Hey everybody! Another week, another newsletter. There’s a couple of reviews and the triumphal return of Ed’s Corner! Get the definitive word on some stuff, here! Enjoy!
CONTENTS
REVIEWS
Beran, It Came From Something Awful
Herbert, Dune Messiah
LAGNIAPPE
Ed’s Corner: Infinitely Simulated Stupidity & Giving Up On Finding Your Place in the Universe
REVIEWS
Dale Beran, “It Came From Something Awful: How A Toxic Troll Army Accidentally Memed Donald Trump Into Office” (2019) - I’ve come to call it the Mark Fisher school of social criticism. Mark Fisher, for those of you unfamiliar, was a British cultural studies writer who wrote about contemporary culture, especially online culture. If you’ve heard the phrase “capitalist realism,” that’s one of his. His work has proven highly influential on many writers in the same areas, in terms of ideas, themes, and tone. I think it is fair to say, at this point, that he is the object of what could be called a cult (think more like the Marian cult or the cult around Foucault, not Heaven’s Gate). A lot of writers in the “online discourse hell” space hail Fisher as not just an influence, but as something of a prophet, a saint figure, complete with martyrdom at the hands of the force that Fisher understood as fundamental to contemporary life: the depression and malaise induced by late capitalist existence.
I don’t want to dismiss Fisher intellectually, and I don’t want to downplay people’s emotional attachment to a writer who they felt understood what they themselves were going through, and who died, leaving a lot of people feeling bereft. That said, the thought produced by Fisher’s epigones has a lot of severe weaknesses, and a meta-weakness- the cult of Fisher, for all of its wide-ranging criticality, does not do self-criticism very well beyond ritual invocation of its own fecklessness and inability to effect change.
I’d like to say that this book encapsulates the Fisher school’s weaknesses and its strengths, but that’s only maybe a quarter true. It doesn’t have all the weaknesses of the Fisher school. “It Came From Something Awful” doesn’t have the wounded defensive quality Fisherite work often does, and doesn’t show the sympathy for the far right that often occasions displays of that defensiveness. Beran stumbles into other Fisher school mistakes, but not those, thankfully. The book’s strengths, on the other hand, are less that of Fisher and his epigones and more that of fairly solid, middle-of-the-road history or journalism: fine research, well-organized findings, the relating of an important and interesting story. I suppose where the Fisher school comes in at all is that the author’s embeddedness in some of its precepts undermines him, turns what could have been a great work into a decent one.
I avoided this book when it first came out for a stupid but honest reason: it’s title, subtitle, and cover all made it look deeply inane. But some commentators who I take reasonably seriously took this seriously, and for a while I was trying to keep up with altright-explainers, so I figured I’d give this late entry a try.
Right off the bat, Beran distinguished himself from other writers on the subject (most notably Fisher-cultist turned “main reason people googled ‘social patriot’ circa 2019” Angela Nagle) by actually knowing what he was talking about. Talking to Nazis like Richard Spencer, or even the boot boys, is like looking at bugs in a terrarium. Actually going into their spaces, especially the fora, is more like levering open a rock and sticking your face into what’s underneath. Journalists and scholars don’t like it, and usually can’t tell when someone fakes it (the sheer lack of new information in “Kill All Normies” should have been a clue, but hey, it was 2017). But Beran not only did it- he had been doing it for a while, at least lightly. He was a habitue of the titular “Something Awful” and no stranger to the chans, especially in the early days. He actually talked to people involved, not just founder figures like “Lowtax” Kyanka, “Moot” Poole, and Fredrick Brennan, but everyday, anonymous users of the boards.
And it shows. Beran lays out a sensible, comprehensible history of anonymous forum culture. He starts with early, pre-web message boards like the Well — which tried allowing users to be anonymous, but quickly wrapped up that experiment — to the beginning of contemporary forum culture with Something Awful (I had friends who were big into it on the early aughts) to the terrible marriage of Japanese anime image boards and American entrepreneurial innovation we came to call the chans.
