Virtual enchantment: Rethinking engagement in social VR through the Better World Museum

Abstract

This article develops the concept of virtual enchantment to analyze how immersive digital environments generate affective experiences that both resist and are recuperated by platform capitalism’s extractive logics. Drawing on Bennett’s understanding of enchantment as wonder that exceeds habitual perception, virtual enchantment describes affective intensity that momentarily interrupts habitual patterns of interaction, creating conditions for contemplative engagement and speculative imagination. Through an autoethnographic phenomenological analysis of the Better World Museum: Angl the Artiste, a virtual museum within Meta’s Horizon Worlds celebrating Black artistic production, this study examines how enchanting encounters operate within and against corporate virtual reality platforms. The analysis unfolds in two parts. Part I demonstrates how the museum’s design generates genuine aesthetic encounters through curatorial strategies, spatial arrangements, and interactive affordances. Drawing on Levitas’s concepts of ontological and architectural utopia and Benjamin’s framework of radical imagination, this section analyzes how enchantment cultivates contemplative engagement and positions the museum within Afrofuturist traditions that reimagine technology as a site for Black creative agency. Part II examines the material infrastructures structuring these experiences. Drawing on platform studies and critical race scholarship, this section analyzes how Meta’s surveillance architecture, racialized labor divisions, and algorithmic selection mechanisms simultaneously produce and commodify enchantment, revealing that virtual enchantment operates within platform capitalism as a structural tension. The article argues that virtual enchantment must be understood dialectically: as simultaneously genuine and recuperated, resistant and extractive, liberatory and complicit. By refusing to resolve this tension, the analysis advances utopian media studies as an orientation treating digital infrastructures not solely as sites of critique but as spaces where enchantment can sustain hope, generate ephemeral collectivities, and cultivate speculative possibilities within extractive conditions. Virtual enchantment offers not a dismissal of platform critique but a strategy for sustaining communal engagement and imaginative possibility within and against digital capitalism.