Centralization is inevitable, but decentralization is right behind it
subconscious.substack.com
subconscious.substack.com
Keeping a sword dangling over the monopolist's head is reasonable.
Consequently, a service provider will plow enormous resources into differentiating their service, and generating other lock-in effects, so the users find it hard to leave.
A popular open source protocol is actually the perfect playing field for a would-be monopolist.
The monopolist can make their service better and better with cash and execution, but meanwhile the protocol is stuck at a baseline since a varied ecosystem doesn't upgrade itself as quickly. So it is less and less attractive.
Whereas when there's no popular open source protocol, the OSS ecosystem upgrades itself fast, like a cheetah? :P Whatever mental model you're using here might just be going over my head and I'd appreciate you being more explicit about it
At first I thought "email seems a good example of this: most people don't want to leave Google, I don't want to leave FastMail"... but then I remembered that I could just leave FastMail and take my email to Google. Which proves the upthread point about the open protocol being a safety net for users.
Can you talk about some examples of monopolised open protocols?
But there's no monopoly. There's feature-based lock-in built around the open protocols, and it's very effective, but it's not a monopoly.
To bring the topic back to networking, it has been said that decentralization is the worst form of networking except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.
(With apologies to Winston Churchill.)
That was how the US grew between 1700 and 1914. Everyone in Europe sick of monarchies just moved out to the new world.
When there isn't a finite amount of land to squat it becomes a viable long term solution.
This seems to be one of the key goals of Jack Dorsey's bluesky over Mastadon. Mastadon apparently has a lot of friction when trying to switch servers, even though it's a federated protocol. Bluesky claims to want make it much more trivial to take your identity to any provider on the federated network.
hello@joe — greeting, editorial rule and name on the Internet
http://apichat.fr/doku.php?id=hello_joe_greeting_editorial_r...
Relying on a centralized competitor to offer something better would be dubious. If they gain substantial marketshare there's nothing stopping them from deciding to simply swap back to our current system. It could even be done retroactively since everybody has those lines in their terms and conditions that amount to 'We can do anything, and you can't do anything about it.'
But with a decentralized system you have the possibility of a new type of domain where while one operator may be able to be the only one that can create them, once they transfer that domain to you it becomes literally impossible for them to access, change, or affect it in any way, shape, or form. Decentralization is able to turn various digital goods into something much closer to their physical counterpart where you are buying something that is no longer connected to the seller after checkout. And this can really help ensure the integrity of services that otherwise might be susceptible to bait and switch business models.
> A domain isn't much more than a key/value pair in a small database.
No, it's often a huge investment and important part of security approaches (certificates, validation, email, etc.)
> You're paying never-ending rent to them for them to not go out of their way to delete your entry.
Yes, you're paying them to not update that value to point to someone else's server. Just like you pay your landlord to not only keep your apartment in working order, but to not let someone else live there.
> becomes literally impossible for them to access, change, or affect it in any way, shape, or form
How is this a good thing? Someone takes over your domain and nobody is able to get it back? You just spent millions of dollars on marketing to get people to visit your somenameforme.tld and now it points to another site because your key leaked. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯?
https://consumer.ftc.gov/consumer-alerts/2019/10/sim-swap-sc...
You are not going to be able to pay extra to make rotten to the core pretty.
Is there any legal or technical reason why someone can't set up a DNS server that resolves domain names to different IP addresses than those traditionally used?
So why does no-one do this/ Obviously people do do it for ad-blocking, so why not for other purposes? Too difficult to get traction, perhaps?
If I decide I want to have my personal website be called google.com I can edit my hosts file to point google.com to my webserver and everything works for me, but anybody else going to google.com is going to get Google's page instead unless I somehow convince them to edit their files or use my weird DNS server.
Even if I come up with some great reason that makes people want to accept that google.com is better when it goes to my website instead, what happens when someone else decides they should be able to use google.com for something else and they convince a bunch of people to use their weird DNS server? We could fragment the DNS all over the place and have several conflicting entries for every popular domain name depending on what DNS server you're using but is that really better?
OpenNIC has a lot of non-ICANN domains but runs in a fashion similar to ICANN (central organization deciding rules for TLDs). Iirc there are some small non-US communities that use this a lot.
There are also a decent amounts of crypto TLDs (.bit for namecoin, Ethereum has a couple, etc).
