Stitching the World Together

January 6, 2010
CURRENTS


By ANAND GIRIDHARADAS
CARTAGENA, COLOMBIA — We tend to think that machines connect the world, but it is really in fact people. In the past, it was pilgrims and explorers and colonizers who, in variously benign and cruel ways, drove interchange among peoples. It was they who gave this pastel-hued city on the Caribbean its Spanish-Islamic arches, a cuisine that might blend tamarind and steak and corn in a single dish, and salsa songs equally indebted to the European and African pasts.

Today it is not pilgrims or colonizers who bind us, but a new class of the globally connected who are relentlessly cross-pollinating the human community. They are becoming some of the world’s most culturally consequential people, but we know little about them as a class.

I have had close encounters with them in Mumbai and New Delhi, Washington and Cambridge, Bangkok and Hong Kong, and now in this percussive Colombian city. I have seen how they are stitching the world together one restaurant recommendation and friend request at a time, and this column is in their honor.

They come in several types, though some of them straddle more than one:

THE ANOINTERS They are geographic early adopters: investors who bet on places still thought risky, then see fat returns when the fearful finally join the bandwagon; tourists who venture to countries thought unsafe, as Colombia is thought by many, benefiting from the lower prices and thin crowds, and then spreading word of the new reality to the less-daring; buyers from Bergdorf Goodman who decide whether Moscow’s or Cape Town’s fashion week has become big enough to attend; event managers who decide where to gather a film festival, software conference or corporate confabulation.

THE REPLICATORS They are corporate colonials: expats, country heads and corporate transfers seeking to spread not civilization but best practices. They come from New York and Seoul to build foreign offices of Goldman Sachs and Hyundai. HSBC has a special squad known as the “Marines,” who must be ready to relocate on a few days’ notice. Replicators bring world-class managerial techniques to the countries they inhabit; the best of them imbibe new ideas from the locals that they relay to headquarters. They often spend a disproportionate amount of time ensconced in five-star hotels, but they are adventurers doing business where it is not yet fashionable and raising everybody’s game.

THE APPRENTICES They travel abroad from less-connected countries, apprentice in the best universities or companies in the world, then rush home to apply their discoveries. They are not interested in hanging around. They have worked back home; they know the opportunities and gaps; they come to learn what cannot be learned easily at home. Upon returning, they tend to bring in better systems and processes, and they adapt alien models to local realities. If Replicators bring cellphone towers from the West to India, Apprentices create Indian companies that let village-dwelling farmers bank on their phones.

THE DOCKS They are the globalized locals in less-connected societies who serve as receivers for the outside world. They are in a place to stay. They are the keepers of its institutional memory, but speak in a language that foreigners understand. They know what in their society will most appeal to outsiders; they are expert explainers who do not tire of giving the same late-night tour. They live on the social-networking sites Facebook and Orkut and aSmallWorld. They possess insider knowledge: in Shanghai and Buenos Aires, they will tell you which local dive is best and which tailor won’t rip you off. They are respected within their societies because they broker access to foreigners and foreign opportunities.

THE SWITCHBOARDS They do not live in interesting, out-of-the-way places themselves, but they know everyone who does. When in university, they make friends with the foreign students; five years later, they have a guest room awaiting them in a dozen countries. They are collectors of internationals, and connectors, too. Someone working on children’s issues in Zimbabwe may be too enmeshed in the cause to come upon someone similarly engaged in Bolivia. Their mutual Switchboard friend will insist that they connect and perform a Switchboard’s favorite art: the intro e-mail, with a clever subject line.

THE FUSIONISTAS They are bi-everything, or almost everything — biracial, bicultural, bilingual. They are diplomats’ children, first-generation immigrants, the returned offspring of émigrés. They long agonized over a split identity, and perhaps suffered through high school with their inability to answer the question “Where are you from?” Now it’s payback time. They have figured out how to turn hyphenated confusion into a competitive advantage by serving as cultural bridges. They own East-meets-West fashion boutiques in the developing world; they throw dinner parties with soul food and kimchi in rooftop New York apartments.

This connective population deserves further study. They are not necessarily the richest people in their societies, but they often belong to the educated upper-middle class. They share a restless bent of personality. They fancy themselves as adventurers, although in a way they are quite conservative: far from being hippies and backpackers, they roam the world for the sake of work, not play. They hope to join the establishment, not overthrow it.

They can fear commitment — tending to be renters, not buyers, for example, even when they can afford to buy. They find it hard to mate with those less restless and seafaring than they. But they also struggle to hold steady relationships with others of their ilk, bouncing around the world. Video calls on Skype soothe the anomie that comes with ambition.

At first, it was an extra-helpful, eccentric friend here and there. Then there seemed to be more and more such people, but clustered in particular cities like New York and Shanghai. But, increasingly, they are everywhere, connecting, bridging, even in out-of-the-way tropical towns like this one.

So the next time you eat Greek-French food in Tokyo or watch a Chinese-American’s avant-garde film about Beijing or hear in Berlin that Beirut is the new vacation spot, you will be watching the pilgrims and explorers of our own age at work.

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