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.
The Economic Analogy
At the zero lower bound, cutting interest rates cannot stimulate growth; additional liquidity fails to circulate. Likewise, by the mid-2010s, distribution costs for media, travel, and communication had fallen close to zero, yet deeper cosmopolitan engagement did not rise. Attention and mobility were trapped in local loops—the cultural equivalent of a liquidity trap. Without injections of external novelty, local cultures simply recycled their own tropes.
In the case of the GFC, central banks responded with Quantitative Easing (QE): purchasing long-duration, risky assets to compress term premia and reset expectations. The underlying insights apply to cosmopolitan culture as well: when conventional channels fail, recovery depends on direct intervention into longer, riskier horizons to restore confidence and circulation—and to reintroduce the random provocations that keep cultural pools fresh.
Subprime Globalism
The pre-2015 era was marked by subprime globalism. Cheap flights, algorithmic feeds, and surface-level exposure extended shallow cosmopolitan “credit” to everyone. Platforms securitized this exposure, packaging superficial encounters as safe, universal “global culture.”
Then came the defaults: Brexit, Trump, refugee backlash, pandemic border closures, algorithmic nationalism. The shallow cosmopolitan assets proved fragile; the system entered its own 2008 moment.
As in finance, elite failure was central. Bankers and rating agencies once packaged toxic debt as AAA; the Davos class and cultural gatekeepers likewise sold superficial “world citizen” identity as durable capital. They profited from illusions of stability while seeding fragility.
But culpability was shared. Just as households eagerly took mortgages beyond their means, millions embraced shallow cosmopolitan commitments—slacktivist posturing, tourist-tier multiculturalism, algorithmic consumption—pretending these were deeper than they were. Both elites and commoners colluded in inflating the bubble.
The aftermath resembled a bailout. Nations and multinationals were treated as too big to fail. Sovereign actors retained their global channels—diplomacy, state-linked corporations, strategic platforms—while grassroots cosmopolitanism collapsed. The ethnonationalist turn was less an alternative than a sovereign bailout. The result: cultural stagnation, where global flows persist but only through narrow, monopolized pipelines, and the serendipitous cross-pollination that sustains cultural vitality dwindled.
Cultural QE: A Recovery Mechanism
The analogy to QE points the way forward. QE worked by lowering the risk premium on long-term, uncertain projects and by shifting expectations. Cultural QE must do the same—underwriting risky, long-horizon cross-border projects that grassroots actors cannot sustain alone.
Three principles guide this phase:
Duration – focus on multi-year commitments that survive electoral and platform cycles.
Portfolio rebalancing – push institutions to substitute safe local content with foreign work.
Expectation management – signal credible long-term support, changing priors about feasibility.
But beyond restoring flows, cultural QE is about restoring serendipity. It ensures that random provocations—unexpected voices, surprising exchanges—are injected into every local cultural pool, preventing memetic inbreeding. Cultural QE is not just stabilization; it is fertilization.
Building the Supergrid
Unlike the cosmopolitanism of the late 19th century and early 20th century, which took shape through top-down curation in the form of institutions like the Worlds Fairs and the Olympics, the post-industrial challenge is to achieve similar effects bottom up. The Cosmopolitan Supergrid is not something to be built top-down, but bottom-up, link by link.
The finance analogy suggests several micro-to-macro mechanisms.
Translation Lines: Funds guaranteeing first-time translations to extend cultural circuits.
Residency Bridges: Paired artist and researcher exchanges between sister cities, forming durable links.
Visa Circuits: Multi-entry, 3–5 year visas underwritten by cultural institutions, stabilizing mobility flows.
Production Nodes: Minimum-revenue guarantees for films, festivals, and publications spanning multiple regions.
Platform TLTROs: Conditional financing to venues and platforms that rebalance their catalog toward foreign content.
Forward Guidance Anchors: Public, multi-year commitments by cities and institutions to host sustained cosmopolitan programming.
Each is a composable grid element rather than a piece of a monolith: a conductor, a substation, a bridge. Together they form an interdependent system that both sustains flows and reintroduces the sparks of novelty cultures need to remain vigorous.
Migration within the Supergrid
Even the best-intentioned infrastructure—including a Cosmopolitan Supergrid—can be misused, especially amid growing refugee and migrant flows. Crises that could lead to humane, scalable solutions often devolve into abusive low roads unless we pre-emptively plan for resilience, equity, and integrity.
Key Risks
Criminalization of Migrants: Mass displacement might trigger securitized responses—borders armed, people caged—turning refugees into targets rather than beneficiaries.
Host-Nation Appropriation: Nationalist governments may co-opt migration protocols for political theater or partisan advantage, weaponizing migrants as props.
Exploitation and Capture: Fragile flows can be hijacked by smugglers, traffickers, or bad-faith political actors, turning humanitarian channels into vectors of harm.
