
What to do once you admit that decentralization never seems to work (2018) - abdullahkhalids
https://hackernoon.com/decentralizing-everything-never-seems-to-work-2bb0461bd168
======
hn_throwaway_99
One thing I don't see argued very much is that lowering barriers to entry and
providing more frictionless access usually inevitably leads to _more_
consolidation, not less. When there is very open access (e.g. "Anyone with a
computer can spin up a website!") it means that users will choose services
that even have small improvements or advantages, until those services build up
so much market share that they inevitably have huge moats to competition. I've
heard lots of comments along the lines of "I wish Amazon had more
competition!", but then those same folks will choose a service if it's 10c
cheaper or if a product can arrive an hour faster.

On the contrary, if you look at businesses where there is _not_ huge
consolidation, it is often because there is "market unfriendly" regulation.
E.g. there are many rich car dealers spread throughout the US because they've
put in place so many anti-competitive regulations. While I'd love it if Tesla
could sell direct everywhere, it also means a lot of this wealth that
currently stays relatively local would get sucked up by a Silicon Valley
corporation. Same thing goes for Realtors and the real estate business.

As a consumer I love more open markets, but I don't think we've fully
addressed the consequences of how this leads to greater inequality and
consolidation of services.

~~~
zeroonetwothree
The car dealer model is extremely bad for consumers. It seems weird to herald
it as some kind of achievement.

~~~
coldtea
Enlightenment comes when you realize that being a consumer is not a 24/7
occupation.

The same people who consume also need to be either small business owners,
freelancers, or employees. In fact without the money from that, they couldn't
be consumers in the first place.

So what's bad for a consumer role can balance out or be very good if it helps
keep more people making money as opposed to the "efficient single corporation
with the minimal workforce" selling everything". Such corporations are how
many small towns in America turned into wastelands...

You need middlemen, even if it's not the most efficient productivity wise,
because it helps make more money go around, stay local, and keep communities
livable.

The alternative is a future with a 20% working, a 0.01% corporate overlords
with the top end having Bezos style riches, and 80% barely making ends meet,
living in slums, and we're getting there...

~~~
edoo
Nearly every law in the US is a weaponized corporate action to prevent
competition and secure market hold. That already happened. That is the root
cause of the wealth disparity. You argue for more of the same. The government
will not be able to fix problems it created. It will only make them worse.

~~~
CyanBird
This Friedman-like thinking and cute propaganda sound bytes just doesn't work
tho

Chile during the Pinochet Regime is an excellent example of the Neoliberal
system not delivering on the promises, as hn_throwaway_99 mentioned, economies
of scale simply take over any benefit of low gov friction "free markets", and
any small advantage over time becomes an overwhelming one. At which point it
simply becomes a mathematical snowball effect, reducing or removing government
barriers of entry won't make your particular gadget or doodad be able to
compete in quality nor cost against one produced by a huge mega-conglomerate,
if anything that mega-conglomerate will see if it can steal your idea or buy
the patent (gov!) so it can improve its own. It is the same thing that happens
in South Korea with the Chaebols

Anyhow, point being, the Kansas Experiment failed[1], Chilean Chicago Boys
Experiment failed to deliver after ~17 years of authoritarian rule(When
Pinochet left power country had a ~40% poverty rate)[2]

This leads to the simple idea that the less friction your system has to accrue
wealth the higher wealth inequality will be, and then the goal should be to
make it as easy as possible for everybody to make their own start ups, but to
create as much friction as possible for said startups to gain too much economy
of scale momentum. Where the threshold of where that line would be, be left to
policy makers, and ideally something politically independent, akin to the
central bank

[1] [https://www.npr.org/2017/10/25/560040131/as-trump-
proposes-t...](https://www.npr.org/2017/10/25/560040131/as-trump-proposes-tax-
cuts-kansas-deals-with-aftermath-of-experiment)

[2] [https://imgur.com/BpwMlBy](https://imgur.com/BpwMlBy)

Pg17 United Nations Document
[https://www.undp.org/content/dam/chile/docs/pobreza/undp_cl_...](https://www.undp.org/content/dam/chile/docs/pobreza/undp_cl_pobreza_cap_7_desiguypob.pdf)

~~~
squirrelicus
But... Like... Economies of scale are literally what gave the capitalist West
it's unthinkably high standard of living.

~~~
coldtea
Can't tell if sarcasm or not, but the US doesn't have some "unthinkably high
standard of living".

It's actually below most western European countries in most global metrics,
including such basics as infant mortality. It trumps most in gun deaths and
incarceration rates though, so there's that...

E.g.

