Pandora was the first woman in Greek myth, made by the gods and sent down with a sealed jar she was told never to open. Her name means "all-gifted." In Hesiod the vessel is a jar, a pithos. It only became a box in the sixteenth century, when Erasmus retold the story and confused the word with pyxis, a small box. One mistranslated word changed the myth for five hundred years, as clear an example as any of how the written word shapes what we believe.

Here she stands on the grounds of modern consumer culture, holding the box shut against her chest. Billboards behind her read CONSUME and CLICK against a burning sky and beside a building that resembles a Walmart store. At her feet a golden calf is stamped on a medallion set over a chalice, the initiatory powers of capital, and a phoenix of fire bursts out of a horse skull, a symbol of rebirth and resurrection. She is about to open the box. A black box is also what engineers call a system whose inputs and outputs are visible and whose inner workings are not. That is the exact condition of the models now writing, deciding, and recommending on our behalf. In the myth everything escapes from the jar and only hope stays behind. The phoenix rising beside her is the same idea in another language.