The simulation hypothesis, credited to Nick Bostrom (2003), proposes that our lived experience of the contemporary world is a simulated reality. Simulation theory, however, has a distinguished history in philosophical discourse that long predates the ubiquitous mobile devices that make possible twenty-first-century “life on the screen,” the title of Sherry Turkle’s 1997 work on human–computer relationships. Whether ancient or modern, simulation theory dares to pose two questions: what is reality (ontology) and how do we know it (epistemology)? Already one might see why most of us leave such questions to the airy heights of the ivory tower. Who, in their right mind, uses ontology and epistemology in day-to-day conversation? We are simply trying to get on with ordinary life: paying bills, going to work, staying in touch with family and friends, shopping for groceries and other goods, and following the local and national news. Increasingly, however, each of the ordinary activities I just named is mediated by screens in which one substitutes the digital real for embodied relationships with actual others.