Anyone ever give you a houseplant? "Here's a thing you didn't ask for that you now have to take care of forever, think of me?" My mother gives me houseplants a lot. "oh, you like plants? Here's one you didn't pick!" That fucking robot? "Hi, there. We're elitist snobs that totally want to obligate you to help out our thesis project in personification, guilt and obligation, particularly in the shadow of internet-based mooching. Wanna play?" People who have never had nothing don't understand that vandalism is a way to strike back at your own powerlessness. "Kilroy was here" is a fundamental expression of identity and autonomy, and "take care of this instrumented lump of shit for social media" is a fundamental negation of that. HitchBOT's inevitable demise says everything about academic tone-deafness and nothing about the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Q: how many "for a good cause" adventurers have completed similar journeys without experiencing any malfeasance? A: all of them.