Not even the most heavily-armed police state can exert brute force to all of its citizens all of the time. Meme management is so much subtler; the rose-tinted refraction of perceived reality, the contagious fear of threatening alternatives.

How do you say 'We come in peace' when the very words are an act of war?

If the rest of your brain were conscious, it would probably regard you as the pointy-haired boss from Dilbert

Computers bootstrap their own offspring, grow so wise and incomprehensible that their communiqués assume the hallmarks of dementia: unfocused and irrelevant to the barely-intelligent creatures left behind. And when your surpassing creations find the answers you asked for, you can't understand their analysis and you can't verify their answers. You have to take their word on faith.

People aren't rational. We're not thinking machines, we're - we're feeling machines that happen to think.

What's the difference between being dead, and just not knowing you're alive?

Brains are survival engines, not truth detectors.