Towards the Cosmopolitan Supergrid

From Subprime Globalism to Cultural QE

Cosmopolitanism has entered a decade of stagnation. Despite unprecedented infrastructure—global platforms, cheap communications, mass mobility—the years since 2015 have seen a retreat into narrower, parochial forms. This is not merely cyclical fatigue but structural breakdown.

Why does this matter? Grassroots cosmopolitanism is the mechanism by which cultures receive serendipitous shocks from outside, the random global provocations that break them out of inbred traps of localism. It is how memetic vitality is maintained: by ensuring that no culture becomes a closed pond, degenerating in isolation. When cosmopolitan flows stagnate, the world fragments into disconnected, self-reinforcing pools of ideas, each vulnerable to decay.

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An analogy to economics is instructive. The world economy struggled for a decade with the zero lower bound, liquidity traps, and post-crisis stagnation, following the Global Financial Crisis sparked by the US subprime mortgage crisis. Similarly, cosmopolitanism has faced its own Subprime Globalism Crisis, followed by bailouts that preserved only the largest sovereign players.

The path forward is to build something durable: a Cosmopolitan Supergrid, akin to the great supra-national institutions of the 20th century—the Olympics, World Fairs, the International Geophysical Year, space cooperation. Like those, it must be more than a passing initiative. It must be civilizational infrastructure: a distributed cultural network resilient enough to withstand crises and fertile enough to keep cultural evolution vigorous. Unlike those, however, it must be catalyzed bottom-up rather than constructed top-down.