On the Impossibility of Dwelling in the Metaverse

This paper examines whether genuine dwelling—understood as embodied engagement with a world that resists, endures, and exceeds human control—can occur in the metaverse. Drawing on Heidegger’s account of dwelling and Ingold’s concept of the ‘taskscape’, it argues that the metaverse is structurally unable to sustain dwelling in the full ontological sense. The argument unfolds in three steps. First, dwelling is shown to depend on friction: bodily cost, temporal irreversibility, material resistance, and exposure to mortal finitude. Second, the metaverse is interpreted as a technological and commercial project oriented toward reducing these frictions through attenuated bodily burden, reversible action, programmable environments, and artificial scarcity. Third, the paper extends the concept of the metaverse beyond immersive hardware to describe a broader condition of digitalized life in which experience becomes increasingly modifiable, personalized, and optimized. In this wider sense, the difficulty of dwelling in the metaverse is not limited to a niche technology but reveals a tendency within late-digital culture itself. The paper concludes by proposing a politics of friction: a public deliberation over which resistances are unjust and should be transformed, and which are constitutive conditions of ethical, ecological, and responsible life.