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

Enchanted encounters in the Better World Museum

You saw a big bright smile, but she cried most nights.

You saw a fashion statement, but she stressed her imperfections didn’t look right.

You saw a strong mother, but she was met with postpartum.

You saw a beautiful relationship, but she felt she wasn’t good enough for him.

You saw a major talent, but she felt she procrastinated everything she did.

You saw a growing woman, but she still felt like a kid.

These lines are the words of If You Only Knew, a poem narrated as part of The Shaderd Sol, an original virtual sculpture by Angl the Artiste and the first work encountered on entering the museum. The piece is not a reproduction of an existing artwork but a work born digital, conceived and realized within the VR environment itself. The Shaderd Sol takes the form of an anatomically stylized heart made of black and cyan shards, its slow pulsing animation and floating shattered pieces suspended in the surrounding darkness. The fragmentation is not incidental: the shards symbolize the fractured emotional experiences of Black individuals navigating society. Activating the piece triggers a brief 15-s recitation of the poem played in three-dimensional audio, giving voice to experiences of struggle that are often rendered invisible. The animation’s rhythm and the spatial audio are designed to create conditions for physical sensations, such as chills, empathetic resonance, or a visceral response that can “challenge and engage the whole person” (McCarthy et al., 2006: 369).

When I activated The Shaderd Sol for the first time, I expected to be drawn primarily to the poem. Instead, it was the heart’s animation that arrested me. The pulsing rhythm was slow and insistent, and somewhere in the stillness of watching it I became aware of my own heartbeat, not as a thought but as a bodily fact, the two rhythms briefly running in parallel. I had not moved. I was not aware of having chosen to go still. The pause seemed to happen to me rather than being something I decided. This response exemplifies what Bennett (2001) terms enchantment: a “momentarily immobilizing encounter” that suspends chronological time and bodily movement, triggering a state of wonder and fascination (5). McCarthy and Wright (2018) emphasize that enchantment is not about recalling the familiar but about encountering something wholly new and arresting to our attention. Like pausing to fixate on a uniquely shaped stone on a beach, it is the object’s singular presence, not any familiarity, that draws one into full immersion. Such wonder resists rational explanation: as Sinclair and Watson (2001) note, some forms of wonder persist even when fully understood. Enchantment “uproots the subject, throws it momentarily off balance, outside of time and space” (Pyyry, 2017; Pyyry and Aiava, 2020: 581).

The museum is deliberately designed to engineer conditions for emotional provocation, fostering surprise, fascination, and wonder rather than passive consumption (Bennett, 2001). Its architecture and curation invite contemplative engagement, encouraging sustained, embodied presence. This is not unique to virtual space. As Witcomb (2013) argues, physical museums have long operated this way, deploying affective, sensory strategies to unsettle received narratives and produce forms of critical engagement that exceed rational information processing. The Better World Museum’s distinctiveness lies not in the fact that it produces affect, but in how VR’s immersion transforms the conditions under which affect circulates. Where the physical museum acts on the body through material presence and architectural scale, VR positions my virtual body within the depicted scene itself, collapsing the residual distance between artwork and myself that even the most affectively sophisticated physical exhibition retains.

It is precisely this collapse of distance that creates the conditions for enchantment. Being suddenly close to what ordinarily remains at a distance creates a kind of unpreparedness. This is what Bennett (2001) describes as an encounter with something one did not expect and was not ready to meet. In that moment of captivation, one becomes fully present. The animated heart’s rhythm and shattering pieces draw one in completely, producing a feeling of being “both caught up and carried away,” an engagement that is not just visual or intellectual but fully embodied (Bennett, 2001: 5).

The museum extends this approach across its full collection, organizing space so that enchantment operates as a catalyst for socially conscious attentiveness, enacting what Stengers (2018) calls “slowing down,” a practice of resisting accelerated systems in order to restore attentiveness, collective thinking, and sensitivity to what speed tends to erase. This decelerative logic, however, sits in direct tension with the infrastructure that hosts it. While physical museums foster deceleration through architectural scale and curatorial sequencing largely insulated from commercial imperatives, Meta’s Horizon Worlds is designed to maximize interaction, sustained content consumption, and behavioral data extraction. The virtual museum’s presence within this infrastructure is therefore not incidental. It exists within the very system its purpose resists.

