book by Jason Pargin (David Wong), ISBN:9781250285959

Excerpts

How much would you charge to drive me to Washington, DC? One hundred K is my starting offer for you to make this drive. Make me a counteroffer.

You have trouble getting to sleep at night,” she began, “because you can’t turn off your brain. Usually, it’s replaying something stressful that happened in the past or rehearsing something stressful that could possibly happen in the future. You then have to down constant caffeine just to function through the day—I bet you’ve got one of those big energy drinks in the center console right now. You sometimes get really good ideas in the shower. You can’t navigate even your own city without software that gives you turn-by-turn directions. You get an actual, physical sense of panic if you can’t find your phone, even if you know it’s still somewhere in your home

You don’t have a girlfriend or a boyfriend,” she continued before Abbott could interrupt. “You’ve never had a long-term relationship, and at least once in your life, you thought you were dating someone while the whole time they thought you were just friends. You actually don’t have any close friends. Maybe you did when you were in school, but you don’t keep in touch. You’ve replaced them with a whole bunch of internet acquaintances—maybe you’re all members of the same fandom or a guild in a video game—but you’d be traumatized if any of them suddenly showed up at your front door unannounced. Sometimes, out of the blue, you’ll physically cringe at something you said or did when you were a teenager. When you use porn, you may have to sort through two hundred pics or videos before you find one that will get you off. You’re sure that humanity is doomed and feel like you were cursed to be born when you were. Am I close?”

Congratulations, you’ve just described everyone I know. ((2023-03-08) ZviM The Kids Are Not Okay)

this is the big one: The reason you’re hesitating to make this trip, even for a life-changing amount of money, isn’t because you’re worried that I’m a scammer or that my employer is a drug lord and this box is full of heroin. No, what you fear above all is humiliation at the hands of the unfamiliar. What if you get a flat tire on a highway in Tennessee—do you even know how to change it?

You would never do that. Not just because it’s wrong but because you’d be torn apart by the awkwardness of that conversation

Never challenge a man in a Buick. He’s got nothin’ to lose

...zoomed in on the charred paranoia collage. Written on a handmade banner above the darkened scraps were three words: THE FORBIDDEN NUMBERS

From the blog of Phil Greene: Without will, the human animal ceases to exist, becomes an automaton, its nervous system rewritten by software algorithms to perform functions at the behest of another

Every father of an embarrassing son feels it as a curse, knowing that none of their own accomplishments mean a thing if their kid is a big enough fuckup... The boy had failed at every entry-level job Hunter had forced him into, usually having a full-on meltdown the moment things got too hectic. Abbott would declare that he was getting “overstimulated,” which sounded to Hunter like some kind of jargon he’d heard online—he’d developed a habit of coming up with medical-sounding ways to say that he’d rather be at home, alone, playing video games in his room

Nobody has people skills, because they stay home all the time, so they’re scared to do anything but stay at home because they’re afraid of being weird in public or getting caught on camera and mocked by millions of strangers. It’s an isolation vortex

Real friendships, real bonds are based on being genuine and vulnerable and flawed around each other, but we’re constantly told that’s dangerous. Ask yourself, who benefits from that? Who wants a society where there are no strong bonds between individuals?

It’s a real roller coaster, the way you go from tense paranoia to childlike enthusiasm and back

...does all of his meal deliveries online because fast-food drive-thru interactions make him anxious. He doesn’t eat at sit-down restaurants because of an irrational fear that the waitstaff will forget about his table and he’ll be forced to just sit there for hours, suffering in silence

He knew what he was about to do was dangerous. He was summoning a dark force that, once unleashed, no man or government could contain. But he could see no other options. Zeke was going to take this problem to the hive mind at Reddit.

Online radicalization pipelines had become Key’s specialty toward the end of her career

Key believed TikTok was possibly the most addictive piece of software ever created. Still, she believed the scariest platforms were those that didn’t cater to short attention spans at all. Charismatic streamers would stay on camera for twelve hours or more on YouTube and Twitch.

Some of the most important vectors of radicalization weren’t even social media but online computer games in which the voice chats had birthed entire subcultures of their own

The police had tracked down the truck from the apocalypse shack, which she knew thanks to a TikTok video from a witness at a gas station in Victorville. The clip, only twelve seconds long, depicted three figures in yellow hazmat space suits examining the interior and bed of the abandoned Ranger

And then, finally, it was posted to Reddit, the vast message board. Redditors half-jokingly referred to themselves as a “hive mind,” a collective of idle brainpower that could solve complex mysteries and generate new hyper-specific porn fetishes at the rate of several per minute.

Less than fifteen minutes later, a seemingly unrelated video popped up in a subreddit called r/StreetTantrums (sub names were all prefixed with the r and a slash). This one had originated on Twitter, a two-minute clip of a crazy-looking woman in lime-green sunglasses and an orange hoodie having a meltdown over her stalled pickup

Eventually, viewers in the comments noted that the truck was the same one featured in the WTF? biohazard video, and those audiences connected like neurons forming new pathways in a brain

Redditors immediately dubbed the mystery woman GSG, for Green Sunglasses Girl. What Key knew, that they didn’t, was that GSG was almost certainly the mysterious occupant/arsonist of the Apple Valley apocalypse shack

yet another bombshell hit: GSG talking to a kid in a white SUV, the two of them then loading into the vehicle a black box about the size of half a coffin... soon it connected with an earlier Reddit post about a rideshare driver named Abbott Coburn

Did you know the government planned to nuke all of this?” said Ether

Twenty-two bombs,” said Ether, “to clear a way for 40 through the Bristol Mountains.

