facing is trying to avoid reversing this progress! The fact is that we are, by every way that you can measure, living in the golden age of civilization. In terms of how long people live, the availability of food, medicine, shelter, climate control, electricity, transportation. Even if you forget about all of the trivial stuff and just focus on the most meaningful things like literacy and child mortality, people's children not dying, things are objectively better now than at any point in history.
There's no good old days you can go back to. If you reversed just 30 years, say because you remember the 1990s as being particularly great and wish you could go back there, if you reverse the clock to the 90s, you're dropping over a billion people back into extreme poverty and you're making gay marriage illegal for hundreds of millions of people. You're reversing an unimaginable amount of progress.
And that is kind of a very weird and privileged position to be in, to only see the problems and not realize how different the world looks now than it has looked at any point in the past. So when we talk about all of the bad things happening, talking about spreading war in Europe or the effects of climate change, the danger there is that it can roll back this progress. Not that, as some people phrase it, things were wonderful at some point in the past and they've just been degrading ever since.
That narrative of decline, I think it's not just depressing. I think it leads people to some awful conclusions and it leads people to types of extremism, based on, “Well, it doesn't matter what happens because anything would be better than this.”
When the reality is almost the reverse! Living at almost any point in any previous human civilization would be worse than this.
The life of an average person in a developed country today is in many important ways materially richer than the than the richest person in the world just a couple hundred years ago. In the 1830s, Nathan Rothschild, then the richest man in the world, died of a simple infected wound. There was no amount of money that could get him the antibiotics to cure that back then, and now you can get antibiotics at any pharmacy.
You had a really great subplot in your book that encapsulates this, which is “the worms.” One of your characters, Ether, just mysteriously references that on an early page, like “You’re not ready to know about the worms.”
I love this story, I knew the real-life story, but I didn't know that was what Ether was referring to until I got into the middle of the book. And then I was like, oh, this is the perfect way to introduce the story of the worms. Have it be this mysterious thing dropped in the beginning, secret knowledge, and then you explain it later. So can you explain the story of the worms as your character Ether said it?
She keeps hinting that there’s this thing that’s been happening behind the scene with “the worms,” the mysterious worms. It sounds like she's crazy. And eventually, and this is a mild spoiler, she's referencing the guinea worm. Which is one of the most horrible things on this earth, where basically it has plagued humans forever.
This thing, its egg enters your body and then it makes its way to its muscle tissue. Then this worm starts growing through your muscle tissue and grows up to be up to three feet long. Eventually it erupts from the skin in a painful burning blister, which motivates you to dunk that limb in water. Which is what it wants you to do, because then it releases the eggs to then spread to other people.
This is something that used to hurt millions of people. Millions of children got infected with these worms every year.
Right now, the cases of guinea worm infections have almost reached zero. We have almost entirely successfully eradicated it. One of the most horrible things you could experience, we have eradicated it over the last few decades due to a whole bunch of work, including by the late Jimmy Carter, and a lot of volunteers and a lot of very difficult, steady, heroic work.
But that was done entirely in the background. This thing that's quietly wiped out, a huge amount of suffering that's quietly gone away, it doesn't really make headlines, and if they do make headlines, it doesn't go viral. Whereas if this was something new that happened, if suddenly there was a news story where a child had this three-foot-long worm growing through their muscles and now they're worried this is going to spread, there would be a panic. It would be like, oh my god, here's another sign of the apocalypse. But when you have quietly reversed an apocalyptic event, we kind of just don't care!
Yeah, that is really true. Reverse apocalypses get ignored!
Relatedly, you had a great article why apocalypse fantasies are stupid.
Like, what do people think about when they think about apocalypse. Lack of electricity, lack of clean water, widespread violence? That's normal for most humans who have ever lived! We've had a reverse apocalypse lately, and that's the reason that lack of electricity and lack of clean water seem apocalyptic to us. I just thought that was a really good perspective.
