In April of 2016 -- before America had even thrown itself full tilt into North-Korea-baiting, white-supremacist-rallying lunacy -- scientists and a general gathering of geniuses got together to try and figure out if humankind as we know it is actually just living in a Matrix-like computer simulation for the amusement of a greater entity.
Most astro of the physicists, Neil deGrasse Tyson, acted as moderator at the Isaac Asimov Memorial Debate and, at one point, expressed the belief that the chances of "everything in our lives [being] just a creation of some other entity for their entertainment” was "very high."
In February, the New Yorker suggested that, based on the insane last five minutes of the Oscars this year (La La Land! Moonlight!), not only are we living in a simulation, that simulation is broken. “This idea was, I’m told, put forward first and most forcibly by the N.Y.U. philosopher David Chalmers," Adam Gopnik wrote. "What is happening lately, he says, is support for the hypothesis that we are living in a computer simulation and that something has recently gone haywire within it. The people or machines or aliens who are supposed to be running our lives are having some kind of breakdown. There’s a glitch, and we are in it.”
Well, Mr. deGrasse Tyson, Mr Gopnik, and all of their philosophy and science cohorts can relax now, because the events of this last weekend confirm that we are, in fact, living in a computer simulation and it is, indeed, malfunctioning. Over the weekend, it all became clear: all that is supposed to be beautiful has been made ugly. All that is supposed to be safe, predictable, and vacuous has gone dark and surreal.
Let's consider the evidence.