Black Box of Doom Cover

“I think that, long-term, it traps your brain in a prison, that it’s designed to keep you inside, alone, with only those screens for comfort. A friend of mine came up with a name for it, for these algorithms, this media mind prison. We call it the black box of doom.”

What I Liked:

So much. I think it might be my favorite piece of Jason Pargin writing ever, which includes all his essays and the two and half books of his I’ve read.

I honestly think it would be a lot easier to discuss the things I DIDN’T like about this. There was a bit of a fairytale ending, but after what Pargin put these characters through, it was well-deserved. Kind of like how at the end of a rough week all you want is a bowl of ice cream and some mindless television. That.

What I Noticed:

Pargin has always been a fascinating voice for me to follow, personally, through his non-fiction essays both on Cracked.com and through his newsletter. He sees the world in his way, tracing the cracks of society back to where they began. This book, this “adventure” you could call it, is simple on the surface, but every social and mental interaction is laced with the choices we make in the online world.

Abbot Coburn isn’t just a Lyft driver, picking up some strange girl who has offered him $200,000 to drive a box across America with zero questions asked, but he’s a young man who feels lost. His Twitch streams do well, but he’s not famous. He’s got a dad who rides him about not having a “real” job. And just when things starts to go sideways on their venture, that’s when the internet decides to get involved, and nothing on the internet ever starts dead.

It’s right there, I feel, that Pargin found the meat of this story. Road trip tales aren’t something unheard of, they could be a genre all to themselves.

But his spin, lacing conversations with views of the social media world we live in, I think that’s what he really wanted to write.

What I Learned:

How to make a story your own.

They say every story has already been told, but the way you tell it is what’s special. This is Pargin’s way of saying, “A road trip story but what if all of social media was bat guano crazy?” And he dissects every piece of what we’re doing on the internet.

I don’t know if you all know this or not: But not everyone online is okay.

Thanks for reading,

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