In terms of interpretation of this story, Beran is on somewhat shakier ground, but makes some decent connections and points. His biggest point is about a conjuncture between the spread of forum culture and the death of counterculture. By the time the late nineties rolled around, every single counterculture since the Beats, including mutually antagonistic ones such as hippies and punks, and even those that eschewed the whole game, like grunge, had been co-opted, defanged, and commoditized by the overarching capitalist monoculture. Seemingly the only thing the culture industry could not sell, by the time Lowtax was starting Something Awful, was the rejected backwash of Gen X grunge ‘tude: cynicism, indifference, and a certain soupçon of fascination with gory death and sexual violation (it turns out that somebody could indeed sell those things, but I guess the fora habitues were past caring by then).
I split the difference on this. It’s an unsubtle reading and ignores or misreads some important factors (I’m still rewriting my birthday lecture which covered some of this ground- patience!). But it’s not so wrong as to be unusable, and also probably represents something like the historical common sense of a lot of the people who helped make the forum culture, and at least part of the story as understood by many participants in it today (including, mutatis mutandis, the Fisher cult).
One thing Beran gets, that a lot of writers both in and out of the internet-discourse fail to grasp, is that a lot can change in twenty years, and it’s not all meaningless signifier churn. At various points, the people on the boards bestirred themselves to do things other than swap funny or grotesque pictures, and abuse themselves and others. Anonymous grew out of 4chan, and while a lot of people pooh-pooh it now, whatever else it represented, it represented at least some people rejecting Gen Xer nihilism for some sort of collective, values-based project. And then, of course, various snitches snitched and it collapsed. A more organized movement probably would not have collapsed like that, but when you’re organized by whoever can talk the biggest on an IRC channel…
Into the gap left by both the decline of Anonymous and the collapse of the “hope and change” Obama dream — and I think a lot of us undersell exactly how high the hopes were for Obama because we don’t want to review how badly most of us, myself included, got suckered — came the same sort of nihilism of the kind of people who, at the turn of the millennium, made mocking teenage suicides a sport… but changed. It got sharper and even meaner, weirdly more desperate, more violent. The rise of the incel culture seems to have been a leading indicator, that the nihilism was going to leave the realm of jokes and pranks and start getting bloody… and, for the product of groups of supposedly anything-goes jokesters, weirdly self-serious. I still sometimes try to imagine the reception on “the old internet” that I only watched from a distance to the idea that anyone was entitled to sex… well, between the rise of both internet porn and dating apps (the latter of which could be seen to quantitatively prove nerds’ inadequacy) and the egging on of cultural/political entrepreneurs like Milo Yiannopolous, Mike Cernovich, and eventually Trump’s man Steve Bannon, a new crew of culture industry vultures found ways not just to commodify a counterculture’s dissent, but to weaponize it.
Here is where things start to fall apart in this book. First, so the blame doesn’t all go to the Fisher school, Beran relies way more on Hannah Arendt for his analysis of the right than makes sense. I tend to think this probably comes down to a mixture of simple… I don’t want to say ignorance, but maybe just unawareness of the way the study of fascism has gotten past/around the grand old lady, and the ways in which Arendt’s analysis actually coheres rather nicely with the hopelessness of the Fisher school. Even here, Beran isn’t completely off-base, and makes good use of some of Arendt’s ideas about déclassé upper class types allying with similarly deracinated lower orders to create fascist mobs, which suits the likes of Yiannopoulos and his gamer cohort to a T. But there’s some extreme flattening of historical patterns here that make it hard to see the differences between now and the periods Arendt writes about. I’m something of a lumper myself but it got a bit out of hand here.
This leads to the overarching weakness of the book, where it meets up with the weakness of the Fisher school of contemporary-awfulness analysis (and, in a weird way, Arendt). The Fisher school is so thoroughly invested in the all-encompassing awfulness of our lives under late capitalism that it can’t see anything else… including features of that awfulness that aren’t part of its pre-established menu of tropes and laments. Basically, they really, really don’t get offline. The further Beran gets from a screen (he laments “the screen” without getting into why it’s so much worse than “the page” or “the stage” or “the epic poem”) the less he knows what he’s talking about. Unlike some Fisher epigones, his hopelessness about/spite towards the left doesn’t lead him to hate on online libs/leftists to the detriment of his analysis. His chapters on tumblr are quite thoughtful.