[http://premieroffshore.com/usa-is-best-country-in-the-
world/](http://premieroffshore.com/usa-is-best-country-in-the-world/)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_rankings_of_the_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_rankings_of_the_United_States)

[https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/09/180924190303.h...](https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/09/180924190303.htm)

[https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/02/15/u-s-
student...](https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/02/15/u-s-students-
internationally-math-science/)

And those countries have much less megacorps and "economies of scale"....

~~~
perl4ever
The World Bank[1] says in 2018, US GDP per capita was over $62K while the EU
was under $37K. That seems like a huge difference to me and I don't think
anybody really understands why it exists - American or not. It's salient not
because it _disproves_ your judgment (and that of many others) that the US is
a dysfunctional hellhole, but because it is what people are compelled to
rationalize away and obviously don't succeed on their own terms.

[1][https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?location...](https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?locations=EU-
US)

~~~
CyanBird
>The World Bank[1] says in 2018, US GDP per capita was over $62K while the EU
was under $37K

This is meaningless because it is not normalized, the EU has a higher
purchasing power parity than the US which is what your average citizen truly
cares about

[https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/08/09/few-see-
eu-...](https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/08/09/few-see-eu-as-worlds-
top-economic-power-despite-its-relative-might/)

Post-Hard Brexit it will probably change, EU PPP has already been damaged by
the current Brexit scandals, and the last few years of increased US Dollar
interest rate has increased relative US PPP, but because of income inequality
those financial changes aren't really transferred to the everyday US citizen

Also, the difference in raw incomes is mostly based of the so called
"Exorbitant Privilege" the US has for having its currency be the default world
reserve currency, it is quite easy to understand when one comprehends that the
US central bank basically "prints gold", and that like ~60% of all
international transactions are done abroad but with the US dollar as
transaction medium

~~~
perl4ever
"This is meaningless because it is not normalized, the EU has a higher
purchasing power parity than the US"

I find it rather unbelievable that things are cheaper in Europe. A few years
back, I used to work for a multinational, which opened an office there, and
some people I knew went and at least one or two stayed, which lead me to idly
consider the idea of being an expat, and my cursory research indicated
salaries are lower _and_ the cost of living is higher.

~~~
CyanBird
I mean, from my perspective, just the fact that you had the chance to work
abroad for a multinational would put you _way_ ahead of the wage the median US
citizen has to survive on, so your experience is not representative of the
median, let alone PPP stats

------
zelly
Decentralization the way the crypto crowd wants can only happen if everyone
has a server at home, some consumer-grade ARM box that you plug in and forget.
It should be configured to work out of the box without the customer ever
having to use the shell.

• your own Nextcloud server to replace Dropbox, GCal

• email server (replace Gmail)

• torrent seedbox (replace Netflix, Spotify, etc.)

• personal Bitcoin node (replace banking and reliance on centralized Bitcoin
miners)

• ActivityPub/Mastodon (replace FB/TWTR)

If you want to message someone, you don't use WhatsApp--you talk directly to
their self-hosted XMPP server. You verify your own monetary transactions on
your Bitcoin node without having to rely on a third-party service. You and
your friends participate in your own ActivityPub social network.

There are a lot of problems with this obviously. You lose out on the
discoverability that centralized hubs give you. On centralized networks, you
can find someone on the other side of the world just as easily as you could
find your neighbor. A decentralized world brings you back in time to where you
are more limited to the people in your physical area or the online niches you
run in. Do you want to sacrifice globalization to have decentralization?

~~~
humanrebar
Fraud is probably a harder problem than discoverability. You can always
exchange (maybe through an automated pairing) IPv6 addresses if nothing else.
Supporting chargebacks, eliminating spam, blocking phishing, etc. if both
harder and more important to a functioning culture.

~~~
zelly
Agreed. More broadly, decentralization is less equipped to counteract bad
actors. You really are on your own, but isn't that what you asked for when you
wanted to abandon Facebook/Google/government.

A decentralized network cannot be trusted by nature. Anyone can join and lie.
Successful decentralized networks need some cryptographically-secure checksum
to verify its inputs: BitTorrent uses SHA-1; Bitcoin uses Merkle trees. The
network participants are just dumb mirrors to provide redundancy and compute.
This solves the problem of the integrity of the information, but there is no
such analogue for verifying the behavior of humans using the network. For
example, you can download a valid BitTorrent file that is also a trojan (virus
databases are centralized), or you could send Bitcoin to a Nigerian prince
(third-party escrow layers are centralized). There is no algorithm to make
sure what you're doing is ethical.

Imagine running reCAPTCHA as a decentralized service that runs on random
people's machines. Impossible.

There is no way to flip a switch and change everything from centralized to
decentralized without making major sacrifices. No one wants to go back to the
dial-up era. Much of the lauded results of the internet are actually a result
of its centralization.

~~~
tpxl
Decentralized networks lend themselves to far better moderation than
centralized. Private forums have always had better moderation than something
like reddit. Well, not all, but you can ignore those ;)

~~~
perl4ever
Usenet?

------
zby
Decentralization is good when there is no need for coordination. We sometimes
like to collaborate - but we don't like the constant requirement of mandatory
coordination. Unfortunately technology connects us more and more and that
means that coordination and un-coordination brings more and more externalities
(positive and negative respectively).

Decentralization works in cases that are like we were back to the near empty
savannah and where everybody could just go in his own direction. The Internet
was once like that - but it is not any more, it is rather the reverse.

By the way, just a few hours ago I submitted to HN this article:
[https://www.interfluidity.com/v2/7230.html](https://www.interfluidity.com/v2/7230.html)
\- it is about these tensions between our freedom to do whatever we like and
the need for coordination in a more and more connected world.

