I was referring to theoretical communism, the one where there's no private property for real, where everything is communally managed. Perhaps anarchocommunism i

I was referring to theoretical communism, the one where there's no private property for real, where everything is communally managed. Perhaps anarchocommunism is a better term. Tragedy of the commons gets the issue across just as well. In practice communist countries were highly centralized, agreed. All property was the private property of the state. > benevolently protect the common resources on everyone's behalf A resource is too abstract a notion. The things we're talking about here are services which can adapt and improve. In his essay, Marlinspike was trying to communicate that you can't federate or decentralize because "the ecosystem is moving" i.e. your centralized competitors are innovating and you have to keep up with them or ideally even exceed them. Mere protection here isn't good enough, it requires active change that may upset some stakeholders. Collectivism fails here because of its totalizing nature: there's one of everything, which is theoretically at least communal property. But then you have to please everyone, so the only changes you can make are the ultra-low risk ones and because you often don't know the risk, in practice that means you're forced to simply clone what is observed to work elsewhere. So you end up permanently behind and with time it gets harder and harder to keep up. With competition that's less likely to happen, because there's an incentive to take risks and do things that may upset some existing users, if you think it'll please even more people who aren't your users today. This is a core tension that appears whenever people talk about decentralization. It's the way the Bitcoin community lost the plot as well. Some people interpret it to mean "one universal totalising system which is collectively owned". Other people interpret it as "an interoperable system of many competitors that can innovate and diverge from each other when needed".