“I’m sensing that you’re one of those people who did hallucinogens one time and suddenly discovered the great love that connects the universe.”
“No! I did them a bunch of times, over months. I’d tried to think of what I spent most of my time talking about, and it was usually some kind of retail transaction

I assumed the Day-Glo hoodie was marking you as staff, like you were with a service.” “Oh, no. This is a trick I learned living off the grid. Ironically, wearing high-vis gear makes you invisible; people assume you’re part of a landscaping crew or something*

In 1995, an army veteran named Timothy McVeigh blew up the federal building in Oklahoma City after having spent nine months sourcing the materials. Nine hundred federal agents would work the case … after the bomb went off. Prior to that, the number was zero, despite the fact that McVeigh had spent weeks blabbing about his plan to everyone he knew

The most recent large-scale terrorist bombing in the USA occurred in downtown Nashville on Christmas Day 2020, when an RV filled with improvised explosives detonated early in the morning, wrecking dozens of buildings. No one had been working that case, either, despite the fact that the bomber’s girlfriend had called the police eighteen months earlier, saying, “Hey, I think my boyfriend is filling an RV with explosives.” (2020 Nashville bombing)

In Key’s experience, the FBI was great at stopping terror attacks if they were tracked from the brainstorming stage. If a plot were to somehow fly under the radar until, say, a finished device was already en route to its target, the chances of catching it in time were depressingly small

but he strongly suspected the pair weren’t going to make it to their destination one way or the other. Their operation didn’t stink of competence, and he imagined taking the flight and then arriving to hear the Navigator’s driver had fallen asleep and run into a ditch in Turdburg, Oklahoma. No, Malort knew he had to do it the hard way, to follow and monitor for the inevitable fuckup that slowed them down

what was life but a series of hard jobs you had to endure because you’d screwed up the easy ones?

The truth was, the only reason she didn’t have red yarn on her board is that it had been immediately torn down by her cat, Ben (short for “Benadryl”), shortly before he’d run away and/or got eaten by a coyote

Key had ended her FBI career shortly after reaching her lifelong goal of becoming a strategic analyst, the experts at the top who ostensibly examine big-picture threats and quietly save the USA behind the scenes. But nothing ruins your view of the world like getting your dream job. Key’s tenure had been marred by turmoil, beginning with a mandate to summarize the threat from left-wing extremists, to which she had made the ill-advised comment, “You’re worried about an uprising from a population that needs four different antianxiety prescriptions to order a pizza over the phone?”

In the time since, she had developed a very specific theory about the potential for domestic terror in the USA spreading, not as a mass political movement but as a social contagion. The country was full of isolated weirdos who were rapidly trying to find ways to make their lives meaningful

Her views deviated sharply from the bureau’s in that she believed all mass shootings were acts of terrorism, even if they didn’t conform to the government’s suffocatingly narrow definition of the term. They believed “terrorism” required a specific ideology, but these modern attacks were a grab bag of loosely held beliefs that secretly all pointed in the same direction: a desire to destroy the ability and willingness of individuals to gather in public and form communities. They were attacks on social cohesion, pushing a vision of the future that, in many cases, not even the attackers were aware of.

To be fair to the Joint Terrorism Task Force, their job required them to sift through tips regarding supposed terror plots at the rate of several per hour. To be somewhat less fair, it really did appear to Key that their process was to randomly pick a group of dumbasses who’d spoken in public about blowing up a monument, assign a dozen undercover agents to carefully lead them from the idea stage to the execution stage, at which point, they’d raid their trailer park and declare that they’d once again justified their budget.

We have the plate number!”
“Who does?”
“The world! Everyone! It’s out there.”
“On the internet, you mean.”
“You say the internet like we’re talking about a singular dumb entity who’s always wrong. Everyone is online

I remember you being extremely excited to move on to the next phase of your life. You mentioned at least four hobbies you were already buying the supplies for.”
This was true, but it turned out that Key’s actual favorite hobby was buying supplies for hobbies. She didn’t really get any joy out of the next part, and it was starting to get expensive.

I heard a stat that almost one in ten men are on antidepressants now, and almost one in five women. Which was shocking because—”
“It’s so low.”
“I know, right! I don’t have any friends who aren’t on an antidepressant, or an antipsychotic, or something. I was like, where is this well-adjusted majority?”

otherwise, they’re drinking themselves to death or they’re on painkillers or worse

I think you find it draining to deal with anyone face-to-face. And I think it’s specifically because you can’t control it. Online, you can duck out of any conversation, you can say anything you want, you can calibrate how you come across.

I think our interactions could be totally great the whole time and you’d find it just as exhausting because the world has trained you to be afraid of being fully and truly perceived. We’re social animals; that’s the equivalent of making a fish afraid of water!

