Borderless Living: The Future of Countries
A decade ago, everything we did was under brick and mortar. We drove to offices for work, went to the market to buy vegetables and groceries, wrote on notebooks, and learned from textbooks. We dated our partners by staring from rooftops, proposing through paper notes, and meeting in campus cafeterias. We often spent weeks of our time getting one single conversation or a first meeting with our date. We sat on walls and gossiped about neighbors, classmates, and colleagues (I now complain to my wife that since lockdown there is an absolute lack of gossip around! In my view, we gossip with folks whom we trust. Indeed, gossip can be a metric of trust at surface level). We visited our families and religious centers, celebrated formation days and independence days, and these reinforced our beliefs about our identity through network effects (although limited).
Fast forward to today, most of us shop through apps, work from home, bank through smartphones, and even select our mates through digital apps/dates (tinder, match.com). From moving our bodies through long distances, we have shifted to moving our fingers across 6 inches to access products, services, money, and even love.
Here’s how my days look now (yours too!): I wake up and check my sleep scores on Fitbit, watch news feeds on google/in shots, order groceries on BigBasket, and have breakfast from Swiggy/Zomato. This never ends as on work I connect with colleagues on Teams or Meet, speak to friends on WhatsApp, and share stories on Instagram. Whether we agree or not, we are all now living in the cloud. Even if the internet does not work for a minute, we often react as if oxygen is cut off from our lives.
At 50,000 years ago, the hottest hot-spot was west Asia (ovens, bows-and-arrows), at 10,000 the Fertile Crescent (farming, pottery), at 5,000 Mesopotamia (metal, cities), at 2,000 India (textiles, zero), at 1,000 China (porcelain, printing), at 500 Italy (double-entry book-keeping, Leonardo), at 400 the Low Countries (the Amsterdam Exchange Bank), at 300 France (Canal du Midi), at 200 England (steam), at 100 Germany (fertilizer); at 75 America (mass production), at 50 California (credit card, technology) — Rational Optimist, How Prosperity Evolves, Matt Ridley
Over the years, innovation has shifted from regions in Asia to silicon valley. Many borders have been re-drawn (including India). Few countries were split and new countries got formed. It would be naïve on our behalf to presume that cultures, countries, and states would remain as is for the next thousands of years. Maybe in the future, there would be cloud countries (like Facebook, which has more than a billion users) with its own payment systems (like crypto, bitcoin), healthcare system (“some”Care), and education system (Digital University), where citizens need not have to shift to any region to access benefits.
During my school days, when the class goes on, I used to stare outside through the windows. My teacher used to say, Praneeth — your body is present, but your mind is absent. I think she was right, our bodies are present in physical space, while our minds are constantly living in the cloud sphere.