For a background on that, I grew up in an evangelical church. One thing that kind of drove me away from it when I became a teenager is they became really focused on the end of the world. This was in the 80s and 90s, and that particular branch of evangelical Christianity became really focused on end of the world scenarios, everything falling apart because this will signal Christ's return. And eventually I figured out that what they're describing, when they picture starvation, pestilence, war, what they're describing is how everyone lived for 99% of human history. Extreme poverty and sickness, those were just routine.
So it's almost weird that there’s this modern American view of, “But what if that happened in my neighborhood, can you imagine? That would signal the end of time!” It's like, no, you're describing the way almost everybody lived until the industrial revolution. You're describing what was normal. You've become so disconnected from it, the idea of “What if there was a plague? What if there was violence in the streets? What if everything was reduced to rubble?” There's somebody living like that pretty much all the time somewhere, and there are fewer people living like that as a percentage than ever before.
Again, it's not to say there's no problems in the world. It's not to say that there can't be cataclysms in the world. It's just that it's helpful to understand you are living through an unprecedentedly cataclysm-free period.
Yeah, that's a really good point, and that is one thing I'm trying to write about. And there's a couple other concepts that feed into this, really. I wrote an article you might enjoy called “If Something New Seems "Unnatural" or "Dystopian," Consider What It's Replacing.”
I feel that it really dovetails with your article, which I enjoyed very much, about the widespread weaponization of disgust in political discourse. I’ve noticed that this is a major problem for some potentially huge suffering-reducing and emissions-reducing technologies, like lab-grown meat — which could be potentially another huge reverse apocalypse!
When things are new and people don't really have strong opinions about them yet, you can generate substantial opposition just by hitting the disgust button and trying to associate disgusting words or phrases or imagery. So could you discuss your concept of the weaponization of disgust in political discourse?
Sure, because it's a little bit more complicated than what people might think. An easy way to notice is look at anybody who's trying to scaremonger about immigration. Because with something like immigration, this to me is the perfect example of discussing a real issue in a way that's not helpful at all.
For the most part, people who make their living as pundits trying to scare people about immigrants, watch how long they talk before they start describing the immigrants as “smelling bad” or “bringing disease” or just in general being “dirty” or “savage.” These are emotions trying to trigger visceral disgust in you. It's not trying to reach the logic center of your brain. It's trying to reach the gut because you have these basic instincts for avoiding disgusting things. It's an evolutionary response to avoid disease or rot or anything like that that can make you sick. So if they can appeal to your sense of disgust, it will “turn off” the logic centers of your brain.
Immigration in the real world is this unbelievably complicated bureaucratic issue. It's a paperwork issue, it's an issue of like trying to figure out the safest and best way to let people in and get them jobs and get them settled. It is not exciting, it is not terribly interesting to the average person. But if you can paint it as an “infection” that is “infecting our country,” — which is what dictators have done forever, saying these outsiders are a disease — then people will do whatever you say because we instinctively want to avoid disease
You can see this if you watch carefully. For example if they want to make you afraid of some new technology like electric cars or clean energy or whatever, what they will do is say the type of person who likes these things, or the type of people who eat vegetarian meat substitutes, they're too “effeminate” or “weak.” They'll describe their personalities in a way that, again, makes you feel disgust. Like, “This man who is doing these things, he's not manly enough.” This man who's driving an electric car, that's a signal that he's not tough or manly or brave. They're trying to make you feel disgust because certain types of men are disgusted by other men who don't perform masculinity right. That also is disgust.
So they would simultaneously see someone who is living in filth as being disgusting. But if they see someone who is too clean or whatever, they would also be disgusted by that, because then that person is “effeminate” or “prissy” or whatever word they would use.
It all comes down to trying to make you feel something in your gut. That basically comes down to “be disgusted by anyone outside of your group and anyone who practices different customs than your group.” So it's tying disgust to basically anyone who doesn't live exactly the way “we” do.
That is like a cheat code, almost, for human brains. That is a parasite of its own, a memetic parasite. It's using a different attack line to the human psyche than logic and reason and argument.
