Metaverse Datafication

Chris Hesselbein is an Assistant professor of Science and Technology Studies in the Department of Management Engineering at the Politecnico di Milano, Italy. He is an ethnographer who studies how knowledge and technology are co-constructed with conceptions of social order.Paolo Bory is an Assistant professor of Sociology of Culture and Communication in the Department of Design at the Politecnico di Milano, Italy. He studies from a social and historical perspectives the imaginaries and narratives about networks and digital technologies such as AI and supercomputing.Stefano Canali is an Assistant professor of Philosophy of Science in the Department of Electronics, Information and Bioengineering at the Politecnico di Milano, Italy. His research focuses on the epistemic role of emerging technologies in science and their connections with evidence-based policy, scientific change, and the science-society interface.

• Introduction: Metaverse datafication: technologies, definitions, and futures 1. Six provocations for metaverse datafication: an emergent cultural, technological, and scholarly phenomenon 2. The metaverse-industrial complex 3. The Better Bandit: Decentralised Infrastructure, Crypto-States, and the rematerialisation of virtual worlds 4. Meta’s artistic turn: AR face filters, platform art, and the actually existing metaverse 5. Materializing corporate futures: how the EU navigated the Metaverse hype 6. Value and virtue in the extended reality (XR) industry 7. Yuanyuzhou 元宇宙: yesterday, today, tomorrow. Historical roots, current visions, and future dynamics of real-world integration in the Chinese governmental narrative on the Metaverse 8. I VR therefore I am: toxic binary thinking in visions of the metaverse 9. Extensive culture: expressions of endlessness in the metaverse and the limits of data accumulation