The Advent of 'Scalar' and 'Negotiated' Universalism: Beyond the Populist Backlash and Civilizational States

Towards a Distributed and Cosmo-Local Hermeneutics for the Commons : Rebuilding Shared Meaning in a Fractured World

The Broader Context: The collapse of ‘Western’ globalism

Houston, we have a problem.

Our central challenge is this: how do we reconcile the growing, and in many ways justified, demand for local, digital-virtual, and civilizational differentiation with the undeniable, existential need for planetary cooperation? This is not a choice between two futures, but the central contradiction of our time.

The problem of course, is not a new one. Throughout the whole history of humanity, there have always been at least two camps. Those that want to protect the local and ‘their own’, and those that want to go beyond their own, towards greater unity and integration. And what has been considered ‘our own’, has really scaled up over the millenia.

The first us was the tribe, which grew from family size to clans to tribal federations, eventually becoming the federated villages and city-states, which at one point, decided to de-tribalize. The most famous example are the reforms of Cleisthenes in Athens (508 BC), who formally abolished the old Ionian tribes, replacing them with 10 new virtual (i.e. fake) tribes, combining city, rural and maritime regions to create a new civic identity. But it is important to understand that every single civilizational form is formally opposed to tribalism, and seeks to overcome it in a new unity. That unity might be a city-state, a kingdom, or an empire. And the latter has a specific universalist aim, to organize the whole world, and fight against any other empire which attempts to do the same. At some point, the universality of the empires necessitates a universalist ideology, and these were provided by the ‘Axial’ religions. These were ‘ethical’, post-tribal religions that aimed at becoming ‘global communities of faith’, i.e. with trans-territorial aims, but ended up ‘fused’ in some way by the imperial systems which frequently adopted them as ‘state religion’. They provided the binding element, the integrative narrative, that allowed unification at a higher scale. I trust you because we love or fear the same divine or transcendent value system, not just because you are my family, or a member of a tiny city-state.

This form of ‘Civitas’ started collapsing in Europe, who paradoxically never achieved unification after the Roman Empire, and which created a new form of integration starting with the Treaty of Westphalia. The main idea was that people would form ‘nations’, based on some historically achieved cultural and political evolution towards unity between people of shared language, culture and governance, and that all these nations would in turn form an international system of sovereign states, each united around their own sovereign, until after the democratic revolutions, the people themselves became their own ‘sovereign’, at least theoretically. It took several centuries to achieve this ideal state, with the last Empires collapsing in World War I, and the creation of the United Nations after WWII. This would be a forum for global cooperation, i.e. integrative world system in its own right.

And yet, seventy five years later, this system is in crisis.

From our p2p/commons centric point of view, it pays to see the historical evolution of human civilization from the point of view of civilization systems. As we often discuss this on the substack, the shortest overview is the following:

• Gifting and commoning as the main value exchange modalities of kin-ship based, tribal forms of human life

• Market and state-based forms of coordination in the civilizational form.

But it is important to see that there is a huge split between the ‘East’ and the ‘West’ of the Eurasian landmass, as Michael Hudson argues, as something unique happened in the ‘West’.

Indeed, very early on in Chinese history, starting with the Han empire, i.e. the state that was the central power, allied with the scholarly class of Mandarins, which formed the heart of the bureaucratic apparatus: not the military, and not the merchants. But in Greece, as particularly exemplified in Athens, a powerful creditor class had taken power, which was enslaving its own peasant citizens who could not repay their debts: this led to revolts and civil strife, which was solved by the reforms of Solon, who forbade debt bondage, but did not touch the unequal access to land. This was unlike the Clean Slate legislations of the Middle East, where monarchs also periodically redistributed the land. Thus the Greek template, which became the Roman and the medieval template, never broke creditor hegemony, setting the stage for the dual system in the West, and the tension between democracy and oligarchy which still functions today, and periodically destroys democracy. We are in such a moment today.

This deep structural tension between a creditor class and the citizenry, which Hudson traces to antiquity, is the economic motor behind the political crises of our own time.

If you sometimes see me writing positively about the Chinese system, and more critical about the Western system, this is the reason, and not a preference for authoritarianism, which I actively reject: after the decline of the labor movement, the Western system could no longer prioritize policies in favour of the common good. And paradoxically, the ‘Eastern’ systems with more state control, can adopt policies that are necessarily for the long-term benefit of their nation state.

The current phase of Western decline was precipitated by the fall of the Soviet system in 1989, which, according to Kees van der Pijl, created a transnational ruling class , especially for the West. Again, looking at history as an evolution of coordination systems, what do we get:

• WWI as the struggle between nation-states and empires, which eliminates the latter: the Russian, Habsburg, and Ottoman empires are dissolved, and the ‘parliamentary’ form of capitalism and its nation-state become hegemonic

• WWII is then a struggle about the form that the management (i.e. coordination) of the capitalist nation-state should take: it defeats the fascist alternative (a state-corporate fusion), and as of 1989, it overcomes the Soviet competitor (which stands for state-based central planning).

