The simulation hypothesis is not just an end-run against the argument from design, or a way to have your god without admitting any divinity, but a sort of modern myth that encapsulates the ontological condition of late-modernity. That there is something aesthetically as well as spiritually repulsive at the core of this hypothesis can serve to mask its metaphysical implications. You might begin by asking what a simulation is and why it is done. One answer might be that it is a falsification of being for playful purposes. It is done without putting much at stake in order just to see what happens, out of curiosity. It is play that lacks the playfulness of cosmic lila, but instead is done because it is 'cheap', is a toy about which it matters little if it has to be abandoned and restarted with different parameters. Or indeed it could be one of a large series of repeated 'runs' made in a search for statistical regularities. If modernism implied the revival of a certain gnosticism, simulation is a sort of post-gnosticism with flat affect and no initial catastrophe. It is this flat and bland quality projected past the apparent chaos of things and into what is beyond being that seems to characterise its contemporary resonance.