I think the efficiencies and benefits to centralization OP pointed out are real, but that there are practical benefits to decentralization as well.

Decentralized solutions are not saddled with the same need to appease everyone at once. You can have local solutions extremely well adapted for local situations that know more details about the context than a large company trying to deal with everyone ever could.

I’d argue centralized solutions are only as stable as the problem is uniform. If the problem differs even slightly between actors looking for solutions, those actors are either settling for a less than perfect fit when adopting a centralized solution, or the centralized solution is complex enough to handle those differences. As differences increase, the tradeoffs become unacceptable and/or the complexity becomes too much to handle, and the centralized solution falls apart.

I don’t think a lot of centralized solutions are currently centralized because they’re efficient solutions to uniform problems; I don’t think most everyday, practical problems are all that uniform when you take everything into account (ex: supply availability for physical goods, UI expectations/preferences for digital stuff) although again, there can be/often is at least some gains in efficiency. I think it has more to do with the organizational forces you describe.

100%

I've been thinking of how this applies to our world today. For example, it is in Google's interest to train us to only use a subset of queries and words so their centralized solution can work (same with YouTube and any recommendation engine probably).

Predicting or prodding you towards certain items (ads), pages, suggestions and the like - intentionally or not - only serve to reinforce a society of increased uniformity and thus, increased desirability of the centralized system.

Newsfeeds suffer the same problem as does even autocomplete I think.

It scares me about our future sometimes because products will slowly become more hostile to you the less you fit into a centralized model of their ideal consumer

The problem is that in biology, you don't have intelligent entities exploiting the centralization, which is I think where the metaphor breaks down.

Interestingly, the metaphor isn't completely broken; I have seen serious discussion of thing like cancer, and even more interestingly, what can convince a cell to not be cancer, in terms of self-interest and exploitation and such. One of the mysteries of how multi-cellular life ever got started was how one cell convinces another to not seek its own survival at all costs. Being rather complicated multicellular entities ourselves, we take this for granted, but it's a legit research topic.

Still, the cancer abusing the system is not doing it with human-level intelligence, whereas arguably Facebook is a super-human level intelligence, so the metaphor is not great.

The influence of Conway’s law is underappreciated. We are all trained to see hierarchies as the only principle for building structure, it’s a dominant normative ideology. Once we see how to build decentralized systems, we can discover they are often more resilient and more effective. But we have to overcome the current centralization of power and our own tendency to structure the world in hierarchies.

The concept of property, and the fact that our laws and government are built around protecting it, is the sole mechanism through which massive disparities in power are achieved and maintained in society. It centralizes wealth through avarice, making our stomachs unlimited in size. It also creates the dilemma of externalities, as we differentiate the value to us of the things we "own" versus the things we hold in common with others or that are "owned" by the state.

Property is also a entirely artificial concept. It takes the practical concept of use and possession and extends upon it to completely absurd extremes. It ties our society up in knots wasting a massive amount of human energy in the activity of determining and enforcing property ownership, and leads to incredibly convoluted structures in laws and markets, often leading to huge structural failures.

For instance, intellectual property law is completely absurd, on every level. It is an effort to force something that is fundamentally free and infinitely available to everyone to become scarce exclusively so that we can properly ensure it fits into a property-based system. The amount we lose as a society from the fact that all software is not simply open source is incalculable.

Property is an informational concept more than a legal one. The concept of "mine" is present at a very young age, and clearly present in various animal groups. The data-structure is a simple association of objects with an owner, and for the substrate animals use only their brains, but humans use paper and, increasingly, bits. Banks and local government agencies keep the most official of these records, but informal records count too. (My son may think my daughter's blanket is his, but she will protest loudly and vehemently, and there is not really a formal reason for her claim).

concept of property...is the sole mechanism through which massive disparities in power are achieved and maintained

Property is a necessary, but insufficient condition for inequality. Property is how you keep score; the reason some players win far more than others is not entirely known, but I'm pretty sure it has more to do with personality, talent, and luck than the jurisprudence of property rights.

It's not clear what a society without property would be like, BTW.

Once you have abstract property as a concept, it's all about tracking the association in and of itself, separated from any physical manifestations of it (possession and use). Your house is yours not because you live in it, but because there's a title on it in your name, and a record in the registry. This makes it possible for one person to have ten houses, live in one, and rent the rest out to those who don't have any. If they accumulate the rent, they can eventually buy more houses, and it becomes a positive feedback loop.

