The Bloomer's Paradox
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In Jason Pargin’s I’m Starting To Worry About This Black Box Of Doom, a manic pixie dream girl cajoles a shut-in incel loser to drive her and her mysterious box cross-country. The further they drive, the more evidence starts to build that she is a terrorist and her box is a nuke. As our protagonist becomes increasingly desperate to turn around and return to his comfortable world of social media feeds and psych meds, she pleads with him to come out of his shell, learn to trust people offline, and have a sense of adventure. The book’s dramatic tension comes from our simultaneously rooting for his character development and worrying that it might be a ruse to manipulate him into blowing up Washington, DC.
This book is not shy about its moral, delivered in approximately one soliloquy per state by our author mouthpiece character (the girl). Although there is a literal black box of doom - the suspected nuke - the real danger is the metaphorical “black box” of Internet algorithms, which make us waste our lives “doom” scrolling instead of connecting to other human beings. Or the “black box” of fear that the algorithms trap us in, where we feel like the world is “doomed” and there’s nothing we can do. She urges us to break out of our boxes and feel optimism about the state of society. Quote below, Ether is the girl, Abbott is the loser, and he’s just ventured the opinion that it’s unethical to have children in a world as doomed and dystopian as ours:
“My grandfather,” continued Ether, “who I basically never talk to anymore, one hundred percent believes Christ is going to return to earth at any minute to bring about the apocalypse, due to mankind’s sinfulness. He believes everything he watches on the news is a sign: encroaching Communism, the Satanic conspiracy to allow gays to marry, race-mixing, debauchery, pornography, drag queens, the QAnon child sex cult, the climate change ‘hoax’ he says has fooled the world. He has a TV on every minute he’s awake, tuned to these ultra-right-wing news outlets ranting about depravity.”
“I know old guys like that,” said Abbott. “My dad works with a couple. They’re nuts. You can’t even talk to them.”
“So we can agree that, purely via the carefully filtered media a person consumes, they can come to fully believe in an apocalypse that is not, in fact, occurring?”
“I mean, the world is on fire, just not in the way your grandpa thinks.”
“Are you one hundred percent sure, Abbott, that you haven’t fallen into the exact same trap, just from the other side?”
“Ah, you’re about to tell me climate change isn’t real.”
“I am not. I’ve seen the melting ice with my own two eyes. But let me ask you this: When I met you, I asked if you felt like you were cursed to be born when you were, if you felt like you had arrived just in time to see the world end. So I’m guessing that you think the world is collapsing because of the feminization of society, something like that? That we’re killing masculinity?”
“I mean, that’s definitely part of it. Men are scared to date; no babies are being made.”
“Okay, and in my corner of the internet, the harbingers of doom were the opposite: savage patriarchal governments crushing women’s rights, taking us back to the dark ages while overpopulation destroys the environment. So that’s two groups who both believe the world is ending, but for totally opposite reasons. Some say runaway capitalism, some say runaway socialism. Some say it’ll be chaotic lawlessness, some say iron-fisted authoritarianism. It’s like I have one panicked neighbor saying there’s an impending drought and another screaming that we’re all about to drown in a flood. Somebody has to be wrong.”
“That wouldn’t make them both wrong.”
Ether groaned and put her head in her hands. “Okay,” she said, trying again. “How about this: What do you think the world will look like in the future, post-collapse?”
Abbott thought for a moment as if picturing it. “Uh, terrified people scrounging for food and running from bandits. Rampant disease, infrastructure breakdown. All the stuff from the movies, I guess.”
“No internet?”
“I wouldn’t think so.”
“No electricity? No running water, no sewage? No hospitals?”
“Probably not.”
“Got it. So, what I’m about to say isn’t an opinion, it’s not a matter of personal philosophy or politics. It is an objective fact that what you’re describing is how virtually all humans have lived through all of history. Until, that is, about thirty years ago. Just in the time I’ve been alive, somewhere between two and a half and three billion people got their first access to clean water and toilets. That’s billion, with a B. About that same number got electricity in their homes for the first time in their lives. Worldwide, infant mortality has been cut in half, illiteracy has dropped almost as much. Suicides are going up here in the US, but worldwide, they’ve dropped by a third—again, that’s all just in my lifetime. Basically, every positive category has skyrocketed: access to communication, paved roads, motorized transportation, international travel, climate control, medicine…”
“Okay, it sounds like you’re talking about a bunch of good stuff that happened in China and India and—I don’t know. A bunch of poor countries I’ll never visit.”