There are of course a lot of corporations that use custom DNS domains for internal purposes, like .corp or .internal or the like.
It is difficult to get people to change their DNS serves en masse to something non-standard. The lack of being able to get real TLS certificates is also an issue though there is work in this direction: OpenNIC is developing a traditional CA afaik and namecoin has some experimental stuff to support DNSSEC and TLSA to have TLS certs enforced by the blockchain.
Unfortunately wallets have their cons too, and there are a lot of people who have lost their passwords or thumbdrives and thus access to their crypto.
No silver bullet.
But yeah, the moment you have key recovery, even if it's decentralised and requires multiple parties, you aren't 100% in charge anymore.
But, it's probably a good alternative to being 0% in charge with custodial wallets.
You could say that’s actually a better outcome than losing your private key.
As an example, IBM was once the dominant market force in computation. As the business grew and became increasingly byzantine, it was unable to respond to market changes or market demands in any meaningful way, and therefore the market became decentralized. This happened to Microsoft. If Apple continues on its current path it will happen to Apple. If Google continues on its current path, this will happen to Google. The entire internet was once significantly decentralized both in structure and in content providers. The content got silo'd by a few major players, and it is now swinging back the opposite direction while the structure is becoming increasingly AWS/Azure/Google. This too will eventually start going the opposite direction as those infrastructure providers ossify.
Nothing is forever.
https://www.webmd.com/a-to-z-guides/what-is-pfas
There.. Fixed that for you
Spam (and other bad actors) is one huge, and obvious, reason why; it's led to a significant consolidation in e-mail as well; SMTP delivery is hit-or-miss these days, and you can get ahold of a person to fix it only if you are "big enough"
The web plays a big part in this too. You can continuously deliver a client that updates its protocol in lock-step with the backend. This makes alternative clients something hard to do, and if you can't separate the client from the service, then it significantly increases the friction to change. Eudora didn't care which e-mail server it connected to, and you could take Eudora with you when you got a new ISP and lost your old e-mail address.
How much of my monthly fees to fastmail is spent on delivering e-mail, and how much of it is "keeping up with the gmail webclient"? I suspect it's more on the latter than the former.
This is one of the smartest things I've read in a long, long time. It seems deceptively simple or shallow, but it's not.
At least once or twice a year, for the past ~15 years or so, I reflect on how the email protocol has survived and thrived despite numerous attempts at "reinventing email" and such.
In a way it's like saying "we won't have a baseball team as good as the 1939 Yankees in my lifetime" in the sense that e-mail is the '39 Yankees of federated protocols.
On the other hand a lot of boosters for various new federated protocols want to compare their pet project to the '39 Yankees when they it's more like the 2021 Orioles.
I like the article, because it exposes very quickly a very powerful idea, but I disagree with the conclusion.
Information networks are built by humans, they are designed, they are not necessarily bound by the rules of evolution. Which means we may yet be able to find a system that is not afflicted by the curse of perpetual destruction and reconstruction.
The key challenge is that that system, by design, will be less efficient than other competing systems. So if there is a surrounding meta-system that allows it to compete with others, the other systems that tend towards consolidation will drive out your system.
It's essentially the same problem we see in economics today with supply chains. Companies that optimized their supply chains to have more margin made more money and won... as long as the supply chains were all running perfectly. But once COVID happened, it became clear that those businesses had no resilience.
Good analogy thank you.
Given humanity's track record, destruction and reconstruction seem like a solid bet.
Not to mention, systems will require change anywhere nature interacts with it.
The freeway map shown looks like the major truck-freight corridor for transporting goods (many collected at coast ports from overseas shipping) across the country to warehouses and distribution centers, certainly not what most people use for travel by car. Hence, comparison to air travel doesn't make much sense.
As far as centralization and decentralization, for most things this comes down to technological limitations (ignoring the issue of economic monopolies blocking local regions from adopting the latest technologies). Local agriculture and local energy production are a lot easier to maintain (and benefit from no transport costs), than say, local chip foundries. Maybe someday cheap 3D printers capable of spitting out nanoscale RISC-V products in someone's garage will be available, but certainly not anytime soon.
(It is true that there are limits on what people will remember.)
"maintaining relationship" is not the same as remembering or knowing the person's name. It is spending enough time with the person that you have an ongoing relationship, which is eased if you remember a number of details about them (job history, hobbies, birthdays, etc).
