Perspective Chapter: The Primacy of Poetics – Why Artists Will Build the Metaverse

This chapter interrogates dominant techno-deterministic narratives of metaverse development and advances a countervailing thesis: that the future of virtual economies will be shaped less by technical infrastructure than by cultural architectures of meaning. While automation and artificial intelligence rapidly commoditize once-scarce “hard skills” – coding, design, managerial oversight, financial analysis – the capacities resistant to computational replication – poetics, cultural intuition, narrative construction, culture-building, and meaning-making – emerge as the decisive vectors of value. To capture this shift, we introduce the figure of the synthesist: a hybrid professional archetype endowed with “bilateral fluency,” the ability to operate across artistic-humanistic and technical-computational registers without translational loss. Drawing on case studies of failed corporate metaverse projects contrasted with thriving user-generated platforms, alongside neurocognitive research on creativity and integrative cognition, this chapter demonstrates that virtual environments achieve sustainability not through technical sophistication but through their ability to generate cultural resonance, participatory mythology, and affective engagement. Arguing that the metaverse economy is undergoing a paradigmatic transition from product-centered to meaning-centered organizational logics, necessitating antidisciplinary practice that exceeds conventional interdisciplinarity, such a reorientation foregrounds hybrid artist-leaders as the most strategically positioned actors to guide organizations through the transition. The implications are profound: educational curricula, talent pipelines, and governance structures must shift from skills-based replication toward creativity-centered innovation. Ultimately, the metaverse is not a technological frontier but a cultural epochal shift; its viability depends on recognizing artistry not as an ornamental supplement but as the infrastructural condition itself for value creation in virtual economies.