You know what we’re missing,” said Ether, in a conversation Abbott had already checked out of, “is gathering places. We’ve stopped going to church, we’ve built suburbs where people don’t have that third place that isn’t work or home, where everybody can go hang out. You can’t do that at a chain restaurant; they want you out of there so they can seat the next customer. Young people don’t go to bars or clubs like they used to. But in general, there’s just no profit in providing a public place where we can all just go and be together.

“I heard that the average number of close friends has dropped over the last thirty years,” said Ether. “It used to be that the number of loners who literally had no friends was tiny, like three percent of the population. That’s quadrupled since then; now twelve percent of us have nobody. Today, you’re almost as likely to be totally alone as you are to have a big squad of friends like teenagers have in the movies

When they’d met, Ether had joked/claimed that she could read Abbott’s thoughts, and she probably could, because everyone could. Teachers knew when he was lying, guys knew when he was scared, girls knew when he was indulging lecherous fantasies. It had always made him feel like everyone else had a sense organ he was lacking because it never went the other way

his father’s white SUV was nowhere to be seen.
But of course it wasn’t.
He was going to puke. Here was another familiar sensation, of being humiliated down to a level lower than he’d previously thought existed

You know those postapocalyptic zombie shows where they have to cross the wastelands and they’re like, ‘We can’t trust anybody out here! We’re on our own!’ Well, that’s a geek fantasy for indoor kids. Out here, in the real world, in the actual desert, this is when you have to be willing to trust people. You don’t have a chance otherwise

“I think,” she said, “I caused so many people so much pain for so little reason that my brain can’t hold it all. I finally realized I couldn’t move on, couldn’t live my life unless I just rebooted myself

people are going to preserve that version of you, from the part of your life when they felt the most superior to you.”

As Patrick used to say, we’re all just babies trapped in God’s hot parked car.

Zeke had spent the hours after dinner struggling to focus as he finished his commissioned art (this piece was for a regular customer who paid top dollar for depictions of sexual pairings between characters from the animated Disney film Zootopia and the live-action detective series Bosch, a genre that he apparently could not find elsewhere).

Did that sign say we’re heading toward Roswell? As in, where the supposed UFO crashed in the 1940s?”
“Ha, yeah. We’re not too far away. You’ve been out for more than two hours
Ether, there is no way you picked Roswell at random.”
“We were already in New Mexico! I saw it on the map, figured there’d be a lot of hotels there
If this was your plan all along, please tell me now. If the box contains what you believe to be UFO parts or other alien artifacts, just say so.”

The Roswell craft was just a military balloon, with radiation gadgets on it to detect Russian nuclear tests. The government actually pushed the UFO thing to throw people off the scent. The Greys came about years later, from an incident in 1961. Before that, there were no famous alien abductions, no short, big-eyed aliens, no operating tables and anal probes. The story is actually really scary. Maybe too scary. I don’t want you to be up all night, creeped out.”

...middle-aged couple named Betty and Barney Hill, they’d gone on a road trip to Canada and were heading back. They’d been on the road for eighteen hours

“I think that all of it,” replied Ether, after a yawn, “and all of this you see around you, was because of drowsy driving and a light bulb.”
“A what?”
“In the mountains they drove through, at the exact spot where they said they saw the UFO, there’s a big light on an observation tower. And when you’re on that twisting mountain road in the dark, the light appears to swing from one side of the sky to the other

As for the Grey aliens, that’s the best part: The creatures they described under hypnosis just happened to look almost exactly like the aliens featured in a sci-fi TV show that aired two weeks before they started their sessions.”
So why are you so creeped out by it, if none of it happened?”
“I’m creeped out because none of it happened. The story finally leaked, against their will, years later. Then it became a book, then a movie, spreading around the world to every population with access to mass media, like a thought virus.

“Just to be clear,” said Pedro, “you think your kid partnered up with a hot chick he’d never met before to take an illegal trip out of state in exchange for a huge pile of cash from the Russian mob, and you’re ashamed of this? I wish my boy would do something that cool. He never leaves his room.”

And then, for the first time in Abbott’s entire life, he understood everything: this man, this woman, himself, and the gun.
Abbott had learned early that when his father got angry at someone, the humanity of his target just evaporated from his mind. In that moment, they were an object, an obstacle unworthy of sympathy or empathy. Abbott had thought his father was a psychopath for as long as he’d known the word, but now, finally, he got it. There is a primal override that shuts off all those feelings, because in moments of maximum peril, they are a weakness that allows the predators and incompetents to do unchecked damage to the world.

