The Bloomer's Paradox
Deep Dives
Explore related topics with these Wikipedia articles, rewritten for enjoyable reading:
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Optimism bias
14 min read
The article's central argument about 'reverse apocalypse' and the tension between pessimistic media narratives versus objective improvements in human welfare directly engages with cognitive biases around how we perceive progress and risk
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Hans Rosling
14 min read
The statistics cited about global improvements in clean water, electricity, infant mortality, and literacy are signature Rosling arguments from Factfulness - understanding his methodology and impact would deeply enrich the reader's engagement with these claims
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Mean world syndrome
12 min read
The article's core thesis about media consumption creating distorted perceptions of danger and societal collapse directly describes this phenomenon studied by George Gerbner - the grandfather's doom-scrolling and Abbott's apocalyptic worldview are textbook examples
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
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