Something's wrong. Axel shrugged. That statement probably applies to every second I've spent on this blasted world. - Karl Schroeder

But what good's abundance if nobody can experience it?

He was acutely aware of how little attention the people who lived here actually paid to their immediate environment. They seemed cut off from their own senses, cocooned away from their bodies in the infinite spaces of inscape. Cybernetic realities were more real to most people now than their own lives, it seemed. And any connection between those internal spaces and the physical world seemed entirely accidental.

We're all pretending; that's what events like this are all about.
"Why are we doing it at all?"
"To fit it. Better that we be there to be spoken to than absent to be spoken about."