The subreddit now boasted tens of thousands of followers, and speculation had spread to every platform, with true-crime TikTok influencers sticking their faces into the camera

For the last forty years, everything has been built around getting into a car, going to an appointed place at an appointed time, and driving back. There’s no chance for adventure, to run into new friends, new situations. It’s all planned, supervised

When I was a kid,” said Abbott, “my dad wouldn’t let me walk anywhere by myself, because he was convinced I’d get snatched up by child molesters. (Free Range Kids)

Now those same boomers are like, ‘Why don’t you go outside? Why are you looking at your screens all the time?’ These are the same people who started this trend of never letting kids go out on their own because their screens told them the streets were full of monsters

“He’s been angry since I was born. And where normal people get mad and then get over it, Dad just keeps cycling higher, like a runaway reactor. Like he’ll get mad, then he’ll get mad about the fact that you made him mad, and the only thing that will calm him down is if he can spread it, make everyone else miserable. He sees the universe as this machine that is designed to give him everything, and he takes it as a personal affront when it misfires

Dad joined the Marines out of high school because his parents were scared of what he’d do otherwise. He told me that himself. Bragging about it

The rise of violence on the part of “incels”—the self-described involuntarily celibates who’ve crafted their sexual frustration into a misogynistic worldview—had been a focus of Key’s work in her last few years on the job.

The first widely reported incel attack came in 2014, when the almost impossibly creepy Elliot Rodger killed six victims after posting a string of videos about how it was a cruel injustice that the beautiful women of the world wouldn’t have sex with him

sexlessness in young men had tripled in the last decade, something like three in ten male adults now having no active sex lives... inequality—real or perceived—always breeds instability

Key’s theory, which Patrick had mocked as the “Virgin Apocalypse,” was that all modern hate groups were really just incel grievances in disguise. It’s a historical fact that one of the key precursors to mass violence in a society is simply an excess of young, unmarried men.

The really unpopular part of Key’s theory, the one that had caused a lot of colleagues to stop talking to her in the hallway, was that the smart societies knew you could deal with this problem simply by finding some excuse to go to war. Through all of history, wars were a way to burn off your excess young men, like venting heat from an engine.

Key believed the world was full of crazy men who were kept tethered to reality by sane women, though this was the kind of thing that, again, never got a great reaction when said around the office

Testosterone makes us want to impress girls. See, I went to high school in the real world, not in some Disney Channel show, and in the real world, the bullies had girls lining up to fuck them. The nerds stayed lonely. The bullies were bullies because the girls told them they would award bullying with sex—that was their entire motivation. Which means ninety-nine percent of the ‘toxic’ masculine behaviors the feminists like to bitch about are enforced by women

You, as a female, are limited in how far you can fall. Whatever repercussions could come from this—legal, financial—only one of us is at risk. More than ninety percent of prisoners are men

You’ve been bullied your whole life,” she said softly. “I’d know that even if you hadn’t told me. Now imagine being a woman and knowing that almost every man, everywhere, in every situation, can physically overpower you

No matter what I say, you’ll just come back and say women have it worse, and that’s the male experience in a nutshell

In the real world, it’s often those who are the most comfortable in the system who want to bring it down

What they had in common, in Key’s view, was aggrieved narcissism, a total inability to put personal affronts into perspective. Why shouldn’t others die for your petty humiliations, when you’re the Main Character of the Universe?

So what do we do?”
“It’s the same answer for this or life in general: Watch and learn and hope an opportunity presents itself. And pray that this goddamned thing doesn’t go boom in the meantime

This behavior—gruffly shutting down bids for human connection—was something he vividly remembered hating in his father, and he hated seeing it in himself even more, but found himself doing it all the same. Why did she get to move on and be happy? The fires of rage must be kept alight at all cost, and there is no justice until everyone has been sufficiently burned

You honestly feel like you’ve been marginalized?”
“It’s not a feeling. Nobody cares about us.

You can call it manipulation, but, Abbott, so much of it is just self-preservation

I feel like,” she said finally, “you quickly tried to search your brain for an opinion I couldn’t possibly agree with or find common ground on. I think instead of communicating, you’re trying to shape your words into weapons to deal maximum damage to your ‘enemy,’ which you have now decided is me. And I would only ask: Is this making you happy?

I have this theory, that everything that happens on our screens is designed to do exactly what’s happening here, to repel us from one another, to create a war of all against all. It’s like a filter that only shows you others’ bad behavior, blocking the pure and letting through the poison, to make you scared of everyone who isn’t exactly identical to you. 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.”

Americans, as Malort liked to say, used to be a wild people. It was a whole country descended from hard-barked frontiersmen and those who’d managed to not get slaughtered by them. The USA had sprouted from soil so saturated with blood that the wells tasted of copper, less a “melting pot” than a meat grinder. It was a land of pissed-off underdogs who couldn’t be governed, simple folk who were polite and generous but with no desire to ever again feel a boot on their neck. Or that’s how things used to be, anyway

This thing, this soulless husk of a pod person, pointed a gun at me and pulled the trigger, no hesitation. Barely missed my skull. I turned and looked at him, and what I saw in his eyes was nothin’. Like he thought this was all playing out in one of his video games, like he was used to a world where nothin’ was real. It scared the shit out of me because I thought, That right there is the future.”

Interactions on r/DCTerrorAttack were becoming less and less fruitful as its population grew; they were now forty hours into the crisis

The sub was now the home of a core group of posters and a sprawling audience of spectators whose demands for compelling news were growing faster than it could be produced. Attention-seekers were eagerly filling the void, and that, friends, is how you build a bullshit machine

gone back to the sparsely populated original subreddit, r/AbaddonsNavigator, and posted the exact same question. It had taken roughly eight and a half minutes for the moderator, ZekeArt, to reply, “Is this it?”

