Locality is not expected to be a fundamental aspect of a full theory of quantum gravity; it should be emergent in an appropriate semiclassical limit. In the context of general holography, I'll define a new construct - the causal state - which provides a necessary and sufficient condition for a boundary state to have a holographic semiclassical dual causal geometry (and thus be "local"). This definition illuminates some general features of holographic quantum gravity: for instance, I'll show that the emergence of locality is "all or nothing" in the sense that it exhibits features of quantum error correction and quantum secret sharing. In the special case of AdS/CFT, I'll also argue that the causal state is the natural boundary dual to the so-called causal wedge of a region.