Abstract：The historical process of capitalism’s growth and expansion is deeply embedded in a distinct geopolitical logic, which manifests not only in the general process of capital accumulation and territorial expansion but also in the specific need for contradiction displacement and crisis resolution. The geographical narrative of capitalism’s crisis resolution reflects its instrumental use of spatial fixes. In the past, capitalism’s spatial fixes primarily revolved around real geography, but with the emergence of digital capitalism, its spatial fixes have undergone a profound shift from real geography to virtual geography. The developed economic attributes of capitalism provide it with the technical conditions for laying out the virtual geography, and the political attributes characterized by a keenness for expansion endow it with the inherent driving force for establishing virtual hegemony. Virtual geography is the projection of digital capitalism’s pursuit of geographical control into cyberspace and digital realms, inheriting capitalism’s inherent logic of profit-seeking and desire. On a logical level, virtual geography manifests as the virtual replication of reality, the reality oriented toward the virtual, and the advanced virtuality of the virtual. Virtual geography shapes the spatial fixes of digital capitalism, including constructing a spatial politics of digital enclosure, creating a spatial economy of rent-free land, and generating a spatial culture of dissolving time. The immaterial nature of virtual geography makes the spatial fixes it facilitates highly concealed and thus far more elusive, urgently calling for our critical scrutiny.
2025, Vol. 42 
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