Geopolitics of Cosmo-Localism

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The series

  • The Geopolitics of Cosmo-Localism (I): Understanding the upcoming conflict and potential synergy of East, West, and Digital. Part I: the post-Civilizational thesis. [1]
  • The Geopolitics of Cosmo-Localism (II): How the cosmo-local phygital commons change the world order The new trinitary world order is East - West - Digital, NOT the ‘West vs the Rest’ [2]
  • We need Commons-Based Instruments of Expansion!! Dispatches from (Zu)Kas, the civilization-building Web3 Oasis in Southern Turkey. [3]


Summary and context by Grok

Based on prompts by Michel Bauwens:


1) Analysis of the Current Situation

We are living through a classic phase of civilizational exhaustion. The 2008 financial crisis did not produce a structural reckoning with neoliberal capitalism; instead, Western elites pivoted to violent nationalism and intensified culture wars as new tools for maintaining power. The dominant political game is still binary (“the elites” are always the other side), but a trialectical lens (inspired by Bertrand de Jouvenel) reveals something deeper: politics as fractional elite struggles. Competing elite factions constantly seek new alliances with middle and bottom layers, mobilising different segments of “the people” in culture wars that are simultaneously internal to the West and entangled with the larger “West vs Rest” geopolitical contest.This entanglement accelerates fatigue. The intra-Western polarisation feeds into (and is fed by) great-power rivalry — the U.S./NATO bloc versus the rising China-Russia-Iran axis and the broader Global South re-alignment through BRICS, SCO, and multi-alignment strategies. Multiple overlapping civilisational cycles are hitting their limits at once: the capitalist accumulation model, the Westphalian nation-state system, industrial metabolism, and liberal universalist ontology. Supply-chain fragility, ecological overshoot, internal polarisation, and the return of raw territorial power politics all point in the same direction: the old binaries are no longer generative. They exhaust participants without producing a decisive winner.History shows this pattern repeatedly. When rival factions wear each other out — Catholic vs Reformation wars, Herodian vs anti-Roman factions in late antiquity — space opens not for total victory by one side but for synthesis from the margins.2) The

2) Synthesis of the positioning by Michel Bauwens

The wager is that this very exhaustion is not leading to a simple multipolar clash or renewed hegemony, but to the emergence of a genuine third pole — the cosmo-local phygital commons — that can midwife a post-civilizational, pluriversic planetarity.

This synthesis pulls together the core logic running through the P2P Foundation’s long-term work, the Geopolitics of Cosmo-Localism series (Parts I & II), and the emerging Cosmo-Local Plan:

Design Global, Manufacture Local (DG-ML) as the operating principle: “Heavy” things (material production, energy, food, housing, resilience infrastructure, bioregional regeneration) stay local and circular. “Light” things (knowledge, open designs, protocols, software, cultural patterns) go global as shared commons, reproducible at near-zero marginal cost through phygital (physical + digital) networks.

Trinitary world order: East – West – Digital/Commons. The cosmo-local pole is not a mere supplement but an autonomous actor and potential mediator. It operates through trans-local “phyles,” open-value networks, and fractal sovereignty stacks (hyper-local → bioregional → cosmo-local).

Convergence and regenerative jurisdictional alliances: Local regenerative projects (bioregions, commons-oriented communities) converge with global coordination tools (Web3 protocols, Capital for the Commons, agentic AI cooperatives). This creates new bottom/middle/top layers: commons networks at the base, supportive “partner-state” formations in the middle, and regenerative alliances at the top. These alliances are polycentric, cross-scale, and post-hegemonic — neither statist Leviathans nor extractive capital.

Pluriversic planetarity as the outcome: The result is not one new universal civilisation but many worlds co-existing and relating through shared protocols while preserving ontological and bioregional diversity. The current turbulence (culture wars + great-power rivalry) is the dialectical fatigue phase that creates exactly the opening for this synthesis from the margins.

In short, the wager is optimistic but pragmatic: the old rivalries are exhausting themselves, and the margins (P2P/commons networks) are positioned to become the new consensus-forming force — the regenerative jurisdictional alliance.

3) Related Schools

Your framework sits at the fertile intersection of several emerging schools that reject binary endgames in favour of synthesis, multiplicity, and relationality:

Pluriversal / Decolonial Geopolitics (Walter Mignolo, Arturo Escobar, Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Global IR school): Rejects any single “universal” (Western liberal, Marxist, or otherwise) in favour of multiple co-existing world orders and ontologies. Pluriversality is the decolonial option — delinking without creating a new hegemony, exactly the “many worlds” logic that cosmo-localism operationalises through its phygital commons.

Polycentric / Commons-Based International Relations (Elinor Ostrom extended globally + networked-governance theorists): Emphasises self-organising, nested institutions built bottom-up + middle + top. Regenerative alliances are the practical expression: no top-down Leviathan, but fractal sovereignty and protocol cooperatives.

Historical-Sociological Synthesis Thinking (Bertrand de Jouvenel’s power analysis extended to IR; post-Westphalian compromise models): New grand bargains emerge precisely when old factions exhaust each other. Your trialectical reading in the tweet is the direct bridge here.

Glocal / Networked Multi-Alignment (Parag Khanna’s connectography, metamodern complexity thinkers): Functional coalitions, trans-local resilience, and “heavy-local / light-global” architectures trump rigid bloc logic. This is the practical geopolitics of the third pole.

