[HN Gopher] The promise and paradox of decentralization
___________________________________________________________________
The promise and paradox of decentralization
Author : yosoyubik
Score : 95 points
Date : 2021-11-05 16:22 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.thediff.co)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.thediff.co)
| keiferski wrote:
| 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.
| isodev wrote:
| It's hilarious how a bunch of "investors" put together some
| money, invented a whole corpus of fictional vocabulary to replace
| existing concepts, slapped a web 3 label on it and voila - the
| most profitable global scam is born.
| wombat-man wrote:
| Yeah I've been playing around with decentralized apps and it's
| pretty unimpressive so far. Still people are dumping a lot of
| money into the concept. It's interesting to watch I guess.
| kordlessagain wrote:
| Not much, other than our own computer, is really decentralized.
| Even if something like IPFS was easy to access, a lot of highly
| decentralized data is fairly worthless because something has to
| index it, in a centralized place, to make it searchable.
|
| The "paradox" is things may be decentralized, but then finding
| and using those things in aggregate is hard.
| afiori wrote:
| The solution is to look at federation more than to
| decentralization.
|
| Together with decentralization comes the idea that
| centralization is bad, which is wrong; centers are good, you
| just have to protect the sistem from abusive centers, and/or
| let people choose which center or center of centers they
| prefer.
|
| In an alternare universe facebook has a moderation system users
| "subscribe to" that warns your client of what content you are
| likely to want to avoid but allowed you to "fork" it so that if
| you were displeased with their moderation you could run your
| own and have others subscribe to your moderation instead/too
| notriddle wrote:
| Federation, at least the way email, XMPP, the Fediverse, and
| the production version of Matrix do it, is a half-assed
| approach to data portability.
|
| The biggest problem with it is that, if a formerly-good
| server goes bad (or goes away entirely), everyone who used it
| is screwed, because their identity is tied up in the server.
| This means your most important criteria for choosing a server
| is stability. In practice, most of the user base picks old,
| established servers, hoping that the past predicts the
| future, and cementing a small oligopoly who can then use
| their power to direct the network's future.
|
| Real portability, like Matrix is working on and Scuttlebutt
| already has, helps with this problem. If your user ID isn't
| tied up in a domain name, then you can try out hosting your
| own server, and switch to and from it without much risk, so
| more people will try it.
| beders wrote:
| > The Internet was supposed to be a totally open set of protocols
| that anyone could interact with, and for a long time it was,
|
| That is still true today. Anyone can still open a connection to a
| socket or make a server-socket available on that particular layer
| and can expect routing to work. Yet.
|
| While it is tempting to equate "the Internet" with the world-
| wide-web - a term used less and less, they are two very different
| things.
|
| The biggest danger to the internet is about control of the
| underlying networks. That countries can cut themselves off from
| the internet or monitor all packets being routed in large regions
| is problematic. Efforts into "decentralization" should start
| there.
| austincheney wrote:
| The biggest problem with decentralization is that most people
| cannot imagine it, at all. Most people, including developers, are
| limited to what they are already familiar with, which is websites
| and content. That is not decentralized and any attempt to use
| websites or content to frame some discussion of decentralization
| is at best grossly incomplete.
|
| If you want to think in terms of decentralization you have to
| stop thinking in terms of broadcast, influence, publication, and
| broadcast. In a decentralized system you only influence those
| whom you are directly connected to and only if they wish to
| consume it.
|
| If the goal of your online presence is some form of attention
| seeking behavior then be happy with Twitter and Facebook. If on
| the other hand you wish to share and expose absolutely everything
| without embarrassment or violations of privacy decentralization
| is probably something amazing.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| Good article that makes a good faith effort to discuss tradeoffs
| rather than glorifying or demonizing decentralization.
|
| > The first downside to "Anyone can build anything" is that
| "anyone" means anyone, and the people to whom decentralized
| systems are the most attractive are the ones who are banned from
| other systems, often for good reasons.
|
| This is an often overlooked point from the user perspective.
