The importance of decentralisation

this article doesn't deal at all with DNS so kinda misses like the biggest centralization flaw on the internet but whatever

> Where does my use or possession end? For example, I trade two sheep for a bicycle which I need for transportation to get to my job. Can someone come along and take my bicycle any time I'm not using it? If so, how is this theft justified?

You either work out an agreement with the people who might take it that a bicycle be available for you after work or you just go and find another bicycle. It's funny you say this because bicycle and scooter sharing systems have become incredibly popular, because it's far more efficient than everyone having to keep their own vehicle for the long amount of time that they're not being used. Imagine if we didn't need to have parking for storing so many vehicles. The fact that you need a vehicle to be in a certain place at a certain time is a logistical issue that needs to be solved, but owning it as property that everyone else is excluded from using is not nearly the only solution.

If we structured society such that the accumulation of material wealth was infeasible, there would be far less need to worry about people going around and taking things they didn't legitimately need.

> It's why countries or communities that have gone down the road to socialism and communism have always invariably collapsed.

I'd argue this statement is completely unsupported. There has been no form of communism that hasn't been embattled by attacks from established capitalist systems at their outset, causing them to either consolidate into authoritarian centralized regimes in order to survive or to get wiped out in their infancy, and this centralization is what leads to failure. Socialist nations who have transitioned smoothly from capitalism have done so very successfully (take Norway). This may say bad things about the ability for a property-less system to survive in a capitalism-dominated system, but it doesn't say whether it would be capable of staying stable and successful in a less hostile environment.

> I’d argue centralized solutions are only as stable as the problem is uniform. If the problem differs even slightly between actors looking for solutions, those actors are either settling for a less than perfect fit when adopting a centralized solution, or the centralized solution is complex enough to handle those differences. As differences increase, the tradeoffs become unacceptable and/or the complexity becomes too much to handle, and the centralized solution falls apart.

100%

I've been thinking of how this applies to our world today. For example, it is in Google's interest to train us to only use a subset of queries and words so their centralized solution can work (same with YouTube and any recommendation engine probably).

Predicting or prodding you towards certain items (ads), pages, suggestions and the like - intentionally or not - only serve to reinforce a society of increased uniformity and thus, increased desirability of the centralized system.

Newsfeeds suffer the same problem as does even autocomplete I think.

It scares me about our future sometimes because products will slowly become more hostile to you the less you fit into a centralized model of their ideal consumer

Abuse is another one.

Note how you almost never see spam on GitHub. And you can effortlessly cross-reference issues across repos and notify other users by mentioning them. That works, because global view across all repos makes spotting and blocking abuse easier, and moderation is possible thanks to the business side subsidizing it.

Contrast that with WordPress trackbacks. They're all spam. And blog comments are full of spam too, because individual operators don't have know-how to fight them, other than outsourcing spam filtering to… a centralized service.

> Well, one of the fascinating things that anthropologists point out is that every society succeeds by-and-large in getting the children to behave like (that society's version of) adults. In other words, culture is somehow stable even though it gets renewed from generation to generation. So we are programmed in a way, and for that to work as well as it does, parts of the program have to remain stable, and that implies that the conscious ego cannot be allowed direct control over all parts of the internal model.

Undoubtedly we are programmed to some degree, but is there anyone that claims to know with any sort of precision how much we are programmed, and to what degree that contributes to our success? People like Sam Harris "point out" that rationality should be all we need to continue succeeding into the future as we have in the past, but the problem is, this is largely speculation.

> and for that to work as well as it does, parts of the program have to remain stable, and that implies that the conscious ego cannot be allowed direct control over all parts of the internal model.

It may be beneficial and easier for things to be stable, but how stable do they need to be? The environment (society, politics, technology, etc) that humans live in is certainly not stable, and we continue to be successful, but how can we accurately attribute this result to programming of some sort? Take away our technology for example and cast modern day mankind back into the past a decade or three (say, due to an extremely severe recession/depression) - could we handle it psychologically and societally? To what degree is modern day society psychologically dependent upon the comforts that scientists have delivered to us? How do we proclaim to know such things?

> And, in fact, there are only a few autonomous functions that are also (partially) subject to conscious control: breathing, blinking, and a third one that I just forgot... heh

Getting a short haircut, catching a flight to a far away land, and trying to kill as many of the people your government has told you are your enemy? Working two jobs and sparing yourself even the smallest comforts of life so your children can have a chance at a better life than you, instead of blowing your brains out which would be so much easier? Biting your tongue for the hundredth time when your boss pins another case of his incompetence on you? I speculate that all of these things involve both conscious and unconscious functions, but again we don't know. Some people can pull them off, others can't.

> In other words, the rigidity you're talking about is "works as intended" for the original context: small tribal groups living in the wild. What we call civilization is only about 12K years old, eh? With most of the action happening just in the last two or three centuries the complexities in geopolitics are entirely novel.

Exactly. Might it be foolhardy to rush headlong at maximum possible speed into financially optimizing every last thing we can, with zero thought for whether we are psychologically operating in the shiny new world we are building? Are there any signs of rapidly increasing strange behavior in societies? It seems like we're often told to worry very much about such events, but the remedy is even more change, and faster!

> Rapid progress has been made, but a concerted effort to apply this information as part of an overall political shift has not arisen. Bucky Fuller pointed out that we have the technological capability to create a kind of utopia, from my POV it seems we also have the psychological "technology" to get over our problems and actually do it.

Boom. Well, I would say it has arisen many times, and to varying degrees, but the people who have been appointed to run our societies have tended to not be terribly supportive of such movements, wish makes me feel even more uncomfortable.

I too believe we easily have what it takes to run our societies fairly and properly, and have for quite some time....or at least we used to - I'm start to worry that we might be starting to lose some of the psychological and other less intangible prerequisities to make such a world happen, and I don't share Sam Harris' optimism that rationalism is enough to carry the day. It seems to me there is far more evidence against that theory than supporting it.

On the bright side, it's nice that you and I mostly agree on something for a change! :)