None of these are classical realism (Mearsheimer-style security competition), liberal internationalism, or simple restraint. They converge on the same post-hegemonic, synthesis-oriented, pluriversal direction you outlined: the current exhaustion is fertile ground for a fourth-generation civilizational form."


Full-Text Copies

The Geopolitics of Cosmo-Localism (I)

Understanding the upcoming conflict and potential synergy of East, West, and Digital. Part I: the post-Civilizational thesis.

Michel Bauwens, Jul 28, 2025

* Understanding the Necessity of a Cosmo-Local Shift Towards Post-Civilizational and ‘Pluriversic’ Planetarity

It seems increasingly clear to many that we are in a civilizational intercycle, i.e. at the end of one civilizational cycle, but not yet at a real beginning of another.

What kind of civilizational cycles are ending, exactly ?

First of all, there is the Kondratieff cycle, which is an economic cycle in which a new form of energy, of management, of working the land, synergizes together in some kind of integrated logic, that works for a while. As every cycle it emerges, has a peak, declines, and collapses to make place for another. There is little doubt that 2008 was the end of one such cycle, the “neoliberal” cycle, and that the world economy has not found its stride back. Thus, a lack of integration of new technological capacities in a way that makes sense.

Somewhat longer is the civic generational cycle of one hundred years, identified in the book, The Fourth Turning. When such a cycle ends, we are now in the last disintegrating phase of such a cycle, i.e. the political and civic institutions itself which are at stake. This is what we generally consider to be a ‘Crisis of Democracy’.

This cycle seems very much in tune with the ‘hegemonic cycle’, which is a cycle of geopolitical dominance, and coincides with a cycle of war. The cycle that started with the American dominance after WWII, and its attendant world order, is disintegrating as we speak, and with it, comes the acute danger of war between the allies of the old hegemon, and those of new hegemonic candidates, or alternatively with the supporters of multipolarity, the BRICS alliance.

Here is a brief review of important insights of major macro-historians as well.

If we believe Oswald Spenger, there is a more or less one thousand year long civilizational cycle as well, and as he estimates that ‘European’ civilization started around 998, with the instantiation of both the Holy Roman Empire in Germany, and the french monarchy of the Capetians, we are also at the end of this particular civilizational form, which was a fusion between the Germanic and the post-Roman, infused by a religion from the Middle East. Within the civilizational cycle, Spengler also noted a 500-year cycle between decentralization and centralization, attested by Toynbee as well. A civilization starts as a culture, but which exists as a networked reality between a larger number of players, i.e. the emerging city-states. Think about the Greek Polis, or the Italian city-states, or the Warring States period of China. As they grow independently of each other, they struggle for hegemony, and tend to exhaust each other. This exhaustion in turn leads to the invasion of the civilizational sphere, whether this is Greece, or Italy and Europe, by a peripheral semi ‘barbarian’ state, which unifies the conquered sphere as a centralized and universalistic empire. With the demise of the power of the steppe nomads, this dynamic will of course be substantially different this time. We should also stress that the crisis of ‘Western’-dominated civilizational forms, is a crisis of the world system, since all other civilizational spheres, to the degree they still exist and are not just cultural spheres, all function largely through capital markets and nation-states institution. But bear in mind we will amend this insight when we focus on an incipient struggle between ‘East’ and ‘West’, or between what some call ‘the global majority’ (the BRICS alliance) and the old Western core.

Arnold Toynbee also stresses that civilization itself is evolutionary. A first form of civilization, exemplified in Mesopotamia, transforms itself through the adoption of world religions, the so-called Axial Age, then again, through industrialization which leads to the spread of the nation-state model, and we can argue, reaching a new stage where cognitive and symbolic process take the upper hand. Here also, complications have arisen, and we should seriously consider that the next stage of ‘civilizational evolution’, could also be characterized as a ‘post-civilizational’ reality. Notice that this author does believe that the evolution of human society, just as the evolution of matter and life, is beholden to phase transitions in the level of complexity (taking into account possible disintegrations towards lower forms of complexity).

Pitirim Sorokin has also insisted that there is a pendulum quality to civilizational change, essentially between the Sensate and Ideate models. Sensate cultures focus on the material, on empirical reality and tend to reject the spiritual orientation to life; while Ideate cultures reject the material orientation to focus on spiritual development, think of medieval Christianity of Indian Buddhism as such Ideate forces. Once such a societal form has exhausted itself, and has saturated a lifeworld, it provokes a contrary reaction. Thus, hedonistic Rome produced ascetic Christianity, while by the 17th century, the merchant classes in Northern Europe had grown disgusted by the ‘idleness’ of the monks and clergy, inaugurating phase shifts in their societies. In other civilizational spheres, such as the Sinic, we may observe similar pendulum swings between centralized phases with pragmatic legists or Confucians, and decentralized swings with the growth of Buddhist or Taoist reactions. Why is this important: do not expect what comes after civilizational intercycles to be simple evolutionary jumps towards ‘more complexity’; they are also radical bifurcations and value revolutions.

I will not stress here the major role of technology, not least of all military technology, but especially the role of media, in inducing phase shifts in society. The best way to understand the importance of media is in their capacity ‘to hold complexity’, by governing the relation between matter and energy. Media are essential to the level of coordination a society is capable of. As Eric Chaisson argued: “The more complex the order is, the denser the energy flows that pass through it.”

But we believe an even deeper change is afoot, which is why I sometimes speak of a post-civilizational shift. Essentially for two reasons.

