We’re living
in a simulation?

I hid this in the undergrowth of 8AM World. Nothing links to it and nothing tells you it is there, so if you are reading this you went looking. It is nine years older than the campus you found it on, and it is about the campus you found it on.

Accession

AM–2016–001

Uploaded

21 Nov 2016

Author

Arlin Moore

Medium

Digital video

I cut this in a dorm room in 2016, over a clip of Elon Musk putting the odds that we are in base reality at somewhere around one in billions. I was twenty. I thought it was the most important thing anyone had ever said. Nobody watched it.

Nine years later I built a simulation of a cliff in Uluwatu, put a monolith on it with a consciousness scale cut into the stone, and hid this tape in a bush a few metres away from it. I genuinely cannot tell you any more whether that is a very long joke or a very long argument. I am not sure the two are different.

The date is the part I would point at. This was before the company, before the apps, before the hoodie, before the cliff, before I had the faintest idea what I was going to do with any of it. The idea showed up first and then waited nine years for somewhere to go.