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.
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What to do once you admit that decentralization never seems to work (2018)
81–90 of 148 posts
Re: What to do once you admit that decentralization never seems to work (2018)
#82Democracy 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.
Re: What to do once you admit that decentralization never seems to work (2018)
#83It 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.
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.
Re: What to do once you admit that decentralization never seems to work (2018)
#84Democracy 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 resilien…
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.
Re: What to do once you admit that decentralization never seems to work (2018)
#85The 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.
Re: What to do once you admit that decentralization never seems to work (2018)
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
> You lose out on the discoverability that centralized hubs give you. This isn't a real trade off. Consider how the web traditionally worked. Everyone has their own website, then you have search engines like Google or Yahoo that allow you to find anything anywhere. A third-party search engine doesn't have most of the centralization problems you get with a Facebook or a YouTube, because people only use them to the ext…
Maybe someone can come up with a decentralized search infrastructure. Something agent based perhaps. Otherwise the search is both centralized and in the position to make money from ads.
YaCy got you covered https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YaCy Never tried it, so don't know how good it is.
Re: What to do once you admit that decentralization never seems to work (2018)
#87Decentralization 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…
Broadly agree with one caveat -- the ISP. A mesh network is probably the last link in this chain needed for this to work, and even that relies on a central node: the backhaul, although (and please correct me if I'm wrong if someone more knowledgeable is reading this) I believe that the backhaul is a "dumb" pipe that is not usually censored/traffic shaped.
Re: What to do once you admit that decentralization never seems to work (2018)
#88One 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 h…
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Re: What to do once you admit that decentralization never seems to work (2018)
#89[deleted]
Re: What to do once you admit that decentralization never seems to work (2018)
#90One 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 h…
The car dealer model is extremely bad for consumers. It seems weird to herald it as some kind of achievement.