In Stanisław Lem’s book, Kris Kelvin travels to a space station on planet Solaris. As a result of dangerous experiments, the planet has become unstable, and the inhabitants of the space station are haunted by simulacra that remind the characters of their pasts. Kelvin is at once afraid of his “visitor”, while also oddly dependent on it. A world unfolds before the reader in which a person’s regular senses are not trustworthy anymore.

The works of Lem and his contemporaries often speculate on the discovery of new worlds. What if humanity attempts to colonise a planet that is capable of responding with weapons unknown to us? But while Solaris emerged independently from humans, authors of later science fiction focus on whether the artificial systems that we have created could become our doom, as was the case with the Tower of Babel – an example could be The Matrix, a movie by the Wachowski sisters. Although in the film, we never come across design as a discipline, it is nevertheless an essential theme of The Matrix. With the help of design, humans create a new world that intervenes with, exists in parallel to, complements, and cancels the current one. As Stefano Mancuso claims, the drive to create or find new worlds comes from the fear of no alternatives – what if there only was an option B …¹

This article discusses augmented reality as a phenomenon that impacts the average Western person increasingly more² and asks to what extent it could be seen as a copy of the traditional material world. When our body is physically moving on a street in Tallinn, then in a virtual space that coexists in parallel, it receives a work email, looks at the menu of the closest café, sends a cat photo to a friend or asks their partner for a grocery list for dinner. They can even look at this very street either from the perspective of their physical body, from a bird’s eye view, or instead from photos on Google Maps, shot in 2013. Initially, augmented reality was confined to the screen, but it is now increasingly spreading onto different devices and little by little taking over the space.³ While we share the physical world with species that have mostly existed much longer than ourselves and with whom we have historically established power relations, then our virtual reality is shared with artificial companions whose existence is not defined by the same physical laws. As on planet Solaris, in this augmented reality the concept of reality needs to be reconsidered so that it does not necessarily mean tangible.

The virtual side of augmented reality is still partly tied to our regular world, imitating daily processes. The path of a designer and an artist often starts with copying, imitating existing artworks, until we understand their logic and construction well enough to create originals. The processes of an artificial virtual world are often similarly simulacra of real life: we send letters, save information, buy new clothes or fill out tax forms. As skeuomorphisms, the symbols of functions have largely remained pictorial references to objects, such as an envelope or a video camera that has been irrelevant for a while.

As technology has advanced, enhancements have been made to augmented reality’s hardware as well as the software. Devices that we use for communicating with the virtual side of our existence have become increasingly more transportable. Although Google Glass did not prove very successful,⁴ Meta’s smart glasses, developed in collaboration with Ray-Ban, do not evoke clichés of wearable technology, but look like regular glasses to others,⁵ and with that, help normalise the new technology. Technologically, user interfaces are being increasingly perfected, which, on one hand, makes them ever more easy to use for the wider public, but on the other hand, in some fields creates a gentrification of sorts as business interests start dominating more and more over social ideals.⁶ Big search engines guide user traffic into gentrified areas, and instead of independent websites, Facebook, Instagram and other platforms lure more and more people and businesses to their environments, which are simpler, more convenient, cheaper... and easier to control.

The power relations of real life bleed into virtual reality as well. As the internet is inherently Anglo-centric, its construction follows the logic of the English language. This was especially apparent in the era before graphic user interfaces, as for example in MS-DOS, the user had to give a verbal command to the computer. The author of this article has, in her childhood, also sat at the kitchen table in a Lasnamäe apartment, typing in “start supaplex.exe” without even knowing that start is an English word or that it also has meanings in the physical world. The physical consequences of the virtual world reach planet Earth with its tentacles, building colossal data centres and hiring thousands and thousands of artificial intelligence trainers… mainly in less privileged countries.⁷ With cleverness, it is possible to temporarily hack these power relations and create whole new opportunities, an example being the Nepalese elections that took place on a Discord server,⁸ but these opportunities once again depend on the power relations of the centre and the peripheries. Besides countries, enormous tech giants such as Google and OpenAI have emerged, colonising virtual space and thus also transferring their power relations to the physical world. 

