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Comment by user_named | Hacker News Reader

I think centralization is just a property of reality. Everything is centralized. Crypto is centralized in certain ways (mining capacity, holdings), capital is centralized to the top 0.1% in every country and so on.

It is better to design systems to handle centralization than with the assumption that they will remain decentralized, which would sort of break them.

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I disagree. As just one counterexample, consider the mycorrhizal fungal networks that mediate access to nutrients among trees--they've been doing their job without centralized intervention for billions of years.

If it seems like everything that we build is centralized, it might just be that we're bad at building things that last.

Or bad at building things that decompose...

Like the Internet? I actually think we could be good at building these sorts of things if we let go of the profit motive for doing so. History shows that we have been.

The tree is the center.

These networks handle the exchange of resources (nitrogen, phosphorous, etc) between trees. So far as I know, there's no reason to believe that there's a "leader tree" or anything like that.

This is something touched on by The Tyranny of Structurelessness and further confirmed by the way companies with a flat internal hierarchy operate. Where there is decentralisation there is implicit power relationships and in the terms of the root essay here platform and indirect centralisation. It’s the why of democracy in anarchist organisation.

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