Local in values and principles is precisely what leads to an echo chamber. Of course, an echo chamber is very much the state of the paleolithic human...
I didn't think about this koan for more than three minutes.
I don't follow this very well myself. I also don't do paleo for that matter. I'm a baker. I think pies and pancakes are awesome, French bread is the height of human civilization, and while I try to moderate these things I wouldn't give them up unless they were killing me painfully. (I live in fear of gluten intolerance and eat a muffin every time I think about it.)
When I wrote "local" I tried to find the better word. In the end, "local" is pretty good because it captures the paleo theme; our pre-literate ancestors were always local. But this is 2012 and we shouldn't read that word literally. Think of "local" as "among your friends, family, and neighbors".
This "echo chamber" concept deserves its own essay. Here I will say that the word "mostly" is there for a reason, as it was in the quote I stole it from: Michael Pollan is no more opposed to French bread than I.
And I wish I could give the same loving attention to the words of seven hundred diverse people, or seven thousand people, or seventy thousand people, which would bring me up to almost 0.001% of the people currently alive - but of course I should save some time for the great works of people now dead - but this is impossible, just as my living until 2170 is impossible, and the era has come where we need to face that squarely, because the technology is there but the human capability is not. You can meaningfully hear the words of a few hundred people per day, tops, and if those people are all different each day it isn't good for your personality.
Yeah, obviously giving every voice equal weight isn't practical, and whatever filter you apply is likely to introduce some kind of bias. I'm not saying that the fact that you get echo chamber effects devastates the whole notion, just that it is a failure mode you should be aware of if pursuing something like this, and that "local in values and principles" is worse than "local geographically" as pertains to this specific effect.
Edited to add:
In fact, "mostly local" helps address a failure mode we see presently - if you only hear news from your tribe and a little from neighboring tribes, things you hear about are far more likely to be significant.
