There is a different kind of black box, of course, a real one: the flight recorder aboard every commercial aircraft that tracks the plane’s location, altitude, velocity, and other flight data. These black boxes are visceral reminders of what Paul Virilio calls the “integral accident” (32). Every new technology makes possible a new kind of accident, he explains. The invention of planes, for example, made plane crashes possible. The “integral accident” describes a failure so devastating— the plane crash— that designers build the technology, the plane, with its eventual catastrophic failure in mind. The future accident is integral to the technology itself… We only remember the black box on a plane after a plane crash. We avoid thinking about it up until we cannot. And then it becomes something like a bloody fingerprint at the scene of a crime, mere evidence to reconstruct past events.
The Black Box and Speculative Care, Mark Sample