Emboxified by the wrong kind of button
We're closing the walls in on ourselves while believing we want it
Digital buttons are insanely powerful. They’re like the logic gate of late-stage humanity.
Have you noticed that most buttons gradually emboxify us? It’s insidious. Not all buttons, of course, but roughly 99% of the digital kind.
Emboxification is when the walls literally close in on us while at the same time we are persuaded to be OK with it, even crave and defend it. It’s like enshittification but about the lives of people rather than platforms. No need to look up the word, I made it up.
Through emboxification, we grow to accept ever smaller physical spaces. Our “home range” shrinks by the year, the variety of our choices ever decreases, and the frequency of our real-world interactions with other people plummets.
Sure, I could be describing life after 65 (tropical cruises aside), but today emboxification is happening to our youth, our teenagers, and pretty much everyone under 40.
To borrow Cory Doctorow’s phrasing:
Here is how people die nowadays: First, they are having fun for free; then they become addicted; then they become fragile and malleable; then they become abused; then they retreat into a smaller and smaller space. Then, they die, already in their coffin.
Do we have an obesity problem or an emboxification problem? Do we have widespread mental illness or an emboxification problem? Do we have a fertility problem or an emboxification problem? Do we have a competence problem or an emboxification problem? Do we have social division or an emboxification problem?
I wonder.
As I see it, we are being induced to encoffinate ourselves well before our natural expiration date. Induction now begins as early as infancy, too often in toddler-hood, and almost always by one’s tweens.
Helicopter parenting. Safetyism. Tablet and smartphone addiction. Gaming and social media obsessions.
All represent real reductions of our physical range and our usage of space.
The proximate culprit? The wrong kind of button.
Wrong kind of button?
Yep, the wrong kind of button.
I get it, the wrong kind of button isn’t materializing by magic. Other people are designing the fancy packaging and delivering them into our hands. But we’re still accepting these buttons into our lives and tapping them thousands of times a day, ever emboxifying ourselves one tick tighter at a time. Only we can fix this; they have no incentive to help us.
Put simply, the wrong kind of button is the kind of button that emboxifies us. Yes, that seems circular, but bear with me. Circularity is a big reason the situation is so insidious.
With the wrong kind of button, the more we tap it the worse our prospects become. With the right kind, the better our prospects. Children have little idea what prospects even are or how to change them. They trust us. Dumbfucks.
Have you noticed that a smartphone or tablet is a giant virtual button? While keyboards and game-pads obviously have physical buttons, we’re increasingly tapping the virtual type. Why? Because of the feedback loops!
Feedback loops, like buttons, can be right or wrong for us. With the right kind of feedback loop, we are rewarded with courage and energy so that we explore more, expand our range, and open ourselves interesting experiences. Or, we are appropriately punished for our choices that harm our own prospects or those of others.
But with the wrong kind of feedback loop? We are still rewarded, but this time with instant hits of dopamine that keep us stuck exactly where we are, tapping the button again and again like a pigeon pecking in a Skinner box. When virtual, these buttons can be dynamic and personalized to amplify their addictive quality.
If we were foraging for tubers, this would be a fine feedback loop, because we’d be putting in the work to feed ourselves. But the wrong-button hijacking of our natural dopaminergic cycle induces us to be sedentary and “safe”. Once we get started down that path, more feedback loops kick in. Our minds begin to accept our now-standard situation and invest it into our identity, leading us to become aggressively self-limiting, fearful, and proudly fragile.
And so the wrong kind of buttons gradually emboxify us.
We’ll feel as though we were in control the whole time and that it was consensual, but we weren’t and it wasn’t. We’re human, we have psychological vulnerabilities, and they were ruthlessly exploited.
Is it inevitable that the wrong kind of button leads to emboxification? Pretty much, yes. Being digital and cheap, the purveyors of these buttons can fail a thousand times to hook us and still profit when they pull us in with their thousandth try. If not us, they’ll hook our children and our friends, and then hook us through them.
Who can resist this psychic assault? Emboxification has become endemic. We’re clearly not equipped for this war.
One way out of this insidious trap is to bring the right kind of button into the world. It’s the kind of button that energizes and encourages us. We’ll tap it less often than before, not more often, as it levers us off the couch and returns us the real world of fighting and fucking like healthy humans celebrating their aliveness.
Maybe then we’d see some of our problems get solved.