------
mLuby
>Such centralized government power, too, may be the only force capable of
counteracting the centralized power of corporations that are less accountable
to the people whose lives they affect. In ways like this, most effective forms
of decentralization actually imply some form of balance between centralized
and decentralized power.

A previous HN post said it best: what decentralists want is to reclaim power
from larger organizations—power over their data and identity, power to switch
to a competitor's client or build their own, etc. It's similar to the right-
to-repair movement that way.

The problem is that governments, corporations—groups really—can always be more
powerful than an individual. That makes it advantageous to join one against
your fellow individual. Plus once you pay your initiation fee to the group
(usually giving up some autonomy), the marginal cost to you for additional
members is often very low, or may even be outweighed by the marginal benefits,
so you'll stay and the group aggregates members.

Perhaps a field of individuals constantly vigilant could band together to
sunder any proto-group before it gains traction (and then they'd have to
disband themselves before becoming the target). Though I imagine that would be
a constant arms race to detect group formation, and we've all see how
apathetic people are toward even flagrant digital malpractice.

Or maybe the government decrees that no company can have more than 10% market
share. Bring on the conglomerates and umbrella corps.

Perhaps resources can't be efficiently decentralized, only stateless
protocols. Is that alone worth the effort? There would still be vendor lock-
in.

All I know is I want to wrest more power from corporations than I currently
have over my digital experience without losing access to the resources they
cloister.

------
mark_l_watson
The author of the article wrote a book ‘Everything for Everyone’ that looks
interesting. It is about organizing coops as a push back against the gig
economy or large corporations.

My first job was at what was essentially a huge coop: the 100% employee owned
defense contractor SAIC. SAIC spoiled me for all other jobs I had because
there was a good vibe and efficiency that came with all employees having a
strong motivation for the long term success of the company. After I left SAIC,
it eventually became a public company and changed its name to Leidos.

~~~
mcguire
I worked for SAIC before and after the Leidos split. It may have been a 100%
employee-owned "coop", but it was clear that some employees got more out of
the success than others. And it was always a government contractor like all of
the other contractors out there.

~~~
perl4ever
I'd be curious to hear what Sun Hydraulics or King Arthur Flour were like from
someone who worked there.

------
tannhaeuser
> _Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), for instance, has been a
> critical governance body for the Web’s technical standards, enabling similar
> user experience across servers and browsers_

I'm all for real standards, and believe W3C has acted in good faith, but in
what shape is W3C's standardization process now (hint: they cancelled the HTML
5.3 and SVG 2 spec) and where has it lead us?

~~~
TheRealPomax
You know _why_ they cancelled HTML 5.3, right? A different group had (what the
world at least concluded was) better ideas for HTML5, took the spec, declared
it "living" rather than versioned, and declared itself the authority on HTML.
For a while that meant we had _two_ HTML 5 specs, at odds with each other, and
eventually W3C had no choice but to acknowledge their coup had succeeded (for
better or for worse) because the world ended up siding with WhatWG instead of
W3C.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML#Transition_of_HTML_Public...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML#Transition_of_HTML_Publication_to_WHATWG)

~~~
tannhaeuser
WHATWG formed as an initiative of browser vendors to collaborate on new
browser functionality and other stuff that needed coordination, and there's
nothing wrong with that. The problem now is this has led the web stack to be
defined by a closed club with fewer and fewer members, with incentives not
necessarily aligned with users.

But the web isn't just a browser vendor's gamble; it's used for vital
communication and documentation in business, education, administration, media,
science, law, medicine, etc. If we want to depend on the web (and spend
billions on it), then there ought to be some representation and participation,
since there clearly is public interest, and possibly funding. Maybe people
looked at W3C to organize these interests, but indeed W3C has failed this
expectation by statue.

What they're doing instead is publishing redacted WHATWG snapshots (and have
announced to not even do any redaction in the future). In other words, they're
publishing work-in-progress collaborative documents without significant
contributions and editorial. Having a point of reference is still something I
guess (I'm even basing my HTML 5.x SGML DTDs on W3C's snapshots [1]) but not
advancing the interest of web users, which W3C should have made their goal.