| Decentralization sounds great when a website censors content you
| didn't want it to censor, but most users don't realize just how
| much unwanted spam and abuse content gets quietly removed from
| public platforms on a daily basis. The sheer volume of spam or
| even just angry/abusive users on public platforms these days is
| hard to describe if you haven't been on the spam/abuse prevention
| side of a popular website.
|
| Worse, the most abusive users tend to be the most persistent.
| They can become very good at gaming things like IP blocks,
| reputation systems, or voting systems. The best users can quickly
| get frustrated with even small levels of abuse and leave a
| platform.
|
| Decentralization seems to work well for cases where individuals
| are privately interacting with other users they already know. It
| seems much more difficult to solve the problem of public forum
| websites where anyone can contribute content. That's a dream come
| true for spammers and abusers. I'm interested to see how this
| space evolves as these platforms try different solutions.
| qwerty2021 wrote:
| moderation is not censorship.
|
| punishing someone for breaking the rules - not vague "we
| reserve the right to fuck you in the ass for any reason or no
| reason at all" kind of bullshit rules employed by
| facebook/twitter/reddit/whatever - is not considered censorship
| even at the kinds of places where people are particularly
| sensitive to it - for example, people don't accuse moderators
| of censorship when someone posts porn on 4chan's safe-for-work
| boards and it then gets deleted.
|
| besides, facebook/twitter/reddit/whatever, despite being
| centralized and authoritarian services, aren't equipped to
| combat abuse any better than decentralized entities, the only
| difference being that instead of blatant low-effort buy-penis-
| pills spam they are targeted for subtle manipulation at
| industrial scale.
| afiori wrote:
| > breaking the rules - not vague "we reserve the right to
| fuck you in the ass for any reason or no reason at all" kind
| of bullshit
|
| if Facebook actually had a PR position of "we remove whatever
| the hell we want" it would be fine, rather they prefer to
| have nice sounding rules and then interpret them however the
| hell the want.
|
| Personally I have a similar position towards net
| neutrality... if my isp wants to degrade connections to
| torrents and netflix/youtube that is fine, but the have to
| put it in writing in the contract.
| zaphar wrote:
| One persons moderation is another persons censorship. The
| activity of moderation is indistinguishable from the activity
| of censorship. The only difference is which group decides the
| censorship is acceptable.
|
| If moderation is just the current group in power gets to
| decide what is moderation and what is censorship then I fail
| to see the difference. You just redefined the centralization
| because I guarantee that group will be smaller than the rest
| of the internet.
| throw10920 wrote:
| > The sheer volume of spam or even just angry/abusive users on
| public platforms these days is hard to describe if you haven't
| been on the spam/abuse prevention side of a popular website.
|
| I haven't been on one of those teams, so I hope you'll forgive
| the naivety, but:
|
| These seem like solvable problems with decentralized systems.
| In both cases, _someone_ has to go through the work of manually
| identifying the bad content, right? In a centralized system,
| that 's someone working for the system - in a decentralized
| system, that's a random user.
|
| From a technical perspective, then, the centralized "please
| delete this content" message is pushed out the entire system,
| while the decentralized message/action can be put into a
| blocklist/banlist that other users can subscribe to. I believe
| that this is how the Fediverse works, for instance, and it's
| definitely how adblocker blacklists work - so this kind of
| system is already in effect, and seems to be working decently.
|
| If the volume of spam is truly extreme, then what's to prevent
| you from having distributed blocklists that are fed by
| automated processes (as opposed to manual additions), and users
| just subscribe to the ones that they trust?
|
| From a social perspective, users seem to be willing to do this
| work themselves, given how driven the users of sites like
| Reddit are, with no more reward for posting high-effort content
| than a bunch of imaginary internet points, and how effective
| adblockers are.
|
| To summarize - what prevents a decentralized system from taking
| the same approaches that a centralized system would employ,
| packaging them into blocklists, and then allowing users to
| choose which of those they employ? Same tech, different level
| of control.