My name is Karen Wozniak. But I did my videos under the name Butterflaps

Failing to hide his disbelief, he said, “You’re Butterflaps?”

The spinoff subreddit had analyzed the GSG selfie posted from the Texas gas station and, based on a tiny sliver of a birthmark visible at the upper edge of the screen, had identified her. She was, it turned out, an internet celebrity.

She was also a well-known psychopath and a manipulator.

But then she’d seen Abbott, who looked so pale that he seemed at risk of a vitamin D deficiency and had the vibe of a man embarrassed to be caught in the act of existing. It was like he hadn’t socialized outside of the safety of a screen in ten years, so then the question was what type of sheltered indoor kid was he? Guys in that category could be extremely kind or extremely dangerous, depending on their coping mechanisms

I had around two million subscribers at my peak.”

I definitely wasn’t the biggest, but it was my full-time job, going on camera and gushing about some new palette for twenty minutes. I wasn’t as rich as people thought I was, but it was ten times what I’d ever made as a physical therapist—that’s what I did out of college

two influencers who were married broke up and went public

it became this weird war between the fandoms, everybody sticking up for one partner or the other in this messy relationship drama between internet celebrities none of us had ever actually met.

This spilled over into every platform, we’d flood each other’s Twitter mentions and Instagram comments, and this was my whole day, just refreshing over and over. It went on for like two straight weeks. It was nuts.

So, there was one really nasty girl,” said Ether, knowing she wouldn’t be able to fully convey the nastiness, “and she kept stalking me across channels, including digging up my personal accounts, my old Facebook, my parents’ accounts. Then she photoshopped my face onto some porn and spread it around,

I leaked her info to some fans on my Discord, and … I don’t know what I wanted to happen, but I definitely wanted something to happen. And it did.”
“Yeah, this is the part of the story I know. It’s how I’d heard of you. Or, you know, your persona.”

somebody, not me, decided to do a swatting prank on her

It was the SWAT team’s body cam footage that went viral. They’d showed up to a dumpy little trailer, the white siding scummed with algae. Jolene’s father, drunk off his ass, came to the door and screamed for them to get off his property

there in the doorway behind him stood Jolene, a chubby teenager in a T-shirt and underwear, her hands over her mouth, watching her whole world come apart

Do you know who did the actual swatting?”
“Yeah. He was thirteen years old and lives in Belarus

Anyway, the death threats started pouring in after that, coming into my mom’s work, my dad’s office. Theo did a video denouncing me, all the sponsors left, all the partnerships vanished, all the other influencers joined in the chorus

For weeks after, I just slept all day, trying to stay away from my screens. Once I was disconnected from it and looking back, it was clear that everything we were doing was insane. It was the first time I realized there was something truly dangerous about this, the devices, the algorithms. It’s like it reduced us to our limbic systems, turned us into mindless zealots in warring tribes.

Jolene just wanted to be a part of something bigger than herself, to have a war to fight. It’s all anybody wants these days. And she thought she was on the right side of it, you know, her social media is all antiracism slogans, gay rights, trans rights, and she’s doing that in rural Virginia, in a trailer where her dad had a Confederate flag hanging over the sofa

We all just wanted to feel something real but to feel it without consequence.”

The most important thing to understand about spending your whole life in mortal fear of being in Big Trouble is that it’s not an irrational phobia—Abbott was constantly getting caught

He was bored by everything normal but lacked the tools to survive excursions into the dangerous and exotic. Now, as always, he would be the one they made an example of.

She took a deep breath and rubbed her eyes. “At some point very, very soon, you, Abbott, have to grow the fuck up. You’re driving, not me. You’ve been driving most of the way. I didn’t trick you or threaten you; I made you an offer, and you accepted. You’re not a victim. Do you want good things in your life? A home, money, a career? It will always look like this, risk and pain and the knowledge that if you screw it up, it’s because of you.

And I’m sick of hearing about your dad. You’re an adult. He has every right to be upset about the vehicle getting damaged, but it wasn’t your fault

This is probably thirty thousand in damage. And the insurance won’t cover it, as there’s no police report.”
“You know what an adult would say about that? They’d say, ‘Ether, I’m demanding another thirty K because of the damage to my vehicle.’ It’s just money and repairs, a transaction. Stop piling grand emotional significance onto it.

Abbott felt himself deflate and then said, “Okay. No, you’re right. You’re right.” She spun to face him. “Whoa, really?”
“Yeah. I, uh, needed to hear that. I think.*

Look, see this? The whole ‘dirty bomb’ rumor got started because they saw a supposed radiation symbol on the box. This is it, right there.” She leaned back and peeled away the foil from one corner. “Look. It’s a Megadeth sticker! The metal band from the eighties? They used a radiation symbol because everybody else was already doing pentagrams?

She held up the phone. “Yes, lots of strangers are saying terrible things about you on here. But look—I just turned it off. Now they’re gone. These people walking around this parking lot, in that store, they don’t care about any of this. Inside, food still tastes good, water is still wet, you’re still alive and in a healthy and strong body. That’s real.

