On a recent morning, I decided to grab a cup of dark roast coffee at a Starbucks I often stop at on my way to work. A great group of young people work there and they nearly always serve up a fine brew with kindness and courtesy. On this particular morning, however, things started going south shortly after I pulled up to the drive-through window. I gave the young man $2.85 for my $2.84 order, and he handed me the cup of coffee. Almost immediately, the 85 cents in coins seemed to confuse the young gentleman. Granted, I had fished around in my change drawer to come up with a quarter, five dimes and two nickels, and the combination of coins seemed to present quite a challenge to his powers of arithmetic. Eventually, he had to pull out a calculator to finish the job. In the meantime, I’m sitting there feeling like the lord of all tightwads while waiting for my penny in change, but I didn’t want to just drive off because sometimes I screw up and hand over the wrong amount. As I waited, however, a foul odor that can only be described as the smell of decomposition began to fill the inside of my car. Penny in hand, I began to pull away as the odor of dead, decaying animal carcass grew in power and potency. Thinking perhaps some varmint had crawled up under the hood and died, and the vent was blowing the smell into the cab, I quickly turned off the fan. But this did nothing to stifle the inescapable smell of death that now surrounded me. Then my attention turned to the cup of coffee. I picked it up and took a sniff. The horror! From what ancient crypt did this foul brew flow? Quickly, I weighed my options. There was no way I was going to drink this roadkill roast that currently sat in my cup holder. But I couldn’t survive a morning of work without a cup of joe. Fortunately, another coffee shop lay up ahead and I swerved into their lot. After pouring the java of death into a sewer grate, I went inside and explained my predicament to the young ladies behind the counter. They set me up with a fresh cup of brew for which I tipped them generously. I held the steaming cup to my nose and took a big whiff. Ahh, it smelled like charred wood and fresh dirt, just the way I like it.
People are talking about all the times they were “quiet baked” at work and the internet is buzzed
Quiet quitting, quiet firing, quiet hiring, it seems you can’t pick up the internet these days without reading about how the workplace is being transformed in very subtle ways by Millenials and Gen Z.
Sensing a change in attitudes about how we think and talk about work, Gen Xers are also beginning to unburden themselves regarding the unspoken practices they’ve brought to their working routine.
“I’ve been ‘quiet baked’ at work for decades,” said Roger Ambrose, a line cook at a very upscale Chicago eatery. “I used to wait until my shift was over to fire up a bowl, but eventually I just said, ‘fuck that.’ I need to establish a more healthy work/life balance.”
So Roger started getting baked before work, at break and sometimes even in the restroom. But rather than ask his supervisor for permission, Roger took it upon himself to quietly carve out a little time for himself to attend to his mental health.
“Well, the truth is, my boss was getting super stoned as well. I mean, he was so bloodshot and pie-eyed, I just figured he’d never notice if I snuck a toke or two,” Roger said.
“‘Quiet baking’ is a rejection of extreme ‘hustle culture,’” said leadership expert and Tik Tok guru Emily Armstrong. “These workers are turning their back on the notion that if they go above and beyond their regular duties, then they will be rewarded with raises, bonuses and promotions.”
“That sounds about right,” said Roger. “Often I make sure I get a little ‘quiet compensation.’ As long as I get the waitstaff ‘quiet baked,’ they don’t notice if a few bucks go silently missing from the tip jar.”
Ryder Cup and the spirit of Seve
After making things interesting for a few hours during Sunday’s singles matches, the United States Ryder Cup team once again experienced defeat at the hands of their European counterparts. Unlike previous years, you can’t say that “on paper” the Americans had a clear advantage over the Euros. Rocking a top three power trio of Jon Rahm, Rory McIlroy and Viktor Hovland, the Euros posed a massively formidable challenge on their home soil. Commentators pointed to match ups and course set up as tipping the playing field slightly in the European direction, but Golf Channel commentator and former Ryder Cup captain, Paul McGinley, kept returning to one strategy that he felt really made the difference. Time and again McGinley pointed to engaging the heart as the most important strategy for eliciting the finest play out of the European squad. And the primary method of engaging the heart was through invoking the spirit of Seve.