On average matters because the number is about group size, not any one individual's ability. For the group to cohere, most of the people in the group need to know most of the people in the group.
You will find people who can only manage 100 or fewer relationships, likewise, people who can maintain many more, even orders of magnitude more.
It isn't about the individual. It is about the group.
At about 300 or so, you'll "recognize" most of the group, but you won't know much about many of them, or really have a relationship.
And once the group is above that, you either need to have it hierarchical setup (you don't know all the members of the families at your school, but you recognize the parents, etc) or it just becomes a mash of smaller groups (no matter how you try to pretend it isn't).
You might not remember what everyone in the group thinks of everyone else, but keeping track of grudges is often relevant.
Consider something like a thanksgiving dinner you have what looks like central figures say a grandparent that everyone is related too, but the grand kids have tighter bonds to their parents than the grandparent.
Extend that to a village and you get more social people with more connections across the community, but those aren’t even close to the strongest bonds.
If the site is supported by the country, it is VERY hard to take down.
Of course western governments can block it
If you're interested in topics like the one in the article, all our work is open source and we love getting into it with folks on Github or our Discord (link in the README): https://github.com/subconsciousnetwork/noosphere
Seriously though, I would be happy to have a polite discussion about the reason for our choices in our Discord server!
The discussion space is for our project which we are inviting other humans to contribute to. We are open and welcoming to all, but it's not the town square. We strongly prefer to work in a social context where every participant has explicitly agreed to be kind and respectful of each other, to recognize each other's humanity and to abstain from violence of any kind towards others.
Folks who won't agree to such terms may still fork our work or contribute on Github if they are so inclined.
Also, the rules are not so general or unambiguous as you've described them here. They mention speech patterns and topics that are highly loaded on contemporary politics.
I have found that all it takes for one remain on the right side of such a code is to have good will in one's heart towards other humans. We have hundreds of participants, a lot of lively and thoughtful discussion on a range of topics, and not a single user has been found in violation of the code of conduct to date.
That you got them from somewhere else doesn't head off uncertainty in their interpretation. It does raise the possibility that they're a bit of groupthink spreading through the open source software scene, versus something your group believes in enough to have indpendently developed. Historically such things tend to function more as shibboleths than meaningful exercises and I suspect that's the case here.
Centralization and its opposite are extremely general concepts. You can't have a conversation about them because they mean nothing without specific context. Adding "the internet " or "the web" doesn't help because they're very vague too. It's like talking about "drinks" versus "not-drinks".
My conclusion then is different: we need common ideas, common tools not centralization. What's wrong with the classic web? Well that information access without search engines was a nightmare, but there is no need of "central" search engines as network hubs. YaCy offer an example FLOSS implementation of a distributed search network whose effectiveness much depend on numbers of indexing peers. In a fully "common web" all who host html pages also participate in the search distributed network and search quality became excellent, than some argue we can also distribute webpages like the ZeroNet idea and a new VERY FAST and VERY EFFECTIVE web is here. Oh, it's utopia just because of big players interests against the most and ignorance of the most, witch is not a technical thing. And that's just an example.
Logistic networks are another example where the centralized free scale network is easier than a hub-less network, but fragile, while a hub-less network is hard to keep, especially if not all nodes cooperate, but far more resilient.
The same happen in politics with historical absolute monarchy vs democracies and pretty anywhere else.
My final reminder: in winter is cold, in summer is hot, sometimes is too dry, sometimes too wet, we human as essentially any living being have tried our best to "mitigate" such natural phenomenon to live better. If certain free-scale networks are a natural thing that does not means we have to accept them without trying to made something better for us.
We could also use a system which demotes or outright forbids too much centralization.
So it's not inevitable at all.
Or at least it isn't if you just look at how people are likely to interpret the title, reading "centralization" as in "central to the whole system".
Local increases in "centralization" are normal, e.g. people centralize in cities, but calling that centralization is misleading IMHO. They are local aggregates not central to the whole system.
More important if we e.g. look at (biological) nature centralization is nearly always the prelude of collapse and anything more then very localized centralization is often an indication for potential problems.
So we probably should change our system to demote too much centralization.
I like looking at it from a perspective of privacy, ownership/sovereignty, and choice.