Despite this contradiction, the Better World Museum’s deliberate deceleration nonetheless produces a perceptual shift in which previously overlooked details come into focus, deepening connection and fostering wonder (McCarthy and Wright, 2018). In slowing down, the museum creates space for what Bennett (2001) calls “presumptive generosity toward others,” an attunement to what is around us that enchantment makes available (112). This generosity emerges as an openness toward the histories, experiences, and forms of Black creative production that the collection brings into presence. I felt something of this before The Shaderd Sol: the poem’s litany of unseen struggles opened onto perspectives I had not brought into the museum with me, and the stillness the work produced was not private but oriented outward, toward the lives the poem named and the history the sculpture held. This reflects what McCarthy and Wright (2018) describe as transformative openness, enchantment’s capacity to open up imagination and pull meanings from the past or future into the present (364).

It is through this kind of perceptual shift that the museum’s wider collection operates. Across the full collection, from Artiste’s own Neon Sol and Fist Sol to Alma Thomas’ Resurrection and Joe Overstreet’s Power Flight, the museum enchants by animating seemingly inert material, transforming pixels and code into entities with apparent agency and affective power, producing what Bennett (2001) describes as “metamorphoses of shape, color, size, and pattern [that] capture the imagination” (131). Crucially, the museum functions not as a passive display but as an immersive environment that prompts visitors to confront the cultural and political stakes of aesthetic representation. Jacob Lawrence’s Harriet Tubman (Panel no. 4), drawn from his original 1940 work, is one such instance. As Hills (1993) documents, Lawrence produced 31 panels between 1939 and 1940 to narrate African American history and bring its figures into the present as a source of communal inspiration. Panel no. 4 depicts Harriet Tubman as a child among other playing children, a compositional choice that suggests heroism emerges from ordinary circumstances (Hills, 1993). The pinwheel formation of figures in red, yellow, green, and tan, set against an expansive sky and low horizon, evokes fleeting freedom and the childhood innocence foregrounded in nineteenth-century slave narratives. Lawrence’s original panels already carried this affective charge; these compositional choices, this deliberate narration of Black history, were all intentional features of the 1940 work. What the virtual recreation added was the condition of bodily presence: the painting was life-size, and standing before it made the encounter harder to hold at a distance. The children are playing. They are ordinary. Knowing what I knew about Tubman, about what this childhood was surrounded by and what would follow it, I found myself unable to occupy the position of neutral observer.

This is not to claim that immersion automatically produces empathy or critical awareness. As Nakamura (2020) argues, assuming it does risks packaging encounters with Black pain into consumable experiences that feel morally improving while leaving structural inequalities intact. The autoethnographic commitment of this analysis is more modest: its focus is not on what VR produces in visitors generally but on how the museum’s design structured the conditions of this encounter, and what that encounter produced. Something in my habitual relationship to this history became briefly untenable. What the encounter made available, in Benjamin’s (2024) terms, was a glimpse of what she calls “preferable futures”—not a probable outcome but a felt sense that things could be otherwise, that the heroism ordinary circumstances contained did not have to remain invisible. That this glimpse arose not from argument but from bodily presence before a life-size recreation of children at play is precisely Benjamin’s point: radical imagination is not an intellectual exercise but something that emerges from the quality of attention that aesthetic encounter makes possible.

Utopian encounters

The enchanted encounters the museum generates do more than provoke wonder; they model new modes of being and relation that gesture toward possibilities beyond present inequalities. Rather than organizing artworks for detached contemplation, the museum functions as an environment where artworks, narratives, and visitor experiences intersect to enact what Levitas (2010, 2013) describes as the ontological mode of utopia: a process of transformative encounter through which we might imagine ourselves otherwise. Such moments do not create entirely new selves but foster subtle alterations that expand our capacity for different actions and relationships, cultivating a deeper desire for a better way of being. The museum operationalizes this through what Levitas (2010) calls an “education of desire”: unsettling the taken-for-granted nature of the present and cultivating the capacity to imagine and feel that things could be different.

