  While the physical lives of many of us are in democracies (one person, one
vote - e.g., the EU and the US), our digital lives are mostly in autocracies
(one person, all votes - e.g., Facebook). Cryptocurrencies promise liberation
but stop short, at plutocracy (one coin, one vote). What would it take for us
to live our digital lives in a digital democracy? This paper offers a vision, a
theoretical framework, and an architecture for a grassroots network of
autonomous, people-owned, people-operated, and people-governed digital
communities, namely a grassroots democratic metaverse. It also charts a roadmap
towards realizing it, and identifies unexplored territory for further research.