A system that has a few dominant centralized players that are interchangeable is decentralized as far as I'm concerned. An example would be static web hosting. A system with hosted centralized options but where I can also self-host is also decentralized. An example would be something like GitLab.
I want systems where I own and control my own data and where it's not being data mined without my approval. I want systems where someone isn't always looking over my shoulder. I want systems that treat me as the customer not the product.
Sufficiently large systems benefit more and more from specialization, the emergence of content delivery networks on top of the more generic internet is an example. As the types of content we consume are getting more and more sophisticated, bandwidth heavy and capital intensive, specialized infrastructure and distribution pays off more and more.
For that reason peertube and other alternatives are pretty much structurally doomed. They'll never compete or be as economical as services and infrastructure optimized for that task.
https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html
One reason the blockchain has persisted longer than other decentralized systems is that it introduced economic incentives for maintaining its system. I think this is the best strategy for making decentralized systems that resist the tendency toward centralization while remaining competitive with centralized ones.
A critical component of a well designed trap: consider all suggestions that you are trapped in an imperfect methodology to be conspiratorial/etc, and therefore false. Checkmate.
I’m actually reading a chapter right now on the architecture of the brain that talks a lot about this in the context of our neural connections: Chapter 2 or Cycle 2 “Structure Defines Function”[0].
[0]: https://neurophysics.ucsd.edu/courses/physics_171/Buzsaki%20...
Centralisation versus decentralisation should not be an either/or style debate.
It is possible to have both types of networks. Each can be valuable in different contexts.
For example, we need to have networks for noncommercial purposes as well as commercial ones. Small networks, e.g., L2/3 overlays, managed by their users can be useful for noncommercial purposes. Large networks managed by central third party authorities can be useful for commercial purposes.
With respect to noncommercial internetworks, one lesson of The Internet is that large scales ones are inherently disadvantaged. Besides the problem of proprietary, non-compatible protocols mentioned in the top comment, centralised "infinite scale" networks also become infested with "tech" companies, commercial intermediaries, who usurp them as honeypots for commercial and political advertisers.^1
On "The Internet", noncommercial network use, e.g., communicating with friends and family, is being compromised for commercial purposes by a relatively small number of single, central authority websites. Hundreds of millions of people with small networks of friends and family, e.g., less than 100 nodes, are being unecessarily intermediated by central "hubs" that collect data and serve targeted advertising and/or sell advertising services.
If those smaller networks were not connected nor managed by a third parties, then the attraction of injecting advertising into peoples' noncommercial internet use falls dramatically. The incentive for, and feasibiity of, data collection is similarly reduced. Those are features, not bugs.
Whereas for commercial uses, e.g., sales of goods and services, inter-business communications, etc., small networks are far less valuable. For these applications, we need networks that scale to large sizes. Arguably that utility has already been proven as successful. Advertising and data collection may be appropriate in the commercial context.
1. The irony is that The Internet was supposed to be a means of disintermediation. In some contexts, that is true. In others, it has allowed for the greatest level of intermediation in history.
It could be call "the listing problem", you can decentralize Amazon (e.g. OpenBazaar) but at the end the app you use to list the product could censor and filter what they want without caring about the protocol behind.
IMO decentralized internet (and social media and currency) should be possible, routinely tested, and readily-available when the centralized internet fails. But a neutral, trusted, central server will is basically always preferred when it is available.
This is way overgeneralizing, and not remotely true for a large swathe of things. Centralized systems are actually less efficient unless the central agent is a party to every interaction due to the nature of the system. If the central agent is only a party by virtue of the imposed structure, you've created overhead, made the system difficult to change, and made it brittle to variance from design assumptions.
Decentralized systems can evolve much more rapidly, can survive catastrophic variance, and are more efficient in a large number of cases.
Centralizing mail delivery works well, centralizing economies or ecosystems does not.
Take the set of all systems conceivably used by human beings. Email providers, social networks, parent-teacher associations, dungeons and dragons campaign groups, neighborhood watches, everything.
Now, classify each of those things into one of two groups: either "more like the USPS" or "more like national economies". What is the ratio of "USPS-alike" groups, versus "national economy-ish" groups?
What does the obvious answer to this question -- 100% vs. 0% -- tell you about the relevance of centralization vs. decentralization?
A large portion of human social interaction is peer to peer though.