[1]: [http://sgmljs.net/docs/html52.html](http://sgmljs.net/docs/html52.html)

~~~
TheRealPomax
This seems a false, or at least uninformed, statement. WhatWG is just as
closed as W3C was: the discussions are public, and anyone can contribute to
them. Is there a hurdle that you need to overcome to show you actually care
enough before you're allowed to participate? Sure. But it's the kind of hurdle
that anyone with an email address can overcome. You're not excluded just
because you don't work for "a browser vendor".

Also, it feels like you're confusing the end user with the developers.
Business, education, admininstration, media, science, law, medicine, etc. are
all fields that rely on the web _through_ browsers and browser components,
made by browser vendors. Whether that's IE6, or WebKit, or Electron, or
Android Webview. So yes: the browser vendors are absolutely the people
primarily pulling the strings, and pushing the envelope, which makes a whole
lot of sense: it's their collective product they're curating.

------
sprash
There are many market participants that push against decentralization at all
cost (e.g. one of the reasons Google shut down Google Reader is that RSS does
not fit in their business model). Decentralization is always bad news for
those who like to control things, own present centralized infrastructure or
use gate keeping as a measure to make money.

So just because decentralization is constantly under attack doesn't mean it's
bad or even that it "doesn't work" as the author claims. If it works or not
can be determined by cryptologists and mathematicians on a case by case basis
and not by some "assistant professor of Media Studies" who has actually zero
authority in this field.

Of course the protocols that are required to make decentralization possible
need to be centralized. But that is a stupid argument. The laws of physics are
the same everywhere in the universe. That doesn't mean the universe is
centralized.

------
nwah1
Decentralization and devolution are often confused. For instance, in the US
Civil War, the splintering could be described as devolution. But it certainly
wasn't decentralizing power to the slaves. Which side was the side of
"decentralization?" It's almost a meaningless question, unless being very well
defined.

Obviously, the Pareto Principle is usually at work, even if protocols are
decentralized by design. Email is decentralized by design, but centralized in
practice.

Even if one were to capture political control and attempt to redesign
governance to be decentralized, there would still be a type of natural
selection process for systems which seek to reproduce and expand, by all
possible means including violence.

And decentralization and non-violence are also different, as well.
Decentralized collective violence is common.

~~~
nyolfen
>For instance, in the US Civil War, the splintering could be described as
devolution. But it certainly wasn't decentralizing power to the slaves.

it was decentralizing in the sense that secession was meant to grant political
authority to local elites. 'devolution' just sounds like a moral judgment,
which while fair is not very useful for these purposes.

~~~
mikeash
In what way does it sound like a moral judgement?

~~~
nyolfen
devolution implies a return to a previous, lower level of sophistication.
since the US was not previously split into two regional political structures,
it's not an accurate descriptor, so it sounds more like an attack on the
legitimacy of such an order. critiques of the legitimacy of the confederacy
are typically moral in nature.

~~~
mikeash
I thought it just meant to delegate power from a higher level of government to
more local governments. I don’t recall ever seeing it used to imply any sort
of backward movement.

~~~
nyolfen
ha! you're right, i'd never come across the term and thought it was simply
being used as the inverse of evolution. i rescind.

~~~
mikeash
Fair enough. This stupid language can be confusing.

------
open-source-ux
Decentralisation will never happen on a scale that will affect significant web
traffic.

However, there is another model for web apps, not purely decentralised, but a
practical option where traffic is not funnelled through a small number of big
players. Let's call it the WordPress model.

Consider the following: WordPress is an example of a profitable open source
app that can easily be installed on countless shared hosting platforms or on a
VPS. It's easy to switch hosting providers when you want to (rather than be
locked into one provider). You can take your data with you when you switch.
The popularity of WordPress means that one-click installs are widespread. Many
providers also offer a 'managed' service where they take care of back-up and
updates. But crucially you're still not tied to a single provider.

Now imagine if all web apps were as easy to install on the server via a one-
click installation like WordPress. Unfortunately, there is no common standard
or API for software installation on the server side, and this lack of an easy
installation process for everyone severely limits self-hosting websites and
apps.

Many developers think deploying a server-side web app is a non-issue, or they
erroneously think that installing Cloudron/providing Docker instances/typing
command line instructions are all "easy". Have you seen the server deployment
instructions for "web friendly" languages like Ruby and Python? They're
ludicrously complicated. Developers are completely blind to the complexity and
see nothing wrong in such installation procedures.

The result is ever-growing centralised software through the SaaS model which
beats the self-hosting alternative in simplicity every single time. Imagine if
your local desktop apps were completely controlled, tracked and even
terminated remotely by one provider - don't like the though of that? Yet, that
is exactly what the centralised Saas model enables and nobody blinks an eye.

I wish there was some momentum or traction in making server-side web app
installation as universally simple as a one-click WordPress install for all
for all web apps. It would unlock countless opportunities for developers to
reach more users or customers. I'm not one for conspiracies, but I wonder
sometimes if developers actually prefer the complexity of server-side
installation because it makes selling a SaaS solution much more attractive
over the ludicrously complicated self-hosting option.

~~~
bryanrasmussen
I find the steps I have to go through to install stuff that I expect thousands
of other people must be installing at the same time on a cloud service
ridiculously complicated. The same with most tasks.