On opening day, Seve’s presence was loudly proclaimed when fans unfurled a colossal Seve banner that covered an entire section of bleachers next to the first tee. On Golf Channel, McGinley revealed to his fellow commentators that one of Seve’s old Ryder Cup jerseys hung in the Euro locker room to further inspire and engage the hearts of the players. If these invocations of the spirit of Seve were not enough, McGinley revealed that on the reverse side of the European logo adorning the left breast of the player’s shirts was an image of the great golfing Spaniard. The image of Seve literally covered the player’s hearts, as if his spirit was speaking directly to their hearts. When McGinley spoke of the significance of engaging the hearts of the player’s, he was not just paying lip service. For some, all of this may have seemed a bit melodramatic, over the top, or even a bit loony.
Yet no one could argue that the European team didn’t come out on fire. Inspired by the spirit of Seve, they were performing signs and wonders. They were chipping in and holing long putt after long putt. At times, they were literally chuckling and shaking their heads in disbelief at how well they and their teammates were playing. This is not to say that the disembodied presence of Seve Ballesteros hovered over the golfers manipulating them into great play like they were golfing marionettes. However, whether you call it group mind or collective consciousness or “being on the same page,” the European team designed, assembled and harnessed a spirit of greatness and excellence, symbolized by Seve, that became manifest in their exceptional play. At times, it all seemed shockingly pagan.
When the match ended and the Euros were victorious, most of the players pointed to playing for their teammates, not wishing to let them down. Playing for their country, for Europe, for past European champions, for the tradition of the Ryder Cup, all of it came to be symbolized in the spirit of Seve and they felt it in their souls. They played not for individual glory but for completely selfless reasons, for a spirit that brought out their best and allowed them to achieve something that none of them could have attained acting individually.
It is not unusual for people to talk about spirit when they talk about sport. They talk about team spirit, or the spirit of the game. Outside of sports, though, what are we all playing for? In this era of deconstruction and dismantling, are the spirits that animate our lives ones of cooperation, tradition, striving for a higher purpose and bringing out the best in one another?
Looking at the thing you assume to be there
Scrolling through some old notes, I stumbled across one that really stuck out to me. A man, who is not a guru and whose name I wish I’d written down, was explaining how we perceive and engage with our surroundings and with one another. He was saying we create in our minds sufficiently useful low representations of the world. The thing you see in front of you, or the person with whom you are speaking, is almost always a representation that is a consequence of your memory. Instead of looking at the thing itself, you look at the thing you assume to be there. The thing you see in front of you is almost always much richer than your apprehension of it. There’s always more there than meets the eye, and God only knows how much more there is.
The preceding is my insufficient representation of the thing he actually said. The point he was making goes much deeper, but my memory seems only capable of apprehending this much. On one level, what he is saying is obviously true. We are constantly bombarded by stimuli. We can’t take the time to fully appreciate each thing, each moment we experience. We rely on our memory to apprehend and put the moment in context, and then we move on to the next. But, of course, in doing so, we could be skipping past so much.
The thing you see in front of you is almost always much richer than your apprehension of it. Sometimes, as we’re stuffing mundane moments into sufficiently useful low representation boxes, a glimpse of the richness slips through. Here’s another note I made: Sometimes, the thing you thought you were conversing with is not the thing you thought, and that manifests itself in error, and that’s where you get the transcendent.
Clearly, my notes were insufficiently useful to bring that last point into clarity. But I guess what he was saying is that sometimes, either purposely or by chance, we experience the depth of a thing, or something novel about it breaks our cartoonish memory of the thing, and the resulting experience is transcendent.
I feel like I didn’t nail down that last part. But one thing that seems clear is that if we stopped relying so heavily on our memory of things to make sense of the world, and started letting the richness emerge, it would literally feel like a transcendent experience. How often do we put people and experiences in boxes and write them off as purely one dimensional representations that we’ve encountered many times before? Not to mention, what are we doing to ourselves when we look at the thing we assume to be there instead of trying to apprehend it more fully? There’s always more than meets the eye, and God only knows how much more there is.
Shot callin’ Pickleballin’
Pickleball has found itself in something of a pickle. Its two biggest professional leagues have declared all-out war on one another, leaving fans wondering if the sport can survive this division within its ranks. Players are being forced to take sides and millions of dollars are at stake. Not since the East Coast-West Coast hip hop feud of the 90’s has a rivalry loomed so large in the public consciousness.
