evidence: The second type of thing that people think about Bill Gates is mostly found online. After I had my first dose of the Covid vaccine last year, I started joking that I was experiencing some strange side effects. A sore arm, a woozy nausea that lasted for days—and a burning, urgent desire to buy and consume Microsoft products. In my sweaty bed I had delirious visions of Excel spreadsheets, of myself as a speck of data tumbling down the columns of cells, giddy and growing. I had an itch over every inch of my skin; I needed to be rubbed down with a Surface Duo dual-touchscreen device with Qualcomm Adreno 640 GPU. I was jonesing, like an addict, to load some search terms into Bing. The joke was, of course, that a lot of people believe that the Covid vaccine is part of an evil plot by Bill Gates to plant mind-control chips in our brains, or sterilize us, or simply kill us outright, as part of his crusade to end overpopulation. For certain conspiracy theorists, Bill Gates has become a kind of demiurge, the invisible enemy putting on the vast theater of our world.