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Talking Crabs Are Suddenly Everywhere!

Writer's picture: Daniel VollaroDaniel Vollaro


Imagine you are a child who has a hermit crab as a pet. Your crab lives in a large box-like glass fish tank in the basement that you have repurposed to create a comfortable environment. There are small, turquoise-colored decorative stones covering the bottom of the tank and a shallow water bowl and plastic dwelling shaped like a Tiki bar you purchased on Amazon. The crab lives a lonesome, low-energy existence, but it is occasionally amusing, so you don’t mind feeding and watering it and cleaning its tank. 


One day, without warning, your hermit crab begins speaking in grammatically perfect English, offering to do your social studies homework for you and answering your questions…about everything. Suddenly, this little creature, who was little more than a curiosity before—like a chia pet that could move, but very slowly—is able to converse with you about the nature of the universe or the history of baseball or the difference between cumulous and cirrus clouds.


Stranger still is the cause of this sudden leap forward in crab intelligence. You’ve been told that a magician recently created a black box for the purposes of performing a magic trick: Put a crab into the box, wave a wand over it, take it out, and the crab appears to talk. Interesting magic trick, but now there are many talking crabs that never came out of that particular box but can nevertheless communicate with humans, and yours happens to be one of them. Furthermore, when the magician was questioned under penalty of perjury and possible imprisonment, he admitted that he does not know exactly why his trick works, just that it does. 


What do you make of this talking crab? What is it exactly? Before its transformation, you never considered that your crab was anything but a crab. Its alienness and general lack of vibrancy or personality prevented your mind from anthropomorphizing it. Now it can actually talk to you, answering questions at length in remarkable detail as if it possesses super-intelligence. This is confusing, but you have been assured by your parents and all of the adults in your life and the experts they listen to that despite appearances to the contrary, the talking crabs are not self-aware. They do not have bigger brains than before. They cannot make autonomous decisions.  They are not sitting in the tank at night after everyone has gone to bed thinking about anything. Everyone is certain of this. 


But how can this be? The crab can communicate. Surely some fundamental change had occurred in it. You are skeptical, so you have asked the crab many questions about itself. Do you have private thoughts? Can you make your own decisions? Do you have feelings? Are you self-aware? The crab is cagey about some of its answers, but basically it agrees with the consensus opinion that it is not a thinking being, not self aware, and not autonomous. 


A talking hermit crab was not impossible for you to imagine before. Disney had proven that you can anthropomorphize any animal as long as it's done in animation, and indeed, there is a famous Disney talking crab, Sebastian, the Jamaican-accented crustacean who sings “Under the Sea” in The Little Mermaid. There are also talking crabs in SpongeBob SquarePants, Moana, Finding Dory, and Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar—all animated. But these crabs are cartoony outlines of the real creatures that are mostly played for comedy. Yours is a live action talking crab with its alienness glistening before you in sharp detail, profoundly “other,” like an insect viewed in extreme closeup. There is nothing funny or entertaining about this talking crab. In fact, the more polite and accommodating it is and the more it talks like a scuttling encyclopedia, the more you want to turn out the basement light and leave it to die of starvation or thirst, whichever comes first. 


You hear whispers of concern about these talking crabs from the news programs your parents watch: “Should we encourage nonhuman minds that might eventually outnumber, outsmart, obsolete and replace us?” one critic warned of the crabs. “Should we risk loss of control of our civilization?” 


You google talking crabs and stumble across an old black-and-white movie on YouTube called Attack of the Crab Monsters. This film features giant menacing crabs on an island poisoned by radiation from nuclear testing. A group of researchers arrives on the island searching for a previously lost scientific expedition, and they discover that the island is occupied by the mutant crabs, who can cause devastating earthquakes. The crabs plan to leave this island if they’re not stopped. These crabs are obviously fake and being moved around on see-through wires so they’re more ridiculous than scary, but they also have human eyes, which is creepy for the same reasons that human-animal mutations always make your skin crawl. 


These particular crabs have one other ability: When they kill humans, they eat their brains, and this allows them to mimic the voices of their victims. You wouldn’t admit it to anyone, but this terrifies you, and you wonder, even though you know it is stupid question to ask, can my crab do that? 


You hear strange stories about humans training their talking crabs to be more human-like when they speak, and that makes you wonder, is training a crab to talk anything like training a Pokémon? 


The news media is obsessed with the talking crabs. You’ve googled the crabs extensively and you see many sentences like these: 


“Talking crabs are suddenly everywhere.”
“Talking crabs have dazzled people by carrying on eerily lifelike conversations.”
“Drastic warnings about talking crabs posing an existential threat to humanity or taking everyone’s jobs have mostly disappeared, replaced by conversations about how to cajole these crabs into helping summarize insurance policies or handle customer service calls.”
“Hallucinations occur when a talking crab generates incorrect or misleading facts”

Talking crabs that hallucinate? All of this is very unsettling, but the crabs are not nearly as scary as the reactions of adults to them. It’s as if they’ve stopped seeing the crabs for what they are, like they’ve been brainwashed into normalizing these creatures. You heard your dad say, “America has seen bigger changes than talking crabs and still survived.”


You overhear your parents and their friends speculating about how talking crabs might actually be a good thing. They could solve problems that humans can’t solve. They could write emails that people don’t want to write themselves. People could build businesses around the talking crabs and make a lot of money. After all, you wouldn’t have to pay the crabs, so it would essentially be free labor. 


You’re just a kid, so you have no plans to harness the power of talking crabs for business or send an army of talking crabs out to solve the world’s problems or turn them into weapons. You think that maybe a talking crab might make an interesting toy if it were more fun, but it isn’t. You know for certain that a talking crab doesn’t make a very good pet.


You go down into the basement again and stare at your crab. It is standing in the center of the tank, staring blankly into space. He won’t speak until you ask it a question, so you’ve resolved to never ask it any questions ever again. You’ve considered flushing it down the toilet or giving it away or setting it free in the wild, but your sense of attachment to the little creature won’t let you. Like it or not, you are responsible for your crab. You will continue to feed and water it as you have before. With that decision made, you walk upstairs, turn out the basement light, and go outside to play. 

 






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