I do however find them doable and maybe also a kind of job security for that
reason. But I don't prefer them. I want to build stuff, not do a bunch of prep
work every time I want to build stuff.

~~~
netsensei
Decentralisation isn't a collection of technology. Rather, it's a set of
principles or tenets. It's above all the by-product of the choices one makes.

Sure, you can install a gazillion packages, use serverless, static site
generators, SaaS platforms, install CMS x, y or z.

But then again, you can still use a simple FTP program, copy HTML files over
TCP/IP to a remote server with a process running in the background that
listens for incoming HTTP requests. Your browser will still be able to from
the HTML it receives via a HTTP response. In fact, you don't need a browser.
Curl or Telnet will yield a string of text characters any human can read.

Those basic protocols still exist after 30 years and underpin the Web. Nothing
changed fundamentally, when you dig deep.

As such, you could lease a shared hosting somewhere and put up your own set of
HTML pages and slap a DNS domain to the IP of the server. Boom.
Congratulations. You own a website now.

Decentralisation - at it's core - is about ownership. If you put content and
data on a host, who owns that? You or the owner of the host? This is where the
entire discussion becomes a legal debate.

The big shift of the past decade is that social media offer easy access to
centralised hosts they own. This has caused a massive influx of users to
publish stuff on hosts that are owned by others.

Meanwhile, there's this perception that you need a gazillion tools to build a
website. That you need deep knowledge of languages and such to publish HTML
formatted content on a host you own.

This couldn't be further from the truth. Unless you are a business, or an
organisation and you need to manage tons HTML formatted content, you can do
away with a text editor, basic HTML and shared hosting you pay a tuppence for.

The only reason why things got complex because of business reasons.

~~~
jasode
_> Decentralisation - at it's core - is about ownership. If you put content
and data on a host, who owns that? You or the owner of the host? This is where
the entire discussion becomes a legal debate._

Your analysis that _" ownership of data"_ being the core tenet of
decentralization is incorrect. Consider the 3 major examples of centralization
complaints:

\- Youtube is too centralized. A decentralized alternative is PeerTube. Is
this about _ownership_? No because Youtube's TOS specifically says the
uploader to Youtube _retains ownership_ of the content.[1]

\- Twitter is too centralized. A decentralized alternative is Mastodon. But
it's not about ownership of data. The Twitter TOS says the user retains
copyright ownership of the tweets.[2]

\- Facebook is too centralized. But again, the various decentralized
alternatives do not change the terms of content ownership. Facebook TOS says
the user keeps ownership.[3]

What the 3 examples show is that _data ownership_ isn't the issue. The real
issues of centralized services are _power_ and _audience reach_.

If a musician writes an original song and films an music video, and then
uploads it to Youtube, the musician retains the data ownership and the
intellectual copyrights. Because _intellectual property ownership_ wasn't
transferred, Youtube can be seen as a glorified content-delivery-network
cache. (And there's the rub... that so-called "cdn" of Youtube has attracted a
billion eyeballs.) That means there are different issues that motivates
decentralisation; e.g. the _power_ to filter/rank/recommend/censor/demonetize
videos. The concentration of _massive audience reach_ in Youtube's centralized
service that makes the musician's decision to host his music video on his own
home server _irrelevant_.

I think those 3 examples should trigger a rethink of your mental framework
that led you to conclude data ownership is the main issue.

[1] excerpt from
[https://www.youtube.com/t/terms](https://www.youtube.com/t/terms) : _6.C -
For clarity, you retain all of your ownership rights in your Content. However,
by submitting Content to YouTube, you hereby grant YouTube a worldwide, non-
exclusive, royalty-free, sublicenseable and transferable license to use,
[...]_

[2] excerpt from [https://twitter.com/en/tos](https://twitter.com/en/tos) :
_You retain your rights to any Content you submit, post or display on or
through the Services. What’s yours is yours — you own your Content (and your
incorporated audio, photos and videos are considered part of the Content). By
submitting, posting or displaying Content on or through the Services, you
grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license (with the right to
sublicense) to use, [...]_

[3] excerpt from
[https://www.facebook.com/legal/terms](https://www.facebook.com/legal/terms) :
_" You own the intellectual property rights (things like copyright or
trademarks) in any such content that you create and share on Facebook and the
other Facebook Company Products you use. Nothing in these Terms takes away the
rights you have to your own content. You are free to share your content with
anyone else, wherever you want. However, to provide our services we need you
to give us some legal permissions (known as a ‘license’) to use this content.
This is solely for the purposes of providing and improving our Products and
services as described in Section 1 above. Specifically, when you share, post,
or upload content that is covered by intellectual property rights on or in
connection with our Products, you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-
licensable, royalty-free, and worldwide license to host, use, [...]_

~~~
GhettoMaestro
I disagree with your assertion that this is not about ownership.

Each of those TOS agreements has the same canned phrase:

[...] you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free
[...]

This is a weasel clause. "Yeah, you retain ownership, but you must also give
us a license. But you still own it!"

Rightttttttttttt.

------
carapace
I've been reading Robert Anton Wilson this morning, so I'm all hopped up on
conspiracy theory (what do you call it when the conspiracies are real?)

Anyhow, the system is "works as intended", in re: mass automation of society.

You want decentralization because you want power.

Let me tell you a story about power and decentralization:

Many years ago a friend of mine an I were rambling in the Mission district (of
SF) late at night. He said, "Hey, check this out." and made a kind of bird
call. It was answered from several places within a few blocks around us, and
we could hear other echoes further out as the call propagated. "Those are the
people in the gangs."

Most of us just aren't that motivated.

"the history of the world is the history of warfare between secret societies"
~Ishmael Reed

~~~
rhizome
> _Anyhow, the system is "works as intended", in re: mass automation of
> society._