| Kalium wrote:
| > These seem like solvable problems with decentralized
| systems. In both cases, someone has to go through the work of
| manually identifying the bad content, right? In a centralized
| system, that's someone working for the system - in a
| decentralized system, that's a random user.
|
| It's solvable in the same sense that email spam is solvable.
| Much like adblockers, spam is "solved" by re-centralizing.
|
| > If the volume of spam is truly extreme, then what's to
| prevent you from having distributed blocklists that are fed
| by automated processes (as opposed to manual additions), and
| users just subscribe to the ones that they trust?
|
| Most users are unequipped to evaluate that and disinterested
| in putting in a bunch of work to defend themselves against
| the flaws of the system at hand. Like adblockers or email,
| most members of the general population want it to be easy,
| automatic, and require minimal effort beyond clicking the
| button that gets them going.
|
| Users generally want things to work for them. Investing
| deeply in protecting themselves because the system's
| designers didn't consider abuse is rarely towards the top of
| the priority list. People like things that just work, and the
| further a thing is from that the more adoption will struggle.
| nostrademons wrote:
| This is basically what killfiles were in the days of Usenet.
| It worked well for the demographic that was on Usenet at the
| time (tech savvy and dedicated).
|
| I think the problem is that by and large, users are _not_
| willing to do this work themselves. When faced with a social
| platform that has a lot of jackasses on it, rather than
| individually curate their experience to remove the jackasses,
| most of them just leave the platform and find another one
| where this work is done for them already.
|
| And this is why social networks have abuse teams. If it were
| totally up to them, they'd rather save themselves the
| expense, but users have shown that they will leave a platform
| that _doesn 't_ moderate, and so all social platforms are
| eventually forced to.
| vageli wrote:
| A type of shared killfile might work, kind of like how some
| people or groups of people curate the lists of ad domains
| in ad blockers.
| POiNTx wrote:
| If I'm hosting an IPFS node and I'm accidentaly hosting
| some content I'd rather not host, I should be able to
| remove that content from my node and let other nodes know,
| 'hey, this stuff seems illegal/unethical/unwanted'. Other
| nodes could then configure their node to automatically
| listen to you and remove the tagged content, with
| parameters of saying 'at least x amount of people tagged
| this content' and 'of those people, y amount should have at
| least a trust level of z' where the trust level is
| calculated from others listening to that specific node.
| With blacklist/whitelist behaviour for specific nodes.
| Should do the trick but maybe I'm missing something.
| nostrademons wrote:
| Sure, it works if your starting point is "If I'm hosting
| an IPFS node." There's a level of baseline tech-savvy
| that's implied by even knowing what that is.
|
| Understand that most of the general population operates
| on the level of "Somebody said something on the Internet
| that offends me; how could this have happened?" And that
| the _maximum_ amount of effort they 're willing to put in
| to rectify this situation is clicking a button. The
| realistic amount is that they wish it never happened in
| the first place. That's the level of user-friendliness
| needed to run a mass-market consumer service.
| POiNTx wrote:
| Thinking outloud here a bit and being a bit handwavy but I feel
| like there's a need for a decentralized 'moderation' to some of
| these systems. Where if enough actors think something should be
| moderated, it will. I'm not sure what that would look like in
| practice. Something like if a 'large enough' (whatever that
| means) % of the system that thinks something should be removed,
| it will be. In real world systems we do have these procedures
| in place, I think pretty much everyone can agree that violent
| criminals should be removed from society, what constitutes
| 'violent' has been established by hundreds of years of
| 'justice' where 'justice' is mostly centralized with some
| indirect decentralization from democratic processes. Things
| like peertube, IPFS and any type of decentralized content
| should have this IMO.
|
| [EDIT] Seems like these type of systems exist in some projects
| reading from futher comments.
| agumonkey wrote:
| I can't wait for when decentralization fanatics will invent
| some kind of order that will very much look like the good old
| natural pyramid one can encounter anywhere..
| skulk wrote:
| It already exists, the two ideas just haven't been been
| combined yet. I'm imagining a decentralized platform with
| StackOverflow-style reputation (higher score = more power)
| tracked in a blockchain.
