I feel the same way and it might be we have a love hate relationship with these ideas because there is probably neither a perfect centralized or decentralized system, but rather there is goodness in the middle somewhere, and it's easy for said systems to shift to far to one side for various reasons.
I think most people who care have found that everything is better decentralized. Economy, Banking, Networking, Information, etc. But for some reason we humans don't stop creating centralized systems to then suffer from the bad consequences. This illogical points validates some discussion, I'd say.
I would like for a more decentralized scenario to win, but it seems to me that people tend to gravitate towards centralization. It happened so many times already that it would be surprising if it doesn't happen again.
I think people want decentralization, all else equal. Unfortunately, like most things in life, we don't have a way to just change that but keep all else equal.
I 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
Agree 100% with the point being made here, but the two examples used are also examples of the (large) weaknesses of centralized systems, which is much more abstract, often overlooked, and can be a much greater threat to our well being. A centralized system that everyone depends on will hurt everyone when it fails. A robust, decentralized system limits this exposure.
That's because decentralizing this system would make it crazy inefficient, which is why I think it's a good example - the benefits of centralization are somewhat obvious here.
If you want everything to be decentralized it will always be a pain in the ass and have way more friction compared to a centralized alternative even if it's pretty easy in absolute terms.
The beauty of decentralised systems like these is that they make central governtment less relevant. This is generally a good thing, but particularly so in place with less stable political systems.
I'm really put off by the movement towards decentralization for the sake of decentralization. Over the past couple of years the term has been thrown around as if decentralization is good by default regardless of the actual application and use case and I'm just not sold on the benefits. Of course, some of this might just be my personal bias
I would say my comparison is more akin to dictatorship vs anarchy. Obviously neither choice is ideal, so the specifics of how these systems are implemented is vital.
I'm a big fan of decentralization in general, but I think it's worth pointing out where things could go wrong at scale.
There are good benefits of having centralised services though. I don’t like this either, but I don’t think the solution is as simple as “they shouldn’t exist”.
I think the issues come down to incorrect or misaligned incentives.
I think centralization could work quite well, it just hasn't in practice. When thinking of benevolent dictators, there's obviously some advantage there compared to uncoordinated decentralization.
That said, I'm not stupid enough to think that's a good idea, and welcome any innovations in decentralized coordination.
Its a mix, fully centralized takes power away from people and sucks. Fully decentralized is not stable enough to survive as something useful. The trick is finding the right balance between. Generally its safe to bias towards decentralization because so much historically has overly tended towards centralization.
I hear you. Nobody claims it's gonna be easy to go the decentralization route however. Quite the contrary, it's gonna be extremely hard, probably even harder than what it took to arrive at today's status quo. But IMO it will be worth it.
Centralization and monopoly never end well. Only benevolent dictatorship systems kind of worked half-well, historically. I don't think we should just blindly believe a person in a position of power is benevolent. We humans are easily corruptible, that's the sad truth.
"..it becomes all too easy for us to slip into adversarial and exploitative framings of the human"
That is inherent in the structure of society and largely supported by worldviews in many cases unfortunately.
Personally I think that there are a couple of problems. One is with worldviews that oversimplify along the dimension of cooperative versus competitive. The second part which reinforces the first is that it's actually quite difficult to make a framework that really works without being overly competitive or cooperative or tending towards extreme centralization.
My worldview is centered on technology and so of course I think that is a key part of the solution. Money and government must become high technologies. Decentralized approaches have the potential to provide not only the freedom to evolve but the capacity to operate holistically at the same time.
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