This then is the moment that something crucial happens, when that competition is eliminated: capital becomes fully transnational, and Western ‘democracies’, and the rest of the world that is under their influence and hegemony, becomes ruled by a non-local creditor class.

But the conditions had started earlier. In 1968, faced with the revolt of the students and workers in France (followed by the troubles in Italy in the 70s), the ruling elites had already concluded: we can satisfy the new cultural demands of the middle class youth in our universities, but we cannot satisfy the demands of the workers. Thus the premises of a new system were set in place, reinforced by the great crisis of the mid-70s and the coming to power of Reagan and Thatcher: production would be outsourced to the Global South, insuring cheaper production costs, higher profits, and low prices for consumption good; working class wages in the West would henceforth stagnate, but compensated by these cheap prices, female employment to boost family income, and easy consumer credit; and mass migration of cheap labor would insure cheap access to services, favouring middle class lifestyles.

Let’s call this the ‘Great Separation’, because this fatally undermined the nation-state social contract! The ruling classes of the West became gradually disengaged from their own populations, as did the educated part of the population, the so-called ‘PMC’s, i.e. the professional and managerial classes , and therefore, what Karatani calls the nation-state compact, i.e. the integration of Capital-State-Nation, became gradually undone. It became impossible to change politics through democratic interventions, and the creditor classes largely took over the control of the democratic processes.

It is important to understand that this ‘Great Separation’ was a hermeneutic rupture as much as an economic one. It dismantled the shared national narratives—the ‘social contract’—that had, however imperfectly, bound different classes together. When the state no longer acts on behalf of its people, the people no longer believe in the state’s story of itself. Universalism, in its liberal ‘globalist’ form, becomes not an aspirational ideal but a synonym for betrayal.”

This dynamic is what created the great Divide between ‘Somewhere’s and Nowhere’s, between the more and less educated, between the Virtuals and the Physicals; the left parties slowly became the parties representing the Nowhere’s and the Virtuals, and the populist right became the parties representing the Somewhere’s and the Physicals. (it’s a bit more complicated that that, but this is still ‘essentially true’). Globalism became a dirty word, because it stands for the betrayal of the native working and middle classes, and the choice for a social system that over time, makes them dwindling minorities in their own countries.

(Please note that I am well aware of the forces manipulating the populist backlash, but I am only insisting on the rationale and legitimacy of the popular reaction.)

Thus, there are two main reactions we can see, within the market-state civilizational complex, and both largely aim to restore the balance between market and state by restoring the power of the nation state. In the Global Majority countries, it takes the form of the ‘civilization’ state, which reconnects with a layer of historical identity, to bind the people anew in restored neo-historical joint identity, which is an attempt to slow down the atomizing effects of modernity, and control the power of the transnational creditor class. It also focalizes the identity of this evolving post-Westphalian nation-state to a core identity group within the state: the Han in China, Hindutva in India, historical Orthodox identity in Russia etc .. Within the West, it favours a new type of populist nationalism, which wants to restore the linkage of a restored nation-state with the interests of the native population. If you are a populist voter, you are entirely convinced that the state has betrayed your interest in favor of the interests of the new settler communities. Their political energy is heightened to the degree their voters believe that time to restore their historical continuation is limited. In terms of restoring their lost popular sovereignty, it’s now or never.

To return to our introduction: universalism became a dirty word. Inside the ‘western’ countries, because it stands for the betrayal of the interests of the local populations, and outside of the West, because it is associated with an ideology justifying the exploitative hegemony over the Global South.

But it is not just the right that rejected universalism, as Kenan Malik reminds us, the leftist radicals equally rejected it.

Indeed, this backlash is not confined to the populist right. As Kenan Malik powerfully argues, the left has also embraced a ‘politics of difference,’ abandoning universalism for identity. In his words,

‘The belief that humanity could be divided into discrete groups... had always been a central assumption of racial thinking. Now it has also become a key feature of radical politics.’ The tragedy, as Malik points out, is that this differentialism is not a break from European thought but a re-adoption of its Romantic and counter-Enlightenment roots. The result is a politics where culture and identity have displaced class and politics as the primary lens of analysis.” (https://kenanmalik.com/2019/07/27/white-identity-and-working-class-politics/?)

If the advent of postmodernity means anything, it is certainly also this: it has made differentialism the hegemonic way of thinking in the academic, and even activist left.

The tragedy today is therefore that it is differentialism all the way around, and only the transnational ruling classes really still defend the ‘globalism’ of the post-war compact, though they are realizing it is a losing proposition. For the moment, they realize, at least in the West, that the only way to keep power, is to make democracy all but obsolete, except in ‘form’, by installing surveillance and censorship as the general mode of operation, since they keenly realize that if democracy were allowed to function, they would lose the elections to the parties representing the populist revolt.

We should not assume though that differentialism stands for a universal peace, though of course the most idealistic versions do, but that it will most likely be accompanied by an explosion of conflict at all scales. If neoliberal globalism cannot hold the world together, even if it was in a perverted and hegemonic way, what can ?

