A Great Disappointment: “The Metaverse” as a Digital Religious Object
by Steven Kaplin
Source: AWSM NFT
When leaked documents revealed in October 2022 that there were hardly “any girls in the Hot Girl Summer Rooftop Pool Party,” or anywhere else in the online metaverse Horizon Worlds, Meta (formerly Facebook) was forced to take seriously the fact that its much-touted new virtual reality program had fallen well short of its near-utopian marketing earlier in the year. Given the rhetoric attached to “the metaverse” as not only profitable but offering the technological underpinning for a world-disrupting paradigm shift, the early failures of metaversal worlds can only be described as a great disappointment.
Such a great disappointment draws parallels to failures of religious prophecy and unfulfilled messianic redemptions—“The Great Disappointment,” for instance, in which Jesus Christ did not return to Earth in 1844, as popular Baptist preacher William Miller had proclaimed. For historians, messianic disappointments, including the transformation of The Great Disappointment by Millerites into the origin story for the thriving Adventist movement, offer insight into the ways that religious communities of prior eras have responded to and reinterpreted changing conditions and expectations. For those of us interested in analyzing our contemporary world, the ongoing great disappointment of “the metaverse” offers the opportunity to observe in real time, without knowing the end result, as users, funders, and commentators reconsider and re-ascribe the meanings and expectations of digital worlds.
Metaverses are 3D virtual reality platforms in which users in avatar bodies interact with one another, play games, attend events, buy and sell land, create in-world artwork, and construct new worlds within the world. Like the offline world, metaverses act as a combination of many types of objects at once, simultaneously a social space, an economy, a digital “text,” and a foundation upon which theologies—which necessarily contain complex conceptions of race, gender, class, ability, and more—can be built. In other words, a metaverse functions as a smaller, more easily digestible object version of the world we live in, complex enough to be interesting for analysis but contained enough to monitor in full.
Through the metaphor of The Great Disappointment, “the metaverse” functions not only as digital religion but particularly as a digital religious object that lends itself especially well to pedagogy in a classroom setting. When teaching about Decentraland, a popular international metaverse, in my Spring 2022 Religion and Social Media course, my students and I widely agreed that metaversal rhetoric mirrored theological claims of a radically renewed, perfected, and redeemed world. Metaverses like Decentraland, and cryptocurrencies, which function as the currency for most metaverses, were advertised not only as fun and financially viable but as holding the potential for the dismantling of gender and racial inequalities, elimination of human-caused environmental damage, and upending of corrupt financial and governmental institutions. Metaverses appeared to challenge many of our collective notions about the nature of economies, national borders, and, of course, intellectual categories like culture, religion, and humanity. For my students, “the metaverse” was a digital religious object upon which they could imagine future worlds of all kinds and then analyze the problems, opportunities, and religiosity of such imagined futures.
Buoyed by the success of our class discussions, I set out at the start of the summer to write about the religiosity of metaversal rhetoric and the ways in which such digital worlds act as a site of popular theological imagination. From the early months of 2022 through the time of this writing in November 2022, however, the meanings attached to the metaverse have transformed dramatically. Over the summer, the value of cryptocurrencies crashed by approximately one trillion dollars marketwide and drastically reduced the economic value of metaverses, both for their users and the companies that own or sponsor them. The religious rhetoric around metaverses fell away as its proponents grappled with their offline financial disasters. Metaversal rhetoric redirected toward economic opportunity—a great time to buy low!—and video game-esque fun.
During June of 2022, for instance, Decentraland advertised several telling in-world virtual events, including No Pants Friday, where users can buy outfits for their online avatars, a Pride parade, including access to specialty Pride-themed outfits sponsored by Mastercard, and a bourbon-making event hosted by the Louisville bourbon brand Angel’s Envy. As it turned out, the digital worlds seemingly inhibited only by the limits of our collective imagination were deeply contingent on regular world markets and governments, and as digital objects of study, metaverses were religious not only in their utopian ideologies but in the ways that they reflect new modes by which digital technology intertwines theology and capitalist interests.
Just as Millerite thinking evolved in the wake of The Great Disappointment until settling on a broader Adventist tradition, metaversal ideologies will likely take on a variety of new forms as interested parties adjust to the disappointments of 2022. As observers of these digital religious objects, we have been granted an exciting opportunity for collective questioning and discussion. How do people and communities, in real time, re-interpret their beliefs about their metaversal worlds? What and who guide popular ideologies around metaverses? How does the metaversal threat/promise to invalidate normative boundaries and categories—cultural, financial, national, religious—navigate, and re-navigate, the ongoing power of such norms? And to what extent do digital worlds, like metaverses, actually usher in new paradigms for human life and thought, as opposed to simply digitally replicating the world as it has been? Through such questioning, and the conversations that follow, the miniature world of “the metaverse” grants us deeper insight into our world at large.
Steven Kaplin is a PhD candidate in Religious Studies at Indiana University. He writes about American religion, with particular focus on Judaism, spirituality, and, increasingly, popular culture and digital religion.