| agumonkey wrote:
| out with old, old is the new new
| [deleted]
| nonameiguess wrote:
| What you're imagining also (sort of) already exists. Credit
| reporting agencies, the Better Business Bureau, Yelp,
| Angie's List. They're "centralized" in the sense of
| reputation data is stored in a database with a single owner
| rather than something like a blockchain, but decentralized
| in the sense that anyone can submit reports, reviews, or
| votes.
|
| Importantly, a blockchain is not very fit for an
| application like this because it is append-only. That makes
| perfect sense for a transaction ledger, where you want
| immutable history and transactions are reversed by entering
| a new transaction with the signs reversed, but you really
| want the ability to correct a reputation history by
| actually redacting false reports rather than just appending
| a correction.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| > "the ability to correct a reputation history by
| actually redacting false reports rather than just
| appending a correction..."
|
| George Orwell's 1984 features a main character whose job
| is just this: rewriting history by 'redacting false
| reports'.
|
| Of course well-meaning people will set up these systems
| without considering the potential for abuse. In many
| cases, persistence is desired - it does matter who said
| what when, historical written letters are important
| documents, and records of actions also form institutional
| histories. Normalizing the 'redacting of false reports'
| can easily turn into rewriting history for propaganda
| reasons.
|
| I suppose you could have a two-lane social media system,
| one channel where comments and posts were not anonymous
| and were recorderd for posterity, and one channel for
| anonymous ephemeral chatter. However, trying to run both
| channels on one platform might not work, legally or
| technologically.
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| The major difference between decentralized pyramids and
| centralized ones is the size.
|
| The bigger the size of a network, the more attractive it is
| to abusers, while at the same time being more difficult to
| manage.
| evancoop wrote:
| That would suggest an oscillation - network effects to
| inflate network sizes, abuse, mismanagement, frustration,
| disruption, creation of a new paradigm. Lather, refactor,
| repeat?
| the-dude wrote:
| Isn't email an example of a decentralized system where this
| problem has been basically solved?
| WalterSear wrote:
| I get spam mail and scams all the time.
| jacobobryant wrote:
| Me too, and the vast majority of time they're delivered to
| the spam folder--seems to be working pretty well.
| [deleted]
| roenxi wrote:
| I think this goes a bit deeper to the actual benefit of
| decentralised platforms (and open protocols). When the major
| player in the space goes haywire there is an option to leave.
|
| Using Twitter as an example - they are going to be purposefully
| and continuously ejecting users. As long as the users are
| people who nobody wanted to listen to anyway then that is fine.
|
| But the situation changes because sooner or later (potentially
| already happened) Twitter will eject actual community leaders
| and a community will need to reform somewhere else.
|
| When that happens, open protocols and open platforms will help
| the community reform. It is quite hard to stop a community
| reforming on the internet for example because there are so many
| parallel communication channels that are basically free. So
| using Twitter isn't much of a risk because if they go bad then
| the community can reasonably move somewhere else.
|
| People seem to expect "decentralised" leads to some sort of
| semi-utopia where everyone has equal status or act like some
| sort of saintly community driven by consensus. I don't see how
| it can work that way. It really just makes it easier to
| transfer power when the currently powerful start acting
| abusively.
| tenebrisalietum wrote:
| > public forum websites
|
| Bringing together the entire world in one public space is
| Twitter and Facebook -- i.e. possibly not a good thing.
|
| It's recentralization.
|
| Users of a decentralized _protocol_ may use one or more
| decentralized _networks_ but there 's no need for a given
| specific decentralized network to be accessible by everyone.
|
| This does require effort on the part of the user, but that
| might be a good thing. Handing things to users on a silver
| platter without effort on their part leads to ad-economy driven
| manipulation, etc.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > Decentralization seems to work well for cases where
| individuals are privately interacting with other users they
| already know. It seems much more difficult to solve the problem
| of public forum websites where anyone can contribute content.
