Metaverse events: hyperreal performativity of the synthetic self

This paper argues that, in an age of acceleration where digital and social mediation is a given, events and the event experience are undergoing a radical transformation. Emerging DARQ* technologies and an accelerating Metaverse are reshaping the event landscape, birthing a new era of extended reality events (XREvents). Drawing upon a Future Studies poststructuralist position, with an auto-ethnographic and virtual reality methodology (Kozinets, 2023) we propose that the accelerating Metaverse represents the emergence of a new fifth space of XREvents (Frew, Tzanidis & Flinn, 2023). This virtual domain fundamentally challenges the primacy of live events, revealing the constructed nature of real experiences within the intensifying hyperreality we inhabit.

Our analysis sheds light on how the once seemingly real world of events, and the selves within them, have always been entangled in a web of digital and social mediation. Events have become potent expressions of hyperreality where the self is caught in a vortex of mediation; an omnipresent global gaze that perpetually mirrors the self, and the event experience, back becoming a self-legitimising performative construct. However, the Metaverse promises unimaginable freedom where the self, unfettered by the laws of physics, biology or morals of the physical ‘real world’, is cloned into a synthetic self that can engage in new worlds of experience (Ball, 2022).

In XREvents, the synthetic self can become whatever, go wherever, create, consume and relive endless ecosystems of event experiences. Nevertheless, the speed, scale and scope of DARQ technologies points to a trajectory where the rich detail and sensory saturation are so deep that XREvents become the ultimate hyperreal Spectacle (Hardawar, 2021; Frew, 2013). The promise of XREvents can become a prison where the synthetic self will be perpetually profiled, AI data scanned and scrapped into a new cyber-performativity. Therefore, while we argue that the rise of XREvents challenges appeals to authentic or ‘real’ events, we acknowledge a future DARQ Metaverse may well become a cyber-performative construct. Of course, there is always the possibility that we will see resistance to the seductive dreamscape of XREvents. However, as resistance is reappropriated or creativity assimilated the hyperreal Spectacle is, ironically, really all there is.