A key to succeeding in business is the ability to 'think outside the box'. To think creatively is to think cardboard or, in short, to think the box in all its technoscientific entanglement. Boxes beget boxes amidst cardboard's daily doings in the re-engineering of world. A major branch of packaging science concerns paper-based solutions to product delivery, a field mainly concerned with the design of the cardboard box. Blindness to the pervasive influence of the cardboard box entails blindness to its ministrations, vaulted and mean. Cardboard, seen in the light of technoscience, can illuminate cultures of literacy. Advancement of literacy and accumulation of knowledge hinges on the dissemination of paper, the first mass medium. Without the mediating services of cardboard, technoscientific humanity could not have acquired the current aptitude it has in wielding sophisticated tools to accomplish complex routines.