The mysterious Metaverse gets more interesting as the first two real-world countries create their digital versions.
What is the Metaverse? Is the question many around the world are asking themselves, as Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg keeps pouring money and resources in it.
A parallel virtual reality? What does it mean? And how do you access it? What laws will be followed there? But, in general, why would it even exist in the first place?
The answer is: nobody knows, probably not even Mark Zuckerberg himself. But in recent weeks an interesting development has sparked renewed interest in the Metaverse. The first two countries are born on the platform and started digitizing their real-life assets.
The first is not exactly a “country”: it is not recognized by the international community and looks more like a joke that went too far. The nation of Liberland, an unpopulated and unclaimed piece of land in Eastern Europe, is now a country on the Metaverse.
Liberland is a 7 km/sq piece of land between Serbia and Croatia. It is not claimed by either country for a bureaucratic mishap resulting from the dissolution of Yugoslavia in the 90s.
Vit Jedlička, a Czech MP, is the self-proclaimed President of Liberland, but the “country” has no currency, constitution or even population. And, most importantly, it is not recognized by any other nation on the planet.
Jedlička’s dream is to create a country combining the best elements “of the American republic, Swiss democracy, and the meritocracy of Singapore.” And, most importantly, the entire country will be based on the Metaverse. There, it will have a territory, a population (7.000 residents are already approved), a currency and, presumably, a set of laws. All things precluded to Liberland in the real world.
A matter of survival
But Liberland is not the first country on the Metaverse. Another, this time a real one, plans to move entirely from the real world to the Metaverse. It’s the Pacific nation of Tuvalu.
Threatened by climate change, Tuvalu will be completely submerged by the end of the century according to scientists. At the recently ended COP27 climate conference, Tuvalu’s Foreign Minister Simon Kofe told world leaders that they would become the first digitized country.
“Our land, our ocean, our culture are the most precious assets of our people and to keep them safe from harm, no matter what happens in the physical world, we will move them to the cloud,” Kofe said.
Tuvalu’s officials said that the country’s goal is to keep being recognized as a sovereign nation even without real territory. It would be a historic breakthrough, revolutionizing the meaning we give to the concept of “nation” and “state”.
That is, of course, if it will ever come to be. Even if Liberland and Tuvalu become actual countries on the Metaverse, all the questions on the utility and feasibility of the platform remain relevant.
But, in truth, the tide of progress never stopped for questions like these.
