There's a particular flavor of optimism that people my age — late Gen X, Xennial, whatever you want to call those of us born around 1980 — remember from the 1990s and it's hard to explain to anyone younger without sounding like I'm romanticizing the past. So let me try anyway.
For a brief window, "global village" wasn't just a phrase. It felt like a culture. You'd log onto some early internet forum or chat room and end up talking to someone on the other side of the planet who lived a completely different life than you, and the feeling wasn't suspicion or comparison — it was awe. Respect. A genuine curiosity about how differently people could live and still be fundamentally decent, worth knowing, worth learning from. It was the hippie ideal all grown up and handed a modem: not "everyone should be the same," but "everyone gets to be different, and that's the whole point."
Looking back, I think the 1990s might have been one of the least judgmental stretches of my lifetime. The Cold War had just ended, the old binary that organized the whole world had snapped, and there was this open question hanging in the air: what's the story now? For a few years, "we're all in this together, and isn't that fascinating" was a real contender for the answer.
It didn't win. I want to think through why.
It Wasn't a Conspiracy — It Was Two Different Kinds of Global
My first instinct, being honest, was to wonder if that culture got deliberately dismantled — whether some control-freak class of the ultra-wealthy strangled it in the crib because a genuinely united world is harder to profit from than a divided one. There's historical precedent for that kind of thing actually happening. It's not fringe to say that elites have, at various points, actively worked to prevent broad coalitions from forming when those coalitions threatened concentrated power.
But I don't think that's really what happened here, and honestly the real answer is a little more interesting.
What I think actually happened is that two different versions of "global" got conflated, and only one of them survived.
Version one was the internet's version: information and culture flowing freely between self-sufficient, local communities. Picture little villages and small cities, mostly agrarian, each one self-sustaining — but wired together well enough that ideas, art, music, and knowledge could move freely between them. You keep the depth and integrity of local life, but you get to encounter the rest of the world too. That was the dream. It's not naive — it's basically the "small is beautiful" economic philosophy E.F. Schumacher was writing about in the 70s, applied a couple decades early to the internet age.
Version two was the supply chain's version: physical goods, physical infrastructure, and physical culture all centralizing into a small number of massive, standardized nodes. Not because anyone plotted it that way, but because centralization is just what capital prefers — it's cheaper to finance, insure, and scale one enormous thing than to support a thousand small, self-sufficient ones. Agriculture got radically more efficient per-worker over the century, which meant fewer people were needed on the land at all. Cities won on pure agglomeration economics — density creates job matching and innovation that dispersed villages structurally can't compete with.
Version two won. Not through sabotage, just through raw economic gravity. And once it won, it dragged culture along with it.
McDonaldization, Applied Globally
There's a term for what happened to culture once the infrastructure of globalization won: McDonaldization, from sociologist George Ritzer's 1993 book of the same name. His argument wasn't really about fast food — it was that a specific logic (efficiency, calculability, predictability, control) spreads to everything it touches, because that logic is what scales. And scaling is what gets funded.
The problem is that predictability is the exact opposite of what made the 90s global village feel exciting. The whole appeal was encountering something different — sitting with the fact that someone across the world does things a completely different way, and finding that fascinating rather than threatening. McDonaldization doesn't sell you difference. It sells you a thin, branded simulation of difference, because actual difference is inefficient, slow, and hard to monetize.
I felt this hard the last time I was in Puerto Vallarta. I looked out expecting some version of the awe I remembered from the 90s internet — genuine local culture, unmediated. Instead: a Walmart. A Sam's Club. A Señor Frogs.
That last one might be the most telling of the three. A Walmart is at least honest about being a foreign chain plopped down somewhere — it's not pretending to be Mexican. Señor Frogs is worse in a quieter way: it's a costume. A tourist-facing simulation of "Mexican-ness," built specifically to be sold, sitting on the same strip where actual local culture — unglamorous, non-photogenic, not organized around selling you an experience — has been priced out or pushed to the margins. Some sociologists call this McDisneyization: not just standardizing the product, but theme-parking the identity of a place until the real thing and the marketed version are two separate, barely-related things.
What Got Lost in the Split
Here's the part that actually bothers me, once I trace it all the way through: the internet could have delivered the good version cheaply. A webpage, a forum post, an email thread — genuine cultural exchange doesn't require much infrastructure. It's slow and unpredictable and hard to monetize, sure, but it's also cheap to run.
Physical retail and physical tourism can't do that. Density and standardization win on cost every single time you're moving physical goods or building physical infrastructure. So the parts of globalization that scaled were the parts that could be made efficient — supply chains, resort corridors, franchise retail — and the parts that couldn't be made efficient, the slow and genuine cultural depth part, got starved out by comparison. Not eliminated by any one villain. Just outcompeted, structurally, by the version of "global" that happened to be cheaper to build.
I don't think the 90s global village dream was wrong. I think it was the correct instinct riding on the wrong infrastructure — an instinct about openness and curiosity that assumed the physical and economic world would scale the same way information does. It doesn't. Information is nearly free to move. Everything else is not, and the "everything else" won.
Where That Leaves Us
I don't have a tidy ending for this one. I'm not convinced there's a villain to point at, which is somehow less satisfying than if there were. What I keep coming back to is that the human material — most people's actual instinct toward curiosity and cooperation rather than tribalism — was never really the problem. The 90s internet correctly bet on that instinct. It just underestimated how much cheaper and faster the homogenizing version of "global" would be to build, and how much that cost difference would end up mattering.
Maybe the real project now, if there is one, is figuring out how to build the distributed, small-is-beautiful version of connectedness deliberately, instead of assuming it'll win on its own merits. Because left alone, it turns out it doesn't.