Presenting
EMPTY BOX
Do you know how I got this box?
This big empty box?
Of course, I learned about it from a streaming video online.
But I didn’t buy it online.
And I didn’t buy it from a brick and mortar store.
It isn’t available from retailers online or situated inside an actual building.
Once I watched that video I developed an abstract desire to have a big empty box for myself.
It . . . appeared . . . I guess I would say . . . right here in the back of my garage.
Also . . . I’m not entirely sure I remember having a garage prior to the advent of the empty box-but let’s not get into that right now.
Here it is.
It’s a big empty box.
But it’s something more.
This box is a device the size of a home steak freezer-like you would keep in the back of your garage-that has a small panel you can open on this end right here.
See it?
Basically, once you plug it into the wall, and, uh, there’s not any buttons or switches or dials, uh, you don’t have to turn it on or off or, y’know, there’s no adjustments to be made. It’s plugged in or unplugged. It’s on or it’s off.
But you have that panel you can open once it’s plugged in-just right there.
You can’t open it if it’s unplugged.
But when it’s plugged in you can feed small animals into that panel. Mice. Rats. Birds. Monkeys. Squirrels. Cats. Dogs. Maybe not huge dogs. Small to medium mutts. Puppies and kittens for sure. It takes lizards and amphibians, but it runs less efficiently. Bugs like spiders and insects-roaches, ants, beetles-they don’t do anything. It doesn’t want bugs.
And it hates seafood with a passion. You can watch videos online of people feeding it crabs and fish and lobster and it just explodes. Hilarious stuff.
Put simply . . . it wants things that can suffer. The more sophisticated the better. It prefers cats, monkeys, birds, and dogs. But, sure, it can run on a lean mixture if all you got are snakes or geckos or what have you.
It does not accept humans of any size. It doesn’t want us. Not for moral reasons, it just doesn’t recognize our suffering as “valid.” Don’t ask me to explain it in detail. I’m not a philosopher. As far as I can understand it takes the position that our brains are so sophisticated that we no longer feel authentically. We’re basically simulating emotions. It considers us meaty robots. And it doesn’t like that. My guess is that it thinks of itself as human and therefore it observes a taboo against cannibalism. At the same time, and also because it considers itself human, it has nothing but contempt for us. Which is, if we’re being honest, how many humans feel about many of their fellow humans. In other words . . . it’s rather vicious and it’s rather pretentious.
I mean, look at it. It’s a big, lame home consumer product that just decided out of the blue that it was a person. An antisocial person at that. Which is, admittedly, fairly amusing. And also . . . kind of infuriating.
But I kinda respect it all the same.
It knows exactly what it likes.
That can carry you far in life.
It makes no attempt to hide its hostility behind religion or ideology or money.
Its fuck-you-ness is right there on the surface. Minimal tricks.
But, uh, so . . . you feed it birds, monkeys, cats, and dogs . . . and it consumes them. There’s no noise. If you put your hands on it there’s no extremity of hot or cold. Even if your garage gets really goddamn hot or freezing fuckin’ cold it somehow manages to maintain a completely mild feel. Which suggests some form of internal regulation, right? But when people have cracked it open they find no machinery inside. It’s empty!
Something else that’s weird: no one knows what it is actually made of. Go on. Touch it. What is it? Is it metal? Is it cardboard? Is it concrete? Is it glass? Try to describe its texture. You can’t do it. It won’t let you. That’s my opinion in any case.
And inside there’s no animal remains whatsoever. Now, it is believed that it generates waste-but I’ll get to that in a minute. First, I want to make clear that I do not personally believe this device to operate according to any sort of magic or metaphysics or, uh, supernatural principles. My own belief-and a lotta people who theorize about it online concur-is that what we’re dealing with here is ultrasubtle technology. Basically . . . we open it up, and we see emptiness . . . but it’s actually just ultrasubtlety. The tech at work here is so finely engineered that it ends up invisible to our not-so-subtle ways of seeing. I know that sounds like nonsense, but it’s the most sensible framework I’ve worked out for how a bigass box of nothing exhibits the functions that it, y’know, exhibits.
You put the right kind of animal in . . . and it’s gone.
You bother it with nasty seafood . . . it explodes in your face.
