Toward anthropologies of the metaverse

Anthropology is good for understanding the metaverse, the emerging domain of digital culture that includes virtual worlds, online games, and social media. In the wake of COVID, there has been heightened interest in the metaverse's potential, particularly after Facebook renamed itself Meta in October 2021. Yet current understandings of the metaverse are deeply muddled, warped by rhetorics of promotion ranging from entrepreneurial zeal to rampant hucksterism. In response, anthropology can defamiliarize ways of thinking that might otherwise take on the status of common sense. I show that the metaverse is mischaracterized when its optional aspects are repackaged as obligatory. Four such mischaracterizations are particularly damaging: that the metaverse must use virtual reality (VR, which I rename "sensory immersion," or SI), that it must be interoperable, that it must be massive, and that it must employ crypto. By clearing this conceptual underbrush, we can move beyond both hype and anti-hype to delineate what anthropology offers to the analysis, decolonization, and future transformation of the metaverse.