I want to stress here that I am not opposed to localism and differentialism, rather I believe that we need a new kind of integration, between the different levels of localism (the hyperlocal, the bioregion, the nation-state), and the need for global cooperation to solve planetary problems, if only to avoid a global conflagration into WWIII. Our work on cosmo-localism, which proposes a four-level integration, is motivated by that concern: can we have the increased differentialism that more and more people desire, and still maintain the integration of a world system ?

In this overview of the current global metacrisis which is also a crisis of global integration, one must not forget the emerging new world that the P2P Foundation has been dedicated to describing: i.e. the emergence of translocal self-organized communities that produce value both locally and translocally, and that in a very real way, ‘cut through’ the existing geographical structures that are in crisis. The existing geopolitics of the human cultures existing in a geosphere, must now be supplemented by a new noopolitics, i.e. the politics and governance of translocal communities that use the noosphere for their organizational capacity and intellectual and scientific exchange. We have a growing part of the human population, which is, to different degrees, both local, both somewhat national, and certainly also transnational, conducting lives that are at least partially ‘cosmo-politan’, not because they are one percenters with money to fly around the world permanently (the target of dislike by the populists), but because they are day-in day-out working with people located in different parts of the world. They have in part an identity that is shaped by the common work in effectively transnational communities, bound by a common object (this is called ‘object-oriented sociality’) that they construct together. They practice a ‘universalism of negotiation’, and have effectively created ‘distributed hermeneutic commons’. Thus, to a certain degree, they are already developing what we describe in the next section, ‘in theory’.

Therefore, these new ‘noo-political’ communities are not just technical or economic networks; they are, in practice, sites of distributed hermeneutics. They translate global knowledge into local practice and feed local experience back into the global commons. They have begun to solve the very problem of meaning at scale that the geopolitical order cannot.

Before we can fully appreciate this emerging ‘noopolitics,’ we must understand how meaning itself can be mediated across the four essential layers of human life: the hyperlocal, the national, the bioregional, and the cosmolocal. This is the task of a distributed hermeneutics, to which we now turn.

The Need for Integration: How do we translate meaning at multiple scales

The geopolitical crisis of integration I have just described is, at its core, a crisis of meaning. The failure of the nation-state to hold its people, and the failure of globalism to offer a legitimate universal narrative, have left us without a shared language to understand our world. I am not the only one to see this—the present crisis is also a profound global meaning crisis.

To address this meaning crisis, we must turn to a specific science of meaning: hermeneutics. Before exploring it, a useful distinction comes from Ken Wilber, who differentiated three ‘eyes’ of knowing. The ‘eye of the flesh’ grasps the material world through objective science. The ‘eye of the spirit’ touches the sublime through art and contemplation. Between them lies the ‘eye of the mind’—the realm of mutual understanding, interpretation, and meaning. This is the domain of hermeneutics, the art of understanding how we understand each other.

I am presenting here the work of a lesser known hermeneutician, Georges Gusdorf, who was specifically concerned with the history of meaning making in the European tradition. This is obviously a limitation for this article, but for those who want a broader worldcentric view, here is a short overview of non-European traditions.

So, here is a short overview of Gusdorf, whom I chose because of his ‘holistic’ understanding. In bold, what I like about his take:

“Gusdorf (1912–2000) was a French philosopher and historian of ideas whose major project was to reconstruct the intellectual history of Western self-understanding, especially through autobiography, symbolism, and hermeneutics. His central project: a “history of interpretation as self-understanding”. His work can be read as an attempt to show that hermeneutics is not just a method of interpretation—it is a historical form of human self-consciousness. Gusdorf insists that hermeneutics has a history tied to Western civilization: it evolved alongside religion, science, and subjectivity. It is a cultural-historical formation, not a timeless method. One of Gusdorf’s most original ideas is that the rise of hermeneutics parallels the rise of autobiography. In his famous essay on autobiography he claims that the modern individual becomes both author and interpreter of their own life. So hermeneutics is an internalized interpretation. Gusdorf opposes the reduction of knowledge to scientific objectivity: human meaning cannot be reduced to causal explanation; interpretation is irreducible. He defends the autonomy of the human sciences and the unity of knowledge (against fragmentation). A recurring theme is that modern knowledge is fragmented into disciplines and that hermeneutics offers a way to reintegrate meaning.”

For more about Gusdorf specific European schemata, see here.

Gusdorf’s framework, while rich, is deliberately focused on the Western trajectory. Our more interconnected world, forces us to process multiple competing civilizational perspectives.

Thus, my concern for hermeneutics also coincided with my own personal encounter with the Chinese communities in Chiang Mai, and of course with my adaptation to my life in Thailand with my local family and its extended kinship structure. I have been reading for the past five years, both Christian mystics, but also the great texts of Chinese philosophy and spirituality (though of course, at my very modest level of understanding, as a non-classicly educated westerner). This has forced me to live inside altogether different mental and spiritual worlds.