Wait, what is the idea that "the system has an intent" based on?

~~~
carapace
That's actually several interesting questions.

One aspect is the existential angst of the species, i.e. "Which is worse? That
the world is ruled by the Iluminati. or that it isn't?" Is there a God or do
we really have to do the job ourselves? Are we the victims of chance in an
uncaring universe, and the sweep of progress merely an illusion? Or are we in
fact the self-creating Telos of a sentient Universe?

Does Humanity have a Soul? If not, can we _Create_ one?

\- - - -

Even if we suppose that "the system" is ruled by an elite (which is arguably
true†) can we suppose that the elite is unified and harmonious in their
intent? Or are we caught up in "warfare between secret societies" after all?
Certainly the recent increase in atmospheric CO2 can't be part of any sane
plan, can it?

\- - - -

In one of the Subgenius books there's a story about how humanity is actually a
biological weapon of the anaerobic microbes used in their ancient war with the
oxygen-breathers, and the current climate crisis is their gambit, we're doing
our jobs.

\- - - -

All I'm really saying is that both "system" and "intent" are open-ended
terms...

"What Bodies Think About: Bioelectric Computation Outside the Nervous System"
(youtube.com)
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18736698](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18736698)

\- - - -

But yeah, the Internet et. al. are basically working in the way that the elite
want them to to keep control of the masses, however imperfectly. Watch Hong
Kong and you can see "the system" adapt in near-real-time. The next episode is
happening _right now_.

† "Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average
Citizens"

> Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups
> representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S.
> government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups
> have little or no independent influence.

[https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/fi...](https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/files/gilens_and_page_2014_-testing_theories_of_american_politics.doc.pdf)

------
kartoffelwaffel
> decentralization never seems to work

Not true, and there is many technologies, both new and established, which are
fundamentally decentralized. Bittorrent is the first example that springs to
mind. Cryptocurrencies are another example, etc.

~~~
alkonaut
BitTorrent the protocol is decentralized but again when one of the largest
torrent sites goes down it shows. That the protocol was decentralized didn’t
make the usage pattern decentralized because it’s so convenient with
centralization. And the same again with git: when github goes down we see that
a distributed version control protocol isn’t very different from a centralized
one if we all use centralized servers and usage patterns (which almost
everyone does).

~~~
davnicwil
On the github point, agree that I've never come across a non centralised
workflow with git - what are the decentralised git workflows?

The issues involved with everyone pulling from everyone, dealing with merge
conflicts, etc in a distributed way with no agreed upon, central, source of
truth seems fairly implausible for any reasonably sized team but I'd love to
know if there are gitflow style workflows for this that make it easier than it
first appears.

~~~
danShumway
> I've never come across a non centralised workflow with git

Even in centralized workflows, the decentralized core of Git makes things
better.

You've never had a central repository go down and then pulled from the person
sitting next to you? At the last organization I worked with, this happened
multiple times. And when Microsoft bought Github and a bunch of people
panicked, a lot of them were able to move to Gitlab (even without deleting
their Github repos) specifically because the technology behind Git allowed you
to add multiple remotes.

The article makes the point:

> No system is simply decentralized, full-stop. We shouldn’t expect any to be.

Git is the same way. Even with Linux, where patches are sent around using
Email and there is no central repository that has every in-progress effort,
there's still ultimately one person signing off on the final release. But that
doesn't mean that there aren't decentralized _parts_ of Git that are very,
very useful, specifically because they are decentralized or because they allow
you to fall back to decentralized workflows when necessary.

One of the things this article is getting at is that people treat
decentralized as a binary state -- you either have one source of truth that
coordinates everything, or you have complete chaos. Most decentralized systems
are in the middle; they _allow_ centralization, but also support fallbacks for
when that centralization fails.

Git's branch strategy is another good example of this. Most Git systems use a
master branch. But the value of branching is that you _can_ have diverging
code states that aren't yet centralized into a single location. You can fork
off of master and have a completely parallel codebase, if for some reason you
need to. You can have your release in a decentralized state for a week, where
multiple people are working on separate branches and there is no single branch
that has everyone's changes, and then you can re-centralize everything to
master or a staging once you feel comfortable with the features you want.

------
Co_Reentry
I have read "everything for everyone" and agree on some of the major points it
and this article raises. I do think that there might be a bit of context
missing from this thread and the article in general.

I think someone pointed out that "decentralization" is different from
"democratization" and I would wholeheartedly agree. I think of both as
independent variables which can be tuned in the construction of any
organizational structure. Also to me the idea that democracy, as it pertains
to business structures, should also be something that is tunable.

Projects like DAO's are great examples if highly distributed yet fairly
undemocratic structures. As the core team creating them (and often monetizing
them) do not nessecarily share power in the direction of the project. I am not
advocating for or against that but just pointing it out.

