Elon Musk thinks we’re living in a simulation.
Whether the narcissistic tech-baron actually thinks this, or it’s just one of many pieces of bullshit spewed forth like so many droplets of Covid-denying conspiratorial aerosols from the billionaire’s mouth (like the time he tweeted that Tesla’s stock price was too high causing his stock to drop $14B) we may never know.
“If you assume any rate of improvement at all, games will eventually be indistinguishable from reality,” Musk said before concluding, “We’re most likely in a simulation.”
NBC News
And while Neil Degrasse Tyson wishes he could, “summon a strong argument against it, but…can find none”, this theory seems to negate one critical aspect. If there really are ancient, technologically advanced societies, whose computing power has now dwarfed ours, what if they just…don’t want to run a simulation like ours?
Yes, the growth of computing power is insane. And the sheer magnitude of that growth can seem overwhelmingly deterministic, as though we are living in the shadow of something so large we cannot understand how the world – and our future in it – could possibly be shaped by anything else.
Moore’s Law states,
- the number of transistors on a microchip doubles every two years
- though the cost of computers is halved.
- we can expect the speed and capability of our computers to increase every couple of years,
- and we will pay less for them
And, ominously,
- this growth is exponential
So it’s not hard to see why Musk, a man with more money than God, and exactly zero empathy for fellow humans, would think that an advanced society – run by beings like him, he assumes – would want to run a simulation as shitty as Earth 2020.
Musk’s [Covid-19] theories echo his forceful condemnation of shelter-in-place orders in April, when he called them “fascist” and urged officials to “give people back their goddamn freedom” on a call with investors.
BI
Even though this simulation theory sounds creative but is actually kind of unimaginative (the things we most “worry about, never happen anyway
” – Petty), I haven’t been able to stop thinking it.
It tends to pop up in fun little ways.
We hear about Glitches In The Matrix all the time. Scientists theorize one way the simulation might present itself is in the way quantum particles – like the smallest pixels in a video game – can appear different when obeserved.
When a quantum “observer” is watching Quantum mechanics states that particles can also behave as waves.
Science Daily
But what makes me think we’re living in a simulation are all the Alaskan based reality shows on the National Geographic channel.
5 Lists
Every thought is an entire industry.
Want to get into mechanical keyboards? An entire industry.
Think you have an idea for sassy greeting cards? 2,797 results on Etsy.
Think you just came up with an invention to make that thing easier? Search Amazon and it’ll be at your door in 2 days.
The world seems endlessly large.
But what if. as we would expect in a simulation, a lot of it is just lazy copies of other parts of itself?
Wouldn’t the places that it repeats itself, give us evidence of its existence?
- Top Chef Special Guest Chefs
When Nan Strait (contestant) says Joel Rubochon is her favorite guest because he’s the best of the best, I realize I have no idea who a table full of James Beard winning chefs looks like.
How can so many be legends and be so unknown outside their insular community?
Almost every time they bring out a guest, and Padma or Tom hypes them up as a legend, as famous, as revered, I get my silly hopes up that I will know who it is, only to be let down.
To this point, it’s telling that Padma’s favorite guests are actress Debi Mazar – who insists on the superiority of chefs who fuck verses chefs who do not – and The Foo Fighters, and not, chefs.
2. Old-Timey Movie Posters
In this uber-bootlegged Youtube video which may very well get deleted soon (and so I will proceed to describe it) American Pickers visits the owner of a collection of vintage movie posters in Georgia.
They start out, sneakily enough, with a Batman poster to dupe us into thinking this is all above board.
Next it’s Jane Manfield’s Playgirl After Dark, but pretty soon the simulation starts to reveal itself with posters for “movies” like The Miracle Rider, My Pal Trigger, G-Men Vs The Black Dragon, Adventures of Captain Africa, the latter starring a very white “John Hart” who we’re supposed to believe was a “real actor”.
It doesn’t stop there.
Soon the Pickers are pulling out a poster for Zombies of the Stratosphere before the insanely inappropriately titled Spook Chasers; finally, Hop Harrigan which appears to be a military plane-related comic book serial. Fun.
