Cosmopolis
Contextual Quote
1.
"Nation-states organize affective memories into a vibe-based territorial logic,
metropolises organize declarative memories into capability based physical network supernodes that are dense population centers
cosmopolises organize procedural memories into widely diffused infrastructures."
2.
"More than one distinctive cosmopolis may emerge in response to a technological stimulus, and the set of cosmopolises may not be either mutually exclusive or collectively exhaustive in relation to either the planet or the political world. A cosmopolis is not a planetarity. It is a smaller unit of analysis, and a legibly embodied geographic reality in a way a planetarity is not. We can sketch out cosmopolises on maps. ... new technologies induce new normals through protocolization of what is initially a weird and scary sort of monstrousness irrupting across a frontier. Beyond that frontier lies a new kind of territory, a new kind of “soil” on which societies can be built. Protocols are the engines of what I called manufactured normalcy a decade ago, and cosmopolises correspond loosely to what I called Manufactured Normalcy Fields.
- Venkatesh Rao [1]
Description
Venkatesh Rao:
"The core idea in the synthesis is that major new technologies always induce sprawling technologically mediated geographies — or cosmopolises — that don’t map cleanly to conventional geographic units of governance. Instead, they act as a new kind of “soil” for new kinds of societies, driving unbundling and rebundling of geographic units of governance. This is the reason we speak of “land grabs” around new technologies.
The cosmopolis, it turns out, is not just a powerful unit of societal analysis, but a powerful unit of constitutive synthesis, categorically related to the other two geographic units in my title, the nation-state and the metropolis. You cannot set out to build a cosmopolis the same way you can set out to build a nation-state or metropolis, as a missionary project, but you can act intentionally in ways that help it cohere and emerge.
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.
Cosmopolises are constrained, but not defined, by physical technologies of connection, for both bits and atoms, across space and time. They coincide with nation-states and metropolises at various points, but cannot be identified with either category.
Depending on the generality, diffusivity, and maturity of the catalytic technology, a cosmopolis might span no more than a regional pocket (such as “Silicon Valley” or “Shenzen” in their respective pre-global early decades), extend across continents (such as American and Chinese style internet ecologies today), or the entire planet (such as the global air travel system and the “frequent flyer cosmopolis” it might be said to induce).
We systematically underestimate the power of the cosmopolis as a civilizational unit because it is an emergent entity, lacking the intentional patterns of top-down political organization that defines nation-states and metropolises. Most cosmopolises lack even the rudimentary affordance of a name we can use to point to it.
This does not mean, however, that cosmopolises are undesigned wildernesses. While they do comprehend and accommodate wildness in ways that nation states and metropolises struggle to, they also embody the strongest forms of civilized order.
The element of design enters a cosmopolis as a functionally narrow but composable unit of behavioral logic, the protocol. The architecture of a cosmopolis is a result of a vast number of protocol-design decisions made around a powerful new core technology.
Protocols exist within the territorial logic of nation states and network logic of metropolises too, of course, but they are constitutive in the case of cosmopolises.
When you take away the protocols of a cosmopolis, nothing remains. This is both its greatest strength, and greatest weakness. To a greater extent than competing constructs, it is made up purely of ideas, not materialities. A natural harbor region with pleasant weather and a river running through it is always a proto-city. A region bound by natural geographic borders is always a proto political-territory. But a book without a cosmopolis of literacy is just kindling, or a doorstop.
The computer, and the computational cosmopolis it induces, is merely the most recent cosmopolitical technology. We can identify similar structures throughout history. Arguably, even the Bronze Age ought to be considered the cosmopolis of tin, since it relied on a globalized trade in tin, and associated metallurgical knowledge."
Typology
Venkatesh Rao:
"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."
(https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/welcome-to-the-cosmopolis)
Discusssion (1)
Cosmopolises and Consciousness
Venkatesh Rao:
"It is no accident that the same word, enlightenment, is used for both a historical transformation of Europe’s idea of itself, and the sorts of transformations of interiority wrought by spiritual practices. First-class cosmopolises emerge when a technology is potent enough to induce highly contagious transformations both in the material condition of the world and in the minds of the humans inhabiting it. The fact of a new catalytic technology being a memory technology is the primary “tell” of a first-class cosmopolis in the making.
The archetypal kind of technology that has this sort of interior-exterior effect is language. So we should not be surprised to find, in inventorying the cosmopolitical layers of world history, that a large proportion can be characterized in linguistic terms. Languages we typically think of as “classical,” with a sprawling footprint across the elite classes of multiple political regions over a period of time, on a scale larger than the largest units of stable political integration, are among the most obvious ones. The cosmopolises associated with Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, classical Chinese, Persian, and Arabic are prominent examples. The presence of a lively cosmopolis is often thought of as “soft power” projecting from a “hard power” but this is an impoverished understanding of the phenomenon.
I learned the term “cosmopolis” from a book about Southeast Asia that characterized the early history of the region as being part of the “Sanskrit cosmopolis.” In the terms of reference we are developing here, it was a historical articulation of memory. Affective memories still linger in traditions of performance of epics like the Ramayana and Mahabharata. Declarative memories have now hardened into a fairly accurate historiography of the pre-Islamic era, dominated by Hindu and Buddhist kingdoms. And procedural memories take the form of lingering habits of governance loosely clustered around the Mandala concept. And all three feature in still-live tensions.
It is worth noting that the Indic strand of Southeast Asian culture is in fact dominated by a non-Sanskritic language (Tamil). That we still refer to it as the Sanskrit cosmopolis underlines the extent to which cosmopolitanism is elite-coded (in this case, associated with the diffusion of the Sanskrit-based procedural memories of the Brahmin political-administration caste).