But as history has shown there are real tradeoffs when you try and reach scale
(in whatever metric) when you centralize democracy. It's my view that there is
a sweet spot (and serious upside) for introducing decentralization and
democratization into most projects, but it all depends on the use case. As a
few examples take a look at the success of projects like stocksy.com (royalty
based stock images company owned by the contributors), smart.coop (freelancers
cooperative that handles contracts and billing). And of course Mondragon
([https://www.mondragon-corporation.com/](https://www.mondragon-
corporation.com/)) which takes democracy in the workplace to an industrial
scale.

At my current company ([https://www.staffing.coop](https://www.staffing.coop)
and [https://www.tribeworks.io](https://www.tribeworks.io)) we decided to form
as a cooperative (instead of using a DAO) because it better fit our current
needs. But we don't see this as a static choice.

------
jayd16
It seems we're getting bogged down by conflating decentralization with
democratization. Email is certainly decentralized but its not something every
layperson can run and maintain.

~~~
nickpinkston
Even true democratization generally still only serves to multiply starting
advantages unfortunately.

Give a laptop to a 12 y/o upper middle class kid in a healthy home, and you
could make the next Zuckerberg. Give one to a poor kid in the ghetto with a
violent home life, and you make get some improvements, but the net effect will
be widening inequality.

This is why redistributive policies are always going to be required.
Democratizing the means of production, or even capital ownership itself, is
never enough.

~~~
RobertKerans
> Give a laptop to a 12 y/o upper middle class kid in a healthy home, and you
> could make the next Zuckerberg. Give one to a poor kid in the ghetto with a
> violent home life, and you make get some improvements, but the net effect
> will be widening inequality.

I'm not quite sure I get your example: so if you give it to the former you're
more likely to produce closer to the extremely rich man with the socially
corrosive advertising platform that has clear, real, marked destructive
effects on entire country's political structures, the one that vapourised
entire media businesses due to misinterpreted analytics, etc etc. The net
negative effect of the hypothetical latter seems vastly less?

------
eternalban
> You lose out on the discoverability that centralized hubs give you.

Obviously you can have decentralized services that address this important
'presence' issue.

IMO the issue is that we have conflated the 'functional goal' with
'architecture'. The 'goal', for me at least, is public information systems
that protect civil rights and resist the rise of tyranny. That goal, after
thinking about this space for the past 25 years, can be served with a
combination of centralized and decentralized services, and a mix of grassroots
and corporate players.

To get there, we need (a) societal consensus that privacy in fact matters
quite a lot to, and is a bedrock of, our civilization, and (b) [the
recognition that] ideological bias is a deadly sin for a system architect.

~~~
o09rdk
I was going to say something similar, or at least related.

Centralization processes can occur on a decentralized architecture, but I
don't think that means the decentralized architecture has failed. I think
people need to distinguish decentralization as a network system state, and
decentralization as an affordance. Centralized structures on a decentralized
protocol can reorganize themselves, but if you build the system as
centralized, it's much harder, if not impossible, barring some implicit
decentralized aspect of the architecture.

The question isn't so much "do decentralized systems end up as centralized,"
it is "can a disrupted decentralized system reorganize itself?"

It's obviously relevant to your point in that the reason for decentralized
architectures, as you say, is to maintain communication in the presence of
threats, especially to free exchange of information. It's not necessarily to
maintain a given network structure state.

I couldn't care less if a handful of servers become dominant on Mastodon or
IPFS or whatever, if it's easy to change which handful of servers they are
should they start to become compromised in some way.

------
HocusLocus
"The apparently free, participatory open-source software communities have
frequently depended on the charismatic and arbitrary authority of a
“benevolent dictator for life,” from Linus Torvalds of Linux (who is not
always so benevolent) to Guido van Rossum of Python"

GRAB. FORK. It's all there. Nothing stops you. Sleepless nights, stay on your
toes.

Nothing stops people from complaining either. And if you fork, people who
didn't will begin complaining about you.

~~~
lanstin
Are you arguing about the centralized role Linus or Guido have? I think what
you point out, the lack of a formal requirement for centralization just makes
the point that centralization emerges from these networks anyways a bit
stronger. And hence the point that we need to build accountability (git
annotate for source) into the new systems is strengthened.

~~~
yjftsjthsd-h
Didn't Guido just recently remove himself as a central authority?

------
zcw100
I’m surprised IPFS hasn’t been mentioned. It’s a great example of compromise.
IPNS tries to replace DNS but it’s slow so the compromised and allowed
DNSLink. It’s a great application of decentralization. I want some bits that
hash to X and I don’t care who gives them to me.

~~~
rhizome
Nobody has ever been able to describe the use case for IPFS in simple terms,
much less how discoverability works in that environment.

------
jasonhansel
We already have a decentralized/federated social network with millions
(probably billions) of users. It's called email, and it works pretty well--
though not perfect, email illustrates that there's nothing intrinsically
impossible about such systems.

~~~
viraptor
Messaging systems (like emails) and social networks are not the same thing.
Maybe mailing lists would be closer, but those are actually centralised.

~~~
jasonhansel
They're not centralized in the way Facebook is, since your mailing lists may
come from a wide variety of sources running separate servers & software.

