This chapter begins with the sombre matter of world destruction. Almost by definition, the fully artificial worlds described in this book are ontologically fragile. They can be pulled apart or undone, as easily or more easily than they were put together. Whether they are replaced by a natural world of power politics involving different ethnic groups or whether no more than chaos and disorder can be expected in such a scenario is no doubt an important question, but it does not affect the real possibility of world destruction. This chapter argues for an alternative to hegemonic wars and the threat of nuclear annihilation, an alternative to be sought in the dynamics of world building. Today competition between the superpowers is organised around the capacity to build new technological worlds; those unable to compete must eventually become elements in a world built by others. The emergence of these artificial worlds opens up possibilities for state actors to change the global power distribution without the risks arising from direct action against their rivals. In Ukraine, while Russia seems determined to bring the current world order tumbling down, it also has to face the full brunt of that world order’s power in a succession of system wars ranging from a new form of technological warfare to the uses and abuses of the global energy, financial and trade systems.

The philosopher David Chalmers believes we may be on the cusp of a great migration, one likely to overshadow every wave of human migration in history: the move to a virtual world or worlds, as the real one continues to degrade. In centuries to come, instead of asking: ‘should we move to a new country to start a new life?’ we may ask: ‘should we shift our lives to a virtual world?’. As with emigration, often the reasonable answer may be ‘yes’.1 With sufficient computing power, virtual reality will no longer consist of pre-packaged individual experiences. It will become a concurrent and real-time platform where billions of people can meet to conduct business, shop and have fun. In one of his online interviews, the journalist Dean Takahashi called the metaverse ‘the most difficult and important thing humanity will ever build’.

Is it possible that we have more capacity for change than we are currently expressing? This chapter begins by assessing the historical importance of the Covid pandemic, arguing that it helped revise how we look at the economy. If the way the economy works can be recreated to eliminate the risk of a viral infection, then it can presumably be recreated for the sake of other, equally desirable social goals. At first, one might think these changes signal the return of industrial policy, but I argue that world building differs from industrial policy because it operates at the level of the background conditions under which economic life takes place. These background conditions include the fight against climate change, the provision of skills and political stability and the creation of comparative advantage for national industries. In the end, however, the most general background conditions are formed at the global level. They are the framework conditions of global economic integration, and the need to shape the framework conditions for economic activity is not unrelated to the fact that other states are also trying to shape them. Indeed, both the United States and China believe in the idea of a world system articulating the relations of economic power and dependence at the heart of the global economy.

This chapter begins by discussing how the internet of the future may encompass large chunks of the physical world and onboard most if not all economic and social activities. The concern that Huawei and other Chinese companies would have access to the control panel of the global technological system set in motion the ongoing technology wars between China and the United States and explains the new appeal of ‘decoupling’. What is decoupling? The strategy has been applied to the most sensitive advanced technologies such as chips. The goal of geopolitical competition is to preserve exclusive control over the sources of technological power and to ensure that access to those sources is denied to a rival. The theory of world building captures this reality by stressing the existence of sovereign actors no longer constrained by a system of shared rules, architects of the world order that are nevertheless profoundly global in their outlook. Chips play a major role in the new geopolitics. If straits and islands are the gates to the oceans, microchips are the gates to the virtual. They can be compared to the basic layer of a computer operating system.

One tries to make sense of contemporary geopolitics and a pattern emerges. Two critical developments in recent years were the trade and technology wars between the United States and China and then, soon after, the great pandemic. Together they managed to shake the global system out of its benevolent torpor. Globalisation did not collapse, but it changed shape. States are again prominent even if they still operate within something like a networked global landscape. The war in Ukraine deepened these dynamics by showing that anything can be weaponised: energy, cyberspace, investment, technology, trade, the global financial system, currencies, history, religion and even food.

The climate crisis signals a change in the technological order, a moment when our fundamental way of relating to the natural environment is rethought and, as a result, new political and economic arrangements become both possible and necessary. This chapter looks at previous energy revolutions and finds that they resulted in increasingly artificial systems granting their creators new and extensive forms of geopolitical power. The clean energy transition promises to enact a similar revolution as it unleashes new sources of energy, sharing many of the elements of information economics. The metaverse, artificial energy and zero marginal cost energy increasingly form a single complex. What we call ‘clean energy’ may turn out to be unlimited or unconstrained energy, at least if compared to the fossil fuel economy, since, on the one hand, it no longer relies on finite energy stocks and, on the other, it does not have the same destructive impact on the planet. Countries that recognise zero marginal cost energy as an opportunity to be seized rather than as a problem to be curtailed will be the ones designing and creating the world of tomorrow – the world everyone else will be forced to inhabit. The race to design and build the new global energy system will decide who runs it.

Anyone can conceive the fantastical image of a ‘green sun’, but to create a world inside which a green sun will be credible and command belief requires a special skill, ‘a kind of elvish craft’. Note the metafictional artifice: fairy tales, which so often have elves as their characters, are themselves a product of elvish magic or enchantment, the ability to create imaginary worlds that other people will take for the real one. Inside these worlds, what the world contains is true: it accords with the laws of that world. J. R. R.Tolkien distinguishes between magic and enchantment. The former aims to produce a change in the real world, what Tolkien calls the primary world. Modern technology, in the sense of machine technology, Tolkien regards as akin to magic, a desire for power and for making the will more immediately effective; the word he uses in this context is ‘bulldozing’, an act of destruction, levelling mountains and filling valleys.