Recent news has lifted the veil: while Europe still dreams of a civic metaverse and cultural immersion, Meta is already equipping the US military. The announced collaboration between Mark Zuckerberg and Palmer Luckey (the founder of Oculus), now head of Anduril, a fast-growing player in the defence sector, marks a turning point. This rapprochement illustrates the continuity between the entertainment industry and the war industry. The promises of an immersive universe devoted to creativity and sociability are imperceptibly sliding towards the battlefield. Goodbye smiling avatars and virtual open-plan offices: make way for heavily armed technomancers, able to pilot autonomous systems through XR interfaces and military AI models. What was sold as a future of encounter and play is becoming a tool of control and combat.

This military backlash is not anecdotal. As so often in the history of technology, the imaginary of war captures and diverts what could have been a space of emancipation. XR, supposed to open up our perceptions, is turning into a combat simulator.

And it is not only a question of uses: it is also a question of data. Every gesture, every interaction produced in XR, whether linked to entertainment or to artistic creation, feeds immense training datasets. At Meta, for example, our bodies, our intimacy and our imaginations become raw material. This data, collected on the pretext of improving our experiences, is also used to calibrate models intended for the military: behaviour simulation, movement anticipation, reaction optimisation. Our creative impulses thus feed logics of control.

In this context, the figure of the artist fades behind that of the content creator. As the sector industrialises, artists are summoned to produce within a standardised framework for the platforms, to feed streams calibrated for attention and data capture. Art becomes content, experience becomes a metric. This shift neutralises the critical and poetic reach of the works, absorbed into the entertainment economy, an economy whose spin-offs, once again, also benefit military uses.

This is why the place of creation remains essential. Because art cannot be reduced to an immersive gadget: it diverts, questions, throws into crisis. In the face of creeping militarisation and the reduction of artists to “content providers”, we must preserve zones of friction, poetic and political spaces where experience remains human, fragile, subjective.

Creating in XR today is not just exploring a new medium. It is resisting the industrialisation of our perceptions. It is affirming that other uses are possible, that our gazes and our bodies must not be reduced to targets to be trained or to exploitable data streams.

XR is not neutral: it is a machine for producing the sensible. It is up to us to choose what we want to inscribe in it: the shadow of battlefields or the light of other possible worlds.