As an illustration, my own house has five different shrines, representing five different worldviews:

• the spirit house on the ground floor, defending our house and family, which implies a belief in spirits

• The ancestor shrine on the first floor, with my wife’s father’s ashes and my mother’s ashes, which implies a belief in ancestors

• A cross blessed by the Pope, received during one of my two visits inside the Vatican

• A complex Buddhist shrine with three levels, which has Buddhas, enlightened local monks, and is linked to pictures of Thai monarchs

• A shrine to Ganesh, the hindu deity for Wisdom and Wealth

(Incidentally, when our new neighbour moved in, a ‘Chinese’ Assembly of God church, they required us to move our spirit shrine, so we did <g>.)

Living with a Thai wife from a very different local Lanna culture, I am keenly aware that there are always differences, but also always commonalities, and we have to embrace both. We cannot merely retreat neither to communal difference, nor to pure universalism, this is why ‘cosmo-localism’ is relevant, but more about that later.

Here are my conclusions after trying to understand Gusdorf, and trying to understand at least the basics of other civilizational hermeneutics, and how this would work out in a post-civilizational context. I am quoting myself here, as I wrote this in a preparatory article on the wiki:

“Across the world, one finds highly developed traditions of interpretation, even if they were not conceptualized under the label of “hermeneutics.” In the Islamic world, the disciplines of tafsir and ijtihad elaborate sophisticated methods for interpreting revelation in changing historical circumstances. In the Indian context, the schools of Mīmāṃsā and Vedanta develop rigorous theories of textual interpretation, intention, and meaning. In China, the Confucian commentary tradition is built on continuous reinterpretation of classical texts across generations. In Buddhist traditions, particularly Mahayana, the concept of upāya (skillful means) explicitly recognizes that meaning must be adapted to the interpretive capacities of different audiences.

What distinguishes the Western trajectory, as emphasized by Georges Gusdorf, is not the existence of interpretation, but its reflexive universalization: the moment when interpretation becomes conscious of itself as a general condition of human existence. Hermeneutics, in this sense, becomes not just a set of techniques, but a theory of how humans relate to meaning as such.

In the contemporary planetary condition, this distinction becomes crucial. Humanity is no longer situated within relatively bounded civilizational horizons; instead, multiple traditions of meaning coexist, interact, and often collide within shared global infrastructures. This creates a second-order hermeneutic problem: not merely the interpretation of texts within a given tradition, but the interpretation of entire interpretive frameworks across traditions. What is at stake is the capacity to move between different lifeworlds of meaning without reducing them to a single framework or rendering them mutually unintelligible.

It is in this context that the critique of universalism must be carefully reconsidered. The historical critique—articulated by figures such as Edward Said and Dipesh Chakrabarty—is justified: what presented itself as universal was often a particular Western epistemology projecting itself globally. However, the rejection of universalism as such risks producing an opposite but equally problematic outcome: a fragmentation into incommensurable worlds, where no shared ground for understanding remains.

Between these two poles—false universalism and radical relativism—there emerges the possibility of a different form of universality, one that is not based on shared content but on shared process. This can be understood as a hermeneutic or dialogical universalism: the recognition that all human communities engage in the work of interpretation, and that this work, while never complete or perfectly translatable, can nonetheless be partially shared.

< Universality, in this sense, is not the imposition of a single worldview, but the cultivation of the capacity to translate between worldviews. >

Hans-Georg Gadamer’s notion of a “fusion of horizons,” in which meaning emerges through the encounter between different interpretive contexts rather than through their reduction to sameness.

Within a cosmolocal or commons-oriented framework, this shift has far-reaching implications. The viability of planetary commons cannot rest on a single epistemological foundation, nor can it rely on an unmediated pluralism. It requires the development of shared hermeneutic infrastructures capable of sustaining communication across differences. It also implies the need for dialogical spaces in which meanings are negotiated rather than imposed, and for meta-frameworks that remain open and adaptive rather than totalizing.

Under these conditions, the commons must be understood not only as a system for managing shared resources, but as a space for organizing shared interpretive labor. The circulation of knowledge, code, or value is not sufficient; what is equally required is the capacity to ensure that what circulates remains meaningful across diverse contexts.

Hermeneutics, therefore, should not be seen as a Western inheritance to be either adopted or rejected, but as a universal human practice that has entered a new, planetary phase. What is emerging is a distributed form of hermeneutics in which traditions are increasingly required to interpret one another, and in which universality must be redefined as the ongoing, collective effort to sustain intelligibility across difference.”

In conclusion, the solution, I suggest, is to abandon the search for a universal content—a single story that fits everyone—and instead embrace a universal process. Universalism becomes a protocol of cooperation across multiple scales. This is what we might call a ‘hermeneutic’ or ‘dialogical’ universalism: a recognition that all human communities engage in the work of interpretation, and that this work, while never complete or perfectly translatable, can nonetheless be partially shared. It is not about agreeing on everything, but about developing the capacity to translate between worldviews.

And it’s not just ethnic, national, or civilizational differentiation anymore: it includes any community that is translocal and is constituted by an object-oriented sociality (i.e. integration around the joint object of peer production).