“I’m not saying this to be conceited, but usually when I call someone in pickleball they call me back,” Connor Pardoe, one of Pickleball’s biggest ballers, told Yahoo Sports. He’s the founder of the Professional Pickleballers Association. The gentleman not returning his calls would be Major League Pickleballs owner and billionaire Steve Kuhn.
We had a truce, but you was only stallin’
Since last November, an uneasy truce has reigned in the world of professional pickleball with players allowed to compete in both leagues. All that ended when Kuhn started recruiting pickleball’s top talent and offering million dollar contracts to the game’s biggest stars, household names like Tyson McGuffin.
It’s all a game until the bodies start fallin’
Both sides agree, a pickleball war isn’t good for anybody. But when so much money and power is on the line, the temptation to assert who has the biggest pickle gets in the way of peace and prosperity for all. Pardoe still holds onto hope, “We gave clarity to TV networks. We gave clarity to sponsors. We were able to put the Wild Wild West to bed. We had a tour where the best players played.…If I could bring that back, I’d do it in a heartbeat.”
Media clairvoyants intuit hidden meaning in viral country hit
Unbeknownst to most pop culture consumers, members of the elite popular media are in possession of exceptional powers of discernment that permit them to identify a particular pop culture phenomenon and expose the often hidden or obscured meaning behind the seemingly straightforward message presented.
That’s how the press was able to alert everyone that the low-budget indie movie Sound of Freedom was actually a QAnon conspiracy flick that failed to depict a strictly factual and dispassionate account of the problem of child trafficking in favor of a more dramatic and sensational rendering of the subject. Because why would a Hollywood movie take such liberties?
Then these remarkably observant media scribes succeeded in identifying an obscure country song that had slipped under their radar for several months and exposed it as a dog whistling call to violence.
While all this was happening, most of us probably didn’t realize how this song and this movie were dividing our country. If not for the heads up, fast action of the elite media, these pop culture hits had the potential to literally tear our nation apart.
Now along comes the latest viral sensation that is not only sweeping the nation, but also pitting neighbor against neighbor. “Rich Men North of Richmond: The hit song that has divided the US” a BBC headline proclaims. Despite sensing a palpable tension in the air almost everywhere I go, I’ve been unable to put my finger on the source of unease that seems to be gripping the nation these days, that is until this informative article enlightened me. Sometimes it takes an astute observer of American culture from across the pond, like journalist Caryn James, to alert someone to what’s going on in their own backyard.
Although I’d heard the Oliver Anthony song a few times and seen the video on YouTube, I was unaware of the hidden meanings, the imperceptible dog whistles and the mysterious circumstances surrounding the song’s creation. I just thought the country hit was the product of a poor, rural, working-man, pouring his heart out about his economic struggles and laying the blame for his troubles at the feet of the rich and politically powerful.
Once again, I’ve been royally duped. As Eric Levitz of New York Magazine points out, the song conceals some subtle racism that can’t be recognized unless you have ears to hear. The line “people like me and people like you” to the untrained ear would undoubtedly refer to folks who work for “bullshit pay,” like Oliver Anthony himself. The overworked and underpaid clearly seem to be who the song is for and about. Not so, says Eric Levitz, there is something far more sinister at play here. Levitz writes, “The sphere of the virtuous that includes Anthony and his target listener might not be racially defined…. But it is not unreasonable to wonder whether a color line divides those who deserve more to eat from those who deserve less, at least in the song’s account.”
Again, I’m made painfully aware of my shortcomings as a music listener and consumer of popular culture. Rather than give the song a direct and reasonable interpretation, I should instead engage in some “not unreasonable” speculation about what the songwriter actually means, despite the songwriter’s failure to provide any reference that would push the listener toward a “not unreasonable” conclusion. Therein lies the power of the elite media scribe. They possess remarkable abilities to intuit meaning where it has been so thoroughly obscured as to render it invisible to mere mortals like me.
Staying with “not unreasonable” interpretations for a moment, take another clairvoyant like Matthew Cantor of The Guardian. He points out that Rich Men North of Richmond punches down because of one strange line that seems to call out welfare recipients. Media professionals like Cantor always know which direction the blows are flying. Nevermind the song title and the clear references to the rich and politically powerful, for media elites like Cantor, the song is an anthem to beating up on 300 pound welfare recipients.
