Ugly people are probably not evil, but I’ve met enough people to suspect ugliness and moral failure occasionally share a bathroom. Before the professional victims have a panic attack, relax. I am obviously joking. Mostly. I’m not talking about people who lost the genetic lottery and ended up looking like they were assembled like Mr Potato Head in a collaboration between Stevie Wonder, Helen Keller, and Andrea Bocelli. Most of us are fairly average-looking.

South Africans are preparing for another election season, which means the country is once again drowning in slogans, promises, outrage and manufactured certainty. Every party insists it has the answer, and every manifesto reads like a glossy brochure nobody will read about a future nobody fully believes in. Every politician suddenly rediscovers potholes, unemployment and corruption a few months before asking for votes.

The internet promised humanity infinite knowledge. Instead, it often feels like we accidentally built an industrial-scale landfill for attention, entertainment and distraction. Artificial intelligence has accelerated this problem dramatically, and for the worse. Every day now, millions of images, videos, essays, songs, presentations, advertisements and opinions are generated instantly by people who previously lacked either the ability, patience or imagination to create them. Social media feeds are filling with synthetic motivation, synthetic beauty, synthetic expertise and synthetic emotion