“I’m talking about how your entire life span has been spent in a literal reverse apocalypse. I’m talking about billions of people who lived in what you would consider post-collapse conditions have had those conditions remedied, gaining roofs and lights and safety. A human’s chances of dying from famine or natural disasters are as low as they’ve ever been, ever, in the history of the species. It’s been nothing short of a worldwide miracle that makes everything Jesus supposedly did in the Bible look like party tricks. And people like you and me and others in our demographic describe that state of affairs as the world being ‘on fire.’ I think that’s a bizarre mass delusion and that there’s a very specific reason for it: we’ve been trained to cling to a miserable view of the world to the point that we think that not seeing the world as miserable makes us bad people. When I spent those months doing hallucinogens, I didn’t suddenly see the beauty and harmony of nature; I saw that humans everywhere were working really hard to make life better for other humans and that almost none of us appreciate it. I’m not crediting this miracle to capitalism or socialism or any other kind of ism but to the fact that it’s what humans do, because humans are amazing. And it’s all invisible to us because the progress occurs behind these dark walls of cynicism, outside the black box of doom.”
“That’s nice. And again, nothing you said means anything considering the world’s scientists have agreed that climate change will wipe out civilization.”
“If we don’t fix it, yeah. Climate change is a huge deal; it’s terrifying. And also, it is objectively true that if we do fix it, the media will only report it as bad news. All the headlines will be about the oil and coal workers who lost their jobs, birds dying to windmills — they’ll only focus on the negative side effects. And don’t tell me we never clean up our messes. There used to be oil slicks on our rivers that would literally catch fire. Sulfur dioxide used to choke the air — when’s the last time you’ve heard about acid rain? Or the hole in the ozone layer? Go read about how previous generations all had lead poisoning or how food contamination used to be a nightmare. I’m not saying everything will be fine; I can’t predict the future. I’m saying that it is a one hundred percent certifiable guaranteed fact that it can be fine. But people like us have decided that we’re never allowed to even acknowledge the possibility.”
“Or maybe it’s hard for people to care about toilets in India when another maniac is shooting up a school every week.”
“You think that happens every week?”
“I bet you have a whole bunch of stats to dump on me about that, too. I’m sure the parents of those dead kids would love to hear them.”
“And there’s the anger. People hate it when you threaten their nihilism! That’s the black box, drawing you back in. Can’t you see that it wants you to be afraid to do anything but cower in front of your screens? It only has one trick, one card to play, which is this idea that bad news is the only news you can trust. I’m telling you, if you just allow yourself to step outside of it, you’ll see it for what it is: a prison where the walls are made of nightmares.”
Here’s another of her descriptions of the Black Box as she understands it. Phil is her mentor, Cammy a random friend:
“Social media algorithms are a twenty-four-seven humiliation machine. That, Phil believed, is how a population is primed for authoritarian rule. And that’s just one example; we’re essentially teaching machines how to hack human insecurity...If you relentlessly attack people’s self-image, they’ll scramble for something, anything to preserve it. Every cultural faction has their own scapegoats—the government, their childhood trauma, their mental illness, the evil billionaires, immigrants — and it doesn’t matter the degree to which any of them are valid, because all the system cares about is that you surrender your own agency. ‘I cannot be blamed for the state of my life, because I am at the mercy of this other, more powerful thing.’ Phil’s theory is that people want that powerful thing to exist, to take over their lives. At that point, we will have finally surrendered the entire concept of free will, the one thing that makes us human.”
“So that will make them vote for a dictator?” asked Cammy. “I think they’re already doing that now.”
“It will, and they are. But Phil didn’t think even that would be enough. What the people want is a cruel, all-powerful being that they can simultaneously obey and also endlessly complain about...Look around you. How many people out there are addicted to internet gambling, or games, or porn, or outrage headlines they compulsively click and share? See, [it works] on the back end, too, dialing in on exactly what pixels on a screen will subdue the human animal. And we go along willingly because we want to be subdued. The whole appeal of being in a media-induced flow state is that you block everything else out. We want to be zombies. Puppets.”
Here’s an uncharitable summary of the theses of these two sections:
The Black Box has scared us into believing that everything is dystopian and getting worse. The bad news we are so relentlessly exposed to is trapping us in a prison made of our own pessimism and fear.
