Becoming a Cosmopolitan of the Metaverse
“A tribe is narrow-minded, selfish. I am a world citizen.”
This is a quote from Faustin Rusanganwa, a Rwandan refugee who biked—biked!—across multiple African countries while escaping genocide. He ended up living in Europe for a while and ultimately settled in California.
I heard about Faustin from a friend of mine who’s been working with him to adapt his book into a screenplay. His story is essentially a manual on how to love life, how to turn hardship into adventure, how to be a citizen of the world.
Faustin is a true cosmopolitan. But he’s also very much a cosmopolitan of the past century. His multi-nation journey was conducted on dirt roads with a reliance on telephones and paper documents. What would his story look like if he were to set out to be a champion cosmopolitan of the modern world?
No doubt it would include traversing not just dirt roads and asphalt highways, but digital superhighways. This may seem like a dumb point until you ask whether someone can truly be a modern cosmopolitan if they have no digital presence. I think it’s obvious they cannot. To be a modern cosmopolitan is to engage with the fruits of global commerce and global supply chains. That means going digital.
Last week on the Pivot podcast, Scott Galloway talked about how an essential goal of a modern human is to evolve beyond owning any physical keys. He said this in the context of Apple announcing a new door lock that unlocks with the iPhone or Watch.
Being a cosmopolitan isn’t about being wealthy. But it is about being connected. Today, that means having digital keys. Not merely for unlocking physical doors, but virtual doors as well.
The metaverse does still feel superfluous and kinda lame, even despite Zuckerberg pouring billions into it. Also metaverse citizenship, which is now available, still seems gimmicky. And does anyone really need a Bella Hadid metaverse avatar? Probably not.
The metaverse is a work in progress.
But having a digital self—many of them, across multiple platforms—is core to being a modern cosmopolitan. This advantages the young—the digital natives of the world—but anyone with an internet connection has enumerable digital selves out there waiting to be created.
It goes without saying that Faustin’s journey to world citizenship is far more impressive than analogous journeys in digital worlds. In fact, there is no analogue. In digital spaces, no one has a family or a native town to lose to genocide. No one has the potential of frying to death in the middle of the Sahara Desert (as Faustin very nearly did).
Ah, but digital world enthusiasts so desperately want these stakes! It’s obvious from recent sci-fi books and films that consequences in VR must be equivalent to real-world consequences, or else who cares? In Amazon’s recent release, The Peripheral, the main character believes she’s logging into a virtual game. But—surprise!—the game not only impacts her physical body, but her “virtual” body is in fact not a virtual body at all—it’s a real, physical body that exists in a physical world 70 years in the future. Stakes!
Will we ever encounter digital worlds that force us to confront consequences as real and dire as Faustin’s? It’s hard to imagine. Even if The Peripheral, the characters explicitly state that they don’t really know how the virtual-physical interactions work out. A few big, techy, philosophical terms are tossed about, but it’s all to say, “This is a work of fiction, so just accept the magical elements so we can keep the plot moving.”
Regardless, anyone can dive into digital worlds in pursuit of a cosmopolitan identity. Cosmopolitanism is based on a belief, a world-view. Even before Faustin faced his most extraordinary cross-border adventures, he had already become deeply convinced: “A tribe is narrow-minded, selfish. I am a world citizen.”