That process began at the museum’s entrance, before the collection itself came into view. On each visit, I performed the same gesture: pointed my virtual hand toward the ribbon and triggered the wall’s descent. What followed was not dramatic in the conventional sense, no explosion of light or sound, but as the wall dropped, the museum’s full scale became suddenly, viscerally present. Standing at its threshold, I felt the kind of smallness that does not diminish but orients, the sense of entering something larger than what I had carried in with me. And there, directly ahead, was what the descent had been designed to reveal: an inscription foregrounding the racialized hierarchies of the art world, the first thing the spatial arrangement ensures you see. I noticed that I read it differently than I might have on a page. The space around it, and the scale that had just become present, demanded that I take it seriously:

Everyone knows about Picasso, but not many know Edmonia Lewis; the first black woman to be internationally recognized as an amazing sculptor? Why is it Barnett Newman sells a painting with one white line over a blue canvas for 44 million dollars but Jacob Lawrence’s most complex piece only reaches just under 7 million? Black artists already struggle for being black, but now have their art unappreciated.

The inscription functions as a curatorial intervention, foregrounding how racial bias rather than artistic merit shapes the valuation and visibility of artworks. By juxtaposing the astronomical value assigned to Newman’s work against Lawrence’s relative undervaluation, it makes visible the racialized logics that determine artistic worth, while the reference to Edmonia Lewis establishes a continuity of creative achievement and systematic exclusion. Together, these juxtapositions do what Benjamin (2024) argues is itself a political act: they expose the present’s racialized valuation logics as constructed rather than natural, revealing that the systematic underrecognition of Black artistic production is not inevitable but made, and therefore unmakeable. In doing so, the inscription “opens a perspective into a different future” (Hiltunen and Rainio, 2023: 59), providing a means of envisioning alternative modes of existence (Medlicott, 2019). Standing before that inscription, having just triggered the wall’s descent and felt the scale of the space settle around me, I found myself doing precisely what it was designed to prompt: reconsidering a system of valuation I had previously moved through without question.

This exposure of racialized valuation logics operates alongside a parallel curatorial strategy, surfacing what Sennett and Cobb (1972) call the “hidden injuries” of structural inequality through affective encounter. The pairing of The Shaderd Sol with If You Only Knew enacts this most directly. The poem’s litany of unseen struggles confronted me with the gap between public performance and private pain, between what others see and what is actually lived, and the broken heart sculpture gives that gap a physical form: shards held together in a slow pulse, fractured but still beating. When I stood before it, what struck me was not the pain the work depicted but the persistence it implied. The sculpture did not ask for pity. It asked for recognition, the kind that Levitas (2013) associates with shared vulnerability as the ground from which utopian desire emerges, not a fantasy of escape but an acknowledgment that things could be different. That recognition is what the pairing between poem and sculpture is designed to produce, and it is what made the encounter feel less like viewing an artwork and more like being let in on something.

The museum’s curatorial arrangement extends this ontological work across time, placing works in dialogue to enact what Levitas (2013) describes as processual ontology of becoming: the condition, as Sayer (2011) argues, of living suspended between present actuality and future possibility, where our sense of who we are remains inseparable from our sense of who we ought to become through our actions. Nowhere did this become more tangible than in the encounter with Augusta Savage’s Lift Every Voice and Sing, named after James Weldon and J. Rosamond Johnson’s hymn and featured at the New York World’s Fair (New York Public Library, 2023), placed alongside Joe Overstreet’s Power Flight, shown at Houston’s De Luxe Black Arts Center in 1972 and linking metaphors of flight and nomadism to transnational struggles for Black liberation (Overstreet, 1971). I came upon Lift Every Voice and Sing first, took it in, and then turned to find Power Flight nearby, close enough that the transition between them felt like a single curatorial gesture rather than two separate encounters. What struck me was not their similarity but the weight of the decades between them, works separated by 30 years that nonetheless spoke the same language of collective aspiration. What the gap made legible was not repetition but endurance, the same longing surfacing again not because it had been passed down, but because it had never been resolved. Moving between them produced an intertwined present: a felt sense of multiple historical moments coexisting within a single encounter, in which past struggles and present witnessing became temporarily inseparable.