You need your medication; we’re going to go get it. If the cops are waiting for us there, fine. We’ll step out with our hands on our heads, obey their commands, and ask for a lawyer. They’ll search the vehicle and it’ll be scary and traumatic, but then we’ll get over it, because despite what the modern world insists, you can actually get over bad things happening to you

I’m always going to be the incel terrorist. I can live to be a hundred years old, and that’s all I’ll be. The internet doesn’t forget.”
“Fuck the internet, then.

All of my friends are online. It’s where I work, it’s where I live. If everyone abandons me

And if you should find yourself in a group of friends who are all united under a cause that makes them miserable, then losing those friends wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing. The wrong friends can make you lonelier than being alone.

“I hope you don’t think I’m being glib,” said Ether at a gas station in a town called Earle, “but you know this makes your career, right? As a content-creator? In that industry, it doesn’t matter how you get your name out there, as long as it’s out there. You’ll be telling this story on podcasts and videos for the rest of your life.”

You haven’t been watching the news for the last couple of years.”
“Not in the way other people watch it, no. I’ve been doing plenty of research. About the world, how it’s trending. And every time I share it, people get really upset.” He shrugged. “People don’t like to face reality.”*

“In our civilization,” she began, “stuff has been happening in the background, quietly, out of view. There were these worms. To get the worm out of your body, they have to slowly extract it through that burning blister, pulling it through the muscle millimeters at a time, over months. They’ve been infecting people for millennia. They’re called Guinea worms. In the 1980s, more than three million people a year were infested with them. Last year, it was fifteen.

While your news feeds were bludgeoning you with stories of school shootings, pathological politicians, and nonstop outrage, this war against the worms was quietly won thanks to relentless, selfless effort by thousands of strangers. Had you heard anything about it?

“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?”

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

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

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

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

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

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?”

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

All that stuff you said about the world getting better, that’s great for all of those other countries, for all the poor people in Bangladesh or wherever. But the USA is dying, I mean, that’s objectively true

who told you that, the thing about everybody affording a big house with one job back in the good old days? I feel like we’re getting that from old sitcoms or magazine ads. A quarter of those 1950s houses didn’t have indoor plumbing, and almost none had air-conditioning

And those houses were tiny and packed with three generations of family

You’re right that they didn’t have student loan payments, but that’s because hardly anybody went to college—hell, in the 1960s, most Americans didn’t even finish high school

people were still just working in whatever factory kept their town afloat

Everybody longs for those home-cooked meals like in the Norman Rockwell paintings, but those meals only happened if Mom spent hours cooking them—most women literally spent most of their time in the kitchen. We make jokes about processed food and drive-thrus, but that stuff is the reason mothers are able to do literally anything other than chop potatoes and knead dough all day. And you can apply that to everything—it used to take much, much longer to shop, to correspond with friends, to travel, to bathe, to wash your clothes, to buy a book

For most of history, sex education of any kind was forbidden; it wasn’t even openly discussed, by anyone, ever

Oh, and until the 1950s, every third bed was infested with bedbugs

Why do you know all this?”
“Why don’t you know all this? This is the fundamental context of your life!

If pleasure was a thing that could be measured, the available pleasure to the average person over all of history would basically be a flat line on a graph that then explodes upward right before you and I were born.

Like music! Music is magic, it heals the soul, and our access to it is infinitely greater than it ever was before! And literature—the most beautiful works from the most incredible minds are out there to be read on demand, at almost no cost. And then there’s all the little conveniences we instantly took for granted

I'll go to Wikipedia and read about how fascists are taking over every government in the Western world.”
“Yes! Exactly! And that’s happening because all of those extremists are selling the same blatant lie: ‘The world is falling apart, and we have to get back what they took from us.’ At that point, it’s always just a matter of deciding which vulnerable group to pin the blame on.

Marvin Heemeyer was a business owner in Colorado.
Oh, the Killdozer guy
I have this theory that we have been quietly building a society full of Heemeyers, seemingly normal people with middle-class lives and brains full of retribution fantasies. Supposedly mature adults with no sense of scale or proportionality.”

here’s my individual, actual reality: I don’t own a home or a car. I have no trust fund. I don’t have a degree or any skills society deems useful. I’m not strong enough for construction—you can ask my dad. I tried to learn to code and couldn’t wrap my mind around it. Everything else is either bottom-of-the-barrel stuff—janitors and plumbers, or women’s work—customer service, nursing

what are you really worried about? I don’t think it’s fear of poverty; it’s fear of humiliation, that other people will think you’re a loser

If an ancient king got an infection, some quack would stick a leech on it, and then they’d hack off the limb without anesthetic. But what he would have, that you don’t, is respect.”

learned about Abbott was that he was the most comfortable in conflict, mainly because that was the only time he knew what to say. Maybe arguing was the sound of his childhood, and it soothed him

Is there seriously anything I could do to make myself attractive to women, aside from suddenly winning the lottery? And yes, I know that me just asking that question makes me unattractive.
Humans tend to match at their own attractiveness level. So usually when guys ask this question, it turns out they actually have encountered willing girls, but thought they were repulsive

Girls know your type. If a guy’s last girlfriend was a screen, it means he’s used to all of the pleasure flowing one direction. If we were in a relationship, I just picture you staring at screens all day until you’re in the mood to have sex, at which point, you’d expect me to be right there to provide it, then you’d go back to your screens. Girls call this porn brain... No real woman can give you the frictionless relationship of a media-augmented jerk-off fantasy.

