Robinson's characters describe the knowledge that we live on a planet with eight billion people "all smashed into one big mass" as "the everything feeling"
"we feel the global village, but in a mixed-up way"
"it resembled being somewhat stunned. Not unlike despair"
Nationalism is an attempt to "[p]ull in the perimeter" so that it "gets easier"--"your language is your family" and "[y]ou still get to have your us and them"
("But it's wrong," one of Robinson's characters notes)