Supergrid as High-Road Protocol Stack
The Supergrid can be understood as a high-road protocol stack. Cynical migrant-busing practices reveal a usable logic—point-to-point routing—that the Supergrid can retool into humane, resilient protocols.
Rather than resist migration flows, the Supergrid must anchor humane migration as core functionality—not as an afterthought. The solution is protocolized, polycentric migration infrastructure, akin to an “Internet of Migrants,” not a centralized monolith.
City-to-city packet routing: Migrant “packets” (families, small groups) routed directly between willing, capacity-verified cities, bypassing national bottlenecks.
Capacity-based tickets: Cities issue migration slots based on carrying capacity, with “refugee-credit” markets fairly allocating responsibility across the grid.
Security as secondary vetting: Nations focus narrowly on legitimate security concerns; most flows managed at the city level with civic integration as priority.
Maintaining packet integrity: Families and groups move together, preserving social cohesion and reducing integration friction.
In this way, migration management becomes a functional core of the Supergrid, embedded in its protocols, immune to capture by nationalists, and resistant to exploitation by hostile elements—while also ensuring that migration continues to inject the unpredictable, serendipitous shocks that renew local cultural life.
Implementation Guardrails
Diversification rules: Prevent concentration in fashionable geographies or languages.
Authenticity tests: Ensure funding supports genuine foreign voices, not local pastiche.
Counter-cyclicality: Scale interventions up during xenophobic shocks and taper when private demand normalizes.
Exit strategy: Shift from guarantees to endowments and insurance pools once grassroots cosmopolitanism regains momentum.
Towards the Cosmopolitan Supergrid
The 2010s revealed the fragility of subprime globalism. Its shallow commitments collapsed under stress, and its bailouts preserved only sovereign-scale channels. The task now is to construct a more resilient alternative.
That alternative is the Cosmopolitan Supergrid: a distributed, emergent mesh of protocols, agreements, and cultural circuits, built bridge-by-bridge like sister-city agreements, residencies, and translation pipelines. Unlike the UN model or corporate monopolies, it is not a top-down monolith but an assemblage—polycentric, pluralist, and woven deeply enough into everyday life to be too rooted to fail.
Above all, the Supergrid restores cosmopolitan serendipity: the steady stream of provocations and encounters that keep cultures vigorous, breaking them out of local inbred traps. Without it, the world degenerates into disconnected memetic ponds. With it, cultural evolution flourishes again.
Cultural QE is how the Supergrid begins. By underwriting long-duration, risky cross-border projects, institutions create the balance sheet of cosmopolitanism. As more links accumulate, the network interlocks into civilizational infrastructure, akin to the Olympics or the great scientific cooperations of the last century.
The choice is stark: stagnation through sovereign monopolies, or renewal through an emergent Supergrid. With cultural QE, we can begin constructing the latter—one bridge at a time.
Coauthoring Protocol
Here is the ChatGPT session.
Analogy Seeding: You supplied the core cluster of economic phenomena (ZLB, QE, GFC) and cultural decline (cosmopolitan retreat), which we mapped systematically into an extended analogy.
Iterative Layering: We expanded in stages—first a clean economic–cultural analogy, then extensions (subprime, bailouts), then policy instruments (Cultural QE). Each pass added depth without discarding earlier scaffolding.
Surgical Revision: You asked for targeted grafts (elite failure, commoner culpability, Supergrid metaphor, refugee management, serendipity throughline) which I wove in with minimal disturbance to the established argument. This “spinal cord” method preserved continuity while strengthening motivation.
Structural Freeze: Once the essay reached full length, we froze structure into an executive brief format: title, intro, analogy, crisis, remedy, risks, conclusion.
Aesthetic Integration: We added image concepts, stylistic references (James Gunn Superman), and a generated visual aligned to the argument’s metaphors.
Final Assembly: The essay now combines narrative, analytic rigor, policy recommendations, risk protocols, and visual support under the unifying metaphor of the Cosmopolitan Supergrid.
Note: This is a rare case where I did some editing in post, after cutting and pasting into Substack. I moved some passages around to better positions, and inserted a couple of sentences here and there.
Decloaking in full Seldon mode. I like it.
One degree of difficulty unaccounted for is that cities don't get to control their own visa systems, which means the links in this grid will need to be virtual-only in countries that are currently ruled by the anti-cosmopolitan parties.
I'd love to see some analysis around how countries that are currently cosmopolitan-aligned can tune their internal politics to remain that way, minimizing backlash, while being aware that this is very much an adversarial system in a way that I don't quite think global monetary policy was. (Occupy Wall Street never got any real political power compared to the anti-cosmopolitan forces that are currently dominant in the US, Hungary, Russia, etc).