|
| But these don't actually need to exist. Decentralization
| doesn't have to mean a flat hierarchy, it could (against all
| trends) be a hierarchy with the user at the top, as social
| media once looked like. I could select the content I want to
| see by selecting the people that I trust and the content that
| they approve of, provisionally trusting the people that the
| people I trust also trust, and maybe extending that to an
| arbitrary number of hops. In that way I can choose my own mods.
|
| This requires clients that work for the user rather than for
| the content creator, complete anathema to major browser
| vendors, who divide their time between anti-features to force
| their users to do things that they wouldn't want to do if given
| a choice, and candy for website owners/developers.
|
| Labeling spam should punish the connections that caused it to
| be surfaced. That might damage serendipity slightly, but the
| modern web has run a bulldozer over serendipity with its
| engagement metrics algorithmically curating newsfeeds.
|
| edit: one of the reasons I want (and probably many want) this
| kind of control is because I don't want spam, but I _do want
| abuse_. I don 't want angry people filtered out as a rule, I
| want to be able to make the decision to blacklist specific
| angry people, or even people making stupid arguments in good
| faith. I want control over my own filter bubble. If that
| contracts my www to a gathering of friends and family, so be
| it.
|
| If web 1.0 is simple content consumption, and web 2.0 is users
| providing content to each other filtered by powerful rent
| seekers, web 3.0 should be user _governance._ The "mod" system
| is an authoritarian lack of a governance process, and should be
| replaced with tools that aid collective decisionmaking.
| jayd16 wrote:
| I'm with you except on the argument that decentralized
| reputation systems are easy to game. Isn't ssl and therefore
| most internet security based around decentralized reputation
| through cert validation?
| lbotos wrote:
| > decentralized reputation through cert validation?
|
| Certs are pretty dang centralized.
|
| Also, Your second sentence needs a bit more fleshing out
| because it doesn't follow.
| jayd16 wrote:
| Certs are certainly decentralized. You can create your own
| root, share them, etc. There a several highly trusted roots
| that are chosen by OS makers, not centralized. Some roots
| are quite big but what part is centralized?
|
| Chain of trust is a decentralized reputation protocol and
| we use it frequently and effectively.
| rhn_mk1 wrote:
| While it's not strictly centralized, as in, there's no
| single root, the sets of root certs in usage are
| extremely similar. There are only a handful that matter,
| and they overlap significantly because they share
| choices: Windows, Android, Apple, Firefox, various Linux
| distros.
|
| A contributing factor is that the culture that grew
| around them makes it uncommon to be able to manipulate
| your own certificates. If you set up a Web page with your
| own root cert, you can be sure it will never grow.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| Mozilla's latest bundle has 148 root CAs in it:
| https://ccadb-
| public.secure.force.com/mozilla/IncludedCACert...
|
| So "decentralized" in the sense that there are more than one,
| but it's not some hierarchy-less free for all where anyone
| can attest to their own identity and trustworthiness and the
| network just automatically accepts that.
| jayd16 wrote:
| Sure it is. You can easily create your own root CA and have
| others trust it.
|
| I don't really understand the complaint because you
| literally can attest to your own trustworthiness through
| your own cert.
|
| Having others trust you is a taller order. Obviously that
| isn't automatic.
| api wrote:
| The way I look at it is that deplatforming by the existing
| centralized platforms is actually a way for them to create a
| more powerful moat.
|
| Any competitor will immediately be inundated by spam, scammers,
| child porn, trolls, and Nazis to name a few. Since bad drives
| away good this will make their platform less desirable. The
| existence of a highly toxic refugee population deters anyone
| from creating competing networks.
|
| I don't think this was planned or intended, but it works out
| this way.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| That's really well put & I hadn't thought of things that way
| before. I think the solution is very active moderation and
| barriers put in the place of new account creation. (Gotta
| rely on a community of people who already want to be a
| community.)
| pphysch wrote:
| The author touches on some of the weaknesses of true
| decentralization but does not directly address the fundamental
| paradox.
