I think there must be aliens circling the earth in spaceships we can’t detect shaking their damn heads and telling their alien interns to watch more cable channels read more checkout-line magazines surf more keystone konspiracy websites so they can crack our code of stupid. All those sci-fi movies got it wrong. The aliens aren’t bio-techno killing machines, they’re just the alien equivalent of interns who can code and design a bit. So they ended up in a go-nowhere gig orbiting some lame goldilocks planet building gigantic shapes out of stone, inventing native spirits and making apparitions, and trying crazy sh*t out with mass-media. They aren’t giant ants who’ll enslave us and we won’t be their enslaved ants or their batteries. The whole universe isn’t a simulation, it’s just that some of the stuff we’ve made feels a bit sketchy — like those accidental plagiarism problems, when the person forgets some snippet was cut-and-pasted from somewhere else. So we’re more like an app. But the alien founders still have a bit of funding to burn and haven’t figured out how to exit to their next big thing, so we’re just treading water. That’s it, isn’t it?