This needed capacity for translation is not an abstract ideal. It requires concrete ‘hermeneutic infrastructures’—practices and spaces for negotiation—that operate at multiple scales. How such infrastructures might function, from the hyperlocal to the cosmolocal, is the subject of the next section.

The possibility of a new Cosmo-Local (Planetary) hermeneutic Circle

I am indebted here to the prior work of Sacha Pignot, Benjamin Life, Austin Wade Smith and others, as well as by practical implementations of these new types of institutions such as Samantha Power, Will Ruddick and many others.

If ‘dialogical universalism’ is to be more than an abstract ideal, it must take practical form. It requires what I will call a ‘distributed hermeneutic infrastructure’—a circulatory system for meaning that operates across the different scales of human life. In our cosmo-local vision, this means synthesizing two worlds: the old civilizational world of hierarchically scaled geography, organized mostly in the nation-state system; and a new world of self-organized noospheric communities, who produce knowledge, code and increasingly, material artefacts, but organized through digital mediation.

The synthesis between these two worlds depends on a continuous, circulatory process.

Knowledge and meaning must flow in both directions: upward, from lived experience to global abstraction, and downward, from universal patterns to local enactment. This is not a one-way transmission but a living cycle of interpretation, where each layer both receives from and contributes to the whole. Without this circulation, the cosmo-local vision remains fragmented—globally connected but locally meaningless, or locally rich but globally invisible.

Understanding this cycle requires mapping its four primary layers.

This four-layer structure forms a complete, planetary hermeneutic circle—a continuous, bidirectional flow of interpretation:

• Downward movement: Knowledge is abstracted at the cosmolocal layer, mediated and framed by the national layer, collectively interpreted and stabilized at the bioregional layer, and finally enacted and lived at the hyperlocal layer.

• Upward movement: Lived experiences, adaptations, and innovations born at the hyperlocal level enrich bioregional narratives; successful bioregional models shape national policy and legal frameworks; and all of this feeds back into the global knowledge commons, ensuring that the cosmolocal layer remains grounded in human reality rather than floating free as abstract information.

For this cycle to be healthy and sustainable, neither direction can be neglected. A system that only transmits meaning downward becomes authoritarian and disconnected; a system that only aggregates upward becomes chaotic and unable to generate shared coherence. The cosmo-local vision depends on nurturing this full cycle—a distributed, planetary hermeneutics where meaning circulates across all scales of human life, continuously reinterpreted and renewed at every turn.

1. The Cosmolocal Layer: Abstraction and Circulation

At the most expansive level, this is the global commons of digital networks. Here, knowledge, code, and designs are created, shared, and stored. The primary hermeneutic function is abstraction—extracting patterns, principles, and generalizable solutions from specific contexts and making them available as “boundary objects” that can travel the globe. This is the realm of open-source software, shared design files, and global scientific databases. But this layer is not merely a repository; it is also the destination for insights that have traveled upward from the local. Its challenge is to remain porous and responsive, ensuring that global knowledge remains intelligible and usable, not just technically accessible. This layer could be activated by what Austin Wade Smith calls ‘cosmo-local guilds’—networks of practitioners who travel between physical nodes, translating learnings across scales. They possess the network knowledge that purely local actors may lack, making them the human embodiment of this layer’s hermeneutic function.

2. The National Layer: Mediation and Policy Framing

This is the crucial layer of the nation-state. In our contemporary world, the nation-state remains the primary unit of political and legal organization, and it is the key site of mediation between the global and the local. Its hermeneutic role is one of policy framing and institutional translation. National governments and institutions interpret global knowledge and norms through the lens of national interest, legal tradition, and public policy. They decide how to fund, regulate, and implement cosmo-local projects, translating global possibilities into national strategies. In the upward direction, they aggregate regional and local experiences into national narratives and standards. This layer can either facilitate the flow of meaning or act as a barrier, filtering and reshaping knowledge for domestic consumption.

Contrary to many other interpreters of the network age, I do not foresee the imminent disappearance of the nation-state, since its creation was the result of a long political and cultural process, certainly in the European ‘nations’ that created the model. I believe it will remain important as a level of mediation between larger unified territories, which exist for a reason. But nation-states can co-exist and promote the regenerative and contributive economic practices that are associated with the next, ‘bioregional’ level, which is a crucial innovation for ecological reasons.

3. The Bioregional Layer: Collective Interpretation and Stabilization

The bioregional layer is the realm of ecological context, which may or may not co-exist with regional cultures and long-standing narratives, but has become indispensable because the nation-state has not shown itself (in general) to be an institution capable of ecological regeneration. Its hermeneutic function is collective interpretation and stabilization at an ecologically realistic scale. Here, the policy frames from the national layer and the abstract knowledge from the cosmolocal are received and interpreted within a community’s pre-existing worldview. This is where meaning is “made at home,” where global designs are debated, adapted, and integrated into a living cultural tradition, achieving a degree of stability and coherence. Conversely, it is from this layer that local wisdom, regional innovations, and culturally specific understandings begin their journey upward, gaining broader resonance. The bioregional is the level of solidarity between the various regenerative efforts. This layer could be anchored by what Austin Wade Smith terms ‘bioregional guilds’—communities of practice united by shared ecological context and pragmatic local work. These guilds are the primary interpreters of global knowledge, adapting it to local conditions and feeding their innovations back upward.

