Disagreements with this article via a claim that says technology inherently centralizes, to me, seems flawed. The concept of democracy was evolved as a system

Disagreements with this article via a claim that says technology inherently centralizes, to me, seems flawed. The concept of democracy was evolved as a system that could distribute social power in order to catalyze the wider involvement of its members in their own social and economic concerns. All the way back to Alexis De Tocqueville in the 1800s (in his book Democracy in America), Tocqueville attributes the ultimate success of liberty in America, however, to a feature of American political order he refers to as “administrative decentralization,” which–going beyond federalism as such–fosters the participation of citizens in “real . . . political life” beginning at the local (sub-state) level. [1] To me, a series of decentralized, shared ownership systems that come together to provide and replace the functionality that has today been built into centralized networks is the only way to achieve any kind of "liberty" (however one may define that word). The missing link for these systems has historically been cost - who runs the servers that runs these systems, and who pays to develop them? It is exactly for this reason that they were centralized in the first place. Today, we've got one way to solve for these problems (tokens). I'm sure there will be more. But they will all be catalysts towards this direction. Edit: To comments talking about how protocols won't just be replaced by big companies. All companies ultimately care about one thing -- distribution. They will continue to be the direct link between customers / users and the service they provide. The difference is that they will need to build upon the protocol that has the most distribution. If we imagine a new open protocol for "online document comments" that existed, Google Docs AND Office online could use it and have interoperable commenting from each other's identity systems vs the state of the landscape today. what would their motivation be to do it? Same as using open source libraries like ffmpeg or openSSL -- except this time, they don't pay to host the APIs that power this protocol. [1] https://www.catholicculture.org/culture/library/view.cfm?recnum=9958 https://www.catholicculture.org/culture/library/view.cfm?rec...