Imagine a farmer in rural Oregon who needs to coordinate with other local food producers, share knowledge about regenerative practices, and access funding for community projects. At the same time, he wants to connect with similar farming networks across bioregions, learn from innovations happening globally, and contribute to a shared knowledge commons. This scenario perfectly captures what cosmolocalism is about—and why Ethereum serves as ideal infrastructure for making it real.
Cosmolocalism, as theorist Michel Bauwens explains, follows one simple principle: "What is heavy should be local, and what is light should be global and shared."
Heavy things—like food production, manufacturing, and energy generation - should happen close to where they're needed. Light things—like knowledge, designs, protocols, and coordination mechanisms - should be shared instantly across global networks.
How Ethereum Embodies Cosmolocal Principles
What makes Ethereum fundamentally cosmolocal?
While it operates as a global network, every single operation happens locally. Every transaction is processed by specific computers in particular places. Every piece of data is stored on machines tended by real people in real communities. Every smart contract execution uses electricity from local power grids.
This isn't just philosophical, it's practically important.
When we recognize that Ethereum nodes exist within actual ecosystems, drawing power from local grids and requiring maintenance by local technicians, we start to see how global protocols can be ecologically embedded rather than extractive.
Sharing Knowledge, Localizing Production
The current global system is wastefully inefficient. As Bauwens notes, "The current global system of production and trade is reported to use three times more of its resource use for transport, not for making." We ship materials around the world multiple times before creating finished products. This creates both ecological damage and economic fragility.
Ethereum enables a different approach. Instead of shipping heavy physical goods globally, we can share light digital protocols globally and use them to coordinate local production.
The CosmoLocal Economy
Marcus Barrick points out that current economic thinking focuses almost exclusively on quantitative scaling: "bigger is better, more is always more." But cosmolocal economics focuses on qualitative scaling—improving the relationships and processes that enable high-quality local production everywhere.
As Barrick notes, "a tree packages the smallest amount of nutrients and information to travel long distances within a seed, it does not regrow a tree beside it and then ship it away to long distances"
Ethereum enables this kind of qualitative scaling by packaging coordination protocols and knowledge into easily shareable digital "seeds" that can grow into locally adapted economic systems.
Ethereum's Cosmolocal Capabilities
-> Universal Ledger for Local Coordination
-> Programmable Currencies for Community Value
-> Public Goods Funding
Blockchain technology provides what Bauwens calls "a vast capacity for translocal coordination, and creates a new fourth sector model of 'organized networks based on common infrastructure.'" This isn't just about financial transactions—it's about creating transparent, tamper-proof records of contributions, resource flows, and decision-making processes that local communities need.
Think about a bioregional network of food producers. They need to track contributions, coordinate distribution, manage shared resources, and make collective decisions. Ethereum provides the infrastructure for all of this without requiring centralized authorities or extractive intermediaries.
Real-World Applications of Cosmolocal Ethereum
-> AgroforestDAO: Digital Protocols for Soil Regeneration
AgroforestDAO brings people together to heal land with trees—locally rooted, globally coordinated. Using Ethereum tools like DAOs and ReFi, they fund soil regeneration while sharing knowledge openly. It’s shovels in hand, powered by code.
-> Neighbourhoods: Data Sovereignty for Local Coordination
Neighbourhoods flips digital power dynamics—local communities build their own coordination apps on Holochain, owning their data and rules. It’s cosmolocal infrastructure where the network serves the neighborhood, not Silicon Valley.
-> JournoDAO: Information Resilience Through Networks
JournoDAO defends truth from the ground up. By funding local journalism onchain, they help communities resist media monopolies and misinformation—replacing ads with collective support. It’s information resilience, blockchain-backed and citizen-owned.
The Gap Between Potential and Practice
Despite Ethereum's cosmolocal potential, significant obstacles remain:
-> Disconnected Ecosystems: Crypto and impact funding are not finding their way to local production ecosystems.Barely involved in real-world, physical production.
-> Limited Cross-Pollination: Local commons and digital nomads remain poorly connected for now.
-> Scale Mismatch: Local communities often remain small and weak, lacking the social and financial power to scale.
The result is two parallel worlds: A thriving and well-funded field of Web3 technologies, unconnected and unrelated to actual physical production. On the other hand, we have an explosion of underfunded local production.
Bridging these worlds requires finding natural intersection points where global protocols genuinely enhance local capacity.
This is what Bonfires is building: a novel fundraising mechanism, to access the cosmo, in service of the local.
Communities need better coordination tools, sustainable funding mechanisms, and ways to share knowledge across networks. Ethereum provides technical infrastructure for all of this.
But adoption happens when communities see these tools as genuinely useful for their existing work, not as replacements for their existing relationships and practices.
Homecoming
The most profound insight about Ethereum as cosmolocal infrastructure may be that it enables us to use our most sophisticated tools to help us come home. Ethereum serves cosmolocalism not by replacing local coordination but by providing the light, shareable infrastructure that makes local coordination more effective and connected.
Bonfires is here to light up this Dark Forest.
