Centralization is key to imparting knowledge, establishing law and order, and securing our existence through terraforming the planet on an immense scale — which is what separates humans from animals.
Scott Alexander uses the example of the US interstate highway system to defend the type of “centralization” which has been so crucial in humanity’s increasing standard of living [1]:
> I like Seeing Like A State as much as anyone else (though see the caveats in Part VII of my review for some criticisms). But it worries me that everyone analyzes the exact same three examples of the failures of top-down planning: Soviet collective farms, Brasilia, and Robert Moses. I’d like to propose some other case studies:
> 3. The interstate highway system: 1950s army bureaucrats with a Prussia fetish decided America needed its own equivalent of the Reichsautobahn. The federal government came up with a Robert-Moses-like plan to spend $114 billion over several decades to build a rectangular grid of numbered giant roads all up and down the country, literally paving over whatever was there before, all according to pre-agreed federal standards. The public had so little say in the process that they started hundreds of freeway revolts trying to organize to prevent freeways from being built through their cities; the government crushed these when it could, and relocated the freeways to less politically influential areas when it couldn't.
Put simply, centralization is in our DNA. It is fundamentally how humans have become the planet’s most fearsome apex predator. Nature is very fearsome, of course, but the power to shape nature via concentrating power into the hands of the most capable in a meritocratic fashion is even moreso.
It’s not surprising centralized services dominate their decentralized counterparts. Bitcoin, however, is interesting here because the S&P is actually down since 1970 as measured in gold [2] — rather astonishing, given the S&P tracks some of the most powerful (centralized) human organizations in existence. It appears despite our best efforts, sometimes elements which exist outside of our political and legal grip can outperform even the greatest man-made feats.
Satoshi Nakamoto used clever cryptography to replicate a precious metal in digital form, as an attempt to pull humans away from centralized government monies. That was 2009, though, and people have since gotten too caught up in the glittery financial rewards aspect of Bitcoin to appreciate it on this level.
> Bringing fresh competition against Chrome isn’t really an option either. Modern browser rendering engines are so complex (especially when you have to implement all of Chrome’s undocumented quirks too), that even Microsoft gave up trying. And if you’re thinking of making your own system that eschews the web standards, good luck trying to bootstrap the entire web’s worth of content
The Gemini protocol is getting there. I recommend Lagrange [3]. Drew Devault hosts some of his blog articles on Gemini.
[1]: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/contra-weyl-on-technoc...
[2]: http://pricedingold.com/sp-500/
[3]: https://gmi.skyjake.fi/lagrange/