One has to do with our new technological revolution. Civilization was essentially a geographic arrangement, between the agricultural countryside, and its capacity to create a surplus to develop differentiated cities. So the agricultural surplus eventually created industrial capacity, and the surplus of the latter creates a further surplus for cognitive-type societies. While we at first created ever faster coordination techniques, we have achieved a fundamentally different capacity today, that of translocal self-organization. In other words, there is a physical domain, pertaining to geographic organization in territories, which took the form of nation-states and of networked globalization, but there is also a sphere of virtual domains, in which humans can self-organize new value circuits relatively independent of their physical location, and can coordinate in real-time. So there is a tension in our societies between the forces that want to restabilize society, at least to a certain degree, through a return to ‘nation-states’ or civilization states, and post-national forces of different kinds. While this is not new, religious communities were trans-local and supported the establishment of more stable imperial structures, trans-locality has achieved a quantum level of capacity this time around.

The second reason has to do with our environmental crisis which is a fundamental crisis of our relation with our lifeworld, around the necessary recognition of our interdependence, and the lack of regard of our capitalist systems for so-called ‘externalities’, which far from being such, are the very basis of the planetary survival for life. Indigenous societies were participative regarding their natural environment, and they considered other living beings as kin, being animated by powerful spiritual beings which demanded a certain respect, in terms of their exploitation for human need. We should never forget the very successful temporal reproduction of indigenous societies: the Australian Aboriginals for example, are believed to have reproduced their culture for over 50,000 years. Most civilizational models last a few hundred years only, and the civilizational model has been rocked by major recurring Dark Ages, lasting on average 500 years long, each time with a larger footprint.

There is a clear descending line concerning our relationship to the natural world.

For example, this is from a summary in Point Zero, Vol. I, a book on civilizational development by Boris Sirbey, which stresses the increased distance and differentiation between the human mentality, and the natural lifeworld, throughout civilizational evolution. The following is a summary of the scheme summarized in that book:

For animists, like say the Columbian Kogi or the Australian Aboriginals, everything in nature is alive and conscious, including rocks and forms of matter considered to be ‘without life’ by us moderns..

For vitalist indigenous cultures, like the Inuits or the Native Americans, the human is deeply interconnected with life, which needs to be respected.

In the stage of symbiosis, the human and life are seen as partnering (Maoris)

Under the biocentric vision, the human strives to achieve an ecological balance (Minoans, Incas)

Under the ecocentric vision, civilization itself becomes a priority, but with a vision of balance (the relation of the Egyptians with the Nile)

Sumerian city states inaugurate a more pragmatic vision, in which expansion becomes central

Then come the expansive empires but which nevertheless retain a regard for their ecologies (Babylon)

But then starts ‘progress’ thinking, though at first in moderate form (the author mentions the Aztecs)

After this, a real break occurs, which becomes increasingly radical:

Anthropocentrism, the human is now central in the worldview, and the monotheistic injunctions can be seen as inaugurating this

Materialism: the human is now surrounded by dead matter, which is a mere resource for human exploitation.

Finally, humanity reaches a nihilistic phase, in which it prefers the dead universe above life itself.

Whatever the merit of this scheme, I believe it usefully shows the direction of differentiation between humanity and its lifeworld: an increasing separation, and which demands a renewed integration,.

It seems we have indeed reached an endpoint of sorts in this form of ‘dominion’.

Civilization may be said to have been a response to natural challenges, and it was born in the massive efforts to direct the flow of water for human benefit, in the river deltas of Mesopotamia and China, as well as elsewhere later on. Civilization is based both on agriculture, and on the mining needed for weaponry. In that context, ideologies, imaginaries and narratives gradually arose which place the human above nature, as its steward first, later as its master. But while pre-capitalist civilizational forms had regional scope, respected the nature- and resource-preserving local commons institutions, capitalism became a globally extractive system which has serially exhausted the whole planetary sphere and is endangering the very reproductive cycles of nature.


Clearly, we may have reached Peak Civilization, and hence a Great Unraveling, if we mean by that at least the two aspects I have mention:

  • Civilization as a geographic entity
  • Civilization as a master-slave paradigm regarding nature.

So, we may either speak of a further evolution of civilization towards a new civilizational form, what the Chinese call ‘Ecological Civilization’, or we can argue, as I sometimes do, that it is the civilizational cycle itself which is at stake. The first time I found this thesis was in Keith Chandler’s book, Beyond Civilization, which I read several decades ago. I cannot recommend it enough.

So in terms of our cycles, we are conceiving of a shift of a cycle which has probably lasted 12,000 years, when a receding Ice Age made possible new forms of agriculture.

Now clearly, keeping in mind the ‘Point Zero’ scheme above, we cannot just go ‘back’ to indigenous social systems, which only supported a few million people on the planet. But we can clearly learn from them.

The evolution of matter, life and human culture always proceed through a process of differentiation, then re-integration, as we have learned from the science of complexity.


This means that we must conceive of the next evolutionary phase as a re-integration, a synthesis, of:

  • The temporality, balance, and harmony, of indigenous cultures
  • The societal complexity and differentiation of ‘civilizational’ societies.