Also: messaging is actually a very important part of social media companies'
strategy (e.g. Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, etc.).

~~~
viraptor
Messaging is an important part and most social networks contain messaging. But
messaging on its own is not a social network. (no contact discovery,
subscription to events, persistent connection with other users)

~~~
jasonhansel
Yes! Which is why we need other decentralized social networks that can follow
email's route to success.

------
dangoljames
It seems to be workin' well enough for the folks over at mastodon.social, JS.

I've never really been a huge fan of twitter, and I got rid of failbook years
ago, but masto fills the void without all the pain of the aforementioned other
'platforms'.

------
rhizome
My fantasy solution to all this is to separate PII from functionality.

You would have profile providers and interaction providers, and any of us
would subscribe ourselves into the services we want to use, disconnecting
whenever we didn't want to use e.g. Twitter or wanted to take a break. Within
these joins, a person could control which of their PII they want to allow the
service to have access to. You could run your own PII provider or join/pay for
someone else to run it.

------
aniijbod
Democracy is decentralisation. It doesn't 'work'. It's what Churchill called
'the worst form of government'. Except for all the others. Its most egregious
failure is that it often fails to undermine things that can and do subvert it.
Decentralisation is like a Yin-Yang kind of thing, constantly challenged by
its nemesis 'the forces of centralisation'. Ultimately decentralisation, just
like democracy, is more resilient over time. At any one time, centralised
systems can potentially bring more resources to bear upon a problem more
quickly. But because decentralised systems can be designed to 'temporarily
centralise' this 'emergency response capability shortfall of decentralised
systems' is just a design problem. It turns out that it is also probably the
most serious challenge to decentralisation. But because resilience, in the
light of the challenges we currently face, is something we are all committing
ourselves to tackling, expect 'designing decentralised systems' to stay at the
top of the process design agenda for the forseeable future, notwithstanding
any yet-to-be-experienced shortcomings and failings of decentralised systems
that appear on the horizon.

~~~
nickik
Democracy is just decentralized decision making. And even that decision making
is incredibly low level, and information of what people want gets mostly lost
in the process.

You have very heavily centralized bureaucratic state makes all the choice and
the majority of people making those choices are not elected.

Democracy has some decentralized elements, but its far, far, far away from
what we would consider a decentralized system of government.

In an old 10th town in the middle east you might have 4 different legal
systems for different communities, and then special extra layer of law and
common practice for issues between these community (different for each set).
Plus different higher imperial laws and so on. Each of these system had a
variety of different systems of enforcement and financing. Non-centralized
provision of every-thing we now call a public-service.

Democracies can and will bring 'more resources' to a war when the population
is mostly behind it.

------
TwoNineFive
It's an advertisement for a book. Headline: "X never works" Article: "This is
not an indictment of X" Goes on to list numerous examples of X working.

------
nanomonkey
The author seems to be too focused on cryptocurrency and perhaps unaware of a
lot of successfully decentralized protocols such as DAT, Scuttlebutt, GUN and
IPFS.

~~~
dredmorbius
Cryptocurrencies are interesting (in the context of this essay/discussion)
because they're a well-known instance of a technology aimed at
decentralisation, for a specific reason (to eliminate reliance on trust in the
monetary system), which has to some extent succeeded, and in numerous others,
failed.

The points made generally (not limited to cryptocurrencies) are very well
made. They parallel thinking I and others have been arriving at independently
in recent years, after long swallowing the decentralised, crowdsourced, open
source, distributed, mantra.

I won't say that that's failed _entirely_. But it's definitely failed to
deliver what it promised.

DAT, Scuttlebutt, GUN, and IPFS have negligible take-up so far as I'm aware,
and I keep reasonable tabs on the space.

------
specialist
TLDR: Centralization (winner takes all) is the result of preferential
attachment. Some kind of downward pressure is required to counterbalance,
counteract.

~~~
michaelfeathers
I dug into this topic in this talk in 2017. 'Moving Past the Scaling Myth' The
core observation is that minimal spanning trees have less edge cost than fully
connected graph - if you pay for the difference you can have decentralization.

Centralization is a cost reduction maneuver.

[https://youtu.be/MgbmGQVa4wc?t=700](https://youtu.be/MgbmGQVa4wc?t=700)

------
tehjoker
Missing in the critique: how can an important decentralized system survive
within capitalism? Most important infrastructure is bought by large market
participants and exploited maximally to make money. Even the internet was
turned from an aggressively non-commercial entity into one that is
aggressively commercial.

------
marknadal
Idk what the author is talking about.

Bittorrent was 40% of the world's traffic, more than Google's at that point!

And we, my decentralized protocol, just grew from 2M to 15M monthly active
users. ( [https://github.com/amark/gun](https://github.com/amark/gun) )

It seems to be working.

~~~
jayd16
Torrent links are centralized in trackers and you'd see a single tracker site
dominate if the legal atmosphere allowed for it.

And honestly, it doesn't work as well. If you don't care about
decentralization for decentralization sake its not ideal. Streaming websites
don't use it. Netflix doesn't torrent a video to you.

~~~
rhizome
Can't collections of tracker links themselves be federated?

~~~
jayd16
Sure they could but the point is its a lot easier to just centralize.