It is from within this intertwined present that the museum’s ontological force becomes legible. Standing between Savage and Overstreet, what surfaced was a thought I had not quite articulated before: this did not have to be this way. The neglect of these works, the hierarchies that had kept them from the rooms where Newman and Picasso hung, none of it felt inevitable anymore. Something about moving through a space that treated them with this seriousness made the injustice legible in a way that knowing about it never quite had. That legibility was not incidental to the space but produced by it, by the specific quality of attention that the museum’s architecture demanded and the particular way it arranged encounters in time and across distance.

This ontological work was inseparable from the space that housed it. What Levitas (2013) describes as the architectural mode of utopia, not a blueprint for an alternative world but a provisional imagining of how social life might otherwise be arranged and felt, was not merely a theoretical backdrop to these encounters but something I moved through bodily. The museum’s scale made itself felt from the moment the wall descended: a vastness that did not overwhelm but oriented, placing me within an environment that insisted on being taken seriously. Moving from one work to the next required crossing distances that made the journey between them feel intentional, each traversal a kind of preparation, the space itself insisting that what waited ahead deserved to be approached rather than simply reached. The scale produced not intimidation but a heightened sense of my own presence within it, as though the environment was large enough to hold more than I had brought into it. This is what Levitas (2013) means when she argues that the architectural mode must attend simultaneously to the “machinery of society and the life lived within it”: the museum’s spatial design does both, structuring a social argument about how Black art deserves to be encountered while making that argument felt in the body, in the quality of attention that scale refuses to let you abandon (198).

Utopia as architecture manifests most clearly in the museum’s radical inversion of spatial hierarchy and movement patterns. In Levitas’ (2013) terms, the architectural mode of utopia must address “the social forms demanded by the principles of dignity and grace,” and the Better World Museum enacts this by deliberately upending conventional museum design (197). Where Bal (2010) notes that traditional exhibitions often adhere to predictable, chronological structures and neutral spaces designed not to disturb the viewer, this museum constructs what she terms “exhibition narratology”: the curatorial orchestration of narrative rhythms that guide visitors through intentionally paced encounters and meaning-making experiences (13). Unlike physical galleries, where non-linear movement remains constrained by walls, fixed entry points, and the effort a body expends retracing its steps, the virtual museum’s three halls are navigable in any order, accessible within seconds through teleportation, and arranged to create multiple pathways and viewing angles that shift depending on where you have just been. The space pulled me back to works already passed. I approached them from angles not yet tried, encountering the same piece in a different light depending on what had come before. That freedom was not incidental: the connections between works are not built into a fixed route but left to emerge from wherever you happen to be standing and where you choose to go next, producing “a variedly intense, even bodily, engagement, which is conducive to an experiential narrative” shaped as much by the visitor’s own movement as by curatorial arrangement (Bal, 2010: 15).

The Sol collection occupied a section of the museum where all three works were simultaneously visible, yet the space invited movement rather than static viewing. I found myself turning, reorienting my body to approach each piece from different angles, then stepping back to hold all three in view at once. No single work resolved into a definitive statement on its own. Neon Sol’s figure, bald, upright, unapologetic, registered differently once I had stood before Fist Sol’s dedication to Black Lives Matter, and differently again after the broken rhythms of Shaderd Sol. What accumulated was not a narrative progression but something more like an emotional field: three facets of the same world, each illuminating dimensions of the others that neither could carry alone. The museum’s capacity to generate this kind of transformation through provisional, open-ended arrangements rather than fixed interpretive scripts became most felt here, not in any single work but in the accumulated weight of moving between them.