4. The Hyperlocal Layer: Enactment and Lived Practice

At the most grounded level is the hyperlocal: the individual, the family, the small community, the neighborhood. This is the site of lived practice and enactment. Here, meaning ceases to be abstract and becomes embodied. This is where a globally-shared design is physically printed on a local 3D printer, or produced in a microfactory, where a bioregional narrative inspires a community garden, or where a national policy is implemented in a school. The hermeneutic role is appropriation—the personal and communal act of taking interpreted meaning and weaving it into the fabric of daily life, giving it immediate, tangible significance. But this layer is also the primary source of new meaning. The adaptations, failures, innovations, and lived experiences generated here are the raw material that must be fed back into the cycle, preventing the entire system from becoming disconnected from human reality.

Astute readers may have noticed some tension, which I would like to make explicit. The crucial challenge of the future is the ‘integration’ of both geographic and noospheric layers. This is just a first anticipation of how this integration may look like in practice. There may in fact be much more differentiation between the two layers, since the noosphere <also> exists independently, and is creating its own structures of integration. This is what the next section addresses.

On the need for a Independent Noospheric Layer

In the last few years, I have also tried to document in particular the new institutional layers that are being built independently by the Web3 community. I think it is useful to remind my readers of what has happened so far:

• The invention of Bitcoin as the first globally scalable universal currency that is not dependent on either a market entity nor a nation state, but is socially sovereign and based on the trust in a crypto-graphic protocol.

• The associated creation of the Blockchain as the first global universal ledger, which means we have now the capacity to create translocal chains of value and mutual accounting

• The creation of new types of ‘coordination engines’ such as the DAO’s, distributed autonomous organizations, which coordinate human action through token incentives and are able to integrate market, public authorities, paid work and permissionless contributions based on new kinds of participatory decision-marking which balance out the various stakeholders.

• The capacity of these crypto economic and non-economic entities to fund their own self-infrastructuring for non-private common needs through public goods funding, i.e. their capacity for self-taxation and commons funding outside of the nation-state structures

• The intense creation of a social layer of pop-up villages, federation of villages, permanent oases, to create integrative socialization on a global scale and involving people from social, ethnic and civilizational backgrounds

These developments perhaps represent a nascent ‘fifth layer’—a noospheric infrastructure that is not reducible to any of the four layers I have described. It is cosmolocal in its reach, but it seeks to bypass the national and bioregional layers, creating direct, cryptographically secured links between individuals and global networks. This is both its promise and its peril: it can escape state control, but it can also float free of the bioregional and hyperlocal grounding that gives meaning its depth, and links it to thermodynamic realities.

So far though, most of these efforts have been efforts largely aimed at a rather friendly integration with the existing global structures, i.e. adapting to the realities of private capital, of nation-state regulations, of the power of the private platforms. At the same time, there is a minority at work that is motivated by the creation of more autonomous ‘digitally sovereign’ communities, as expressed in the ‘network state’ movement, an update to the merchant state which has existed in history, and the ‘network nations’ movement, with its more community-centric priorities. Most of them though, are not yet imbued with the needed connection with physical resilience.

But I’m also in touch with an emerging layer of forces that are even more keen on the autonomy of the noospheric layers. These forces have become gradually aware of the ‘becoming authoritarian’ of the nation-state layer, and of the huge monopolistic power of the private platforms, as they are both setting up layers of surveillance and censorship infrastructure.

Gradually, these newly emerging forces have become adepts of the ‘dark forest’ theory of the internet, and they are no longer actively advertising their work, and so I won’t give more details here either. A good example is what happened to ‘Las Indias’, one of the prefigurative networks, which were initially very influential in the hispanic internet, yet completely disappeared, scraping every sign of their existence from the digital sphere. Yet, they still exist and are active in different kinds of post-civilizational settings.

Be aware that there is a totally new layer of self-infrastructuring being built, that is totally compatible with the internet, but also able to function outside of it, that is cryptographically secure from the ground up, and uses zero cloud services. While emerging, this could be a huge part of the available technologies in a not too distant future. This is not an utopia that I am describing, several dozen groups are actively using these types of technology for their self-organization already. One of the initiatives working more openly in this sphere is that of Logos, whom I strongly support as an exemplary way of organizing the emergence of new infrastructures and subjectivities. They built new tech, have a keen historical understanding (which is not always the rule in the libertarian-inspired Web3 context), and organize physically local groups that actively contribute to solving local problems. In that sense, they are truly exemplary. In the next Valley of the Commons pop-up village in the CommonsHub near Vienna, we will announce our own Cosmo-Local Initiative, which goes in the same direction, focused directly on enhancing the coordination of physically regenerative projects.

