It all started as a joke on The Daily Show, but like the most unfortunate of jokes, like Scientology and fluorescent bulb light-saber battles, it had taken on a life of its own.

They say that it would never have come to such prominence if AIs had not taken over the near-infinite number of channels now available. Even 14 billion humans could not compete with 40 Trillion AIs each with their own channel that they could spray fully animated words and pictures into in real time.

Of course, it helped that “ClockFire” was hilarious. In the spirit of Monty Python’s “Agatha Christie” and “Mr. Neville Shunt” sketches, it turns out that there are a surprising number of puns that one can make about concurrency and low-level operating system latency.