But there's no particular reason why any given society has to adopt such a system of property, and not all societies did or do today - especially with respect to land and other immovables. This can often be seen in the colonial history, where the colonizers expected to be able to buy and sell things that the indigenous population didn't even consider property, or at least the kind of property that could be bought and sold. More often than not, the colonizing power would then declare that in the absence of a "proper" abstract property claim on e.g. the land, it's there for the taking of anybody who is willing to make one. And that is how we ended up in the present situation, where that system of abstract property rights is mostly enforced throughout the globe - but I don't see how it follows that it's a system that is inevitable for any human society.

All money and contracts indicating ownership of property mean nothing without either the consent of all involved or the backing of violence (mind you, our system very much relies on violence, we have people who are empowered to enact violence to enforce property law).

There's also a huge distinction between possession (physically having and using something) and owning it (having the enforceable legal right to control how it is used).

And while this concept of control/territoriality might be naturally present in human psychological development, so are things like trying to use violence to resolve disputes and other asocial aspects of human psychology that we actively discourage. The idea that we should use property as the basis for how society functions is something we seldom interrogate regarding whether it creates the kind of world we actually want.

> It's not clear what a society without property would be like, BTW.

Try reading The Dispossessed by Ursula K. LeGuin. It really opened up my mind regarding the way our society is shaped by the idea of ownership.

As a side note I'd like to add that I agree with your assessment of intellectual property. The arguments defending IP law are indeed weak, but when it comes to real things like money, goods, and land, property rights are a necessity to keep humanity from devolving to barbarism.

You either work out an agreement with the people who might take it that a bicycle be available for you after work or you just go and find another bicycle. It's funny you say this because bicycle and scooter sharing systems have become incredibly popular, because it's far more efficient than everyone having to keep their own vehicle for the long amount of time that they're not being used. Imagine if we didn't need to have parking for storing so many vehicles. The fact that you need a vehicle to be in a certain place at a certain time is a logistical issue that needs to be solved, but owning it as property that everyone else is excluded from using is not nearly the only solution.

If we structured society such that the accumulation of material wealth was infeasible, there would be far less need to worry about people going around and taking things they didn't legitimately need.

> It's why countries or communities that have gone down the road to socialism and communism have always invariably collapsed.

I'd argue this statement is completely unsupported. There has been no form of communism that hasn't been embattled by attacks from established capitalist systems at their outset, causing them to either consolidate into authoritarian centralized regimes in order to survive or to get wiped out in their infancy, and this centralization is what leads to failure. Socialist nations who have transitioned smoothly from capitalism have done so very successfully (take Norway). This may say bad things about the ability for a property-less system to survive in a capitalism-dominated system, but it doesn't say whether it would be capable of staying stable and successful in a less hostile environment.

Is there anything to stop people from just moving into and taking over my house when I go out for the day?

Also, I like having a car set up exactly how I like it, with music I like, the mirrors where I left them, and also with a few things in it that I might need even rarely.

Call me selfish but I don't want to deal with a dirty public car that may or may not be available when I want it. All other public things are dirty and unpleasant, I don't see why shared cars or bicycles would be any different.

Do you have a source for that? I'm pretty certain Norway (and other Scandinavian countries) are not socialist and more of a social democracy, where they simply provide a large social safety net through heavy taxation.

I believe they still very much are in favor of a free market economy.

Once you start to think of biology as the study of billion-year-old self-optimizing nanotechnology it makes sense to look to life for models for designing the structure of our own artificial systems. There's the question of what do we want to be like? A starfish? A meta-human?

A decentralized system that depends on each or most of its elements to function is a single "point" of failure for the whole. (E.g., a relatively small wound can cause death by exsanguination.) On the other hand, consider the radical indignities that the lowly planarian will endure only to placidly regrow a tail or a head or whatever. (See "What Bodies Think About: Bioelectric Computation Outside the Nervous System" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjD1aLm4Thg https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18736698 Which, incidentally, adds a whole layer of complexity and nuance to the concept of intelligent design, since the whole of Nature has now been scientifically shown to think...)

It remains to be seen whether Humans + Internet = Self-Organization or along what lines. (What's the news out of Hong Kong this week? Are the distributed, self-organizing people of HK prevailing against the centralized imperialistic communist state?) Governments everywhere are waking up and smelling the data coffee. The major players already have databases on the bulk of world population and are collecting (exponentially) more every day. What kind of cyborg-state shall we make?

I think you make a good (and very underappreciated) point about the relevance of the ideas in this article to geopolitics, or how humanity ~chooses (or so we think) to organize itself.

[didericis] also makes some good points that are relevant to this perspective:

> Decentralized solutions are not saddled with the same need to appease everyone at once. You can have local solutions extremely well adapted for local situations that know more details about the context than a large company trying to deal with everyone ever could.