This is what we mean with the ‘post-civilizational challenge’, and I have often referred, in our other articles, to the scheme proposed by Kojin Karatani, which is that humanity tries, ever again, to restore the conviviality of what he calls Mode A (gifting and commoning), to a higher level of complexity, i.e. Mode D, so as to overcome, the civilizational modes of coordination, i.e. Mode B, the State, and Mode C, the market form. Our first trial were the Axial religions, which were instrumental in stabilizing the imperial forms (China, Byzantium, Islam), followed by mass ideologies, instrumental in creating and stabilizing the nation-state, and today, ‘constructive translocal productive networks’, which will hopefully be the format for post-civilization. Post-Civilization, if it emerges, or the Fourth Mode of Civilization, will be the successful integrative modality to emerge after the Great Unraveling.

Bear in mind that, apart from surviving the expected climate dislocation, we need to maintain the kind of technological stock that can protect the 400 nuclear energy plants from disintegration. We need to maintain (and develop!!) decent living standards for the human population, avoiding human mass death, without the destruction of the entire lifeworld. And we must maintain acceptable levels of human equality in order to have relative social peace. While it is far from certain we will succeed, I believe such a mobilizing narrative gives us a better chance at the future than either the escapist fantasies of the transhumanists, or the utter doom that is promised to us by certain environmentalists. Note that I do not dismiss their warnings, but we must continue to find ways to overcome this crisis.

I believe there is an obvious solution to the current conundrum of maintaining the essential advances of human civilization to date, and the longevity of a participatory human civilization which can last for a few million years on the other side of the unraveling: and that is, the radical implementation of mutualization at a planetary scale.

Mutualization means ‘doing more with less’, through the sharing of resources, and it has been the perennial response of humanity in terms of crisis. And each time, it is achieved by reviving the institution of the commons. As I have demonstrated elsewhere in my hypothesis of the Pulsation of the Commons, in times of civilizational degradation, the commons return, and in dark ages, commons institutions even become hegemonic.

In this context, we have posited the potentiality of a new post-civilizational world order, which we call cosmo-localism.


It posits:

  • The relocalization of production closer to human need, which could diminish matter-energy usage by two-thirds
  • The mutualization of such production and consumption, which can diminish matter-energy usage by another 80%.


There are plenty of cases and social experiments to show that this is a real pragmatic possibility, but a lot of obstacles are in the way. And this is why we must also be ‘realistic’ in our assumptions, and look at the current Geopolitical situation of the world.

This will be the topic for part II of this article, which will focus on the ‘Long Arc of Eurasian Strife’ and present the ‘East West Digital’ framing for cosmo-local geopolitics.


In the meantime, think of the challenge of the new integration as the necessary merging of both a new form of post-Western universalism, i.e. Planetarity, and two forms of diversity, i.e. the geographic and diasporic cultural diversity associated with the long cultural and ethnic histories of human groups, who have a genuine desire to protect their continuity and specificity, as evidenced in the construction of regionalisms, localisms, national histories and currently, ‘civilization states’, but also the diversity of global virtual domains, but really ‘phygital’ domains, with both material and virtual aspects, of the emerging collaborating cosmo-local alliances. How will we square such divergent demands ?


The Geopolitics of Cosmo-Localism (II): How the cosmo-local phygital commons change the world order

The new trinitary world order is East - West - Digital, NOT the ‘West vs the Rest’ 

< no analysis that is confined to the ‘West vs the Rest’ will be adequate in explaining geopolitics. There is a third kid on the block: the translocal commons networks. >

Most people who look at national politics still look at it as the enduring struggle between those that want more ‘free markets’, and those that want more ‘state regulation’. Similarly, most people who look at world politics look at the current situation as a struggle between the ‘West and the Rest’, with the ‘rest’ now being identified as the countries that are aligning around the BRICS countries, and hope for a multi-polar world that can move away from Western hegemony, i.e. domination by the U.S.


Both these views are ‘binary’, and my invitation here is to think instead in a triarchical way, by including the commons as a institution and practice, whether you think, bioregionally, nationally, or ‘inter-nationally’. My thesis is that the increasingly present ‘phygital’ commons, are changing the dynamics of world politics. Between the planetary Leviathan of the WEF and the Western elites' plan for the ‘Great Reset’, and the ‘Eastern’ plan for continentally interacting civilizational blocs, lies the potential for an ‘Archipelago of Regeneration’. Not necessarily of course as the ‘only’ and hegemonic reality, but as a very real component of a future world order.

To explain this framework, we draw first on the works and ideas of Michael Hudson, Mark Stahlman, Balaji Srivanasan and his critics, as well as Venkatesh Rao.

We start with their ideas to understand the East-West part of current geopolitics.

What Michael Hudson offers in this context, in books like The Destiny of Civilization (part of a fascinating trilogy, see below in the appendix) is a very long history of the competition between ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’ Eurasia as a huge determinant of civilizational development. With civilization we mean a complex society, based on agriculture, cities, and mining, characterized by a division of society into separate classes, i.e. the more complex societal system that replaced the earlier hegemony of hunter-gathering.

For Hudson, the underlying idea of the ‘Eastern’ version of the state-market complex, which includes Mesopotamia and India-China, is based on the idea of social harmony, in which the head of state, the monarch or emperor, is in charge of protecting the societal balance. This essentially means that, if civilization is a particular mixture of state coordination and market exchange, the society has a strong state that keeps the market forces in check. In other words, the Mandarins rule, not the merchants. In Mesopotamia, this can be seen in the periodic Debt Jubilee’s and Clean State Legislation, designed to avoid the permanent enslavement of the interior population.