But leftist opposition to the altright, to Trump, and to other instantiations of the right-wing resurgence we’ve seen post-2008 didn’t come from, or even mainly from, tumblr teens and their concerns for personal validity. Hell, if you want to blame the internet for the many weaknesses of today’s left, tumblr wouldn’t be where I’d look- I’d look at Twitter, which Beran does little with, mostly treats as a neutral, if generally shitty, medium. Speaking from personal experience, I can tell you that not only is antifa not a group — and that “black bloc” isn’t one (from Philadelphia?? Beran claims) either — but that whatever concerns those of us who do antifascist direct action may share with the stereotypical tumblr-teen, they/we didn’t get into this because they/we were mad about racist Halloween costumes. To think this betrays the ways in which Beran — and here is where his weaknesses sync up most completely with the Fisher school — really cannot imagine a world apart not from the internet, but from his version of the internet, to the extent that even googling what black bloc is does not seem to have occurred to him.
Beran, unlike Nagle or some other Fisher acolytes, doesn’t add hatred and ax-grinding to the problems this intellectual inheritance brings with him. He does not seem to actively resent anyone who would actually try, however unlikely they are to succeed, to do something about our capitalist-depressive-realist state (and potentially show up the poster-philosophes in the bargain), which I’ve seen a lot of in online essays and comment sections. But the ways in which cynicism and the barest filigree of theory fill in for commitment to thoroughgoing understanding — which would imply much more work, in the archive and the long watch of thought, even if you don’t think it would also imply taking to the street, as my comrades and I do — did a lot to hamper his work. I’m probably making this sound worse than it is, but I think that’s because the good parts and the bad parts stand in the starkest contrast in this book. Moreover, the good parts are good in a simple way — they do the job — and the bad are better fodder for comment… perhaps reflective of the larger incentive structure motivating the fecklessness of the Fisher school. In any event, this book is better than many, for all of its flaws, but somewhat disappointing. ****
Frank Herbert, “Dune Messiah” (1969) - I like Dune! It’s ridiculous, but good. This is the first time I tried the first sequel. Different friends of mine say that different of the sequels are good, but disagree on which, and no one I know seems to think that all of the sequels Frank Herbert wrote are good… or that the many more written by his son, Brian, are any good at all. But I figured the only way to do it, if I was going to do it at all, was to begin with the beginning, so when I found “Dune Messiah” on a free pile, I picked it up.
It’s twelve years after the end of “Dune,” and Paul Atreides rules most of the human-inhabited galaxy (and if there are aliens, we don’t see them, though some of the humans get freaky enough). The Harkonnens, the evil clan that killed his dad, are fooled. The imperial family has been thrown down and forced to give one of their princesses to Paul in marriage (not that he does anything with Princess Irulan, only having eyes for his Fremen lover Chani). Paul’s Fremen warriors, the baddest dudes around, have spread the word of the Maud’dib in a jihad that has killed around sixty billion people. Most of the remainder worship Paul as a messiah, the Kwisatz Haderach (say what you want about Frank Herbert, he comes up with cool names for things and people), and he has some pretty cool powers, like being able to see into the future. His sister, Alia, can not only see into the future but also has had full knowledge of the lives of all of her ancestors she was in the womb! So she’s fourteen but, you know, more or less omniscient except when the plot dictates she not be.
The previous power players in the galaxy are upset by the rise of Paul. The Bene Gesserit sisterhood, to which his mother belonged (and she’s just in the wind somewhere), had put the pieces into place to make Paul the Kwisatz Haderach, but he refuses to do what they want. The old noble families, including the old imperial family through his wife Irulan, feel dissent for obvious reasons. Less obvious are the motivations of the freaky specialized mutants, the Spacer’s Guild, who are like weird spaceship fishmen who take the Spice drug to steer ships through hyperspace, and the Tleilaxu, weird biotech people who make zombie-clones and often “bio-hack,” as people now say, themselves. I guess the Spacers want an independent source for Spice, rather than letting Paul keep his Arrakeen monopoly, but Herbert both makes them a pivot of the plot, but they’re also definitely the bad guys he respects the least.
Between them, these players hatch a plot to do in Paul and Alia. The plot is really complicated, and moreover, to the extent it plays out at all – to the extent that the good guys don’t use their prescience to see through them, and all the measures they took to prevent the prescience from doing just that – it mostly does in drawn-out, boring conversations. Paul is in a snitty little mood throughout. It turns out he doesn’t like being the Maud’dib that much. He doesn’t like being worshiped, or constantly having to deal with conspiracies, and is less than thrilled over how many people have been killed in his name by his followers. He doesn’t want to just let the noble houses/Bene Gesserit/Spacers and whoever win, especially because they want to kill him and others close to him. But in many ways, he wins via the expedient of staying alive long enough to walk away, and become a different kind of legend.