> I’d argue centralized solutions are only as stable as the problem is uniform. If the problem differs even slightly between actors looking for solutions, those actors are either settling for a less than perfect fit when adopting a centralized solution, or the centralized solution is complex enough to handle those differences. As differences increase, the tradeoffs become unacceptable and/or the complexity becomes too much to handle, and the centralized solution falls apart.

The dangerous part imho when it comes to a geopolitical application is, while most of us can recognize the complexities and tradeoffs in a computer system, at least when they're pointed out to us, very few seem to be able to see similar complexities in geopolitics (a massively more complex system), even when it's pointed out. It's as if we've developed an intuition that passionately rejects the very suggestion, a behavior which in itself highlights the complexity involved.

Well, one of the fascinating things that anthropologists point out is that every society succeeds by-and-large in getting the children to behave like (that society's version of) adults. In other words, culture is somehow stable even though it gets renewed from generation to generation. So we are programmed in a way, and for that to work as well as it does, parts of the program have to remain stable, and that implies that the conscious ego cannot be allowed direct control over all parts of the internal model. And, in fact, there are only a few autonomous functions that are also (partially) subject to conscious control: breathing, blinking, and a third one that I just forgot... heh

In other words, the rigidity you're talking about is "works as intended" for the original context: small tribal groups living in the wild. What we call civilization is only about 12K years old, eh? With most of the action happening just in the last two or three centuries the complexities in geopolitics are entirely novel.

However, since about the 60's information about reprogramming ourselves has become more and more available (Just for example, "Programming & Metaprogramming in the Human Biocomputer: Theory & Experiments" by John C. Lilly was published in '67 I believe.) Rapid progress has been made, but a concerted effort to apply this information as part of an overall political shift has not arisen.

Bucky Fuller pointed out that we have the technological capability to create a kind of utopia, from my POV it seems we also have the psychological "technology" to get over our problems and actually do it.

We have very rigid notions of the ways that laws should work, or property ownership.

Undoubtedly we are programmed to some degree, but is there anyone that claims to know with any sort of precision how much we are programmed, and to what degree that contributes to our success? People like Sam Harris "point out" that rationality should be all we need to continue succeeding into the future as we have in the past, but the problem is, this is largely speculation.

> and for that to work as well as it does, parts of the program have to remain stable, and that implies that the conscious ego cannot be allowed direct control over all parts of the internal model.

It may be beneficial and easier for things to be stable, but how stable do they need to be? The environment (society, politics, technology, etc) that humans live in is certainly not stable, and we continue to be successful, but how can we accurately attribute this result to programming of some sort? Take away our technology for example and cast modern day mankind back into the past a decade or three (say, due to an extremely severe recession/depression) - could we handle it psychologically and societally? To what degree is modern day society psychologically dependent upon the comforts that scientists have delivered to us? How do we proclaim to know such things?

> And, in fact, there are only a few autonomous functions that are also (partially) subject to conscious control: breathing, blinking, and a third one that I just forgot... heh

Getting a short haircut, catching a flight to a far away land, and trying to kill as many of the people your government has told you are your enemy? Working two jobs and sparing yourself even the smallest comforts of life so your children can have a chance at a better life than you, instead of blowing your brains out which would be so much easier? Biting your tongue for the hundredth time when your boss pins another case of his incompetence on you? I speculate that all of these things involve both conscious and unconscious functions, but again we don't know. Some people can pull them off, others can't.

> In other words, the rigidity you're talking about is "works as intended" for the original context: small tribal groups living in the wild. What we call civilization is only about 12K years old, eh? With most of the action happening just in the last two or three centuries the complexities in geopolitics are entirely novel.

Exactly. Might it be foolhardy to rush headlong at maximum possible speed into financially optimizing every last thing we can, with zero thought for whether we are psychologically operating in the shiny new world we are building? Are there any signs of rapidly increasing strange behavior in societies? It seems like we're often told to worry very much about such events, but the remedy is even more change, and faster!

> Rapid progress has been made, but a concerted effort to apply this information as part of an overall political shift has not arisen. Bucky Fuller pointed out that we have the technological capability to create a kind of utopia, from my POV it seems we also have the psychological "technology" to get over our problems and actually do it.

Boom. Well, I would say it has arisen many times, and to varying degrees, but the people who have been appointed to run our societies have tended to not be terribly supportive of such movements, wish makes me feel even more uncomfortable.

I too believe we easily have what it takes to run our societies fairly and properly, and have for quite some time....or at least we used to - I'm start to worry that we might be starting to lose some of the psychological and other less intangible prerequisities to make such a world happen, and I don't share Sam Harris' optimism that rationalism is enough to carry the day. It seems to me there is far more evidence against that theory than supporting it.