Yeah. Conservatives have latched on to the trans issue because it triggers visceral disgust in so many people on their side. In their brains, the idea of a man wearing a dress or of a woman with a beard, that's disgusting. And so getting into the finer points of how to run a women's sports league or health care for children, all those are technicalities. What they are doing is appealing to just this base sense of disgust about “these people,” they will imply that they're dangerous. All they're really doing is saying, “Isn't it disgusting,” the way this person is acting versus how “we” feel like they should act, or the way they look versus how “we” feel they should look.
Again, it's not trying to make an argument. It's not actually trying to make an argument about actual detriment or benefit to society. It's just trying to trigger your disgust.
And when you notice people trying to manipulate you like this, it kind of changes how you see the world. Because they may be right about some issue or other, but they're arguing from a place of trying to use playground insults. The kind of thing where when you were a kid, bullies who were just trying to exclude you from from the group would imply something about you that was disgusting. It helps if you think in those terms, that, hey, you're using an approach that would have been used in when I was in middle school. If you're talking to me as an adult, there should be a different standard for how we talk.
I agree. I absolutely agree with that. And for people who believe that, who want to work on more than disgust, what is your advice for surviving four years where U.S. cabinet secretaries are talking to each other with middle school insults?
I'm actually scheduling this interview to come out on January 20th, 2025, Inauguration Day, because I think that your sort of conceptualization of the black box of doom and how to not get stuck in it will be really important for just maintaining mental health over the next four years.
Because a lot of stuff like solar panels and malaria vaccines and guinea worm eradication and basic functional society will continue making progress, but there will also be really visible weaponization of disgust and insults and othering. This middle school bully behavior will be center stage in pretty much every major news source in the world.
So what's your advice on trying to maintain that mindset in a time where it can very much feel like it's under siege, so to speak?
I don't think you can ever expect anyone else to manage your feeds for you. You cannot go on whatever feeds or platforms you use, if you're still using Twitter or if you're going on TikTok, and bemoan the stuff you're being shown.
No one is going to do it for you.
You have to manage this yourself.
And there's this thing where every platform will try to lie to you and say, “Well, if you really care about this issue, then you'll be on here talking about it!”
My argument would be that if you want to become really informed about politics, you would delete the Twitter app off your phone altogether.
Maybe then you tell yourself, “But then I'm just blocking out the information, I will be ignorant.” No, there's other places to get information. There are other places to get news. There are books you can read to actually become informed about things. If you're letting a platform distill an issue down to one sentence or down to 15 seconds of a video, you are actively becoming less informed.
And you can sit here and bemoan that this is how the world is and that these platforms exist, but you are ultimately powerless to make them stop existing. What you have absolute power over is what you expose yourself to and how you manage these things and what accounts you block and what arguments you choose to participate in.
Because here's the thing, there are some arguments or debates that by participating, you're already making things worse. Because the form of the argument is already taking you to a dark place. You've already agreed to their terms and are now just going back and forth saying “Okay, well, but which group should we find disgusting?” Now you're just yelling playground insults back and forth at each other.
And you think you're striking a blow against them, but no. Don't you understand that as long as the exchange takes place on that level, they win no matter what?
At some point, you have to extract yourself from that situation and say:
I have to manage my own mental health.
I have to manage how this makes me feel about other people.
I have to manage how afraid this is making me of my neighbors and of my fellow citizens.
Only you can do that. These platforms are not ever going to come in and help you be a better person. They make more money if you are just obsessively online yelling at people and looking at people yelling at you and engaging in that.
They only care that you remain glued to the screen.
Only you can do this. It's the same thing as with diet or anything else. Only you can manage what you eat. Only you can manage what you buy. Well, information is the same way.
There is information that is a form of junk food that has been specifically crafted to, you know, to light up certain things in your brain. And in general, as a rule, if politics has become entertaining, then it has become useless.
That's a really powerful statement. Speaking of the politics should be boring thing. I'd like to ask you a question. What are your thoughts on the Inflation Reduction Act?
I think that this is a perfect example. What we just saw is that if you have an administration that passes a multi-trillion dollar bit of policy, the amount of engagement, discussion, posts, and tweets about it will be about one one-millionth of what happens when Donald Trump makes a penis joke. Because once politics becomes entertainment, then how you rank information is not going to be by how impactful and meaningful it is, but rather by how entertaining it is.
