The Battle for the Soul of the Web: DWeb vs. Web3
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
The solution to empowering individuals is accountability. We should be given tools that let us keep each other in check. Checks and balances are the basis of democracy itself. The web should be governed, with a constitution and a set of evolving laws commissioned by an educated, well-informed citizenry.
Decentralized networks are the very definition of muddied, lawless waters that are only capable of serving an oligarchy. Libertarians tend to think that lawlessness equals individual liberty, but they are sorely mistaken, because oligarchy is tyranny, even when it's dressed as a free market economy or today's web, both are controlled by a handful of companies that blindly chase their short-term interests throwing you, your rights and your future under the bus.
The bottom line is that we need a system that incentivizes people to plant trees under whose shade they will never sit. That's the soul of a democracy, and that's how you build the future of the web, not by bringing it back to lawlessness. Despite what nostalgia tells you the 90's web sucked too, only people with a specific background, education, and middle-upper income were truly a part of it. The hacker culture back then was really just a bunch of rich kids playing with their expensive toys. The same people later went on to create our beloved tech companies, which explains a lot.
I also think that most decentralized projects exist not for their touted merits, but because the rest of the market is saturated. Amazon and it's cohorts already own everything, so now we have a bunch of venture capitalists drooling for a new space to exploit, but they have to exploit it fast and hard because most decentralized projects are unable to provide any actual value. You can only woe people for so long with promises, except if you manage to create a religion, which is definitely one of the goals here. Tap into those post 2008 fears and lack of trust, the inequality, climate change and all the misery and play people like the fiddle. Worked for the conservatives and libertarians like a charm, granted they worked hard on destroying our institutions so they can claim that they are not working. Oldest trick in the book.
There's no golden road to public goods without norms, laws, and technology to support it; and there's no sacred system that doesn't have a road to power concentration within it. The incredibly oligarchical Roman Republic and Empire (from I think your quote comes from), had a system of public goods provision that depended on those oligarchs, who personally bankrolled them, but which lasted a very long time. The United States is the system that most deliberately implemented Montesquieu's checks and balances theory, and depending on how you look at it, is either the most successful capitalist/liberty-driven society ever, or a terrible inditement of how oligarchy can prosper within a constitutional framework built on that system.
The hacker culture of the 70s, 80s, and 90s relied on access to computers, but for a sizeable subsection was a ticket out of (a somewhat relative) poverty and social exclusion for many of them. There were a lot of rich kids too, but I don't think many of the excitement about the global power-distributing abilities of access to knowledge, and access to personal computing power was, or is insincere.
One of the directions you can take that goal is as you dsay: to create a governed, constitutional, environment of laws online. But the challenge here is: how would you do that? In a global space, it either requires the rigid and drastic national division of the existing world network, or the development of a world governance system with global reach and enforcement.
There are some routes to get there, and people I know are working on it, but I don't think it's a path that's particularly guaranteed to lead to a democratic system free of oligarchs.
It's a tough problem, and I wish I had your confidence about what the right ways to solve it online are.
The problem is the incentives, and of course the root of the problem is the lack of resources. We don't have enough for everyone, so we are pitted against each other, and the winners keep winning, thus inequality.
It may be the toughest problem in the world, but nobody is trying. At best most public good projects are feel good ones, at worst many of them are actually grifts. But it's not even about sincerity, it's about power. Countries would be able to do much more, political and economical unions even more.
Funny the commies had the same solution for their starving population.
Every democracy in the world is ruled by party politics, left right, blue green these are parties not policies. Politicians all go to the same private school thats heavily financed by their party.
The term checks and balances is a very American thing no other democracy has it and America is not even a democracy its a republic. For example the only check and balance on the UK parliament is the unelected house of lords who get their place because they are born into an oligarchy, besides that the only other check is the crown.
Never said that the United States was a democracy, although it is both a democracy and a republic, although the difference between these is specific to the country due to a historic compromise. As far as the state of that democracy goes the United States is considered a flawed democracy. I think that's generous considering how much influence billionaire oligarchs wield in the country, how large inequality is, and given the lack of educated, well-informed citizenry with the media being controlled by said oligarchs and education is being held back for political purposes, so that the people are easier to control.