This is a short summary of a fascinating article on WIRED by Balaji Srinivasan http://www.wired.com/opinion/2013/11/software-is-reorganizing-the-world-and-cloud-formations-could-lead-to-physical-nations/ which discusses the already present and the possible future where virtual communities existing and coming into existence in the clouds are taking physical shape on the Earth in real-life communities, groups and will perhaps even form new nations. "Software *is* reorganizing the world."
I find it important to touch upon this subject now as, I believe, we will sooner than we think be quite caught by surprise by new communities and a new world surrounding us and springing forth, as it would seem, from nowhere.
As our generation is, unfortunately, getting poorer, Srinivasan tells us that we are taking our minds to the clouds and are sort of "emigrating" there to seek work opportunities, like-minded individuals and, being of a social nature, communities to which we may belong. We may not have the slightest clue as to who our neighbour is but we may know someone as far as thousands of kilometres away like the backs of our own hands. Srinivasan calls this process, which "starts out internationally distributed and ends up physically concentrated" the "reverse diaspora". But the definitive tangible form of this new frontier is, as of yet, unknown to us.
For the present, Stanford, MIT, and others present us available quantitative studies with "cloud cartographies" that, instead of "mapping nation states" map the "states of our minds" by using the newer metric "geodesic distance" instead of just using the physical measuring unit "geographical distance". The former shows us the "number of degrees of separation between two nodes in a social network". I suppose these will be able to predict where and how the new geographical communities will take shape.
Reading the full article is worth the time. I certainly have much to learn and to find in the online world and I would not be surprised if my virtual explorations took me to places I have never even dreamt of. So we don't get left out of this brave new world let us, with caution of course, venture to connect online.