I think there are people out there who think of Donald Trump's [first] presidency as being incredibly eventful, and it was if you consider lots of outrageous statements that generated lots of engagement and lots of news coverage as being events.
In terms of policy, the main impact of Trump's administration was that he remade the judiciary. He got a lot of judges approved on the Supreme Court and elsewhere. Other than that, there were some tax cuts for the rich and tons and tons and tons of just outrageous statements that didn't come to anything.
For example, today I have seen many, many tweets where Donald Trump and/or Elon Musk made a joke about annexing Canada. That's a news cycle because that's outrage. It's a crazy thing to say. Can you believe this crazy thing he said? So people stare at the screens for a while and argue about it. And then we will still be arguing about it long after Donald Trump forgets that he even said that.
Meanwhile, there are people whose perception of the Biden administration is that absolutely nothing happened, that Joe Biden didn't do anything. Well, it's true he didn't make a lot of headlines for saying crazy things, but he quietly passed a piece of legislation that actually totally changes the trajectory of American energy policy and is going to have an effect for the next 100 years!
And the amount of public attention it got was minimal. Because it is huge and technical and all of that, and there's not a neat good guy or bad guy, and there's not a social justice outrage angle, and there's no element of disgust in it. Because it's largely a series of technical things that are being funded just kind of quietly.
I'm not going to accuse the news media of not writing about it. Someone who's reading this who works for The New York Times could give us link after link saying, look, we did all of this coverage! That is absolutely true. But the way people get their news now, and the way it filters its way out into Facebook and social media, the engagement was negligible.
That's the thing. Fundamentally, it's a demand-side phenomenon. Part of what I'm trying to do is, I guess, dramatize the “boring progress” part of politics. I try to write little news articles every week for years saying, look, here's a cool thing the Inflation Reduction Act funded! With, like, a cool graphic or something. Just to try to get it into people's black boxes of doom and poke their entertainment button enough that people are like, oh, hey, here's an actual real world bit of policy that matters. I guess I'm kind of trying to work with these dynamics that you're talking about and smuggle in some information about important stuff.
To say that it’s difficult is a ridiculous understatement. I don’t blame people. The average person, they’ve worked all day, they come home and they’re cooking dinner for the kids, then they browse the headlines. If I say, this would be a great time to read about 4,000 pages of legislation and just where these tax dollars are going and how this could impact climate and manufacturing and all these things….I get it. They want to see something fun. I understand that. It makes sense. It even makes sense that they elected a president from the world of reality TV. They wanted electoral politics to be a reality show, he had that experience. If it hadn't been him, maybe it would have just been somebody else. Somebody else who understands inherently that what people want is a show and they want to be entertained and they want outrage.
And quietly, behind the scenes, there's bureaucrats everywhere that are going to continue to pass laws and update regulations and get the work done quietly to keep the trains running on time. Maybe this media ecosystem sees the president's job as to just go up and be a stand-up comic and say some ridiculous things so everybody can argue about it for a while. Then when you have a president who doesn't do that and just does the boring legislative work in the background to try to overcome a series of crises, we get enraged because it's like “He hasn't done anything!” Well, no, he did all sorts of things, but they weren't entertaining, so they didn't make it into the device you look at to entertain yourself!
I don't blame people for being like this. I fall victim to it all the time. “Our side” falls victim to it. For example, a lot of people want to look at climate change as if it's a comic book movie, where you've got a few evil villains and then if you can go defeat those villains then everything will be fine again. When in reality, climate change is just this unbelievably difficult challenge of engineering and coordination and regulation and legislation. It is this unbelievably complex issue that is gonna be overcome mostly by technology and a series of extremely long and technical treaties and regulations and documents that would put you to sleep if you tried to read them.
We want to see it as this exciting battle between good and evil. But some of the companies that cause climate change are going to be the same ones that solve it. Some companies are just going to pivot to what type of energy they're providing and some of the same people are going to get rich. And that's just kind of the way it works.
And a lot of this is perspective, right? One of the really good examples of your “black box of doom” theory is the reaction to medical advances.
