This simulation is glitching 🟠

Welcome to the age of China, for bad or worse

I am increasingly puzzled by the world these days. Is it my late-thirties talking? Am I becoming the parents generation now? It’s quite possible. 

But, hear me out. Earlier (and I mean perhaps a decade or so back), the world still used to be elegantly segmented. There were capitalists and socialists; liberals and conservatives. Nationalists fought globalists. Alien encounters were relegated to conspiracy theories and crackpots. Presidents did and said things that were predictable and reassuring, if not always inspiring. There were clear, identifiable bad guys in the world - the Asian dictators, the sultans of middle east and Putin. China was always secretive but we ignored them for some reason.

In any case, all that’s out of the window. I don’t really know what the hell is going on anymore. Who are the good guys and who are the bad guys? What is reality and what is a fabrication? Is sarcasm just fuel for stupidity? Are aliens real? Is Kim Jong Un dead? or is Kim Jong Undead? What will China do next? I can’t even predict for fun how the world is going to be a decade from now.

Let’s recap 2020 for a bit

May 2020 is here folks. We’ve successfully navigated 33.33% of the year which has been like a movie that started with a high speed chase, had three plot twists and a death all in the first 30 minutes itself. 

Let’s kind of recap the script so far: 

• We may not remember but large parts of Australia and its forests burned early this year. Millions of animals died. 

• Britain silently left the EU (not so silently)

• A global pandemic halts life and pushes people to stay indoors 

• Donald trump asked people to inject bleach to fight the corona virus (or) maybe insert light to fight it

• Pentagon releases video several years old of a UFO spotted by US navy

• Kim Jong Un may be dead. Or, a vegetable.

• I am not recounting deaths of celebrities because, while sad, it always happens and keeps happening (But special farewell to Kobe and Irfan Khan).

Ok, ok. I can list down things in any year and make it sound as ridiculous or ‘crazy’. But I do feel that 2020 has been collectively a year of reckoning. The world will turn a little bit on its axis on a lot of issues and things could get quite messy geo-politically. 

For one, we are going to go into a deep recession. India will likely slip into recession for the first time in many decades (at least outside of my lifetime). And when this happens, countries become unpredictable and volatile. Irrational decisions are made to keep power and to distract. So, buckle up. 

Also, explain this (10 marks): Stock markets keep going up.  

Is the simulation glitching?

Indulge me some more. Let’s assume we are in a simulation (Why?)

So, what’s going on in 2020. I can think of multiple interpretations of what’s going on: 

• There is always an element of external game-changing event in most cases (if you’ve played sim games). Deus Ex Machina. An act of god, if you will. This helps keep the game fresh and interesting and adds an element of surprise so that even if you are at the top of your game, you are dealt with new issues to deal with. 

• The sim runner / game player is bored and wants to end it - just enjoying watching the sim built come crashing down while he / she / it makes random moves to see what happens.

• Or maybe the kid of the supreme player somehow got access for a little bit and is now wreaking havoc

• Perhaps we are in a sim designed by China to seek out answers to what would happen if X happened. Let’s say there’s real earth and they have created this Sim. These people want to know how to handle a global pandemic. Hence they run a sim. The people of Earth want to know!

Maybe we are all just starring in an episode of Black Mirror in someone’s alternative reality. I really, really hope that’s not the case because those things don't often ending happily.  

But guess what, being in a sim might actually also explain the Fermi paradox (if the space is so big and crawling with life why haven’t we met anyone yet?) Hang on, though.

Aliens are back in the news

Let’s talk about the Aliens in the room.

Pentagon has officially confirmed that the old footage of unidentified flying objects supposedly shot by US Navy pilots is real. As someone who is literally waiting for first contact to happen in his lifetime, this is supremely exciting. Or, in Trump’s words ‘a hell of a video’. In fact, in our company town hall (virtual) yesterday someone asked the CEO what he thought of the UFO video throwing him quite a bit.   

