From the first lines drawn in the sand, from the first words of ritual uttered, humankind has sought to bend the world to their will, and by imagining it, reconstituting it in their image. However, with our growing awareness of the impact humankind has had on the planet in our current era, the Anthropocene, the darker aspects of humanity’s creativity, our capacity for extraction and exploitation, have come to dominate contemporary discussions of the future. Public perceptions of technology have steadily turned from techno-optimism (Krier and Gillette 1985) to more critical engagements (Barbrook and Cameron 1996; Danaher 2022). In today’s popular culture, this ranges from the invariably bleak scenarios in the likes of Black Mirror to the downright apocalyptic visions of climate fiction. Once promising a brave new world of “cyberspace” that would free people from the burdens of “meatspace,” where previous inequalities would no longer hold and democratic polity would be reinvigorated (Bell and Kennedy 2016; Bell 2001; Rheingold 1993), neither the Internet (Hunsinger 2020), nor the concept of “virtual reality” seem as innocuous or liberating today (Botz-Bornstein 2015) as in the evangelical writings of its inventors (and investors) at the dawn of the computing revolution.