The Sanskrit cosmopolis is now not so much dead as buried alive-and-asleep beneath newer cosmopolitical layers — Islamic, European-Colonial, American, modern Chinese. And it sits above older native cosmopolitical cultures, such as the semi-legendary memories of Sundaland, and associated animistic articulations of memory."
(https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/welcome-to-the-cosmopolis)
The Cosmopolis, the Metropolis and the Nation-State: how they may be at odds
Venkatesh Rao:
"A cosmopolis, construed as a behavioral logic extending over a region of space-time, is not co-extensive with the metropolitan cores that might make up its backbone. Indeed, the more advanced the technological basis, the more the two diverge geographically. Computer programmers may aggregate in cities, but computers aggregate in datacenters in the technological hinterland. Computer chips may be designed in the American cities, but they are fabricated in Asian suburbs. Cities (and travel between them), may account for a large fraction of energy use, but energy is produced in sparsely staffed refineries in low-population regions, and increasingly, in remote regions boasting plentiful wind or sunshine.
Changes in shipping technology can create and destroy entire port-based cities (containerization, famously, destroyed the breakbulk-port-based economies of many large cities, by moving the heavily automated operations to neighboring smaller cities with cheaper land).
The cosmopolis and the metropolis then, are at best occasional allies, rather than co-extensive realities. To the extent they stand united against the logic of the nation-state and its territorially based ancestors, it is a case of the enemy of my enemy is my friend, rather than a full convergence of interests.
For a great many ideologues and idealists of modernity, this is an uncomfortable idea. To be an architect of computational postmodernity, for many, is to be an architect of the convivial, human-centric city of the future. But in the battle for the post-nation-state future, the metropolis and the cosmopolis are destined to be rivals, competing to fill the growing twin vacuums of collapsing state capacity and nationalism narratives."
(https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/welcome-to-the-cosmopolis)
Discussion 2 on Cosmopolitan Communities
Ralph Horat and Jan Baeriswyl:
“While village communities have for a long time been the place where social bonds were being forged and one’s own identity was being formed, that changed radically in the course of industrialization. Our everyday life has been divided into private and professional life, our space into individualistic housing estates and private office buildings, and our social environment into a circle of family and friends and work colleagues while the largest part of society just appears as service providers or strangers. But it is precisely this dichotomy that is beginning to dissolve as many jobs will become automated and most work is no longer bound to a specific place or time. As there is a growing number of people feeling isolated and alienated in their homes, we need to reinvent what it means in the 21st century to live as part of a thriving community ecosystem. A highly automated, distributed and open technological supply infrastructure and the possibility to be constantly connected with the world lay the economic ground for free, autonomous and cosmopolitan communities. The physical place of such communities we call the “Cosmopolis”. The word “Cosmo” is referring to the idea of “world citizenship”, while the second term “polis” (originating from ancient Greece) stands for self-governed and autonomous city-states. Thus, the Cosmopolis could be seen as a self-organized, self-sufficient and autonomous citystate that acts at the same time as a node in a universal and collaborative digital network. Below we propose various physical growth stages.”
The Nested ‘Cosmopolis’
Ralph Horat and Jan Baeriswyl:
Neighborhood (approx. 150-200 residents)
On the smallest scale, we could have thriving, modular and largely self-sustaining neighborhoods with a size of around 150 - 200 people. This corresponds roughly to the Dunbar number, which throughout history proved to be the natural group size, within which we could maintain and organize social relationships around the principle of generalized reciprocity, meaning that individual contributions are not being quantified or settled with money, but instead imbedded in a social and cultural context, in which social capital played the major role. The flourishing of the community on a neighborhood scale depends largely on the open access to the smart supply infrastructure (see chapter economics) enabling to live in a state of freedom, the culture and values, as well as the chemistry on an interpersonal level. Whereas today the specific composition of a community in neighborhoods is being randomly determined by market mechanisms with the ability to pay the price as the main criterion, new possibilities are opening up enabling people to form co-living communities in a more meaningful, coordinated and fluid way.
Cosmo-Village (approx. 600 – 1’200 residents)
Ralph Horat and Jan Baeriswyl:
“The neighborhoods together could form a Cosmo-village. While each neighborhood is largely self-sustainable, they could at the same time have a specific economic and/or cultural function. This specialization could create a mutual dependency, ensuring constant circulation and exchange amongst the members in the village preventing the formation of bubbles, while at the same time giving each area a unique identity and thus creating a social magnet for like-minded people to be in a certain neighborhood they feel attracted to. Living in an age of freedom means that no one has to confine oneself to a certain “job” or “role”, but rather has the freedom to have multiple identities, roles and areas of self-actualization, spending daytime in different neighborhoods of the Cosmo-village.”
Cosmopolis (approx. 3’600 – 7’200 residents)
Ralph Horat and Jan Baeriswyl:
“On an aggregated scale, the Cosmo-villages could form the Cosmopolis, which could be the largest self-organized body on a local level. As history has shown, there is a strong correlation between the degree of social self-determination and the size of a city. Whereas the Greek polis left enough space for thinkers such as Plato and Aristoteles to imagine a better world by formulating a new model of civilization, that freedom and optimism was taken away under the vast administrative apparatus of the empire after the conquest of Alexander the Great. The bigger a certain administrative district becomes, the smaller and more irrelevant the citizens feel, and their quest to create a better world together turns into a search for individual happiness – or as Theodor W. Adorno has put it – to “the right life in the wrong one”. There are many parallels to today’s society where utopian thinking as a constructive force of progress remains absent since the capitalist market structure paired with the administrative apparatus of the nation-state leaves not enough civic design space. Therefore, we propose that the Cosmopolis needs to be limited in size within the physical dimension in order to prevail social self-determination and freedom. “