But something peculiar happens in Ancient Greece: a private class takes power, that of the landowners who also become creditors, leading to a deep social crisis of debt enslavement, and a revolution, which results in the creation of the democratic Polis, the ‘democratic’ city, based on a peace agreement between the oligarchy and the people (somewhat akin to the Timocratic Governance of Dao’s today!). Property remains unequal, but the inhabitants (at least some of them) become citizens with equal political rights, and the democratic state can hold the oligarchs in check. This is done by structurally recognizing conflict. But private property, respected independently from the state, and a strong division between private and public law, became the entrenched law of the land. Rome was similarly characterized the existence of Tribunate, elections of officials, a strong welfare state for its proletarians (‘panem et circenses’), and a division and balance between the ‘populares’, the party of the people, and the ‘optimales’, the party of the patricians.

While this system was weakened in the Middle Ages, which reverted to ideologies of social harmony (between bellatores, oratores and laboratores), it was the Church who retained the tradition of Roman Law, and in England, the royalist Common Law upheld these principles. But we have to stress that even the Middle Ages were characterized by strong fraternal self-organization, in the form of urban guilds, and numerous assemblies that regulated and limited the power of the ‘western’ kings and aristocracy. Ellen Meiskens-Wood’s ‘From Citizens to Lords’, is a good overview of that thematic (see the appendix for details on her trilogy).

Now what does Hudson’s interpretation mean for an understanding of today’s geopolitics, in broad terms:

  • Until the 18th century, despite the growth of Europe, China remained the dominant economy and society of Eurasia
  • But Europe, and then the U.S., i.e. the West, became hegemonic.


Thus the continental power of eastern Eurasia was weakened in favour of the maritime power of the West, and it gradually imposed it’s conflict-based political models to the East, i.e. the democratic nation-state, while at the same time weakening popular power and prioritizing merchant power. Global regulatory institutions worked in favor of the West, forcing the ‘Rest’ to defund their social programs and infrastructural investments.

But that period is coming to an end, and quickly. For Hudson, the West has become a rentier-based capitalist society, no longer producing the material wealth necessary to maintain its long-term hegemony. The West has broken the link between the ‘cognitive’ economy and the material economy, and its ‘symbolic’ elites have become highly alienated from the rest of the population which is still more anchored in physical, local and territorial realities. This is the basic problem that the populist revolts are trying to solve, but which is already achieved in the ‘East’.

Indeed, China, by contrast, has become extremely successful by focusing on an industrial strategy, and using this new surplus to radically diminish the poverty of its people, and in the last decade, to mount an extremely rapid shift towards renewable energy. For Michael Hudson, who is still a socialist, that means that there is a path in China, towards a socialist-type society, which has become impossible for the West, as it is losing its surplus and has de-industrialized itself. Russia has undergone a similar evolution: when Putin came to power, his first act was to discipline the oligarchs and strengthen the state, putting Russia back on track as a strong modern state. Russia has reached food sovereignty, has re-industrialized and is putting its natural riches to use as it reorganizes its economic infrastructures for a collaboration with the East, rather than with the West. Both have also, along with India, chosen the path of re-integrating their past traditions, under the concept of the civilization state, which is no longer a neutral ‘Westphalian nation-state’, but a state attached to its cultural identity and spiritual past. This new model is becoming a point of attraction for other BRICS countries.

We should not ignore the ‘culture war’ aspects of this new geopolitical reality: a strong motivation for both China and Russia is their fear of the cultural dislocation they can see at work in the West, and from which they want to preserve their own countries. The civilization-state is a specifically anti-woke project, and theorized as such. The similarity in analysis and cultural feeling explains the otherwise difficult to explain ‘sympathy’ between western populists and eastern ‘statists’.

In conclusion, all the authors discussed so far help us understand the geopolitical competition between the Western view (pre-Trump that is) of planetary stakeholders alliances, as proposed by the WEF, but which have no direct role for popular sovereignty, the Planetary Leviathan model, and the ‘Eastern’ multi-polar alliances of continental civilizational blocs, united in a post-Westphalian state order.

But note that Michael Hudson’s analysis does not seem to cover any changes that are linked to the emergence of digital networks.

This is definitely not the case for Balaji Srivanasan, author of the Network State and well-known crypto-libertarian actor and thinker, recently conducted an interview, on the Collapse of the West, in which he also offered an interesting geopolitical analysis.

Starting from the conflictual situation in the U.S., Balaji notes the increasing ideological and even physical separation of the Blue (Democrat) and Red (Republican( tribes. This means that people are actually moving to more politically friendly places but also that only 4% of Democrats are marrying Republicans.

These two political tribes have two different enemies which focuses their friend-enemy dynamics:

The Reds, which represents the physicals and the Somewheres, i..e the fractions of the population that is more linked to their physical role in society (workers, farmers and small businesses), are on average less educated, and more ‘rural’, have suffered most under neoliberalization and blame ‘China’ for their plight. They want to use tariffs and other protective or punitive measures to bring back industry to the U.S.

The Blues, which represent the ‘Nowhere’ urban educated population, which benefited most from cheap immigrant labor and cheap products from the Global South, and is more flexibly related to place, has a particular beef against ‘the internet’, which has destroyed their once privileged sectors of employment such as academia and media, and has given an uncontrolled voice to their political enemies. Thus their priority is a regime of online censorship, and the use of hate speech legislation to shut down the means of expression of their political enemies.

While the Reds were mostly affected by earlier technological trends of worker replacement, it is now the ‘symbolic’ work functions of the Blues that are on the chopping block, because of the increased role of AI-driven automation.

Both tribes have experienced an existential fear of replacement which makes the conflict potentially violent.