I mean, it’s an old video of some unexplained shapes flying - there is nothing more to be said about it. There are a million logical explanations for what it is without jumping to aliens. Afterall all, by it’s very definition, any flying object you cannot identify is a UFO 

Still, the fan of x-files and space operas wonders. What about all those other footage, the conspiracy theories and claims - could some of them be true? The global pandemic makes me think about some conspiracy theories of my own. Like, is Covid-19 the work of aliens? Are they putting us all in homes and silently landing in places and integrating with the rest of us? Someone should write a guide on how to spot an alien masquerading as one of us. 

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Anyway, one thing I am absolutely looking forward to is all the fake videos that are polished and look very real that’s going to emerge. Here’s one: 

Emre Özyumurtacılar @Emre_Ozy

Boulder, Australia 🇦🇺🛸👽💫 @multistagecorre #UFOs #Ovni

I am not sure of where I stand on the whole first contact thing. One one hand, I’d like to know that there are other sentient, intelligent species in the universe. Otherwise, it just feels enormously lonely when you consider the scope of the universe. On the other hand, if we do spot alien life, I am not sure I want them here interacting with us. I am not afraid for us. Rather, I am afraid for them. We are a world where people get killed because they married someone from another caste or because of their skin color. Imagine what we would do to those poor aliens who might look vastly different from us. Very likely they’ll all get slaughtered or end up in wet markets in China for consumption. 

The other day I saw an orange afterglow in the horizon. Then, a couple of nights back, I saw a moving point of light in the sky. It was moving too quickly and this wasn’t the airspace where any flights / helicopters go. So, what was it? Please think about it and watch out for those pesky aliens.

P.S. There’s a faint chance it may have been the reflection of my phone’s light on the window.

Dragon fire on Uncle Sam

Back to the simulation. If you ever needed a better example of what a disaster Trump is, here is the sad and morbid one. As I write this, deaths in the US due to Covid-19 (65K) has exceeded the full capacity of a Yankee stadium (54K).

This is not just an example of the disaster that Trump is but also a reflection of the changing power dynamics of the modern era. I think United States, the nation and geopolitical entity, is on the slow path to irrelevance. As the US right-wing shrinks into itself ejecting bile and anger at anything global, the world at large is increasingly dismissing the country’s importance.

In gun-toting MAGA crowds protesting to be let out of ‘Corona Jail’, one can almost see the fall of Rome playing before our eyes. Something’s fractured in the country that cannot and will not be easy to fix back and I can only see the cracks widening and separating until China brings a small hammer to it to put it out of its own misery. By the end of the decade, US will only be the third largest economy in the world but I’d bet much lower in its influential rankings.

On the other hand, China is quite near its peak world-domination phase. While U.S., the nation may be on the decline, US the corporation may yet be a shining star for a while. So, it’s going to be the American Illuminati (I mean Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Google and Facebook and scores of junkie capitalists) against the Chinese Juggernaut. The battle for the ages - the cold war of our era, if you will (and hopefully just a cold one at that).  

In fact, it is this US corporation that China is actively going after, especially when it comes to tech. Apart from investing heavily in companies around the world, China is also looking to set the standards of how future technologies (including AI, biotech, etc.) are going to work (China Standard 2035) with explicit intent to weaponize future tech and create the oppressive information bubble like China everywhere.

Honestly, despite corporate US’s increasingly fascistic behavior - stomping down on unions, putting workers at risk and finding every loophole to not pay the costs (tax loopholes, consuming public goods, etc.) - I believe that China’s rise to define the global future is scarier given their horrendous record about human / animal rights, free speech and in general view of the world.

I am not really sure what would be the outcome of American Corporation Death Star vs. The Chinese Black hole. Or, it could be that they all strike a deal and screw the rest of us. Either way, until the final meltdown, we’ll all likely continue getting cheaper phones and even cheaper fashion, not to worry.     

In the end, like always, I say, it could be worse.