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I go back and forth on this. I am NOT in the "decentralize everything" camp. But I fear power more than chaos. Chaos turns over. Power resists that. Power seeks
by patcon 6y ago
I go back and forth on this. I am NOT in the "decentralize everything" camp. But I fear power more than chaos. Chaos turns over. Power resists that. Power seeks its own structural stasis. But in chaos, there's a fertile and teeming intertidal zone in every churn of a chaotic system. (though it is uncomfortable for us as inhabitants, and that is fuckin real)
I've had the privilege to be involved in both tech, biochemistry, and a few years of community organizing, and there's something going on here that's interesting. There's maybe some redemption of decentralizing forces, even though they invite chaos. If there is a redemption, it's in a dynamism I don't see articulated too often.
It's like we need some force that decentralizes at the edges (that pushes itself out, and invites more entry across the boundary of in-and-out), but that once inside, it's agents repel themselves from power -- repel themselves from the center.
In my community organizing conversations, we speak of this concretely around the term "we". We want members who are new and drifting around the edges, considering entry -- we want them to feel welcome to step over the boundary into a space, and feel welcome to use the word "we" as early as they care to. But then as people stick around, they'll use "we" more, moving toward the center. But as they cross some fuzzy threshold, a good "leader" or steward in such a community should pump the breaks. They should resist using the word "we" too comfortably -- they should resist using the word "we" to wear the community like a mech suit in conversations. They need to work hard to prevent themselves from falling toward the middle of the group and making themselves central. And if all members navigate this dynamics well, then you end up with a leaderFUL organization, with many leaders. And that community is fractal, almost holographic -- any fragment of that community contains a low-resolution version of the whole :)
I believe this dynamic is important to all stable and complex systems of the certain sort that we humans are :)
EDIT: I'm quite interested in these intersections, so if someone is reading this, pls feel free to poke me on Twitter @patconnolly if any of this runs parallel to your own complexity science or network science interests!
- tartoran 6y agoI like your power/chaos analogy and it seems healthy to me to invite both centralization and decentralization at the same time or a flux between the two. If power and chaos always kept one another in check they'd create a symbiosis that would benefit everyone
- clairity 6y agocheers, a vivid and lucid description of the dynamics. i’ve been thinking along these lines in relation to business and economy, toward a conclusion that our economic policy should be principally geared toward encouraging medium-sized ($10-50MM) and focused businesses, which provides plenty of reward and economies of scale while avoiding the corrupting forces and negative externalities of behemoths and conglomerates. same with personal wealth - encourage people to get to ~$2MM (where you can easily live comfortably without working again) but progressively discourage (not prohibit) wealth accumulation above $10MM (e.g., make wealth be put to work harder and in more provably positively-externalized ways to accumulate further).
- patcon 6y agoAw jeez, thanks for saying. This sorta of thinking clicks with me. Esp the "discourage not prohibit" framing. I think I have similar hopes, except I maybe hinge my thinking less on direct taxation or regulatory schemes ("if you get above threshold X, we take Y%") and instead lean a little but more on tactics of growing the co-operative ecosystem, which i believe will dampen the bad stuff in similar ways. I feel that co-operative companies tend to grow by collaborating instead of expanding/acquiring -- by scaling whole sector horizontally, instead of individual companies vertically -- and more co-operative companies will results in similar outcomes to what you speak of, but which cannot be easily dismantled as the tides sweep left to right, and back again :) But I feel aligned with what you're saying, and I would cheer such measures even though I work with other tactics!
- mindslight 6y agoI've been wrestling with this quality in a technical sense for quite some time. Take for instance IP. IP was designed to be decentralized. And "End to End Arguments in System Design" piled on and led to UDP, further disintermediating sysadmins and their kernels. And we all felt that energy when we discovered the Internet, that magic hope of building new systems that served ourselves with voluntary peer to peer interactions. But all of this was a bit fallacious, in that there is nothing forcing parties to follow a protocol's guidelines, rather than taking things "as they are" and acting in their own self interest. "I"SPs have deployed DPI gear and transparent proxying, GeoIP providers have forced some implicit notion of location onto every IP address, piracy surveillance firms legally harass people running small routers, etc. Ultimately there was nothing built into the protocol that would prevent these things happening and so they did, despite that boundless world we felt when it was fresh. Think of how difficult these attacks would have been if most packet fields had been protected with encryption and addresses were based on source routing (onion, of course). Obviously that would have necessitated different technique requirements, and perhaps failed in different ways, but you can see what I'm getting at. There are modern overlay networks that do these things, but since their users are a minority of all users, it is easy to block them outright. FWIW I see the same thing with Bitcoin and its lack of the untraceability property. How long until the financial control industry ("money laundering") invents a parallel source of truth, and progressively gets it enforced at the exchanges?