|
| True decentralization is a natural but ephemeral quality of
| networks with _relatively few_ nodes. That is, scales where each
| individual node has enough internal resources to accurately
| represent the _entire_ network. Human networks are parameterized
| _very roughly_ by Dunbar 's Number (100-250), while modern
| computer networks are much more capable.
|
| As a small network scales up, decentralization becomes unnatural;
| nodes and links require too many resources to accurately model
| and communicate the network state. It becomes net energy
| efficient to introduce layers of dedicated networking nodes,
| routing protocols, and entire subnets. It is not a fluke that
| "Web3.0/DeFi" technologies so far are either a) tremendously
| inefficient or b) end up centralized.
|
| If you want to preserve true decentralization at this scale, you
| need to _enforce_ it. Prohibit centralization in any form. No
| more central networking /control nodes. Perhaps there are clever
| schemes where you can e.g. shard the entire network uniformly
| across its nodes, but the bottom line--the paradox--is that some
| _central authority_ must decide on and enforce the sharding
| /decentralization policies and _actively_ prevent centralization
| from emerging.
|
| Frankly, decentralization at _almost_ any meaningful scale in our
| modern global society is a myth. It 's a myth tightly coupled to
| the American origin story and its philosophical roots in the
| classical liberalism of Locke et al. and Western/Reformation
| Christianity.
|
| From a hard scientific perspective, it makes no sense why to
| sacrifice the welfare of a system for the sake of maximizing the
| welfare of an arbitrary component _that depends on the welfare of
| the system_. _Especially_ when we are confronted with systemic I
| /O imbalances on a global scale. To arrive at the myth of
| decentralization, you need the ingredient of (hyper)individualist
| ideology.
| ItsMonkk wrote:
| This mirrors my current thinking.
|
| Each individual naturally filters out information that they
| consider weird, the less they know the person that they are
| reading, the farther it is from their viewpoint, the more that
| idea will be passed over.
|
| Each community is made up of the average of the opinions of its
| members, and we can collectively track this through the Overton
| window. The more people that don't know each-other in a
| community, the less their weirdness budgets are, therefore the
| slower the community is able to change its mind. This is where
| Dunbar's Number comes in, eventually you reach a point where
| the Overton window metastasizes and two factions in that
| community break apart.
|
| So what we really need to be asking is...
|
| 1. Dunbar's number suggests that as a community gets larger, it
| should naturally split, why don't digital communities do this?
|
| One obvious conclusion is that the internet sites that we are
| building them on top of do not allow the split. The website is
| owned by the web owner, and they want all communication on it,
| and they don't have any sharding built in, so we can't split.
|
| But even when we build sites like Reddit that are inherently
| built of many communities and make it extremely easy to create
| new communities, we still see concentration of communities. So
| it is dismissive just to say it is the owners fault. It must
| somehow be that, because digital is so effective, the economies
| of scale within the digital space grows and even with the
| worsening of communication the community gets stronger with
| each member. That is, opinions within the websites Overton
| window have such good quality, that it doesn't matter that all
| discussion outside the window is ignored. And there are mostly
| more people entering than there are leaving, so it works out
| until it doesn't.
|
| And thus as you say, the only option we have to reach beyond
| our local maximums is to split the communities soon after we
| reach something close to Dunbar's Number. Does that mean each
| community would just be 150 people? Does that mean each person
| could only be a community of 150 people local to them? No. You
| can have a community of the top community members, and that 150
| community would have it's own Dunbar's Number. In fact, this is
| mostly what the House of Representatives and the Senate are, or
| was before 1920.
| pphysch wrote:
| > In fact, this is mostly what the House of Representatives
| and the Senate are, or was before 1920.
|
| An interesting observation: the population of the USA since
| its founding until today has increased approximately by a
| factor of Dunbar's Number. In theory, this would call for the
| introduction of another layer of national bureacracy (say, a
| Regional level above the individual States). Yet our
| political structure has not meaningfully changed, at least
| _de jure_ ( _de facto_ I believe it has changed substantially
| with the rise of capitalism in the early 20th century).
