"it has caused us to evolve, for lack of better words, according to the law of survival, this being of the fittest, for lack of any good words, in a reality that favors those least resembling the fit or the living." A treatise on defeat as an outcome not at all humiliating: sometimes, it is not tirumph that determines winner from loswer. There follow three essays: on art; artificial intelligence; and mankind's regression into the primitive commune known as the horde - an uncaring, uneducated, and untrusting population. It is about deception by ornament, an unusual orphanhood, and conceptual deterioration... a conclusion just shy of optimistic goes without saying. "... we see art, the bard's speciality, as a semantic stronghold; robots seek to undermine it, and hordes, apathetic as they are, walk indifferently by it, ravaging the fields by which the citizenry of art sustains itself. It is within these walls that we must first establish our base."