But like I said, until some assassination attempts towards the end – which themselves are repeated, almost beat for beat, with different zombie-cyborg-assassins made out of friends of the family, if I remember right? – a lot of what happens in this book is conversation. The original Dune was also a bit slow and wordy. But there was more going on, and everything felt fresher. The strings show more here, the strain of a decently smart guy trying to depict a story of epochal geniuses with minds expanded beyond where humanity could go. In Herbert’s mind, that involves a lot of circular conversations made up of declarative sentences and high-nonsense philosophical aphorisms about power, fate, etc. Herbert had a better bag of tricks than others purporting to depict genius – Isaac Asimov, Orson Scott Card, Tom Harris from the thriller side of things – in that he stocks a lot of the genius less in what people say and more in how they observe things due to their super special vaguely-cybernetic training… but that can get a little old, too, especially when the plot does not move at the sort of pace you’d like. So this is a sort of middling effort. I’m thinking about whether it’s worth continuing, or just reading the wikipedia entries. ***
LAGNIAPPE
Ed’s Corner: Infinitely Simulated Stupidity & Giving Up On Finding Your Place in the Universe
The rumors are true, although you may believe it to be impossible, it’s time for another Ed’s Corner. I know I put these out infrequently enough that the odds of a new one coming out are rather low, but that’s what I’m here to talk to you about today: probability, and what is and isn’t possible to discern with it. The trouble with probability is that you have to fill out the probability range, that is, you have to know what is possible within a space before you can really make a judgment as to what is probable. What is and isn’t probable is fairly easy to calculate, what is or isn’t possible in a practical sense is kind of hard to say. The trick of it is, even massive statistical outliers are possible, or to put it in a less mathematical way, some really stupid stuff can happen, even if it’s not remotely likely to occur.
Given that anything can happen I can’t even really dismiss absurd contrivances like The Simulation Hypothesis out of hand. For those of you that aren’t familiar with the concept, it’s sort of a philosophical thought experiment, often attributed to philosophy professor Nick Bostrom. The hypothesis posits that it is scientifically possible for a civilization to become so advanced that it could create computers that could trivially simulate all of reality, including the one we exist in right now. As such, our entire reality might be one simulated in one of these programs.
Now, I’m willing to grant that it's possible: you, me and everybody else might just be little bloops and blips of binary, running a determinative call function in the mainframe of some bored future teen’s smartphone. As I said before, unlikely outliers are still statistically possible. You could contrive an explanation to any of my counterpoints that running such a simulation would be at best impractical, and at worst undesirable for any given future universe. Here’s an example: if their computers are so advanced as to simulate all of reality, then any predictive power inherent in such a simulation would be so advanced as to obviate the need to simulate the pre-supercomputational past, as the computer could probably make accurate predictions just with data from its relative present. After all, maybe there are some advanced questions that require such a high degree of certainty, or are so complex that it requires simulating an entire universe down to the atomic superposition of quadrillions of atoms at any given nano-second in time. I don’t know what that computational task would be, but that’s for the bored teens of the future to know, and me to merely acknowledge the theoretical possibility of. Even at my most skeptical, it’s all possible, in the end.
Where Bostrom, and more modern proponents of Simulation Theory such as our incredibly divorced pal Elon Musk, lose me, is the next step beyond the simulation being possible. This step is, that if it is possible, then it is more likely than not that we are indeed living inside of a simulation. Their argument goes, that if a computer that can simulate one universe is possible, then a computer that can simulate an infinite number of universes is also possible. The reasoning continues that the odds of the universe being a simulation go up the more simulations that are in existence, and at some point in the future there could be infinitely many simulations, so that infinity of possible simulations edges out all the other possibilities in the possibility space. There are other ways the universe might be, but there are infinitely many ways for it to be a simulation, so therefore it’s more likely for it to be a simulation, as there is only one way for the universe to exist in what we understand to be “reality,” relative to that infinity.