| igorkraw wrote:
| If you want to see true decentralisation, look to Europe,
| especially Germany, Switzerland etc., but also the EU
|
| And for an ideology that actually build decentralised but just
| systems, I am strangely enamored by anarchists.
|
| They(except Ancaps) have been working at this for about 1-2
| centuries and it's a hard problem (and not all anarchists are
| trying to be smart about it). The only way that I can see to
| make it work (in theory) is to find a way to do confederations
| of confederations that keep everything more or less manageable
| with human interpersonal relationships and "sane" local rules
| on each layer and delegate global things upwards, with
| shortcuts and balancing mechanisms that make sure the state
| apparatus stays decentralised, nimble and controlled bottom up,
| not too down. I think Switzerland and Norway as well as some
| first Nations are closest to this, but I hope we'll all get
| there one day.
| pphysch wrote:
| Interesting interpretation. In general, Northern Europe is
| far less individualistic[1] than USA. Don't mistake deeply
| entrenched (perhaps invisible) traditional hierarchies for
| the lack thereof.
|
| I view anarchism as another expression of classical
| liberalism, with the same structural faults re:
| decentralization, etc.
|
| [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_Jante
| bufbupa wrote:
| Interesting perspective, thanks for sharing. Personally I've
| always internalized decentralized vs centralized arguments not
| as "all nodes communicate peer-to-peer" vs "all nodes negotiate
| through common mediums" but rather as a "power is distributed
| to leaf nodes" vs "power is consolidated at root nodes".
|
| I think you're right in that peer-to-peer doesn't scale. I also
| don't think many (reasonable) individualist ideologies espouse
| that it does either. Individualism isn't renouncing
| hierarchical power structures, but rather asserting that the
| power rests with the hierarchy's leaves (individuals) not with
| the root nodes (collectives). It's the same way the west
| leverages a republic rather than direct democracy for it's
| legal system.
|
| Or put another way, the individual leaves should be in control
| of the nodes higher up in the hierarchy, not visa versa. Imo,
| your interpretation of the debate is missing the real argument
| being had here. Decentralization in this a political context is
| saying "power should be distributed to leaf nodes as much as
| possible". Naturally, those leaves will still organize
| themselves hierarchically in the name of efficiency (ie: I'll
| elect this official to make decisions on my behalf because i
| don't have the time to contemplate every bill/law being
| proposed myself). But that hierarchical delegation is still a
| distributed/decentralized power structure as long as the people
| can freely re-organize into a different hierarchy or elect a
| new representative at will.
| afiori wrote:
| for a decentralized social-like network nodes closer to the
| root need to have influence on nodes closer to the leafs, but
| leafs also need to move around and maybe connect to multiple
| root-like nodes simultaneously.
|
| One of most successful decentralized system that is useful
| for what it was meant to do is DNS, which has this tree-like
| delegation in its core
| pphysch wrote:
| > "power should be distributed to leaf nodes as much as
| possible"
|
| I don't see how this works in practice. Power manifests in
| subtle ways. For example, you can have a pure direct
| democracy where individual voters nominally carry all the
| political power...
|
| ...but who decides what is on the ballot? Who determines the
| _ontology_ of current and future policy decisions? Are
| closely-worded policies X ( "ban abortion") and Y ("restrict
| abortion") the same policy with shared vote counts or
| different policies with separate vote counts?
|
| If you democratize that power, you are subscribing for
| literally endless arguments over semantics.
|
| See also district gerrymandering.
| bufbupa wrote:
| I definitely don't have a formulaic answer to that
| question, but here are some heuristics that I'll posit
| drive us in the right general direction:
|
| - Freedom of information So that leaves can error correct
| when corruption is detected
|
| - Freedom to re-associate So that leaves can re-organize
| when the existing power structure becomes destructive to
| the leave's objectives. This may be a contextual or
| cultural shift rather than a direct form of corruption.