This brings me to my central conviction: we need a new layer of countervailing power. The nation-state layer, as Karl Polanyi showed, was historically the site of a dynamic struggle. The nation represented the community, divided politically, and fought for influence over the state. From the early 19th century onward, a ‘lib-lab’ cycle alternated between regulating and deregulating oligarchic market power. But since the transnationalization of capital in the 1980s—the ‘Great Separation’ I described in Section 1—this dynamic has broken down. National democratic processes are no longer able to take effective counter-measures against oligarchic control. The capacity of Western nation-states to protect the common good has been systematically undermined, more so than in the state-centric civilizational states of the ‘East.’

Most forces at play—whether the civilizational states of the Global Majority or the populist movements of the West—remain within the civilizational framework. They seek to restore the power of the (nation)state against oligarchic power. This is a defensive reaction: an attempt to rebuild the walls that Transnational Capital has breached. Our proposal is different. We are suggesting a post-civilizational solution: the creation of a transnational countervailing power that does not seek to reclaim the nation-state (although it is not necessarily hostile to this endeavour of restoring popular sovereignty) but to build parallel structures of solidarity, governance, and meaning.

On the one hand, we are suggesting the vision of the Archipelago of Regenerative Villages. This suggests, not necessarily an abandonment of local, (bio)regional and national linkages, but a parallel development of trans-local, trans-national solidarities and infrastructuring. See it as a permanent third way, focused on the interconnection and strengthening of the post-civilizational, regenerative seed forms.

On the other hand, and this is more difficult to imagine at this stage, we are suggesting the construction of ‘Magisteria of the Commons’, also called ‘Axial Entities of the Noosphere’ (AEONS) by David Ronfeldt. This is also strongly connected to the ‘Ecological Institutions’ described by Austin Wade Smith. This would be based on the slow interconnection, sector by sector of associated communities that are concerned with the protection and stewardship of planetary, trans-local resources. Build from the ground up, but also immediately with planetary concerns.

“These AEONS would not be administrative or economic bodies. Their primary function would be to care for a resource, as well as hermeneutic: they would also serve as the interpretive infrastructure for planetary commons. Each AEON would be responsible for a specific domain—water, seeds, knowledge, energy—and would facilitate the translation of global principles into local practice and local wisdom back into global standards. They would be the institutional embodiment of ‘dialogical universalism’ at scale.

Steve Waddell’s Global Action Networks are a valuable precursor. They demonstrate that multi-stakeholder collaboration at a global scale is possible. But they remain creatures of the NGO and neoliberal age—dependent on philanthropic funding, state approval, and professionalized management. The AEONS I imagine would be different: rooted in productive peer communities, governed by their members, and sustained by the value they create rather than by external donations.

It is likely that they are already emerging but I have not been able to detect them at scale in my own documentary work. But I believe they are essential to build counter-power, both to the nation-state, which can be hostile and oppressive; and to transnational commercial power, which is invariably extractive by nature. If you have seen such proto-global networks at work, please do let me know! I’m keen on making this particularly speculative prediction a reality.

I should also mention the potential alternative to this vision, which has been expressed by Michael Haupt, i.e. that the self-organization and upward coordination of bioregional initiatives will be that equivalent counter-power. He believes that the already existing practices like the Bioregional Social Contract and Bioregional Sovereignty, represents a practical, ground-up alternative to creating new layers of global governance.

A final word on ‘Scalar Universalism’

This brings us to the core of my argument: the concept of ‘Scalar Universalism.’ If AEONS and bioregional guilds are the emerging institutions of a post-civilizational world, scalar universalism is its operating principle—the hermeneutic logic that would govern how meaning flows across scales. When we use this concept, we have something specific in mind: a non-hierarchical universalism that allows all scales and all levels to connect on a planetary scale, without the mediation of the other scales. It is not meant to replace the earlier forms of universalism rooted in the expanding self-understanding of existing cultural communities, but to exist in parallel with it.

Nevertheless, it is a radical departure from older universalisms. The universalism of empires was imposed from above—a single truth for all. The universalism of liberal globalism was projected from the center—a Western model for the rest. Scalar universalism, by contrast, is emergent from the ground up. It does not demand that everyone believe the same thing; it demands that we develop the capacity to make our different beliefs intelligible to one another across scales. Universality, in this sense, is not a destination but a practice—the ongoing work of translation and negotiation.

When Gusdorf’s perspective is translated into a cosmo-local framework, hermeneutics can be seen as the cognitive and cultural infrastructure of distributed civilizations.

Cosmo-localism—understood as the interplay between global knowledge sharing and local production—implicitly depends on a capacity to translate meaning across contexts. Open design, commons-based peer production, and translocal cooperation all require actors to interpret shared knowledge in ways that are locally meaningful.

In this sense, Gusdorf’s hermeneutics anticipates a core challenge of the digital commons: how to maintain semantic coherence across diversity.

The cosmo-local condition intensifies what Gusdorf already identified: interpretation is always a movement between contexts—a “back-and-forth” between past and present, self and other, local and universal.