So remember these four concepts, Blue and Red, China and the Internet, to explain the incipient civil war conditions in the U.S.

Balaji believes this conflict will express itself more radically because of the structural conditions the U.S. finds itself in. Until recently, the Global South would produce products and send them to the U.S., to be paid in dollars which were printed by the U.S., and thus, a substantial amount of surplus wealth financed the US trade and consumption deficits. But these conditions are being swiftly undermined, not least through the West 's action in abandoning their ‘neutral’ management of these financial infrastructures. Thus, in the coming 4-5 years, this bubble will burst, and the U.S. will experience conditions not unlike Germany in the 1920s and 1930s, with a radical impoverishment of its middle class. Trump’s alienation of the whole world and refusal to fulfill its imperial obligations acts as an accelerator of this decline and coming implosion, which will also affect Europe. In the last stage of empire, when the far abroad becomes unavailable, due to the revolt and strengthening of BRICS, the near abroad becomes the target of imperial extraction. Europe suffers from similar problems of de-industrialization and failed mass migration policies, with populism nearly at the seat of power in the major EU countries.

But Balaji also appeals to a third factor, the Gray Tribe, these are the internet generations which have a flexible post-national consciousness and can use the internet, and particularly the emerging crypto-based infrastructures, to arbitrage the crisis of nation states. His dream is to create a network of new territories, bought through crypto crowdfunding, instituting their own libertarian regulations in various places in the world, while focusing on their interconnection. Hence the proposal for Network States. The fact that there are still far and few examples should not blind us to the real power behind the crypto networks, which had $2.2 trillion of capital in 2024. But note that in this vision of a ‘archipelago of network states’, there is little attention paid to the necessity of planetary regeneration, or any answer to the unfolding meta-crisis.

Note that with the ideas and proposals of Balaji, we have now introduced a third factor in geopolitics, the transnational crypto networks.


This is what is also theorized by Mark Stahlman, when he talks about ‘East, West, Digital’. Mark is the founder of the McLuhanite ‘Center for the Study for Digital Life’, and if you recall, McLuhan’s point was that the ‘medium is the message’, i.e. the media influence us in fundamental ways, they change our anthropological behavior. They are not just out there, as external tools we use, but they change our inner selves and our intersubjective behaviors. So for Mark Stahlman, the East stands mainly for China, where the mentality has been profoundly influenced by their logographic writing, the West by its alphabet, and its stress on rationalizing, but the digital generations have already been transformed through their use of binary code of the digital media.

What I think is important here is to understand that the deployment of social life is fundamentally different in each case:

  • Nation-state, whether East or West, deploy first and foremost territorially. For example, according to the famous geopolitical theory by Halford Mackinder, the Heartland Theory, there, echoing Michael Hudson, a millenia long struggle between the maritime and continental powers for the domination of Eurasia.
  • But the digital is about essentially trans-local organization, i.e. the organization of collaborating communities that organize relatively independently of the territory in which they operate.


Let’s think about the European Middle Ages for a moment: the main form of organization is territorial, in the land-based feudal system, but the clerks of the Catholic Church, the educated segment of the population, is quite nomadic, as are some of the guilds, such as the masonic Cathedral builders, but especially the merchant guilds, who will have more power in the cities, and a kind of power that may not always coincide with the territorial interests of the place where they live. There is an interaction between the local aristocracy, and the more nomadic elements, as there is also common interest. But of course the Church itself, is NOT a territorial organization, but binds the whole continent through a network of institutions, and it was itself a rival power. The Pope stood at the helm of a transnational community and so was the Califate. In a recent article, Venkatesh Rao insists on the long history of such Cosmopolis-es, they have existed throughout human history, but their power was strongly linked to particular technologies. A hunter-gathering Cosmopolis, documented in the Dawn of Everything, was of course quite different from a Print Cosmopolis, and so will be the emergent interconnected Digital Cosmo-Polises! See the table at minute 6:28 of his Youtube presentation, for a whole list of historical examples of powerful Cosmopolitan communities which interacted with territorial powers.

In the Cosmo-Local option that we are defending at the P2P Foundation, we see the emergence, and potential for further evolution, of trans-locally organized productive communities.

So on the one hand, we have a powerful trend towards localization, through bioregional regenerative efforts, with hundreds of thousands of people already leaving the cities with neo-rural ideals in mind.

On the other hand, we have substantial ‘virtualization’ of social life, with people collaborating with people around common projects, independent of their physical location, for example, as expressed in global open source communities, but also through Web3 crypto communities.

Our thesis is of course that this emerging Digital Cosmopolis could be much more powerful than its historical forebears.


The Evolution from Cosmopolis to Civium

The thesis of Cosmo-Local Production sees a potential convergence between the bioregionally organized productive communities, and the knowledge and capital available through the translocal virtual communities. Distributed local production and manufacturing marries powerful translocal technologies for collaboration and capital formation.

Under neoliberalism, nation-states were competing to attract the globally floating capital, a process which is still going on, but there is now an added layer of crypto capital, which is linked and embodied in the population of Web3 using digital nomads, a concept we can use very flexibly not just for the 50 million people who actually already moved, but to everyone who is relatively place-independent in his work.

On the localization front, we recently learned from Frederic Bosque that there has been a tenfold increase of eco-villages in France, from 150 ten years ago, to more or less 1500 today, and this figure is even more stunning when you realize a failure rate of 80%, which indicates a lot more projects were tried.