Additionally, Cantor, as well as a number of other elite journalists, seem to have a problem with Oliver Anthony “punching down” on mega-rich, now deceased pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. “Still, a reference to politicians ‘looking out for minors on an island somewhere’ – apparently a reference to Jeffrey Epstein’s ties to elite figures – has also prompted speculation that Anthony could be nodding to QAnon, the far-right conspiracy theory positing that Democrats and Hollywood stars are drinking the blood of children,” Cantor writes.
Inside each of these media clairvoyants, a QAnon alarm goes off everytime the subject of child trafficking, or the name of a known child trafficker is invoked. Legions of right-wing bobble heads nodding to QAnon suddenly appear in their imaginations. “‘Rich Men’ also nods to conspiracy theories and grievances that are deeply rooted in far-right circles. (QAnon believers often cite Epstein as proof that a global cabal of elites has been trafficking children.)” The preceding nod is brought to you by Anne Branigin of the Washington Post.
Clearly, my critical thinking skills are desperately in need of recalibration. What I would interpret as a fairly straightforward populist protest song is actually a racist, QAnon conspiracy drenched beat down of the poor. Presently, I’m not even going to touch on the astro turf conspiracy posited by these media elites that claims Oliver Anthony is not organically grown, but rather an artificial construct, the creation of right wing media figures like Matt Walsh or Ben Shapiro or some other mustache twirling conservative working behind the scenes.
Experts propose increased smoking and hard drinking as solution to members serving too long in Congress
Diane Feinstein had difficulty casting a voice vote. Mitch McConell froze up for what seemed like an eternity in front of a gaggle of reporters. Incidents like these have many people wondering if members of Congress are staying in office too long. The Senate currently has five active members over the age of 80 while the House has 15. Californians are already having open discussions regarding who will replace Senator Feinstein, even though she has yet to announce her retirement and reports of her death are greatly exaggerated.
One policy institute thinks they have a solution. “We desperately need to bring back cigarette smoking and hard drinking among our congressional leaders,” says R. J. Morris of the Center for Integrated Solutions or CIGS. “In the past when Congress partied like it was 1979, heart attacks, strokes and terminal illnesses would cut short most politicians’ ability to serve beyond 70 years old. Now lawmakers think they’re just hitting their legislative prime when they reach 70.”
Many are skeptical that bringing back the smoke-filled rooms and alcohol-soaked bull sessions constitutes a viable path forward. They also point to CIGS receiving a bulk of its funding from the tobacco and spirits industries as a reason to question their motives. That’s why some experts have proposed term limits as a more realistic solution.
“Congress isn’t going to vote to term limit itself. The job is too lucrative. No, the only path forward is to get them hooked on smoking, and if they won’t smoke voluntarily, then we’re just going to have to pump second hand smoke into their congressional chamber. The myriad of health problems that can be achieved is only limited by our ability to imagine what is possible,” Morris says.
The Vanishing Collectors
On Tuesday, October 9,1990, a meeting of the city council of Sedona, Arizona convened at 7:00 p.m. After the meeting was called to order and the Pledge of Allegiance recited, a brief moment of silence was observed. Next the roll was taken and the floor opened for public comment. Second to approach the microphone was a clean-cut young gentleman who introduced himself as Ben Porterfield and informed the gathering that he had submitted an application for the position of City Magistrate. According to the minutes of the meeting, Porterfield “advised he wanted to give the Council an opportunity to match a face with a resume and that he would be available after the meeting for questions.”
As Ben Porterfield took his seat for the duration of the meeting, it is not known if he questioned the decision to use an alias on his application. Perhaps a man who aspires to administer the law for a municipality ought to do so under his real name. This might hurt his chances of getting the job, he possibly thought, especially if they do a background check which was certain to be the case. Also, he may have wondered if managing a trailer park counted as relevant experience for issuing warrants and reviewing matters of law. No matter, Ben Porterfield, or whatever the young man’s name was, had a number of ongoing projects in various stages of development. Whether or not he got the City Magistrate position was of little consequence.
Unsurprisingly, Ben Porterfield was passed over for the position of City Magistrate of Sedona, Arizona. Months later, however, some who attended the city council meeting that night may have wished they’d taken a greater interest in the man at the microphone with the face and the resume. Because Ben Porterfield was eventually going to become the subject of an arrest warrant, possibly issued by the newly appointed Sedona City Magistrate, and the target of a manhunt for absconding with an indeterminate quantity of Sedona residents’ precious bodily fluids.
