Because rational people like to think people are rational. Rational people then go on and write their great sci fi works.

People writing satire know people are irrational. Otherwise they wouldn't be writing satire, would they?

To quote George Carlin: Take an average idiot on the street, then realize half of people are dumber than them.

GPT-3 says: In mathematics, there is a search for a satire-to-satire mapping function with the longest cycle length. These are called N-quines.

I mean, it's not A Modest Proposal, but Onion articles are still actually article length. I know most people just read and share the headline, but they're still taking the time to do full write-ups.

But do they own an NFT of an 0?

They theoretically are based on copyright, but in practice the way it works is a few trusted entities are allowed to submit content and claim it as their own. If you have access to a Content Owner dashboard, you can claim literally any content you want from there- you'll just be putting your access to that dashboard at risk if you claim content that isn't actually yours to claim and Google gets wind of it.

This is how movies and music are added to the system for copyright enforcement purposes- they are effectively uploaded to YouTube and never published (this is called an "asset" in Content Owner parlance)

Youtube's Content ID system is an artificial substitute for actions based on copyright law like DMCA takedowns, because actions based on copyright law have forms and procedures and you need to pay a lawyer to review them. Youtube's system is designed to be so generous to established content owners that they prefer to use it over legal filings, and to have very little recourse for appeal when a video gets taken down.

It might be that the 1s and 0s are derivative works, such as being derivatives of sin(x) and cos(x) for x->0.

Seeing as the default font used by google's file reader is Roboto and that typeface has only been around since 2014, so my expression of 0 using Roboto is copyrighted 2014.

I do not know how any of you _hackers_ stole my original work, and I certainly do not authorize it's use. Immediately send me your full name and address so that I can have my lawyers contact you.

Better do it from a burner device on a burner internet connection, to prevent Google from detecting any link between your burner account and your real account.

I don't know about US lawy but in German law there is a requirement on some originality. ("Schöpfungshöhe") The barrier is low, but a 1 certainly doesn't receive the protection.