This portion of the argument is stupid to begin with. I briefly alluded to the fact that it wasn’t necessarily desirable for a future advanced civilization to bother simulating a whole universe to begin with. Why would they bother with an infinity of them? They barely wanted the one! But again, we’re talking about the realms of possibility. You can come up with some kind of explanation as to why they might make infinitely many simulations of various universes, and it might be possible. Maybe the simulations of universes are the future civilization equivalents of NFT’s, every dimension of existence existing on the blockchain and each individual holder gets to revel in their own personalized universe, which is a cool thing to have for some reason in the future. Still, if you can just compute whatever wherever in this crazy space future, you could probably just have your own computer generate every possible derivation of the simulated universe for your own personal use off the blockchain anyways. This doesn’t seem like a stable investment to me.
Regardless, there might be some reason that my poor little brain can’t wrap itself around that in the future they might make infinite simulations, and we might be living in one of them right now. I can’t even really contest that there might be infinitely many of them, or if there were an infinity of possibilities of one option being the true option stacked up against one other non simulation possibility, then the infinite possibilities probably contains the “true” reality.
But I still don’t put too much stock into the possibility of being trapped in the Matrix, for a couple of reasons. The first being from a philosophical point of view, Simulation Theory doesn’t really get us anywhere. So we’re in a simulation, so what? In knowing this can I hack into the source code of reality? Probably not, otherwise you know somebody somewhere would be slamming down the Konami Code to get some extra lives after accepting an ill-advised drag race challenge down Dead Man’s Curve in an attempt to impress their crush. What does this say about morality? That you should just do whatever you want because you’re not really hurting anybody, they’re all just lines of code after all. But then again so are you in that case, and you feel pain sometimes, and you wouldn’t want another piece of code hurting you for no reason.
Functionally, is there any difference between the morality of a string of binary code, and a living soul? You're merely making an observation about the form in which your consciousness resides, not really about its functions. At least when Plato was talking about shadows being cast upon the walls of a cave, or Descartes was imagining a horrible nightmare delusion conjured by devils to torment you, they were drawing some manner of conclusions as to how you ought to go about living in the cave and terrible nightmare delusion respectively. What is there to be gained from realizing that the world around us is a mere simulation other than to go, “well that’s neat I guess”? Also, not to give Plato and Descartes too much credit, but they were generally better at math than Bostrom.
Getting back to the idea of infinity, the Simulation Hypothesis is trying to play some games with philosophy, trying to obviate the meaning of existence by just throwing a lot of math at it. Not that this same trick of playing around with infinities hasn’t been around in the field of philosophy for a good long time. Zeno, a contemporary of Plato, had a whole series of paradoxes that played upon the idea of infinity, the most famous of which is often referred to as Achilles and the Tortoise, wherein the great athlete Achilles gives a tortoise a head start in a race, and although running at a much faster rate than the tortoise, can never manage to catch up, because in order for Achilles to catch up to the tortoise, first he must cover half the distance to the tortoise, by which time the tortoise has moved some, and when he’s covered half the distance, he has to cover half the remaining distance between himself and the tortoise, plus however far the tortoise moved in the time it took Achilles to move that original half the distance, down along infinitely many halves. If the segments Achilles needs to travel can be divided an infinitely many number of times, and if it takes some amount of time for Achilles to cover than distance, then surely it must take an infinitely long amount of time for Achilles to cover those infinite intervals of distance. On paper you might struggle to find a refutation of this, but mathematically 1/2+1/4+1/8+1/16... does not end up equaling infinity, but rather is equal to one, no matter how many intervals exist in the set, even if there are infinitely many of them. The much more elegant refutation was put forward by Diogenes, who upon hearing Zeno start his explanation just got up and walked away.
The problem with Zeno’s math, and Bostrom’s, is the same, but in slightly different ways. It’s easier to see from the example of Zeno’s Paradox that while we are dealing with infinities, it’s a bounded infinity. There are infinitely many intervals, but they are bounded between the numbers zero and one. Just because there’s theoretically an infinite number of things in a set of things, doesn’t mean it takes up the entirety of the possibility space those things exist in.
The math is slightly different in the case of the Simulation Hypothesis, but exists along the same lines. While there could be infinitely many simulations, at the very least, there’s a theoretical boundary wherein these simulations could occur. There has to be some limits on computational power, even in the super advanced society of the future. They could only do as much processing as converting every atom in the universe into computing power would allow, unless there are more atoms in the universe doing the simulation than the universe being simulated, in which case it’s not really a simulation then, is it? Also, even if they did that, it wouldn’t take too much processing power to determine what that universe would look like, it’d just be every atom in the universe simulating a universe where every atom is used to simulate a universe, which seems like a waste of computational resources.