You try to chunk a human baby in there . . . the baby comes back out wholly intact.
Somehow . . . this empty box . . . converts its preferred animals . . . into an output that’s both waste and product.
Follow me on this . . .
Cars get you where you want to go . . . but they also create carbon pollution, road rage, crashes, and various onerous financial burdens.
Disposable plastic goods make our lives convenient . . . but they create mountains of garbage. Not to mention the proliferation of microplastics, but that stuff is so controversial I won’t even go there.
Guns can protect you . . . but they generate shell casings. And dead bodies. And injured bodies. And injured psyches. And cycles of retribution. And sundered nations. And arms races.
Guns can enforce ideology . . . but that can lead to mass death and destruction.
A mobile screen gives you the world in your pocket . . . but don’t think too hard about the exploited laborers who dug the materials out of the earth so you could have that world in your pocket.
Social media gives us a giddy sense of discovery and connection . . . but just as often leaves us “rotting in our beds” as a popular saying goes. Not to mention filter bubbles, disinformation, violent extremism, depressing loneliness, disempowering atomization, and threats to democracy.
Fast food is fun . . . but also contributes to various health problems conducive to an early death. Not to mention the low pay and shitty work conditions of those who toil to bring you those speedy eats.
Things you buy that are fun . . . are also kinda fucked.
We get a fun result . . . but there’s always a fucked result alongside the fun.
This empty box . . . is the ultimate expression of this inescapable truth of our age.
It’s the purest expression, perhaps.
Entertainment experience and waste experience, the fun and the fuckedness. . . simultaneous. No division. All-in-one.
It’s a useless empty box that takes up too much space, makes cute animals disappear, dangerously explodes if you accidentally feed it seafood, and seems to regard us humans with a dismissive contempt by refusing to eat gross babies; that wastes your time as you try to figure it out, all the while generating vast amounts of highly speculative, inevitably toxic online discourse about what-in-the-burning-motherfuck it actually is, and thereby pointing up how useless and frantic and trivial our lives have become that we burn so many hours and calories over a stupid shitass empty box that defeats all attempts to decipher its innermost workings . . . and one more thing.
The most intriguing output of this empty box’s ultrasubtle mechanisms.
How can I describe it?
It’s like . . . we know these empty boxes are pervasive. There’s something like three hundred million uploads of confirmed empty box content online. Those are just the empty boxes we know about. We can reasonably conclude from this that empty boxes . . . are every-goddamn-where.
And every last one seems to appear in the back of a garage. Even if there was no garage. The empty box comes with a free garage. And if you already got a garage . . . it gets totally displaced by this new free garage.
So we have all these cute-animal-eating-toxic-online-discourse-inspiring empty boxes all over the place spreading as fast and as far as the rate of propagation of successfully induced abstract desire to have an empty box of one’s own inside the human mind.
These ultrasubtle devices are ubiquitous, now, along with their complementary garages.
It’s creating a living space crunch in some areas.
Eating our pets.
Showing us contempt by refusing to eat our none-too-flavorful babies.
And no one knows how to wish these empty boxes back into the unknown whence they came, our wishes for a return to the old status quo handily defeated by a very contagion of induced abstract consumer desire.
And we’ve no power to resist it or fight it. Even if everyone stuffed every last empty box with seafood, that abstract desire is already bonded with our hearts and minds.
The only solution would be to induce some sort of mass amnesia. Or maybe make everybody’s brains explode. Which could work, maybe. If we were able to sequester the people who haven’t been infected by the desire for an empty box . . . and then, you know, we blow up all the infected brains, burn down the Internet, and rig up a robot army to stuff seafood into the empty boxes in a rigorously coordinated fashion . . . it could work!
But . . . like . . . fuck me, I don’t want to get my brain exploded. I want to live.
Even if it’s in this new world suffused with the tension and terror of ubiquitous empty boxes . . . I can get used to it.
Hell, people accept nuclear weapons, runaway climate change, anti-vaccination ideology, the return of measles, COVID-19, and the slow-motion death of democracy.
We can handle some empty fuckin’ boxes that look down on us.
All the same, though, I’m gonna be pretty tough on empty box when it comes to my final rating.
Which is . . . zero out of ten.
Oh, yeah.
I went there.
Sometimes you gotta get tough.