| (Eg: climate change may change many individual's priorities
| going forward). Imo pursuing this heuristic should preclude
| most forms of identity politics; I'd rather the leaves
| associate on philosophical priorities rather than on innate
| physical characteristics
|
| - No special rules for leaves vs nodes higher in the
| hierarchy Or perhaps only more restrictive rules for nodes
| higher in the hierarchy
|
| Your examples seem to have went back to a peer-to-peer
| model of decentralization; which I was agreed is inherently
| inefficient and untenable at scale. You need some
| hierarchical distribution of power, it's just that it needs
| to stay beholden to the leaves in the hierarchy. The person
| who decides what's on the ballot is the individual(s)
| elected/appointed to have that job. That person(s) is
| likely beholden to some pre-agreed upon rules for how to
| phrase questions, and any individual in the society can cry
| afoul if they abuse their position or if we need to update
| the rules with new considerations. All other leaves can
| choose to listen if they want, and choose to respond if
| they want, at whatever level of the hierarchy they believe
| is best suited to respond to the corruption. The hierarchy
| is not rigid, it's dynamic, evolves, and must be allowed to
| error correct as each individual sees fit. The only way
| that's possible is if it's driven bottom up rather than top
| down.
|
| The objective should be to distribute and localize power as
| much as possible, because the more power is centralized,
| the more prone to corruption, less efficient, and less
| responsive to nuance it becomes. The exact laws and
| regulations that achieve that objective? Society is still
| working that out, but I'd argue separate judicial,
| legislative, and executive branches was a good move in the
| right direction. I'd also argue trial by a jury of your
| peers was also a solid move in the grand scheme of things.
|
| I'd argue that same objective holds true for technological
| networks as well.
| igorkraw wrote:
| To answer just what you have in your post with what is the
| lives reality of people of Switzerland:
|
| - anyone who can get 100k people to agree with them decides
| what to put on the ballot
|
| - the parliament, which can shunt responsibility to the
| people after a best effort
|
| - courts, politicians, in the end additional referenda
| settle disputes
|
| District gerrymandering is also a uniquely Anglosphere-
| related problem that doesn't cause nearly as many problems
| in Germany, Switzerland etc
|
| With no offense intended, us nerds on Hackernews tend to
| lose track of the simple solution ala "just ask people",
| "let people have a discussion", "common sense will sort it
| out over decades" while the rest of the population has no
| problems with things which aren't easily formalized
| pphysch wrote:
| I agree for the most part, but keep in mind that "old"
| nations like Switzerland and Germany have a distinct
| advantage here. Family relationships trace back literally
| centuries and there is a strong sense of national
| tradition, which implies some level of ontological
| agreement and makes democracy possible to some extent.
| This shortcut does not apply to implementing a
| functioning democracy in, say, some "nation" of diverse
| ethnic groups arbitrarily carved out by British
| imperialists in the 19th or 20th century (see Africa and
| West Asia).
|
| > "common sense will sort it out over decades"
|
| More like centuries. USA has been a nation for 250 years
| yet we are teasing a second crisis of separatism.
| Immigration definitely plays a big role here. Political
| consensus takes generations to settle.
| lkrubner wrote:
| Hello, I'm writing about this issue now and I'd like to quote
| you. What name should I use to quote you? Feel free to reach me
| at:
|
| lawrence@krubner.com
|
| 434 825 7694
| photochemsyn wrote:
| This is an article about an abstract information economy, not an
| article about the effects of decentralized vs. centralized
| manufacturing.
|
| There's a lack of physicality, i.e. consider the difference
| between decentralized intellectual property (sharing patents
| etc.) and decentralized electronics manufacturing, food
| production, or transportation systems.
|
| Those latter issues taken together result in things like the
| current disruption in global supply chains, for which both
| everyone and noone is responsible. 'Anyone can build anything'
| sounds good, but if your only chip source is China and they have
| an energy/pollution crisis and scale back manufacturing, then
| what? Wait a few years while the USA gets comparable facilities
| up and running, if that's even likely?
|
| So perhaps you get economies-of-scale advantages with centralized
| manufacturing, but security-of-supply advantages with
| decentralized manufacturing?
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