The Black Box is destroying everything that makes us human, causing our society to spiral into dictatorship, and turning us into zombies/puppets.
Or, to be even less charitable:
We must reject doomerism, where we treat the problems of today as unprecedented crises that risk destroying us.
…except for the problem of doomerism, which really is an unprecedented crisis that risks destroying us. You cannot possibly imagine how bad this one is, and we must treat it as an absolute emergency which requires us to uproot everything about our lives.
I’m not attacking Pargin for this. His book is great, and it’s the prerogative of great artists that we treat any apparent contradiction in their works as grist for the mill - if not done intentionally to provoke us, then at least enacted through some trickster urge of the subconscious. But Black Box Of Doom is hardly the only place where we find this contradiction.
Peter Thiel recently gave a lecture on the End Times, described as “portraying the Antichrist as a technocratic leader exploiting fears of catastrophe to impose global control.” Thiel suggested that maybe the Antichrist would use worries about global warming, or inequality, or AI safety, to frighten people into accepting some kind of evil surveillance state. His moral was that we need to stop living in fear of people’s scare stories.
But isn’t the idea that if we try to regulate things, it will summon the literal Antichrist and plunge the world into eternal darkness, kind of a scare story? Isn’t Thiel using this scare story to frighten people into accepting the, uh, evil surveillance state he’s enabling? Thiel seems to have the same blind spot as Pargin’s characters - you need to stop letting scary stories ruin your life, except the scary story about how scary stories can ruin your life, which you should let ruin your life as quickly and decisively as possible.
Tyler Cowen had a recent post China Understands Emotional Contagion, on China’s policy of censoring negative speech online - “punishing bloggers and influencers whose weary posts are resonating widely in a country where optimism is fraying”. He seemed oddly enthusiastic about this - no condemnation, just “If you are spreading negative emotional contagion, there is a very good chance that, no matter what you are saying, that you are part of the problem.”
But isn’t the idea of an epidemic of negative emotional contagion, bringing in its wake collapsing state capacity and stagnant economies, and so threatening that we must arguably suspend our usual liberal values in order to crush it before it spreads - itself a form of negative emotional contagion? If China banned criticism of climate projections, because global warming was too much of an emergency to allow debate or dissent, wouldn’t that be a classic example of doomerism gone too far?
In Internet slang, the opposite of a doomer is a “bloomer”. I recently got a chance to talk to the bloomers at the Progress Studies conference. They were great and I learned a lot. But as far as I could tell, the semi-official philosophy was “We need to be forward-looking rather than obsessed with some mythical better past - you know, like we were in the good old days of the 1920s, back when society could actually accomplish things.”
None of this is logically contradictory. This is a real way the world could be: all crises are overreactions, except the crisis of overreaction to fake crises, which is worse than you can possibly imagine. The present is better than the past in every way, except that the past got the question of is-the-present-is-better-than-the-past right and the present doesn’t. Totally possible, nothing says it can’t happen.
But would the bloomers be equally charitable to other people making this claim for other pet causes? Some would: many are smart people. For the rest, this situation should provide a lesson in humility. A strong view of the “crisis of doomerism” is incompatible with a worldview in which strong crises are impossible, or should never be mentioned because the overreaction to them will always be worse than the crisis itself, or must always be the tool of sinister interests trying to divide us. Rather, it forces us back to the normal position where optimism is a heuristic and nothing more: some crises will be overblown, and we may want a slight bias against taking them seriously, but this bias can yield to evidence like anything else.
And how strong is the evidence for the “crisis of doomerism”? Nobody has proven its existence with a p < 0.05 study. There is no universal scientific consensus on its existence. And there is no shortage of stories about how bad people might be using it to accumulate power (I’ve given you Thiel and China for free). So whatever evidentiary bar bloomers set for “a real crisis” cannot hold these as absolute demands.
My own view is that we have many problems - some even rising to the level of crisis - but none are yet so completely unsolvable that we should hate society and our own lives and spiral into permanent despair. We should have a medium-high but not unachievable bar for trying to solve these problems through study, activism and regulation (especially regulation grounded in good economics like the theory of externalities), and a very high, barely-achievable-except-in-emergencies bar for trying to solve them through censorship and accusing people of being the Antichrist. The problem of excessive doomerism is one bird in this flock, and deserves no special treatment.