Extended Universe

At the risk of being a bit too “grad student,” I’ll start with a reference to Walter Benjamin’s “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century.” In that overcited work, the Marxish philosopher writes of the historical arrival of iron, the first “artificial building material.” Slowly, but surely, iron’s utilitarian applications in locomotive rails and iron-frame structures gave way to its appropriation for ornamental use in the Parisian arcades, which, in turn, bricolaged new and old urban forms to great aesthetic effect. “These images,” Benjamin notes, “are ideals, and in them the collective seeks not only to transfigure, but also to transcend, the immaturity of the social product and the deficiencies of the social order of production.” Taken as a technological development, the Metaverse appears to represent a similar historical process. The functionalism of the internet, long on the wane, has entered an effusively baroque period.

Oceans of ink have been spilled about the Metaverse. A few critical eddies of note: it is nothing new (see: Second Life); it’s classist becaus…