The Digital Frontier

In 1890, the physical frontier closed. In 1991, a virtual frontier opened. The major difference with this virtual frontier: anyone with a keyboard can build on it, not just Americans. Indeed, the majority are non-American.

Over twenty years, the eyes and ears of hundreds of millions of people have migrated from pieces of paper to mobile programmable screens. People's bodies may be in various nations or countries, but their minds are elsewhere—online, with communities of shared interests and beliefs.

One thesis is these mental migrations online will ultimately cause offline physical migrations. The intermediate form is likely to be virtual worlds.

In theory, social networks like Six Degrees existed before Twitter or Facebook. In practice, without profile photos, there was no human connection. Similarly, people don't yet viscerally feel the size of online crowds. Once millions have VR headsets, that will change. ​

A large number of people already spend more time looking at a laptop or phone than doing any other activity. The smartphone in particular caused a qualitative jump in percent of time spent online. VR will likely cause a comparable jump.

Even without VR headsets, we can envision things. First, one can imagine highly interactive storefronts that gain the searchability and convenience of online shopping. People love malls. Put those in VR and we gain teleporting between points, search, instant checkout, and worldwide payments with crypto. Second, we can imagine taking any online forum and putting it in VR. For example, car aficionados could discuss interactive VR models of favorite cars.

To generalize: with VR, the metaphor of "building" on a frontier becomes more real. We can build structures that combine online and offline features.

Digital globalist, physical localist.

Imagine we divide physical America from digital America. Seen from this axis, much of the physical world is malfunctioning. Meanwhile, people migrate to the digital world because things “just work” there. Given the alternative, most pick the digital alternative.

Over the last few decades, a significant part of the value of being physically present in America has been digitized. COVID-19 and remote work accelerated digital life and further reduced the value of the physical. The cloud is becoming primary, the land secondary.

Consider the following choices:

1. physical America + digital America

2. physical America only, but no internet

3. digital America only, but not physically in the US

My thesis: more people would rank 3 above 2 today. Which means much of the US value proposition has moved to the cloud. This is a very recent phenomenon. In 1990, for example, you couldn’t “live on the internet.” It was maybe barely doable in some US regions in the year 2000 and was still hard in 2010. Now digital America is everywhere, because the internet is everywhere.

With the internet, one can now stand against infinity. For good or ill, we’re going to see many more like Snowden, Assange, Wilson, and Nakamoto.