The expendable grunts in this utterly meaningless conflict are content marketing specialists, who dedicate their working lives to tricking Google's spiderbots with boring subterfuge – keyword spamming, elaborate HTML structures and impenetrable hyperlink webs galore.
Harrison brings the trilogy to a close with Empty Space, picking up characters who seemed at first to be incidental to Light and 2006's Nova Swing, and putting them centre stage in a drama that moves between a downbeat, post-crash 21st century – which Harrison says was "gifted" to him by the 2007 financial crisis – and a 25th century mired in narcissism and meaningless conflict.
Walter Shaub, then the director of the Office of Government Ethics, captured the weightlessness of Trump's minimal response perfectly: "Stepping back from running his business is meaningless from a conflict of interest perspective".
But the battle over Knut's remains is a simple reminder that applying the formula of comparative importance to any conflict is meaningless to those touched by the conflict.
The actor was a splendid speaker, his talk filled with witticisms and charming asides — but also with "irrelevant, conflicting and meaningless content".
"Conflict is meaningless in nursing because our primary purpose is caring for the patient to recover; so there should be no room for conflict".
In his General Assembly speech representing Russia earlier on Friday, Mr. Lavrov said the resolution had been possible partly because of what he called the West's realization that the threat of military force to solve conflicts was "ineffective, meaningless and destructive".
Surprisingly little is ever said about the conflict between the meaningless physical world and the meaningful human world, largely because the mismatch is so radical.
In the end, as Donald Nicol commented, the long conflict had been meaningless, with terms that "could have been agreed five years before and saved the Empire so much bitterness, hatred and destruction".
Are we feeding off the suffering of others for a luxurious, meaningless ding-dong between people who manufacture conflict because they're so far removed from what real peril feels like?
It's meaningless because our history is the struggle of many different Britains, each with their own conflicting sets of values.