This quality extended, on occasion, beyond my own solitary passage through the space. On one or two visits I shared the museum with other visitors, exchanging brief words before each of us continued along our own path. What struck me was how little was required for the co-presence to matter. Watching another individual pause before a work made me look again at what had caught their attention, and their different trajectories reminded me that the museum could be traversed in ways I had not chosen. The experience of moving through the space changed in quality simply because someone else was also moving through it. This is what Benjamin (2024) describes as studying and acting together: not organized collective action but the kind of mutual orientation that arises when people inhabit the same environment with genuine attentiveness.

Together, the ontological and architectural modes of utopia produced a fleeting utopian public in the form of gatherings that do not announce themselves as such but cohere around the shared experience of being reoriented and quietly unsettled by the same environment. Such moments align with Kelley’s (2002) argument that collective social movements function as “incubators of new knowledge” (8)—spaces where embodied, shared encounter generates forms of understanding that solitary engagement cannot. The museum gestured toward this possibility across my own repeated visits and the occasional shared presence of other visitors, structuring spatial and temporal frameworks within which embodied encounters with histories of racial exclusion generated something closer to collective pride than I had anticipated finding in a corporate VR platform.

Platform capitalism and the extraction of affect

The phenomenological account offered thus far describes enchantment as genuine aesthetic encounter, one that generates wonder, contemplation, and utopian imagination. Yet it remains to ask not only whether enchantment is real, but whether its reality is compatible with the very platform logics it appears to interrupt. The answer, this section argues, is that enchantment does not escape recuperation: it is subsumed by platform capitalism at every level simultaneously—as biometric data extracted in real time, as cultural value redirected away from Black creators, as critical meaning stripped from its original context, and as an affective intensity that reenergizes precisely the user engagement platform capitalism requires. These are not separate problems but layered dimensions of a single structural condition, and attending to them requires moving beyond phenomenological description toward a media-technical analysis of how Meta’s infrastructure actively modulates the affective experiences it hosts.

The most immediate layer is extraction. Meta’s Oculus privacy policy makes clear that the platform automatically gathers data on physical movement, bodily dimensions, and surrounding environment during VR use (Oculus Privacy Policy, 2023). As Carter and Egliston (2024) demonstrate, Oculus Quest functions as “a data intensive digital sensor” collecting substantial information about both user body and physical surroundings (7). Commercial VR systems track body movements 90 times per second, meaning a twenty-minute museum visit generates nearly two million data points of bodily response (Bailenson, 2018). This granular extraction exemplifies platforms’ structural advantage: by positioning themselves “between users” and “as the ground upon which their activities occur,” platforms gain privileged access to continuously record user activities (Srnicek, 2017: 29). As Van Dijck et al. (2018) point out, platforms render “into data many aspects of the world that have never been quantified before” (33). Within the Better World Museum, this extractive architecture captures intimate bodily data: head movements before artworks, gestural reach toward interactive pieces, the duration of contemplative pauses, and estimated hand size when hand tracking is enabled (Oculus Privacy Policy, 2023). The contemplative pause before The Shaderd Sol is, at the exact same moment, an aesthetic experience and a data event. Enchantment does not precede extraction here; it is extraction.

The infrastructure does more than passively record enchanted encounters; it actively produces them. The interface design of Horizon Worlds is not a neutral delivery mechanism for aesthetic experience but an active modulator of affective intensity. Its spatial audio, locomotion mechanics, lighting systems, and interaction affordances are engineered features whose parameters Meta controls and adjusts. Meta exercises this control through content policies, recommendation algorithms, and behavioral guidelines, each shaping which kinds of experience are possible within the platform and determining its affective range. The platform does not merely host the museum; it determines the conditions under which the museum can exist and be experienced. This amounts to what Srnicek (2017) identifies as ownership not merely of data but of social infrastructure itself.

Campolo and Crawford (2020) term this “enchanted determinism,” a duality in which systems appear magical while their operational logics remain opaque, obscuring social and ethical implications. The Better World Museum may structure conditions for contemplative enchantment, but those conditions are themselves structured by a corporate infrastructure whose interest lies not in contemplation but in engagement maximization. The museum’s discoverability depends on Horizon Worlds’ recommendation systems, whose selection criteria are withheld as proprietary knowledge, meaning that enchantment cannot escape recuperation but becomes a form of affective labor within Meta’s extractive economy.

