It’s billed as “satire,” but, man, I don’t know.
Maybe it was the vibe of the trip, but I picked up this book when we were recovering from Helene in Charleston. At the same time, in the same shop, I also bought Loneliness & Company. Both books addressing more or less the same problem: tech is ruining everything!
I‘m Starting To Worry About This Black Box of Doom follows a Lyft driver and his instigator – a woman we come to know as “Green Sunglasses Girl” (GSG). Their mission is relatively simple: drive this box from LA to Washington DC, get it there by the Fourth of July, and you get a mess of cash. The catch: you can’t bring your phone or anything with any sort of GPS/ tracking/ whatever and you can’t ask about what’s in the box.
Simple, yeah?
Almost immediately a small headline on a police blotter becomes an ever growing speculation of a terrorist plot that Reddit is having a field day with. The plot exists online, no one in the “real world” knows anything about what is going on – including the people behind the wheel of the car. This leads to instances that we are all too familiar with – vigilantes showing up to play hero, mobs of people turning out for the chance to catch some content that would yield great engagement for their social followings, the speculation that incels will be the death of us all.
Through it all, the question of the Black Box of Doom. On the surface, maybe it is the box they are transporting. But, deeper, the black box is the algorithms that drive absolutely everything. What you see, what you like, who you meet, where you go, how you feel about every little things.
As the characters notice: you’re a lot less anxious without the box of doom in your pocket. All the bad stuff about the world tends to disappear when you shut off the social web for a while.
The novel is a fun little read, even if it is entirely too topical and spends a touch too much time defining real-world websites to readers of the future (a lovely future where maybe Reddit doesn’t exist). It does a great job defining a lot of the concerns of techocalypse and the need for people to stop viewing so much of the world through a screen.
Touch grass, as the kids say. The online world is a whole sphere of things you don’t need to ever worry about.