It’s time for us to remember that civic and commercial innovation can thrive on the local level as well – not just globally. The argument against Balkanization, made by US-based technology giants, has always relied on some perverse notion and at times fundamentalist notion of utopian cosmopolitanism: if only we are allow maximum interconnection, intercultural contacts will get established, people in Mali will discover people in Montana, everyone will suddenly care about African warlords like Joseph Kony, and so on. Yet, perhaps, it’s time to question whether the pursuit of this cosmopolitan agenda has served us well. We wanted to build a global village – only to end up with a global panopticon instead. There’s little evidence that people in Montana are any more concerned about Mali than two decades ago. At the same time, the cosmopolitan impulse – strategically played up by Silicon Valley in seemingly noble initiatives like Internet.org (a Facebook-led effort to get the remaining five billion people connected) has stopped us from experimenting with communication models that, while possibly less integrated at the global level, would promote different values locally.