This extractive logic takes on particular significance for Black cultural production. Meta’s Creator Fund and bonus program formally opened monetization to all Horizon Worlds creators in 2024 (Meta, 2025), yet the system rewards engagement-maximizing content such as in-world purchases, extended dwell time, and behavioral retention, rather than contemplative cultural work. A museum whose value is affective and historical sits uneasily within metrics that tie compensation to platform engagement. The bonus program is also explicitly time-limited and discretionary, subject to restructuring “to encourage creators to adopt new tools or features” (Testing New Tools for Horizon Worlds Creators To Earn Money, 2022), making compensation dependent on alignment with platform objectives rather than recognition of independent cultural value. This is the structural logic Benjamin (2019) theorizes in the New Jim Code: not overt exclusion but the encoding of inequity within systems that appear progressive. Yet as McMillan Cottom (2020) argues, the deeper issue is predatory inclusion: marginalized creators are incorporated into ostensibly democratizing platforms on extractive terms, their cultural and political labor monetized for the platform rather than recognized on its own terms. The value generated by this labor accrues disproportionately to Meta, which reported $164.5 billion in annual revenue (Annual Revenue Generated by Meta Platforms, 2026), while creators are compensated only when their work produces behavioral data rather than for its cultural or political significance.

The racial division of platform labor further entrenches this dynamic. Meta’s U.S. technical workforce is composed primarily of Asian and White employees, with Black workers significantly underrepresented (Statista, 2025). The composition of the workforce is not incidental to the platform’s representational limits: it determines which Black cultural practices can be rendered, how they are represented, and under what terms they circulate. These limits are compounded by racialized patterns of technological access: VR headsets remain expensive consumer technologies, and given that median Black household wealth was approximately one-tenth that of White households in 2021 (Sullivan et al., 2024), access barriers risk reproducing rather than transcending existing stratification. The affective economy of the Better World Museum is thus structured by race at every level, not only in the content it presents but in who built the platform, who can access it, and who captures the value it generates.

These dynamics crystallize in the museum’s reperformance of Augusta Savage’s Lift Every Voice and Sing, a work whose history of creation, institutional marginalization, and physical destruction embodies the racial and economic constraints the platform reproduces in new form. Savage’s 16-foot sculpture was a highlight of the 1939 New York World’s Fair and one of just two pieces by African American artists; it was subsequently destroyed by a bulldozer at the fair’s close (Artist Augusta Savage, 2019). Artiste has recreated it in VR, explaining: “I’ve brought it back to life” (Flip Key Studios, 2022). The conservation impulse is genuine, and the reperformance ensures the work’s survival. Yet as Pelta Feldman (2023) argues, reperformances risk diminishing criticality and producing commodification. Savage dedicated 2 years to the sculpture under significant funding constraints, applying lacquer over plaster to achieve the appearance of black basalt (Artist Augusta Savage, 2019). This material and historical specificity is largely lost in virtual translation. Morgan (2010) argues that the historical moment contextualizing a performance inevitably disappears. Jameson’s (1991) concept of pastiche names the condition that fills this void: an imitation detached from its original context, one in which “the past as ‘referent’ finds itself gradually bracketed, and then effaced altogether” (17). The museum’s reperformance thus operates on a double logic, preserving Black cultural heritage from physical destruction while dissolving the material and historical conditions that gave the original its critical force. The affective power of the work survives virtual translation, and may even be amplified by VR’s capacity for bodily presence; its critical and historical force may not. This is not an argument against digital preservation but a demand for analytical clarity about what the replication of artworks in VR reproduces and what it transforms. That clarity cannot be achieved by appeal to affective intensity alone; to evade it is to risk aestheticizing Blackness as a source of wonder rather than interrogating how race structures the affective economy of the platform itself.