Still, the construction logic of virtual reality is radically different. If we want to produce a desk in the real world, we have to find material that we transport, modify, and eventually, get rid of. Materials are strong-minded, but in the virtual space, new terms can be agreed on. Digital design researchers Christian Ulrik Andersen and Søren Bro Pold from Aarhus University underline that the virtual world is, in its essence, textual because it is based on code – that is, text.⁹ This comparison and apparent freedoms are perhaps the reason why science-fiction writing has had an increasing impact on contemporary design. In order to create a new world, one must again copy from somewhere else, often, for example, from text. On the other hand, one can draw comparisons between the traditional two-dimensional image-centredness of the virtual world and film – a different form of fiction. 

And so, direct science-fiction references emerge in the virtual world with increasing frequency, their authors not even attempting to hide the connection. The conversational style of the chatbot of Elon Musk’s company, Grok, is taken from Douglas Adams’s novel The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. The term Metaverse comes from a novel by Neal Stepheson, Snow Crash, which Mark Zuckerberg supposedly assigned as mandatory reading to Facebook’s employees.¹⁰ Sam Freedman notes that sadly, the influence of science fiction goes beyond a handful of products – it influences the whole new world that Big Tech is attempting to build.¹¹ The politics, rules and norms of virtual reality are not just copies of the previous world, the geopolitical and material quarrels of which do not easily translate to virtuality. The augmented citizen of the new world, affected by the regulations of both the virtual and the material world, exists simultaneously in two places. Therefore, for them a world emerges that, by combining the opportunities of both physical and virtual realities, can apply an even more perfected total control over its augmented citizens, and for which the laws of physics or distances are not obstacles. 

The impulse behind science-fiction writing has often been to use storytelling for exploring pessimistic scenarios and effects that technological progress might have on societies, so it is sad and ironic that the stories that were conceived as dystopias have sometimes been misused for inspiration. A critical and socially empathetic reader would definitely not regard Stephenson’s Metaverse as aspirational. When tech giants look at literature and film for inspiration, the public ends up viewing them as part of this fictional world of heroes and antiheroes. Traditionally, the hero, however, is always against the power, on the side of the weaker. For many, artificial intelligence might be a higher authority, but for others, it represents an almighty panoptical figure of power. These questions arise ever more acutely in light of the mass arrests and deportations in the US, and when considering the role of artificial intelligence and tech giants in these events: in literature, an all-seeing power is characteristic of Big Brother or Sauron, not of a protagonist. At their moment of conception, new technologies are typically ethically neutral, but the more possibilities they offer, the more enticing misusing them becomes. Just as the ring of Sauron could too easily compromise even its most noble bearer.

Still, I would like to end this article with the thought that no totalitarian power is beyond challenge and no political system can control everything. Even if the new world has its faults and its antiheros, it nevertheless possesses the potential to become another version of the original decentralised and equal internet, even if its user already tends to feel let down.¹² Besides Nepal, virtual possibilities have helped foster democratic discussion also in Myanmar,¹³ as an example. As a collaboration between UNESCO, Interpol and the heritage protection organisations of many different states, the Virtual Museum of Stolen Cultural Objects has been created, helping draw attention to the black market of cultural artefacts in politically charged regions.¹⁴ “The global village”¹⁵ offers access to information that was previously centralised, even if that access does not cover the whole world, for differing reasons. 

Vilém Flusser wrote in 1966 that without objects, we are merely virtual. Both subject and object are fictions and thus reality is fiction and fiction is reality.¹⁶ In 2026, it seems more arbitrary to separate virtuality and fiction from reality because objects and phenomena without a physical body also influence life on planet Earth, just as on Solaris. Our daily life is a mix of the physical, the virtual and fantasy, where every particle is vulnerable in a political combat. If tech magnates gentrify the already-developed augmented reality, it might still be possible to win it back – either as a whole or little by little – or even create a new one. And maybe all of us should be reading even more science fiction.¹⁷