The Global/Local Conundrum: Backing Away from Technocracy by Tom Valovic
Decades ago, some interesting ideas were in circulation about how to combine global awareness with local action. The phrase “Think globally, act locally” was in vogue and represented an attempt to combine planetary and ecological awareness with actions at the local community level that fostered those values in a pragmatic way. This line of thinking had major successes. One, for example, was getting local governments and activists engaged in protecting and enforcing earth-friendly environmental laws and recommendations.
As ecological crises have worsened and social systems have deteriorated, a gradual upward shift in government control appears to have taken place. The locus of power has moved from local to state; state to federal; and transnational corporate power over-influencing the political profiles of nation-states. Democratic participation appeared to get lost in the shuffle. Technology in the guise of Big Tech and its increasing levels of technocratic control had a large hand in this simply because it enabled much greater levels of centralized control. The world’s biggest tech companies are now richer and more powerful than most countries. According to an article in PC Week: “By taking the current valuation of Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, and others, then comparing them to the GDP of countries on a map, we can see just how crazy things have become… Valued at $2.2 trillion, the Cupertino company is richer than 96% of the world. In fact, only seven countries currently outrank the maker of the iPhone financially.”
These power shifts to much greater levels of multinational corporate control were aided and abetted by many Western governments under the dubious aegis of public/private partnerships. Seen in this light, the 1999 Seattle WTO protests represented a watershed moment of clarity on the need to confront corporate globalization head-on, with mass protests involving groups on both the left and the right of the political spectrum. The democratic process at ground level has also been affected. Those of us using our laptops or smartphones on a daily basis got persuaded (if I might be permitted a moment of cynicism) that making comments on social media or writing emails constituted real effective political power rather than often just the equivalent of sending messages in a bottle into the ocean.
Sadly, in the aftermath, the effort to preserve the values of local agency was overshadowed and greatly diminished. There are many concrete examples. For example, the goals and ideals of localization were subjugated in a haze of government/corporate messaging that, in part, tried to shift the onus of responsibility for environmental restoration onto the shoulders of ordinary citizens and away from corporations. At the same time, as described, a new nexus of political power was building that had less and less connection to traditional democratic governance. The gradual globalization of commerce was the final blow to localism. This was especially evident with respect to food supplies that came to involve massive and environmentally counter-productive shipment across great distances. One example of the folly of such approaches was that seafood harvested in US waters was frozen, routinely shipped to Asia for processing, and then sent back to the US for commercial distribution.
Re-enchanting the World
These and other important mega-trends have brought us to where we are today, a situation that might be called an existential polycrisis with AI now added as an accelerant. We seem to be witnessing the possible onset of massive system failure even in the midst of attempts to ramp up the establishment of some sort of technocratic superstructure. It seems clear that many aspects of our technocratic experiment must be declared a failure, at least in terms of their deeply dehumanizing effects and impacts on physical and mental health. So what, then, might be a path to the return of localism as a force majeure rather than a vaporous thought form that we hang onto with wistful nostalgia?
Personally, I have more questions than answers but the inquiry is a crucial one. Can we envision what might be called post-technological society if systemic collapse is in the cards? (Like ouroboros, is it possible that AI might end up eating its tail and bring about a collapse of Big Tech’s dominance over our lives?) Given the chaotic state of the world, there is a deep need to envision a path through polycrisis and the rise of bizarrely complex sci-fi-like info-bureaucracies towards returning to empowered localism as a cherished value and a means to restore agency and the ability of ordinary citizens to determine and shape outcomes that most benefit their communities and quality of life
Finally, can the important work of the 60’s and the decades that followed mapping out new human potential be re-kindled? Is it somehow possible at this point to hold onto aspects of tech-provided autonomy while jettisoning those that suppress the possibility of building new economically resilient and community-driven local paradigms? Can hyper-technology somehow be downsized and humanized in such a way as to foster this goal? It seems clear that to build models for a new society, we must first envision them. This means first and foremost looking for realistic answers to these questions — the first crucial step towards, in the words of cultural historian Morris Berman, “re-enchanting the world”.
Photo by Chris Yang on Unsplash.
Originally published at https://www.localfutures.org on June 2, 2025.
