This is all potentially good news, said Lehdonvirta, who first learned to write basic code in the mid-1980s, when he was five or six years old. In virtual reality, Keynes’s “economic problem” has decisively been solved. It is a world of total abundance, in which endless novelty, passing fads, and planned obsolescence are rendered nearly harmless. “You can accelerate consumption. You can throw away stuff. The fashion cycle can go faster and faster without increasing material requirements or the environmental footprint,” Lehdonvirta said. All you’re doing when you turn one virtual garment into another is “flipping bits”—changing one kind of digital information into another.