“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.”
Abbott Coburn is a 26-year-old Lyft driver who gets a job to take a woman to LAX. When he gets there, he meets a woman (Ether) who makes him an offer – $200,000 to cancel the ride on the Lyft app but instead drive her and the big black box she’s sitting on to Washington, D.C. The catch is that they have to get there by the 4th of July for him to get the balance and he can’t come with any electronic devices. She gives him $100,000 upfront and promises him the balance if he keeps to their deal.
Abbott is a Twitch streamer and when he goes back to this house to pack, he uploads a quick video to let his followers know that he would be gone for a while. As he leaves all his electronic devices behind and embarks on a cross-country journey with this strange woman he just met, he is unaware of the online furor that unleashes due to his video spearheaded on Reddit and then spread across all online platforms.
“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.”
This book has excerpts of threads from Reddit and comments from spectators as strangers track these two from California to Washington, D.C. The comments get more outrageous as video of him picking up said woman and the big black box with what is thought to be a radiation symbol on it surface online. Everyone has their own theory from a planned terrorist attack on the capital to aliens to drugs to dead bodies.
It’s fascinating and true to real life, watching people make up their minds about strangers who they do not know in real time. People pull up Abbott’s entire Twitch streams and find rants he’s made about women which clearly shows that he has incel tendencies. Every single thing he’s ever said in the past are examined and put up as proof of his intentions.
“Our whole society is idle and overeducated, and nothing spices things up like conflict. There’s an old saying that a child not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth. I’d update it to say the child not sufficiently entertained by the village will burn it down for the spectacle.”
Abbott is a very unlikeable character, but I enjoyed reading his arguments and why he is the way he is. When I was reading comments about this book, I saw a lot of people say they hated this book because they couldn’t “relate” to an incel, and I think this is what is wrong in today’s art. I called it the Taylor Swift effect where everyone wants to relate to art for it to be good. We are demanding that people stop writing any characters that we do not see reflected in us because good art should only reflect us which is leading to artists making albums that are essentially tabloids of their lives.
All I demand from my books is that that character exists. I don’t care if I’m able to relate to that character, I just want the character to exist. Do I relate to Abbott and his arguments? Do I agree with him? Absolutely not. But you cannot argue that men like him exists. You only have to go to a woman’s page on Instagram and read the comments and you will find plenty of men like Abbott.
“Placebos work better when they cost more; it’s science”
I read this book after I wrote our best and worst books of the year, but this is hands down the best book I read this year. I even hesitate to say this because this is not the best written book or the most literary, but I think it’s the book that most struck me and delighted me. I read this book in one sitting. It’s been so long since I’ve been able to do that. Do I think it completely fell apart in the end and the author did not know how to keep up the momentum? Of course, but I still gave this book 5 stars on Goodreads.
Leggy
TwoNightStands 