Just a few months after the meeting, as the year drew to a close, concerned parents began presenting their teenage offspring at local medical clinics for examinations. At the same time, the Sedona Police Department started receiving reports of a mysterious couple who were offering area teenagers ten dollars to draw a vial of their blood. It took authorities a few weeks, but eventually they were able to zero in on a mobile home at the Windsong Trailer Park, located along U.S. 89A in west Sedona. The trailer belonged to Benjamin and Sarah Porterfield, managers of the park.
Sedona Police Chief Bob Irish was at a loss to explain why these two individuals were collecting the blood samples. “The possibilities of it are only limited by your imagination. At this point, it is one of the most bizarre situations I have ever seen.” At the time, it was thought that at least a dozen teens had allowed some of their blood to be extracted for money. According to accounts, the teens were taken into a bathroom where a syringe was used to extract a sample of their blood. “It looked okay to me,” said a 15-year-old who lived next door to the couple. “They would unwrap each needle and put a brace on your arm and have you fill out a questionnaire. You had to be 14 or over, and you could only give three times. But the questions were really weird, like, ‘Did you use Clearasil…Are you on drugs or alcohol?’” The young woman went on to reveal that her boyfriend and his friends had sold their blood numerous times to the couple and that the pair had taken more than 100 samples from at least 30 teen-agers. Interviews with additional teens revealed the couple posed as representatives of the government and that the blood was needed for the testing of lasers.
Blood wasn’t the only thing the strange couple was collecting. According to authorities, the pair had been collecting rent checks from Windsong residents and depositing them into their personal account. This led to an arrest warrant being issued for a Benjamin and Sarah Birdsong on charges of child abuse, embezzlement, impersonating medical personnel, aggravated assault and operating a clinical laboratory without a license. Apparently the age requirement and the questionnaire subjects were asked to fill out were insufficient to secure licensing for the couple’s blood drawing enterprise. Investigators were also not entirely clear regarding the true identity of the individuals. Chief Irish thought the couple’s names were possibly aliases and that they were known to have used the names Millett and Stewart when they lived in the Phoenix area.
On Monday, January 7, 1991, Sedona Police and an official from the Arizona Department of Health Services served a search warrant at the Camp Verde home of Benjamin and Sarah Porterfield. The couple were not present at the time of the raid and had been last seen at the residence the previous Friday. Items taken from the home by police included two handguns, two shotguns, a Mac-10 submachine gun with silencer, an IBM computer, a printer and computer storage disks – the standard items necessary to get a teen blood-buying business up and running. Also taken in the raid were a book of satanic rituals, the Satanic Bible by Anton Lavey, photocopies, posters and banners containing occult logos and satanic imagery. Satanism quickly moved to the top of the list of possible motives for the strange couple’s blood-buying activities. “It seems to be the forerunner as far as theories,” said Chief Irish. The chief further speculated the blood might be used as part of an “occult-type” ceremony, admitting that, “The worst-case scenario would be drinking it (the blood).”
Meanwhile the search for the pair continued in earnest. The couple owned two vehicles, a 1968 Ford pickup and a 1974 Volvo station wagon, that were now missing from the couple’s Camp Verde home. Acting on a tip, authorities closed in on a motel in Mesa, Arizona, but missed capturing the pair by two hours. Later, authorities admitted they could not confirm that the motel occupants were the fugitive couple. Investigators now believed the actual identity of the pair to be Charles E. Stewart, 32, and Sharon M. Smythe, 23, who went by the aliases Benjamin and Sarah Porterfield while living in Sedona. A number of town residents had encountered the couple, describing them as friendly but very private. None interviewed were able to provide any worthwhile leads. An 11-year-old neighbor of the Porterfield’s described how he was well treated by the couple who would buy parts for his bicycle and take him on camping trips. He did admit, however, that they had some strange habits. “I never saw any of that devil stuff. But there was always weird, loud music in the middle of the night. All the time, they would go camping in Boynton Canyon and then we would hear about animals that were sacrificed up there.”