Because like with guinea worms, they're some of the most clear-cut advances that you can have, right? This disease or injury previously killed people. Now it doesn't.
But whenever a new medical thing is announced — and there have been a LOT of amazing new medical things announced lately, like malaria vaccines, GLP-1 agonists, potentially some freaking CANCER vaccines! — I’m noticing two major negative responses to it.
One is, “It must be secretly bad in some way we don't understand yet,” shading into outright conspiracy theory stuff. Or for a more intelligent sort of doomer perspective, I often see articles along the lines of “this advance is a good thing, but it's being unequally distributed, or the poorest people don't have it yet, so that somehow makes it a bad news story.”
And I’m like, no, this miracle cure has not somehow become a bad news story because not everybody has the new miracle cure yet! Look at the context! Nobody had it 20 years ago. Nobody had Ozempic or malaria vaccines 20 years ago. The fact that not everyone has them now doesn't mean it's somehow a bad news story. It means it's good news that hasn't completed being good yet! This is basically what you said, about everything being skewed in the most negative possible way.
Yeah! We've made incredible progress on cancer! Cancers have been cured at a shocking rate! Cancer survival rates have skyrocketed! Cancer is an unbelievably difficult puzzle to solve, because it doesn't represent one disease, it's a vast number of causes that attacks an vast number of parts of the body.
It is ridiculous to act like someone somewhere could cure cancer but they're just choosing not to because they're mean or they're greedy. Most people are trying their best. I'm not defending evil corporate executives or billionaires. I'm saying that most people throughout the system, they want to cure cancer. They want to develop medications that help people.
Most people who work in the government, I've talked to them, they're true believers, Most people go into government because they want to fix something in the world. They're activists. They actually do care. I know there are corrupt politicians, obviously, but most of the people in the rank and file are out there just doing their best.
And problems get solved all the time! You keep bringing up malaria.
Yeah!
Malaria is a subject that most people could not care less about. But malaria has been the number one enemy of the human race going back to the Stone Age! Hundreds of millions have died from malaria. Malaria makes COVID look like nothing.
The fact that we've eradicated it in huge stretches of the world, the fact that we now have a vaccine, is maybe the single most important story in human history in terms of the number of lives saved. That should be the only headline. But I can guarantee you the vast majority of people, if you went out to the street and asked a thousand people if they heard the news about malaria, their answer would be, “Oh my God, are people getting malaria in my city? Do I need to stay home?”
The idea that this massive victory has been achieved, that you did have this almost comic book villain in this parasite that we have triumphed over due to the heroic efforts of millions of people working selflessly and that you don't know any of their names, that's like a perfect example. You could have some celebrity scandal, and that would dominate the news on the same day that we got word that “By the way, we think we've got a malaria vaccine and we've overcome the single biggest killer of humans ever!”
One of the things that you do that I admire so much is something that I call “lyric realism.” In your writing, you put some of that lyric poetry, that sense of wonder and awe and cosmic horror, back into telling the story of reality. Does that make any sense? You make things like guinea worm eradication feel like they have the weight they deserve, when you read about them in your words.
I mean, I try. I wish there was more of that in the world, because the doom will always be more interesting. Even the title of my book is very ominous. “I'm Starting to Worry about this Black Box of Doom.” That's on purpose! If you read it, it is implying that the real doom is in your perceptions and not necessarily in the world. But even that is being framed as, hey, here's this terrible problem we've got to look at. That's what gets people's attention.
And I get it! Due to evolution. If your brain, if you're in the forest and you're looking at 25 trees and one of those trees has a tiger behind it, you're not going to care about the other 24 trees. You're designed to zoom in on the one that's got the tiger because that's the one that matters. You don't sit back and say, “Well, if you think about it, there's 24 tiger-free trees. Why aren't I appreciating those?” It's like, no, you've got to deal with this problem! So you ignore everything else but the problem.
But to extend your metaphor, in a global media ecosystem, there's always a tree with a tiger in it somewhere! You can have hundreds of millions of people surrounded by tigerless trees looking at one scary tiger tree on their screens. We didn't evolve to ingest that amount of information.