What changes today is scale and speed. Digital infrastructures globalize the circulation of meaning, while ecological and social constraints re-localize its application. Hermeneutics thus becomes not just a scholarly practice but a distributed social capability embedded in networks.

Gusdorf’s historical narrative also allows us to reinterpret civilizational dynamics in hermeneutic terms.

Civilizations expand when they can integrate diverse meanings into a coherent symbolic order. They contract when interpretive frameworks become rigid, monopolized, or disconnected from lived reality.

We can therefore describe civilizational phases as oscillations between:

• Hermeneutic openness: pluralism of interpretations, creative re-reading of tradition, expansion of meaning

• Hermeneutic closure: dogmatization, canon fixation, reduction of interpretive plurality

From this perspective, modernity itself can be seen as a massive hermeneutic expansion, dissolving fixed meanings through historical criticism, science, and pluralism — but at the cost of fragmentation.

We are now reaching that point of maximum fragmentation. The hermeneutic expansion that began with modernity has saturated our symbolic space. As Pitirim Sorokin suggested, we have reached a point of bifurcation—a civilizational turning point where the old integration no longer holds and a new one must emerge. The question is: what form will this new integration take? This is where scalar universalism enters the fray.

We stand at the cusp of a new civilizational cycle, and what has changed is the following:

1. Civilizations are internally plural and historically hybridized

2. Individuals embody multiple overlapping epistemic lineages

Globalization, and especially ‘digital’ globalization with its peer to peer dynamics and shared global commons, has created deep entanglement across traditions, and this means that universalism can no longer be interpreted as a dialogue between different civilizations, religions or ethnicities:

The revised premise of ‘scalar’ universalism is the following:

< Universalism is not negotiated between civilizations, but through layered interactions across all scales of lived reality. >

This scalar model leads to a redefinition of universality:

• Not unity (one truth, one system) > < But interoperability (coexistence and coordination among differences)

• Universality = the capacity of diverse systems of meaning to relate, translate, and co-function

If dialogical universalism describes the principle of shared interpretation, negotiated universalism describes its practice. It has three key aspects: hyperlocal lived experience as the grounding of universality; embedded material and ecological negotiation shaping shared norms; and translational universality through dialogue and interoperability.

Cosmo-localism, in this context, is not merely an idea born from individual or collective brains. It is what emerges from the material realities, new ideological framings, and technical capacities that are now taking shape—realities that make the continuation of the old model impossible. We are saying that the new integration will be substantially different from a mere re-arrangement of the nation-state model. And we are predicting that the current efforts, situated within the civilizational paradigm, will not be sufficient for the adaptation required. The question is not whether a new integration will come, but whether we will have the wisdom to shape it consciously—or whether it will shape us through crisis and conflict.

But please notice that ‘integration’ is also a very important keyword in my approach: it means not choosing between commonality and difference, between differentialism and universalism, between the local and the global, but to look at them in an integrative embrace, finding a way for these legitimate human drives, and political realities, to co-exist.

Appendix: Bibliography

Primary Sources: Georges Gusdorf

• Gusdorf, Georges. Les origines de l’herméneutique. Paris: Payot, 1988. Available online: https://classiques.uqam.ca/contemporains/gusdorf_georges/origines_hermeneutique/origines_hermeneutique.html

• Gusdorf, Georges. Les sciences humaines et la pensée occidentale. (Multi-volume). Paris: Payot.

• Gusdorf, Georges. “La découverte de soi.” In L’expérience humaine du sacrifice. Paris: PUF, 1948.

• Gusdorf, Georges. “Conditions et limites de l’autobiographie.” In Formen der Selbstdarstellung, edited by Günter Reichenkron and Erich Haase, 105-123. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1956. [Reprinted in English translation in Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical, edited by James Olney, 28-48. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980.]

• Gusdorf, Georges. “Conditions and Limits of Autobiography.” Translated by James Olney. In Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical, edited by James Olney, 28-48. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980.

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Secondary Sources: Michael Hudson

• Hudson, Michael. The Destiny of Civilization: Finance Capitalism, Industrial Capitalism or Socialism. Berlin: Verlag, 2022. ISBN 9783949546075. Available online: https://michael-hudson.com/2022/05/the-destiny-of-civilization/

• Hudson, Michael. “The Lost Tradition of Biblical Debt Cancellations.” Available online:

• http://michael-hudson.com/wpcontent/uploads/2010/03/HudsonLostTradition.pdf

• Hudson, Michael. Personal Website: http://michael-hudson.com

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Secondary Sources: Kees van der Pijl

• van der Pijl, Kees. The Making of an Atlantic Ruling Class. London: Verso, 1984. New edition, 2012. ISBN 9781844678716. Available online: https://libcom.org/library/making-atlantic-ruling-class-kees-van-der-pijl

• van der Pijl, Kees. Transnational Classes and International Relations. London: Routledge, 1998. ISBN 0415192005 / 0415192013.

• van der Pijl, Kees. “Oligarchies of the World Unite.” Available online: https://www.academia.edu/12423426/Oligarchies_of_the_World_Unite