Who told you that no partner who demands compromise is worth it? Can’t you see the conclusion they’re leading you to? ‘Unless I somehow get this perfect, effortless relationship, I’m better off alone, with my screens.’ The box doesn’t train you to do anything but remain in the box.”

I track radioactive ideas, virulent narratives that develop in insular little subcultures until they burst out onto the scene. One random guy posts a hoax to 4chan in 2017 under the pseudonym ‘Q,’ three years later, weirdos wearing Q T-shirts are storming the Capitol Building

Did you hear about Facebook’s role in the genocide in Ethiopia? And Myanmar?”
“I don’t think I heard about those genocides at all.”
“Well, the company had teams devoted to it, as in, ‘They are clearly trying to organize an ethnic cleansing on our website. What do we do?’ They have war rooms set up to discuss which countries are at risk of the same. The USA is on that list.”

So much of the self-help and wellness advice I was getting was entirely about solitude. ‘Meditate, alone! Do yoga, alone! Work in your garden, alone! Walk through the woods, alone!’ Like ‘alone time’ is the one thing we’re all missing.

He hated driving in the rain, and he hated driving in a strange city. Though Abbott also hated driving on sunny days in familiar cities. It was a relentless barrage of overstimulation and tense standoffs, automobiles having a magical ability to make humans abandon all concepts of empathy and self-preservation

The man yelled into the windshield, calling for Abbott, whom the man apparently believed was currently roasting alive inside.
Abbott shouted, “We’re over here! We got out!” and the man turned, and it was his father. Abbott was, in that moment, more terrified than he had been at any single point of the trip.
When he got close enough, Abbott could hear him say, “I thought you were dead. I thought you were dead. I thought you were dead,” in a low monotonous tone, like he didn’t know he was making those sounds, and Abbott saw that the man was crying*

Abbott said the name of the antianxiety medication, and Cammy, who had apparently joined in the eavesdropping, said, “Oh, I have that. I can definitely spare one.”
“Hey,” said Key, “I’ve got some of those.”
Zeke said, “Me, too! I have the higher dosage, but you could split a pill if you had to.”
Then, after a suspicious pause, his father said, “I do, too. Zeke’s dosage. But they were in my bag, in the rental car.”

Do you guys really think the country will descend into civil war if this thing plays out like the bad guys want?”

But the way I see it, America was never really united.

nationwide, the average life span has gone up ten years since 1960. We’ve gained an entire extra decade of life just in that time, and nobody cares, because apparently progress doesn’t count.

what was supposed to hold all this together was religion, that we’d put aside our differences because we’re all children of God and so on. But half of us don’t go to church anymore, so now that’s your biggest fault line

Abortion, gay marriage, trans rights, the War on Christmas—it all boils down to old-school religion versus new-school secularism, and both sides secretly believe that, eventually, the other will have to go.

the Forbidden Numbers,’ whatever that is.”
Who remembers the old website AmIHotOrNot.com?
People uploaded their pics for strangers to rate their attractiveness on a scale of one to ten. The rating was public
Well, that’s an example of the Forbidden Numbers.” (legibility).
It took them a week to code it, but it was objectively the most important and influential website ever created. Mark Zuckerberg started Facebook to be a HotOrNot ripoff, YouTube was launched to be a video version of it.
Up until then, for all human history, any individual could lie to themselves, could secretly believe they were more attractive than they are, or smarter, or more creative, or nicer, or richer. Or, and this is the big one, that their beliefs were popular. The Forbidden Numbers strip all that away.

It doesn’t matter how comfortable or well-fed somebody is; if you humiliate them in front of their peers, they’ll want to burn the system to the ground. Well, 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.’

That will make them vote for a dictator?
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. He thought it would take the form of an artificial intelligence, one that would spontaneously create itself.”

A few faces turned toward them as they approached and showed no signs of recognition. At first.
As they drew closer, Ether put on her green sunglasses. Then someone registered what they were seeing
Immediately, several people performed what Abbott now recognized as a modern dehumanization ritual: they pulled up their phones and started recording, breaking eye contact to focus on their screen instead
“Can we put the phones down?” said Ether once she was close enough to be heard. “There’s been a huge misunderstanding here. But to work through it, we need to talk. If you’ve got your cameras out, then we’re not talking, we’re performing for an audience. And that audience doesn’t want resolution, it wants conflict, purely because that’s more fun.”
That, of course, did nothing to affect anyone’s actions*

You are all having arguments that are specifically designed to go in circles, forever! Don’t you see the system doesn’t care what you believe, that it only cares that you keep yelling into your screens, getting enraged at strangers you barely disagree with?”

