Similar to my experience of surveying vacuum cleaners on Amazon, then going to get lunch at Whole Foods where a clerk appeared suddenly at the checkout I was at to vacuum up a non-existent mess, with one of the models Amazon had offered up. The ratio of profit to sales cost on a high-end vacuum might be similar to a Lotus Elise. Or maybe it's just confirmation bias.

If this phenomenon isn't already a PKD short then it could be a SCP entry.

There's only about 5,000 "real" people on the planet. The rest are unconscious echoes. Thus the weird pressure and "Truman show" feeling those people face.

None of us are "real". We are all living in a simulation.

Even more edgy: None of us are "real", and it is not a simulation.

(To be pedantic, it doesn't matter if it's a simulation or not. The important part is that we are not what we think we are.)

Of course it's possible for us to be "real" and still be part of a simulation. If we go deeper into philosophy and explore the concept of "free will", another question arises: Are we "real" if all of our choices and actions are preordained?

Of course this is way off topic, so I'll try to steer us back.

The NSA has a choice between improving domestic security by helping to improve standards and protocols, or choosing to deliberately weaken them so they can collect more. (As an aside, it is nonsensical to collect any more since they cannot even process what they are collecting now.) NSA has chosen to support and encourage the weakening of information security, and that has had serious consequences for both national and global security. One good example of the consequences is the Shadow Brokers dump. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shadow_Brokers

This seems more probable. My viewers would have tuned out long ago.

The people at Alexa have been very busy for you :) And Lotus got a lot of sales as well.