According to Jordan Hall, these projects are part of the Civium, a global network of interconnected places, i.e. the oases, coupled with the moving popup villages of the associated nomads, which represent a new form of collective intelligence, in which rural places are now as well connected as urban places, leading to a reconfiguration of territories away from the larger cities. In the West, this process has already begun, but even China has stopped its relentless program of urbanization, by reconfiguring its real estate sector to liberate capital for manufacturing and infrastructure.


Here is an extended quote from Jordan Hall:

- Let’s take a moment to examine the nature of “the digital.” When Andreesen pointed out that “software is eating the world,” he wasn’t kidding around. Digital represents the absolute essence of ‘mediation’. Consider: writing mediates some aspects of language while the telephone mediates other aspects. The telegraph still others. A photograph mediates some aspects of image, a moving picture still others. But digital can (and does) perform *all* of these functions. Digital can express any particular form of mediation.


What this means is that this notion of the ephemeralization of communication will reach its ultimate extension somewhere in the domain of the digital. Barring a significant social collapse of our technological civilization (which is entirely plausible!) it is just a matter of time. The helter skelter endeavor to solve the problem of how to get more and more people into communication by means of innovation and wealth finds its end point somewhere in the digital.

And if the power of superlinear scaling is as I suggest, then the driver moving the history of civilization will continue to do its work. But, with the center of superlinear scaling moved from the physical to the virtual, the balance of power between these two regimes will begin to shift. While the territorial powers will do their best to hold onto their populations, and may succeed for quite some time, ultimately the dynamo of superlinear scaling will subordinate them, just as the city subordinated the indigenous modes of humanity that preceded it.

In the end, this attractor will seek to bring everyone into a single “network”. But, instead of a giant megalopolis, the forces of superlinear scaling will turn their attentions towards the formation of a planetary network connecting, in principle, all minds.”

(https://medium.com/@jordangreenhall/from-city-to-civium-5838e0cdfe31)


How is the Cosmopolis described by Venkatesh Rao linked to the Civium ?:

  • A nation-state is a territorially defined political unit.
  • A metropolis is a dense agglomeration of physical network nodes that coincide within a tight geography, in the form of a converged physical supernode that requires high human density to function.
  • A cosmopolis is the geographic field of diffusion of a set of behaviors associated with a particular powerful technology.


Territorial logic, nodal logic, and behavioral logic all induce societal protocols of various sorts, but it is my contention that of the three kinds of entities, the cosmopolis, by virtue of being the most ethereal, tends to co-evolve with technology the most. As a result, a cosmopolis is typically also a technological frontier of some sort, digesting the fruits of ongoing technological evolution into new and persistent civilizational layers that transform political geography.”

Source: Contraptions

So my understanding is that the Civium is the form that the Cosmopolis takes when empowered by the digital.

The Digital Cosmopolis, the Civium, is a particular form that trans-localization can take.

While China has extended the influence of its civilizational ‘nation-state’ through the Belt and Road initiative, and while the West hoped to retain global hegemony it once had through global neoliberal supply-chains through its its global digital media firms, the Cosmo-Local Regenerative Communities are in the process of doing the same, they arfe building the Civium.


Austin Wade Smith makes the following distinction:

  • State based nations = Nation State
  • Market based nations = Network State
  • Commons based nations = Network Nations

(https://www.linkedin.com/posts/austin-wade-smith-65544932_network-nations-network-state-emerging-ugcPost-7353807881101533185-J44w?)

So what Balaji Srivananasan proposes is to crowdfund capital in the Web3 ecosystem, and to purchase territory in agreement with existing states, and to negotiate forms of autonomy and sovereignty, and these different places can be interconnected in powerful federations of similarly minded network states. But the vision of such states is as a corporate state, much like 17th century Holland. In my understanding, you are not a citizen, but a shareholder, because the network state has a certain ideological content, linked to libertarian ideals. These indeed seem to be ‘market-based nations’.


So think of it this way:

  • The Network State is an expression of the merchant class, which has become cosmopolitan and nomadic,
  • The Civilization State is the expression of the statist political class, the neo-Mandarins of our time
  • The Civium, or Archipelago of Regenerative Villages is the expression of the bioregional but cosmo-local citizens.


The latter ideal is often expressed as ‘Network Nations’, as expressed for example through the workshops led by researcher Primavera de Filippi, which represents a more progressive vision of the non-territorial community form, and to which I have collaborated on occasion:


"“Network Nations” are:

(1) interdependent political communities

(2) united by shared aspirations, values and culture

(3) leveraging networked technologies

(4) to govern themselves, mutualise resources and engage in collective action,

(5) in a sovereign manner (i.e. independent layer alongside existing jurisdictions)


Network Nations aim to provide an institutional framework for emergent political communities of kinship to govern and coordinate themselves through networked technologies, creating new layers of sovereignty that subsist beyond the reach of nation states and private corporations. By acknowledging, and at times even furthering, their interdependencies — with one another, and other political actors — Network Nations can contribute to more effectively tackling global governance challenges that require global coordination. Indeed, by reintroducing a sense of belonging to communities that people genuinely want to "live for," Network Nations strive to rebuild trust among individuals and provide hope that they and their communities have a meaningful voice and role in the political arena."

In a recent workshop document, the participants seemed to stress the distributed territoriality, making a sharper contrast with the network state concept:

"A network of geographically unbound but interconnected local units. This structure allows for communities that are both locally rooted and globally connected, enabling them to act collectively as a larger, interwoven whole without being confined to a single territory."