But maybe there’s some kind of ultra quantum computing that lets you simulate several different universes all simultaneously based on quantum states, or whatever. While physically there are hard limits to how much computational power there is, and there can’t be infinitely many quantum states, in practice there may as well be a true infinity of simulations. However, that infinity is offset by the philosophical space in which it exists: namely, existence. Like I said earlier, almost any damn thing is possible in terms of what exists, including other recursive infinities such as the one created by the infinitely many simulations.
Who said the Big Bang only happened once, if indeed it did happen, or that it stopped happening after our universe was created? What if the Big Bang is still happening somewhere out there, creating new universes every moment between now and forever that exist at a tangent to our own? Beyond that, there might be infinite possibilities for there to be simulations of the universe, but by the same logic it’s also infinitely likely that the universe might be the physical embodiment of the product of a mathematical function that is run recursively and has infinitely many outputs depending on the ending value of the existence created by the last input, or the infinite possibilities of a moment of time split off into every possible outcome from one moment at the center of the timeline backwards and forward into time, or it could be the verses of song sung by the Goddess of the Moon singing in infinite voices as she is accompanied by the voices of the spirits of creation who serve her golden grapes on silver trays as they add their contributions to the unending heavenly choir.
I could go on listing other infinite possibilities for the existence of the physical universe forever, I won’t do so here, but if I did, that list of all of the different variations of different possibilities of origins of existence might eventually itself coalesce into a physical form of reality in infinitely many different ways. There are infinite infinities within the realm of what is possible, so we end up having the opposite problem with Zeno’s paradox. In Zeno’s race, there are infinite intervals that eventually reveal themselves to be vanishingly small, and thus manageable in terms of basic integers. In the possibility space of existence, the possibilities of infinities beyond the realm of computer simulations are so large as to render that infinity small enough to process in terms of basic integers. Even though the odds of us existing in a simulation might theoretically be infinitely likely, any number of other explanations for existence are also equally infinitely likely, so the formula is no longer ∞/x, where x is the number of possible explanations for all of existence there are, but rather 1/∞(x) where x is the number of equally infinitely likely explanations for existence. You yourself can calculate that, indeed, that doesn’t come out to be very good odds.
While I did make things a bit boring there in the last paragraph by doing a lot of math (in my defense, Bostrom started it), we can see how philosophy is kind of cool and interesting. We get to imagine all these interesting possible explanations to a fundamental question and sort of wonder “what if that’s true?” My real gripe with the Simulation Hypothesis is that it kind of shrugs that off, and doesn’t want to deal with that. The Simulation Hypothesis doesn’t need rigorous reasoning or introspection to determine the nature of the universe, it merely assumes things operate like a computer program. I don’t really fault Bostrom for putting forward the Simulation Hypothesis, it’s hard to make a living in the ol’ philosophy biz, and it’s publish or perish in the field to the extreme.
I do, however, want to give a little flack to many advocates who have taken up the theory, mainly programmers, or otherwise involved in technological fields. I think for them Simulation Hypothesis is less a philosophy and more an algorithm, or a manifestation of a least effort principle. You don’t have to do all the interesting and engaging imagining about the world, or possible worlds that exist outside the realm of the computer space, if you take it up as your philosophy. You don’t have to engage critically with the world outside of computers, and wonder what the meaning of it all is, because the meaning of it all is that it’s all computers. If you understand computers, you understand real life, and the more computer stuff you know, the better you understand life. It just seems awfully convenient in its reasoning, consigning the inner life of the mind to pure pragmatism. At the very least it’s efficient, but it’s kind of a waste of the rest of the universe, as you're giving up on literally infinite possibilities, to instead focus in on one possible, insular past of creation.
In the end, the same question I have about the premise is the same question I have about the practice. What is the simulation in the Simulation Hypothesis for? What knowledge and insight would this provide the people undertaking it? The same goes for pondering the Simulation Hypothesis itself, what knowledge or insight could it provide? That it’s good to know about computers and coding? I think perhaps some folks have conflated their bank statements with a philosophical text. This is a distressingly common occurrence.
Woof! Heady stuff there, Ed! Here is Mithra, considering the simulation hypothesis.