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<p>This paper suggests that the metaverse may replicate a structural logic of exclusion where certain groups within a social or economic system are denied juridical recognition. This logic is traced across three historical modalities: juridical non-personhood, concealment, and juridical displacement. Drawing upon Agamben’s (<i>Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life</i> 1998) concept of <i>homo sacer</i> and Farokhi’s (<i>Islamophobia Studies Journal </i><i>6</i>, 2021) extension to digital personas, this paper argues that avatar operators may occupy an analogous condition of cyber <i>homo sacer</i>, inside the social order of the metaverse but outside juridical recognition, where harm mediated through a phenomenologically embodied avatar goes legally unrecognized. To analyze this condition, this paper introduces functional personhood as a third category alongside natural and legal personhood, describing an individual whose social presence and capacity are mediated through an avatar that serves as the perceptual surface through which they inhabit the virtual world. It is argued that existing tort law contains the conceptual apparatus to recognize avatar harm and that the reasonable person standard establishes the threshold for distinguishing actionable harm from the ordinary risks of virtual participation. Three paradigmatic cases make this structural condition visible.</p>

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Digital Dispossession: Abandoned in the Camp of the Metaverse

  • 期刊论文

  • 发表日期：

    2026年5月7日

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  • David Scott Warner

摘要

This paper suggests that the metaverse may replicate a structural logic of exclusion where certain groups within a social or economic system are denied juridical recognition. This logic is traced across three historical modalities: juridical non-personhood, concealment, and juridical displacement. Drawing upon Agamben’s (Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life 1998) concept of homo sacer and Farokhi’s (Islamophobia Studies Journal 6, 2021) extension to digital personas, this paper argues that avatar operators may occupy an analogous condition of cyber homo sacer, inside the social order of the metaverse but outside juridical recognition, where harm mediated through a phenomenologically embodied avatar goes legally unrecognized. To analyze this condition, this paper introduces functional personhood as a third category alongside natural and legal personhood, describing an individual whose social presence and capacity are mediated through an avatar that serves as the perceptual surface through which they inhabit the virtual world. It is argued that existing tort law contains the conceptual apparatus to recognize avatar harm and that the reasonable person standard establishes the threshold for distinguishing actionable harm from the ordinary risks of virtual participation. Three paradigmatic cases make this structural condition visible.