Imagine the following process: a number of local regenerative projects decide to create a common federated identity. They create a DAO as a shadow structure for their collaboration, and acquire tools for financial sovereignty as a unified network nation or state. The challenge for the coming phase of civilization becomes one of reconciling the differences and contradictions between territorial organization and their sovereignty, with the new forms of trans-local collaboration with potential autonomy.

My own cosmo-local imagination, which is based on many years of observation on the ground, is that micro-territorial entities with similar domain-specific activities, say permaculture, would unite trans-locally through the use of common global infrastructure, but also have access to crowdfunded global capital, inventing new forms of ‘entangled’ fractal ownership.

Please note that the technology to do this already exists, at least in germ form!

See for example the True Commons Infrastructure, as described by Sensorica:

- Beyond the Ledger: Why Blockchain and DAOs Fall Short for Complex Economic Organizations, and How OVNs Point the Way Forward


How to advance the Cosmo-Local Transition Agenda ?

Imagine on the one hand, bioregionally coordinated regenerative projects, organizing in mutual solidarity. A recent report by Benjamin Life described the Bioregional Coordination Frameworks already available, and there are Bioregional Financing Facilities to fund these developments.

But, on the other hand,

functional groups engaged in similar practices would unite with their brothers and sisters in the rest of the world, through powerful open source communities. Bioregionalism hereby represents horizontal solidarity, while cosmo-localism propers represents vertical, domain-specific forms of coordination.

What we are still lacking are the kind of formal coordination and financing frameworks that we already have for bioregional development, and this should be a priority.

The important point is that, if there is a successful combination of local productive power and distributed global capital, these entities can become very powerful, and operate on a global scale. They could be the equals of a number of territorial nations, and even surpass them, with capacities to mobilize capital that outstrip that of territorial entities. But because these are commons-centric form of organization, which depend on their commons, they could be agents of resource and ecological protection, continuing the role that commons have played historically, but at a much higher level of scale.

Of course, the devil will be in the details. For example, will the China model allow such entities to operate ? What will be the political reactions, for example, would more conservative populist governments react differently than ‘progressive neoliberal administrations’. But I predict that many regional governments will see the benefits in collaborating and attracting such entities. Part of the agency of such translocal groups is that they do not necessarily have to pass through their nation state, they can network in a multitude of ways and negotiate support at different scales. They may well create ‘isonomic’ competition between the various territorial entities that are interested in attracting them for mutual benefit and collaboration.

But the main point is that these forces will gradually become more powerful and influential and interact with geographic entities.

David de Ugarte of the legendary las indias group, which has now gone underground, as many in the Web3 sphere have been doing with their ‘dark forest’ ‘cozywebs’, spoke of Neo-Venetian Networks, i.e. community-centric global business networks, or ‘Phyles’. But phyles still represents forms of network agency that are not necessarily aligned to the broader common good.

As I have explained elsewhere, we have a crisis of global regulation, and neither market self-regulation nor pure inter-state regulation, let alone a world government, seem particularly attractive. Can we imagine some of these cosmo-local networks as evolving towards becoming powerful regulatory players, which I have called ‘Magisteria of the Commons’.

Whatever the exact outcome, East-West-Digital will be a reality, and no analysis that is confined to the ‘West vs the Rest’ will be adequate in explaining geopolitics. There is a third kid on the block: the translocal commons networks.


Appendix: Some recommended reading

(summaries via mammouth.ai)

Michael Hudson’s Trilogy

..and forgive them their debts: Lending, Foreclosure and Redemption From Bronze Age Finance to the Jubilee Year (2018)

This book explores the origins of debt in ancient Mesopotamia and the Near East, including the tradition of debt cancellations (such as the Biblical Jubilee) and how these early systems shaped economic thought.

The Collapse of Antiquity: Greece and Rome as Civilization’s Oligarchic Turning Point (forthcoming, expected 2023/2024)

This volume examines how classical antiquity (Greece and Rome) moved away from earlier debt-cancellation traditions, leading to oligarchic dominance and economic polarization, which Hudson argues contributed to the collapse of ancient Mediterranean societies.

The Destiny of Civilization: Finance Capitalism, Industrial Capitalism or Socialism? (2022)

The third book shifts to modern times, analyzing how financialization and debt dynamics since the Industrial Revolution have shaped contemporary capitalism, with Hudson advocating for alternative economic systems to avoid crisis.


Ellen Meiskens-Wood:

1. Citizens to Lords (2008)

Focus: Examines political theory from ancient Greece to medieval Europe, emphasizing how property relations and class hierarchies shaped ideas of citizenship, democracy, and sovereignty.

Challenges the myth of a "Western tradition" of democracy by showing how elitist property ownership constrained political participation.


2. Liberty and Property: A Social History of Western Political Thought from the Renaissance to Enlightenment (2012)

Direct Sequel: Picks up where Citizens to Lords ends, covering the Renaissance to the 18th century.

Focus: Traces how capitalist property relations transformed political ideas (e.g., Locke’s defense of private property, Rousseau’s critiques).


3. Democracy Against Capitalism: Renewing Historical Materialism (1995)

Thematic Capstone: While not a chronological sequel, this book provides the theoretical framework for the historical analyses in Citizens to Lords and Liberty and Property.

Focus: Reclaims democracy’s radical roots, arguing that capitalism inherently limits democratic possibilities by prioritizing property rights over popular sovereignty.

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