But do you understand,” said Ether, who had seemingly joined the prosecution, “how you picked the most off-putting possible version of that argument? How you just said whatever would antagonize your opponents the most? What positive outcome did you think would result?”

“If you’re about to ask me for your paycheck,” replied Sokolov, “I cannot even begin to quantify all the ways you screwed this up. I ask you to drive this box out here as discreetly as you can, and within twenty-four hours of your departure, I’m on a conference call with three of my lawyers and the heads of the FBI’s domestic terrorism task force asking me if it’s a nuclear bomb. Then I wake up this morning to a call from my people saying you’re all at my gate, hiding in a pile of balloons. Jesus, and I thought Mal’s plan was stupid.
“Why am I not surprised,” said Sokolov, “that someone of your generation wants a participation trophy?”
“Why am I not surprised someone of your generation wants me to work for free?”

By the time Miles O’Toole was nineteen, he pretty much had the world figured out. He was born in 1992, his own consciousness forming in parallel with the World Wide Web.
Miles had quickly decided that he’d been born into a society that was very much a solvable puzzle. The powerful wanted to hold down everyone else, but they were not clever and could be defied if the clever were willing to break their arbitrary rules. In high school, Miles read about a new technology called blockchain and instantly believed that he had glimpsed how civilization could one day be saved from the brutes.

The bald one punched Miles in the gut so hard that acid rushed up his throat and sprayed from his mouth.
Miles’s worthless friends were all by the door muttering mild protests, saying this wasn’t cool, dude. But no one was coming to save him, and in those few seconds, Miles O’Toole received more of an education than he’d ever gotten at MIT.

Everything Miles thought he knew about the world turned to dust and blew away. None of his techno-Utopia bullshit mattered as long as bullies could punch you in the gut and take what was yours.
Miles never spoke to the Chain Gang after that. He dutifully finished his degree and went to work for a mobile medical billing start-up that accumulated a respectable pile of VC money before getting bought out by the largest player in the space

Abbott couldn’t find his father or Ether, the two people he realized he was depending on for instructions

An older man and a child were cowering under it, and Abbott didn’t have to ask why, because he knew why: they were waiting for someone to come and tell them what to do, somebody who knew what the fuck was going on. But no one was coming, no one else even saw what was about to happen, there was only Abbott, and now Abbott was running and yelling at them, grabbing the little boy by the wrist and snatching at the lapel of the old man.

There among the tubes and cables, Abbott saw his father, his jaw set with determination, screwing around with wires and switches back there
Then there was a noise like a blast of cannons from a pirate ship, and the air in front of Abbott turned red, white, and blue
the Killdozer had rumbled to a stop, now coated from front-to-back in the colors of the flag. The goal had not been to destroy it but to blind it, the pilot presumably steering via cameras whose lenses were now obscured.
The powder-coated Killdozer rolled forward, and the blind driver did the one thing they had almost certainly hoped to avoid: They ran right into the pool

Nobody here can or will tell me why Phil Greene’s possessions were radioactive.”
“Oh, that. He spent thousands of dollars on ‘negative ion’ pendants. They sell them online as anti-5G devices—those are the weird amulets you saw hanging all over his walls. It turns out they’re made of thorium dioxide

Just to be clear,” said Abbott, “if you’d settled up with the Killdozer kid after you cashed in his coins, none of this would have happened. I don’t think it’s chaos that follows you around; I think your supposedly amazing conflict resolution skills could just use some work.”
Ether added, “Generally, when you find yourself constantly in the middle of drama, it’s because deep down, you want it that way.”
Sock brushed some sauce onto charred meat and said, “Well, in my defense, I am a huge dumbass

Mountain Dew was invented as a whiskey mixer,” said Sokolov, who was pounding through bottles of Michelob Ultra at a stunning rate. “Couple of brothers from Knoxville came up with it in the forties, for that specific reason. Now it’s the nemesis of every dentist in Appalachia.

When did that become the dream, to just be a parasite who sucks up food and electricity that other people make? Don’t you want to be great at something, to make stuff, to contribute? Don’t you want to wake up every morning knowing that you’ve helped somebody? That you fixed their leaky pipes or cooked them a meal? I don’t care if you’re doing it for a corporation or the government or just for the hell of it—there’s nothing better than doing work that helps somebody.

Why don’t my videos count?” asked Abbott.
“Count for what?”
“Why don’t they count for work, for doing good for somebody?”
“I guess it does,” he replied, “but I’d ask you this: Do your customers need you? Are you making yourself essential? I just know fans can be fickle, that’s all.

I wrote whole reports on this,” said Joan the FBI lady
Nobody liked my conclusion. The only thing that will save us is a new cold war. Or, you know, a new actual war, against a real enemy.
Hunter shook his head, gnawing on his own rack of ribs from the barbecue trailer. “People just need to get a taste of it. When they figure out that instability isn’t about cool gun battles on the street but empty store shelves and power outages, that all your credit cards stop working and the hospitals go dark, they’ll come to their senses.”

I’ve often thought that what we need to counter what’s coming is a new religion, where the like-minded form bonds through touch and kindness and soft conversations over home-cooked food, practicing human connection as it has been done for tens of thousands of years.