On the bright side, it's nice that you and I mostly agree on something for a change! :)

The context of my claim was about computer information systems becoming centralized. Yes, I understand we do have decentralized washer & dryer machines at home instead of everyone going to centralized laundromat. And building residential houses is still a very local business that resists a hypothetical giant national corporation that builds every house in America. Even Jeff Bezos' Amazon can't conquer 1000 different local building codes and construction techniques to build homes. However, the realm of information technology seems to behave differently.

I like to use the decentralized-Git-to-centralized-Github example because:

- programmers are the ubergeeks that would conceivably be the vanguard of decentralization because they are already predisposed to understand its benefits

- programmers (unlike mass consumers) have the technical know-how to implement their own git server if they wanted to and overcome any challenges of ISP NAT router.

And yet, the vast majority just think: "Hmmm... there's a free service that can host my repo which means I don't have to spend _time_ or _money_ to mess with any of that home setup?!? Sign me up!!!"

There is no "evil capitalist monopoly" that forced Git centralization on to resistant programmers. Instead, the programmers willingly put their code on Github because of the benefits. The economic forces overwhelm the ideals of the decentralized protocol.

As mentioned before, a git distributed protocol can't stop an actor from spending more money on that protocol than others. Github Inc spent extra money on Ruby programmers to create extra features such as issues tracking, web landing page, hosting disk space, reliable backups, DDOS protection, etc. Unequal spending by actors makes one node with better features more desirable than other nodes (such as a personal home node) and this starts a feedback loop of centralization.

To restate the claim earlier: decentralized computer information systems that need to share data is an unstable equilibrium because it depends on having free-will actors not spend extra money on a protocol to gain an advantage which is also an unstable equilibrium.

Even if this thread's article's vision of IPv6 improving direct connectivity were to happen, I still claim the overwhelming majority of programmers would continue to choose something like Github rather than host their repositories on personal home servers. Personally, I wouldn't want my repo to be traced back to my home's ip address. I don't want China DDOS'ing my home ISP connection if they don't like my iPhone app that monitors Hong Kong. If I was a female, I wouldn't want my home git repo to give away my ip address and invite digital stalkers. I'd use Github just for the ability to shield my IPv6 address.

If the programmers -- which we can think of as technical thought leaders -- aren't leading by example (with git) for decentralization, why would we realistically expect other mainstream consumers to adopt decentralized setups? Yes, there will always be decentralized communities but it will always remain niche.

There is no "decentralized protocol" in git. Changes to history are local. You then convince a remote to accept your development history as truth. I feel that you must miss the point of git's distributed and decentralized nature to say that a popular service like GitHub is detrimental to its ideals.

The sense in which git is decentralized is that in order to develop, you need a a full copy of the development history up until the point at which you want to contribute. You then create a history that is unique to you and maybe you push this to a remote at some point. Insofar that your history is shared, there is no difference between the repository at a remote (or an archive etc.) and the repository you and other developers have. Insofar that your history isn't shared, the workflow is entirely decentralized, enabling a distributed development process. Git isn't decentralized to satisfy some lofty ideal, but because this enables a convenient workflow.

A side effect of this is of course that GitHub going down forever isn't the end of the world in terms of git, because anyone interested in the code probably has an somewhat up-to-date copy of the development history that they can push to another remote or continue working on for their own intents uninterrupted by such an event. But that's a side effect IMO and not the most valuable sense in which git is decentralized. The loss will primarily be in git non-goals like discoverability, issue tracking and facilitation of the pull request workflow that GitHub offers. As far as I'm concerned, those are the only things I'm placing bets on that may result in a loss to me if GitHub dies.

I'm not saying that your claim is wrong, rather the opposite I believe it's holds true in the present. Computer Information Systems are reliant on larger economic forces. In many cases centralized systems are not better on a purely technical basis, but rather are better at attracting capital. However there are undoubtably systems of human organization and resource management that would change the fundamentals assumptions behind this.

Sorry for the misunderstanding. My reference to capitalists was a general point and not related to anything specific you wrote. Others in the thread mention capitalists so I just added it to my reply for color.

>However there are undoubtably systems of human organization and resource management that would change the fundamentals assumptions behind this.

I appreciate you bringing up Conway's Law as an explanation but I'm not fully convinced. I think there's an even more fundamental force than any artificial human organization such as Conway: if a bunch of humans don't want to do something , it creates an opening in the market for another group to do it instead. If that "something" is information technology related, it tends to create centralization.

A bunch of us don't want to set up a personal git server (for whatever reasons), and therefore, it creates an opening in the marketplace for Github to exist. At this primal level of desires, I don't think we have to bring in Conway's Law.