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Something that I never see discussed with regards to decentralization: it is more or less required if you want to have meaningful cultural diversity. This is, I

Something that I never see discussed with regards to decentralization: it is more or less required if you want to have meaningful cultural diversity. This is, I think, a bit obvious if you look at history: centralized states with well-defined languages and laws end up swallowing all the smaller dialects, cultures, and kingdoms. Good for empire managers, bad for culture. English-language media is currently doing this to a lot of smaller cultures and languages, replacing them with a uniform monoculture. And that’s because the same thing happens when communication tech is centralized in a small number of megacorps. The original appeal of the Internet to me was the potential for a vast amount of interesting subcultures. So while decentralization does enable a lot of messy and undesirable stuff, I think it might be a requirement if you don’t want everything, everywhere to be exactly the same.

jcranmer 5y ago
> This is, I think, a bit obvious if you look at history: centralized states with well-defined languages and laws end up swallowing all the smaller dialects, cultures, and kingdoms. Good for empire managers, bad for culture. Except it's not obvious. There's very few examples of linguistic dialects and cultures being forcibly assimilated by larger imperial conquest before modern times (the French Revolution is a good dividing point). Even France, one of the best examples of a large, centralized, unitary state throughout most of European history, didn't really make major strides in stamping out the langues d'oïl and langues d'oc that weren't French until the French Revolution. Previous notable large empires--e.g., various Persian empires, the Roman Empire, Mongols, Islamic caliphates, the Ottoman Empire--were often noted for the high diversity of cultures; that monoculture is a necessary component of a state is largely driven by 19th century ideas of nation-states, which (again) don't really exist before the French Revolution.
- keiferski 5y ago
  Pre-19th century empires may have been more culturally diverse than those that came after, but they were still less diverse than the situation which came before. Centralization by nature will remove previous local elite culture, for instance, only allowing for any cultures that are subservient.

jcranmer 5y ago

> This is, I think, a bit obvious if you look at history: centralized states with well-defined languages and laws end up swallowing all the smaller dialects, cultures, and kingdoms. Good for empire managers, bad for culture. Except it's not obvious. There's very few examples of linguistic dialects and cultures being forcibly assimilated by larger imperial conquest before modern times (the French Revolution is a good dividing point). Even France, one of the best examples of a large, centralized, unitary state throughout most of European history, didn't really make major strides in stamping out the langues d'oïl and langues d'oc that weren't French until the French Revolution. Previous notable large empires--e.g., various Persian empires, the Roman Empire, Mongols, Islamic caliphates, the Ottoman Empire--were often noted for the high diversity of cultures; that monoculture is a necessary component of a state is largely driven by 19th century ideas of nation-states, which (again) don't really exist before the French Revolution.

keiferski 5y ago
Pre-19th century empires may have been more culturally diverse than those that came after, but they were still less diverse than the situation which came before. Centralization by nature will remove previous local elite culture, for instance, only allowing for any cultures that are subservient.