The material preconditions of enchantment extend this analysis beyond the platform’s economic and affective circuits. VR headsets require rare earth minerals extracted from Congo, Bolivia, and Mongolia, which Crawford (2021) identifies as the material foundation of contemporary computation. Each museum visit relies on energy-intensive data centers: Meta consumed 67,115,737 gigajoules in 2024, with Scope 3 emissions exceeding eight million metric tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (Independent Accountants’ Review Report, 2005). While Meta reports 100% renewable electricity via contractual instruments, renewable energy certificates do not change the fossil-fuel mix of the grids powering its data centers (Bjørn et al., 2022). When headsets become e-waste, they typically end up in informal recycling operations in India and China, exposing workers and communities to toxic materials (Parikka, 2012). These are not incidental costs of enchantment but its constitutive preconditions, drawn from the same colonial and racial geographies that the museum’s artworks seek to reckon with. The communities of the Global South whose labor extracts the minerals, absorbs the carbon, and processes the e-waste that make VR possible are disproportionately communities of color whose histories of racial exploitation do not stand apart from, but run directly through, the histories the museum seek to honor. To theorize enchantment without naming this entanglement is to reproduce, at the level of analysis, the same operation the platform performs at the level of infrastructure: rendering the costs of the experience invisible to those who consume it.

It is precisely this invisibility, structural, economic, and material, that defines the conditions under which enchantment’s political potential must be assessed. The layered recuperation this section has traced is not a series of separate failures but a single systemic logic: enchantment is simultaneously datafied, economically redirected, and materially grounded in extractive geographies whose costs fall on the same populations whose cultural production the museum celebrates. Identifying this totality is a prerequisite for critique, because enchantment can only move from felt experience toward political agency if the full structure of its entanglement is made legible. Enchantment that does not know what produces it cannot interrogate those conditions; enchantment that does is capable of becoming something more.

Enchantment, critique, and the limits of resistance

That enchantment produces value for capital while feeling resistant is not a paradox to be resolved but a structural condition to be maintained as tension, held open rather than collapsed into either celebration or dismissal. The preceding analysis has shown that the recuperation of enchantment is not a single mechanism but a layered structure operating at every level simultaneously. This does not diminish the value of the museum’s cultural work. It means that enchantment’s political potential does not reside in the affective experience itself but depends entirely on what is done with it, collectively and analytically.

This is the point at which affect theory must account simultaneously for capture and the possibility of critique. Ahmed (2014) shows that affective capture is never total: feelings move between bodies and objects, sticking to some and sliding from others. The circulatory nature of affect works both ways: the same intensity the platform captures could, in principle, turn toward the conditions that produced it rather than remaining absorbed by them. But this turning is not automatic, and the assumption that it is represents a significant theoretical risk in accounts of enchantment as resistance. Berlant (2011) identifies the risk clearly: the most politically dangerous attachments are not those we recognize as harmful but those that feel sustaining, experiences that keep us oriented toward a system even as that system forecloses the possibilities we most desire. The enchantment the museum generates is precisely this kind of sustaining attachment. It feels genuinely resistant and culturally valuable, and it is, but that same sustaining quality makes it productive for the platform. The extended dwell time, the repeated visits, the deep affective engagement are not incidental to the platform’s interests but behavioral data it is built to extract. Enchantment cannot therefore be theorized as resistant simply because it feels different from ordinary platform consumption. The question of how enchantment becomes critique must be asked explicitly, because without it enchantment remains what Berlant warns against: an attachment that feels resistant while leaving the system intact.

A genuinely dialectical framing holds both dimensions without resolving them: enchantment is complicit and resistant, recuperated and reorienting, structurally aligned with platform capitalism and genuinely generative of utopian imagination. The Better World Museum does not escape this tension, and no cultural practice operating within extractive infrastructure can, but it makes the tension visible in a way that creates conditions for its politicization. That politicization requires naming the structural conditions through which enchantment is produced and captured: through collective discussion, through organizing that challenges platform ownership of cultural infrastructure, and through demands that Black cultural labor be recognized on its own terms rather than monetized on the platform’s. Without this, enchantment risks what Berlant (2011) theorizes as cruel optimism, attachment to experiences that sustain us affectively while reproducing the conditions of our exploitation materially. The move from felt experience to political agency is not assumed; it must be constructed. Virtual enchantment is one means through which that construction can begin.