Investigators continued to pore through materials seized from the couple’s home. A computer specialist was called in to examine the contents of the Porterfield’s home computer. At one point, the expert thought the couple may have booby-trapped the device to erase its contents if tampered with. Eventually, however, the computer revealed little useful information about the Porterfield’s or their secret government research into blood lasers. Occult experts brought in to examine the satanic materials concluded they showed nothing to indicate active occult involvement. The elusive couple, who seemed to become more mysterious with every bit of information discovered about them, had seemingly vanished with potentially over a hundred vials of blood extracted from the town’s teen-age population, all while abandoning a cache of weapons and a computer. Perhaps Chief Irish was wishing he’d introduced himself to Ben Porterfield when he had a chance. “I remember at a City Council meeting, he went up to the microphone and said, ‘I’m Benjamin Porterfield, and I’m available to meet with you.’ He looked like a clean-cut, all-American kid,” Irish recounted.
It should be noted that many residents and visitors to Sedona claim the city rests on a large energy vortex composed of a number of smaller vortices, the most significant of which is the Boynton Canyon vortex. These swirling concentrations of energy are linked with any number of strange phenomena. Perhaps a mystery couple collecting blood samples from local teens is a fairly mundane occurrence in an area where unexplained healing powers, strange spirits, ghostly hauntings, UFO activity, and Interdimensional Portals are part and parcel of the landscape. And if two mysterious travelers conducting highly sensitive scientific research should suddenly be called to deliver their collection of samples back to their obscure corner of space and time, and if the pair of strangers should suddenly vanish through the interdimensional doorway from which they possibly emerged, perhaps it should come as no great surprise.
Biden campaign team to promote success of “Hunternomics”
White House officials today embarked on a nationwide television and social media blitz to promote the runaway success of their “Hunternomics” economic miracle. The effort is designed to remind Americans ahead of next year’s elections of how unquestionably awesome their lives have become under the leadership of the Biden family.
Administration officials expect the American media to snort up the news like a newly discovered line of blow and eagerly regurgitate the message with all the coherence and self-importance of a rambling cokehead.
A hallmark of the Hunternomics miracle was the transfer of trillions to the richest corporations and individuals, while small businesses and families were crushed under the weight of Covid restrictions. Average Americans watched their savings decrease under the pressure of high prices and the worst inflation in 40 years.
“Hunternomics extorted trillions out of the Fed, a portion of which was doled out to struggling Americans who generously turned around and passed that money onto the richest Americans in the form of inflated prices. That’s a win, win in our book,” said White House economic advisers Jared Bernstein and Heather Boushey in a press release.
“Hunternomics is real,” President Biden reminded a roomful of union reps at a luncheon in Washington. “My boy is single handedly pressuring foreign companies to return millions right back here to the U.S.A. Now how about showing your appreciation by casting your vote for the big guy.”
Less robot than robot
In a new study researchers claim AI generated social media text appears more human than actual human text. Participants in the study were tasked with looking at tweets and identifying whether the tweet was composed by a human or AI. The study found subjects were more likely to ascribe human origins to AI tweets than those written by actual humans.
“The most surprising discovery was that participants often perceived information produced by AI as more likely to come from a human, more often than information produced by an actual person. This suggests that AI can convince you of being a real person more than a real person can convince you of being a real person, which is a fascinating side finding of our study,” said Federico Germani of the University of Zurich, one of the authors of the study.
Considering that Twitter has long been associated with humanity at its finest and most authentic, the study’s findings are startling. Nowhere does every facet of human potential and excellence shine more brightly than on Twitter with users pouring every available shred of their being and complexity into the 280 characters that form a single tweet. Indeed, it would seem that on a digital platform it is possible for AI models like ChatGPT to appear more human than humans.
However, while Federico Germani is stroking himself over his team’s finding that “AI can convince you of being a real person more than a real person can convince you of being a real person,” perhaps they are misinterpreting the results of their little experiment. Maybe it’s the case that humans don’t operate all that well in a digital space. Maybe it’s the digital realm itself that limits and compromises the human capacity to fully realize and reveal itself, enabling robots to plausibly mimic humans. Maybe it’s just the case that humans suck at being robots.
The internet in general and social media in particular funnel users into producing a low resolution representation of themselves. In many respects these platforms constrain human potential, dumbing down and fitting it into a neat little avatar, which is easy for AI to mimic and even manipulate. Of course the tech gods, governments and corporate controllers would like us to migrate our lives as much as possible onto these platforms. There in the digital realm humans are more or less just a shadow of the self that exists in the material realm, a shadow that can be more easily controlled by artificial intelligence, less robot than robot.
If there is something 