I can go to Reddit right now and see the story of a horrible crime that has been committed in Malaysia. Not that that crime doesn't matter, not that that victim doesn't matter, but from the point of view of as a human being living in the United States, it’s insane that there’s this idea that part of my responsibility is to notice and worry about street crime occurring among 8 billion other people, and some outrageous thing that has occurred on the other side of the planet. That is not of major significance.
There are entire subreddits that are just about people parking badly! Like “Look at this selfish jerk parked across three parking spaces at this grocery store.” Okay, so say I'm living in Austin, Texas, and I'm seeing this outrage headline about a guy who has parked badly in Minneapolis, and it happened eight years ago because it's just a repost of an old viral post. And I'm sitting there getting mad about how this stranger parked their vehicle a thousand miles away from me, eight years ago?
That’s a sort of madness. It’s the algorithm realizing that your brain wants to detect not just danger, but bad behavior, because humans are social animals. If you give me an example of somebody behaving badly, I'm going to have a visceral reaction. I'm going to feel disgust. So this media ecosystem is doing something that we were not ever designed to do, which is to monitor all events happening everywhere in the world, including things that have zero effect on us. Only the bad stuff is going to filter through to you, because you have a brain that's designed to focus on the tiger. So they will give you endless tigers.
Eventually, whether anyone intends it or not, that leads you to one conclusion. And that’s something that TV news realized a long time ago: if we can make people scared of crime, they’ll stay home and watch more TV, and we can charge more for advertisements. I don't know if there was ever an evil TV news executive planning that, I think they just noticed that when we talk about crime, ratings go up. But the end result happens to be that eventually people will just be afraid to leave the house and so now you have a record number of people who don't leave the house. It does not require a conspiracy to end up here, with everything leading you to the same “conclusion.” That out in the world, people are dangerous. People are rude. People are judging you. People are looking to humiliate you. People are looking to mock you. That the only safe place for you is at home in front of a screen monitoring all of the terrible things.
And the best way to keep someone pinned there is just keep feeding them bad news that the world outside your front door is falling apart.
That's a key thing to keep in mind!
I'm planning to publish this interview on Inauguration Day, because I think it's a really valuable counterpoint to a day when there will surely be lots of horrible news filling screens.
Maybe the best thing people should do after reading this article is go outside. Like, turn off the screen, go outside, and note that the entire world is not on fire. Note the abundance of stable buildings, that people you don't know built, that are not collapsing on people's heads. Note the power lines going overhead, or whatever source of electricity you’re reading this with. Note, like you said, the amazing reverse apocalypse that we are currently living in.
Yeah. Because at the end of the day, that's the more challenging thing to believe. The thing about doom and gloom is that it is comfortable. Because if you say, “Well, the world sucks, nothing matters,” then you're giving yourself permission to not do anything.
But if you say, “We're standing on the shoulders of a whole lot of heroic, hardworking, unselfish people who gave us the world we have, and we now have a responsibility to continue their work and to maintain this and to not let it go back to the way it was,” that's putting a burden on you. That's saying you have a duty. To try to be better. To try to keep things going.
There are the mistakes they made, and the problems they left with us. You're going to leave other problems and mistakes for future generations. That's how it works. But they also gave you the best of everything that they could.
It's not just that we have video games and thinner TVs. It's that your ability to go travel to see someone you love, your ability to communicate with someone on the other side of the world who you love, is greater now than at any time in the past. Your ability to view the great works of art, to read the great works of literature are greater now than at any point in the past. All of the things that we've agreed make a human life worth living are more easily accomplished now than at any point in the past.
If you have been put into a mindset that you might as well give up because the world's only ever getting worse, you've been lied to. By people who want you to give up.
When I say that that the world is not as bad as you think, I'm not trying to put you to sleep. I'm trying to do the opposite. I think it is doom that keeps you planted on a sofa staring at a screen. I think feeling that the world is a remarkable place and there are amazing things to be seen and amazing people to meet, that puts a burden on you to get up and go see them and go meet them.
Absolutely. Thank you so much.
That is amazing. I don't think we can top that for a conclusion! Thank you so much.
Where to buy I'm Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom.
