Samsung launches a "sustainability-themed quest" on their "Samsung 837X" Decentraland metaverse project, where they invite characters to hunt for "recyclable product boxes", plant trees in the (virtual) forest, and earn NFT badges.The press release doesn't happen to mention that the Decentraland project is built on Ethereum, a proof-of-work blockchain that currently uses over 100 TWh of electricity per year—around the same amount as countries like the Netherlands or Finland.
In my head canon for the Matrix films there never was a war. Zion thinks there was but even Morpheus admits most of the records are dicey. The truth is we didn't scorch the skies to stop the machines. We just completely pored gasoline on the entire world and set it on fire because we could finally retreat into digital spaces and never have to know we were eating slop every day, and we programmed the machine caretakers with understanding that any human who wants to live in the real world and wants other people to wake up is dangerously neurodivergent and should be purged.
That would be a great layer to reveal after peeling back the sloppiness of the sequels.