The whole time our Pickers are on the phone with a supposed “expert” who is clearly a plant by the simulators, programmed to feed assurances – in the form of valuations on posters – that we are a part of long, cohesive story leading up to, and continuing beyond, our “birth” called “history”.
Just looking up vintage movie posters on Etsy or Pinterest will find you a whole slew of moving pictures of questionable believability.
Like, come on, this couldn’t have been a real movie.
3. Clash Of Clans Knock-Offs
I mean, at this point, the simulation isn’t even trying.
4. The Reality Television Shows of Discovery and Nat Geo
Discovery and National Geographic seem to be playing a risky game of one-upsmanship, pushing the simulation boundaries of Look At What We Can Get Away With in the genre of rugged-lifestyle reality TV programming, relying almost entirely on the premise that Alaska is a real, totally non-simulated place.
- Life Below Zero: living in Alaska
- Wicked Tuna: fisherman fishing
- Deadliest Catch: fisherman fishing near Alaska
- Bering Sea Gold: fisherman fishing near Alaska
- Yukon River Run: riding a river in Alaska
- Live Free or Die: living off the grid
- Homestead Rescue: a family who helps other families live off the grid
- Alaskan Bush People: a family who has never entered the grid
- Doomsday Preppers: people who are preparing to live off the grid
- Ultimate Survivial Alska: ultimately surviving Alaska
- Alaska State Troopers: state trooping Alaska
- Gold Rush: Alaska: gold rushing Alaska
I mean, honestly, who do they think they’re kidding?
At this point, the simulation is practically collapsing in on itself.
You expect me to believe Alaskan Bush People was not created to reinforce every (simulated) city-dweller stereotype of Alaskan bush people in order to keep us from venturing into Alaska, an area of our map the programmers are clearly not capable of rendering at high enough resolutions, at high enough frame rates, to maintain a glitch-free simulation if too many (simulated) people enter it at the same time?
5. Joey Diaz Stories
Joey Diaz stories were clearly created to fill in the gap in our simulation. Specifically, the Bronx-in-the-70s, railing lines off the bar, sweaty subway rides, summer blackout, stories gap.
He’s such a master storyteller he’ll break out these stories on a whim, all of them sounding more fantastical than the last, and nearly every one including a reference to his mother’s rowdy friends or people practicing Santeria in New York City.
He’s also the comic’s comic of our current times, the comedian who makes your favorite comedian laugh the hardest.
Too bad he’s a fucking simulation. The part of the simulation you point to and say, see, this person is so unique, so uniquely American, that he couldn’t have been conceived of by machines. Except he is.
Joey Diaz is the exception that proves the rule.
What Do All These Lists Have In Common?
James Beard Award Winning Best Chef SouthEast, not to be confused with James Beard Award Winning Best Chef NorthEast, or James Beard Award Winning Best Chef SouthWest.
Yea, sure, all those regions exist.
Give me a break.
Every one of these lists, and probably more, confound me with the sheer amount of near-duplicates they’re able to create, each iteration displaying some slight adjustment meant to convince us we live in a large, complete world, when in fact, our simulators are just Control V-ing their way through their boring 8-parsec shift on Q-gwan-7.
Now, if this is world is real, than this tendency to create many slight variations along a seemingly endless spectrum is a tendency of, first, nature, and second, humankind.
We see spectrums – slight gradients of a single feature – all over the place in nature and the human experience.
The colors of a rainbow: at one point is the rainbow red, and what precise location is it blue? The Kinsey spectrum of human sexuality, the work being done more recently to understand autism as a spectrum, all of them examples that would – if we were suckers – explain why there can be 100 slightly different iterations of a successful video game, or seemingly infinite gradations of reality shows allowing that allow viewers to live vicariously off-grid, with all the comforts of on-grid living.
It turns out, The Matrix got it wrong.
The question isn’t the red or the blue pill. It’s the red or merlot pill, or the red or pink pill, or the red or candy apple pill, or the red or mahogany…