This chapter begins with the story of the “blue marble,” the nickname for Earth in color photographs of the planet taken from outer space. These images present a paradox: they suggest Earth’s fragility and invite worldly care and stewardship, but they also testify to a desire to escape earthly limitations and transcend incarnate experience. Similar desires informed the mythology of the personal computer upon its debut. Yaakov Garb, credited with inventing the term “virtual reality,” called these desires “the dreams our culture has inscribed in silicon”; he critiqued the mythology surrounding computer technology and called for greater appreciation of its material supports. In a sense, Garb was asking for a greater synthesis of the analog and the digital, a synthesis that is captured in the original definition of the term “virtuality.” The introduction discusses this older, more philosophical sense of virtuality and related recent scholarship, and concludes with chapter summaries.