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