The global village has failed, but a global city may succeed

The term “The Global Village”, is closely associated with the Canadian born author Marshall McLuhan, who used it to describe the effect of the electronic media, and especially television, on the global culture. More than 50 years later, it looks like many people are disappointed with the effects of what may be called, “One-to-many driven globalization", and either feel left behind or just find it hard to adapt. The result is a backlash of nationalism and anti-globalization, and as much as this sentiment may be understable, the fact is that the wheel cannot be turned back. Globalization is an irreversible reality in many ways. But perhaps, it can be made much better if it will be based on another model. That of a big city, rather than of a village.

Cities are one of humankind's greatest inventions. Of course not all cities are great and not everything is great even in the best cities, but still, if you think about it, even the most miserable cities allow a very large mass of people live and work in an incredibly compact space, while making highly efficient use of shared resources.

The first cities appeared about 6000 years ago and back then were not larger than a big modern village, but right from the beginning they had the recognizable features that characterize cities to this day - A dense construction of residence buildings, organized on both sides of straight streets, specialized commerce and government districts, and centralized infrastructures of drinking water and drainage, etc. This design turned out to be highly scalable, and enabled cities to grow to the megalopoli of today.

As someone who only moved to the big city at his twenties, I can understand why many people don't like cities that much and would rather live in a small place, in a more rural area. On the other hand, I can also tell why I didn't like that too much. Small villages are not scalable. They limit the growth, not just of their population but also of individuals within the population.

In a village, people are expected to have strong community ties. They know one another much more intimately and gossip travels very fast. This causes a restraining effect that either holds the size of the community under a certain threshold, or if this threshold is crossed for some reason, harms the community and may even cause it to collapse. We can see this effect in “bad neighborhoods” of cities, which are in fact not really a part of the city’s society but rather over bloated villages.

The residents of the Favelas of Rio, the slams of Mumbai and Delhi, and other shack towns around the world are people who dreamed about a city life but failed short of realizing their dream, and this is very much the same as what happened to the global village vision. The centralized, one-to-many model that it is based upon could not really sustain the size and complexity of the whole of humankind. As a result, “the bad guys”, extremists and populists could take advantage of it more than the ordinary, good people.

So what we need is a new kind of globalization, one that is based on the model of a city and not of a village. On peer to peer communication and bottom-up growth. One in which technology provides a scalable infrastructure, with the concept of trust built in as an emergent quality of the system. Does that seem familiar? Of course it does, because this is what the Blockchain is.

And this is why Blockchain based social networks like Steemit can play a significant role in this new Globalization process.

I say, “Like Steemit”, because as it is now, Steemit has too much of a village mentality, and if we want it to have a significant impact, that has to change. Now don't get me wrong. I am not saying that a village mentality is a bad thing. It's just that if Steemit stick to it, it will miss the opportunity to have that impact, and quite simply, someone else will create another Blockchain based social network that will. Personally, I am.just waiting to see what changes are planned for Steemit, and if they are in this direction.