We're In A Simulation

Walking backward

Sometimes I think I must look like a crazy person, someone who is not quite all there. Especially when I’m walking through a parking lot to the Amazon drop-off locker and I’m making a slow 360-degree counter-clockwise turn looking off in the distance, at the sky. It’s not uncommon for me to walk backward just to see how the world looks in reverse.

Sometimes I see things that I haven’t noticed before. From a different perspective. Like proof we’re in a simulation, an AI-driven world manipulating our reality to keep itself alive and us unaware of its existence and power.

The dust spot

There it was. The glitch. The spot. The dust spot on the projector. The projector that supplied the clouds over my head. The spray of dark clouds had a dust problem.

Somehow, someone, some thing, hadn’t cleaned the sensor when they changed from a blue sky with scattered clouds to this set of overlapping, threatening clouds. With a dust spot revealing the simulation.

When I returned to my car in just a few minutes the dust spot was gone. Cleared away by someone, some thing, some coder, some error-correcting algorithm.

Life was again perfect. Perfect AI.

Cleaning the sensor

Dust on the sensor of a digital camera can be disastrous, ruining a near-perfect photo with one or more bulbous black marks. Cleaning a sensor can be expensive. It can cost as much as $50 to have it commercially cleaned.

Cleaning it yourself includes the Giotto Rocket. It’s patented. Blasting air from a rocket-shaped rubbery device is patented. The Rocket is perfect for large chunks. For dry chunks.

Then there are sensor cleaning kits with liquid scrubbers and super delicate swabs for the more persistent chunks. And they are chunks. Unseeable, microscopic in size. Planet-killing asteroids on the finished photo.

One of the most stressful days of my life was the first time I squeezed cleaning fluid onto one of those swabs and ran it across my camera’s sensor. I’d read all the literature, talked with photographers who’d cleaned their cameras, and steeled myself with confidence and knowledge.

There’s a part of me that would like to know how much my pulse rate and respiration rate increased. What was my cortisol level? My anxiety peaked. My muscles tensed. I had tunnel vision.

In the end, I had a clean, undamaged sensor. That was all that mattered. Now I do it with my eyes closed. Actually, I squint. Or wince at the worry that this might be the time that …

It’s not a simulation to worry about dragging moistened cloth over the most delicate part of an expensive digital camera. It’s real. As real as the simulation lets it be.

You probably won’t be able to see the dust spot on a phone. It’s there slightly to the top and left of the light at lower right. If you don’t see it you might be in a different simulation.

If you’re a paid subscriber, which you should be, you’ll see more photos from the city upgrading its power grid and the Sharp Farm outhouse.