Decentralisation: the next big step for the world wide web

Back to the future!

(looking forward to the past?)

How long until it reverts back to some nodes having way more influence/power/data than the others?

This is not only a technology problem, it's (mostly, I'd say) a social one. Humans will always want more power and control, whether it's in real life or online.

Every single type of governance has fallen victim to human greed and ambition, as will any kind of Internet, I believe.

Fix the users - save the Internet! :)

I thought pied piper solved it already

It will probably look and feel a lot like how Github has effectively centralized git repos. At least in this world if we don’t like how somebody is centralizing something it can be easily and quickly moved.

I think a lot about this.

In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari talk about the opposition between the state apparatus and the "war machine" (their term for a nomadic/decentralized structure). They talk about how it seems like nomadic societies are primitive, but actually a lot of nomadic societies have "collective mechanisms of inhibition" to ward off the formation of a state apparatus, by preventing power from accumulating within any one party and "evening it out" among everyone.

The applicability of D&G's ideas on the war machine to our current problem of platform power is immediately apparent. A centralized platform is exactly like a state apparatus. In our situation the collective mechanisms of inhibition might be something like stronger/more proactive antitrust laws to break up/nationalize entities that become infrastructural components of the society.

But as you've mentioned, I think this problem of "uneven development" is a feature of any marketplace-like structure. In sufficiently large numbers, a power law tends to assert itself with no other checks on power. This is why blockchains by themselves won't solve the problem. The debate, then, shifts to be about whether this is a feature or a bug, which is something that I'm never sure about.

To close, another quote from ATP comes to mind ("smooth space" is another term they use for nomadic spaces):

> Smooth spaces are not in themselves liberatory. But the struggle is changed or displaced in them, and life reconstitutes its stakes, confronts new obstacles, invents new paces, switches adversaries. Never believe that a smooth space will suffice to save us.