Greenwashing is the act of conveying misleading information about how a company's products are more environmentally sound. For example: Volkswagen cheating the emissions tests on its vehicles, and H&M’s dubious advertising of using "sustainable" materials in their clothing.

In industrial design, planned obsolescence is a policy to design a product with an artificially limited useful life or a purposely frail design, so that it decrementally functions after a certain predetermined period of time or might be perceived as unfashionable. This is seen, for example, in the design of many smartphones.

The Western Balkans include Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, North Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, and Kosovo.

A permanent resident is someone who has the right to permanently live in the country, but is not a citizen. They are not allowed to vote, run for public office, and are unable to access certain rights. After a number of years, they can apply for full citizenship.

For the purpose of this debate, "The Protected Place" is a realm where individuals are constantly contented and happy at a certain level, without the exact knowledge of what exists outside of it. What is known is that, in the outside world, there is a possibility of general suffering such as economic disparity and societal unhappiness (which are not existent in the “Protected Place”), but also that there is a possibility of an even more intense level of individual happiness.

A "sect" is a subgroup of people with somewhat differing beliefs than the larger group that they belong to. There may be varying levels of collaboration and agreement with the larger group. An example of an extremist sect may be eco-terrorism (destruction of environmentally harmful infrastructure) in the broader environmentalist movement.

For the purposes of this debate, there exists a safe technology which can accurately simulate the experience of being in prison. A person within the simulation will experience the simulation as fully real, including time passing slowly as in "real life", while not interacting with others in the "real world". In reality, even a long sentence in the simulation will be done in a matter of days.