Then you will have a battle for control of centralization centered on verifiable identity, kyc and centered ultimately around financial system control, which is the center use case of centralized identity platforms.
All incentives during this phase are centralization, consolidation and scale. Decentralization efforts will be carefully controlled and excluded by very powerful interests. Financial incentives will prevent meaningful adoption.
The carrot will initially be digital money centered on banking directly in the Federal Reserve. Those licenses have been issues for several years and the direction is clear.
There is a lot of carrot left to fuel the consolidation phase, and as economic conditions change and global conditions degrade people will embrace centralized solutions in the short term.
Then you will have an interruption to the central control systems which will lead to decentralized systems.
It will take much longer than people realize for this cycle to play out. We’re still in the consolidation phase. I’m a huge believer in decentralized systems, but like self-driving cars, it’s less of a technology problem and more of an autocratic and powerful interest story.
The identity system we've been stuck with since WW1 will finally be replaced with something decentralized and approaching fair thanks to digitization. What we're lacking is the software that gives individuals self sovereignty.
I’d love to have a constructive conversation rather than resorting to base name calling.
I mean to say that centralization is caused by digitization because of the financial incentives, not that centralization IS digitization. And all of our current systems are systems of legacy control.
In fact I generally agree with you. Generally the identity system will be interrupted, and at the core digitization of the legacy system will happen. I’m simply saying that there will be further consolidation and centralization first and it will take longer than most people think due to the powerful financial interests involved.
To put it in your own words, I generally believe we will have to go through a economics “with the tragedy” before we get to the part where the tragedy gets removed.
Glad to hear your justifications. They are more persuasive than the initial representation.
Thank you for engaging the constructive conversation.. now w.r.t. the power of financial interests, I think it is overestimated and easily shattered but we will just have to see what happens.
I don't know that it is kind to say to someone that they're "full of shit".
Much like 'AI' I think this word 'decentralization' triggers something within.
It's worth considering that impulse (i.e. freedom is really important, and we should think about it), but also needs constant contextualizing.
I have 4 accounts at 4 different banks. If one of them refused to hand the cash over, even without any redress, I have 3 other accounts to fall back on. So my life is much less centralised than Wild West Bill.
The same applies to almost all elements of life. Back in the wild west, no one would date you if you didn't go to church. The priest literally had centralised power to refuse you a partner (and God help you if you were gay or the wrong colour or from a "bad" family). Today no one knows or cares. Very very decentralized. Ditto employment or housing or crime and punishment.
This is unlike true decentralization i.e. 'trustless', which, paradoxically has to be based entirely on trust.
Visa goes offline, people switch to mastercard or use cash.
Now compare that to living in the wild west, and the only town in 100miles bans you because you're slight different to them.
WhatsApp going down on the other hand will be a big pain as lots of businesses and people rely on it. Though I expect them to figure out alternatives within a few weeks.
You've really got me thinking.
Is there a word for that thing when "everyone knows" what they think "everyone is doing", but once they start to dig deeper it turns out nobody really is? Everyone is pretending to, because they think that's what everybody should say and do?
Mass delusion? Group fallacy? Fashion? Groupthink? None quite capture it.
I'm alluding to something a bit more interesting, I hope.
We don't have a way to test those hundreds of voices comprising the supposed silent majority. I'm saying that when/(BIG if) one does - via some hitherto undevised ingenious experiment which always yields truth - we find that no... in fact everyone is at best ambivalent, but mostly going along with what they think the majority view is.
I'm sure there's a name/concept for this in group dynamics.
Consensus mythology? (I'm just making that up)
A hallmark is that interrogating the group yields one answer, but each individual considered privately will give you a very different answer.
But it's not "group-think" I'm talking about, because that implies a more overt pressure. Rather it emerges in the absence of coordination amongst an implied majority when there exists a loud propaganda message designating some other group a minority.
I think this effect has important implications in the kind of 50:50 + swing elections we've seen over the past few years. For example, in Brexit, a mass of lethargic voters assumed "everyone will vote against" and didn't verify the reality by asking lots of diverse friends. It's not that people are trapped in actual bubbles so much as bubbles of their own mind based on assumptions about those around them.
Sorry, that's probably a long and clumsy way of saying something obvious.
in philosophy it is known as heterophenomenolgy hetero = same, phenomenology = experience
Because if Visa shits itself (it has) I use Amex, Mastercard, cash, debit, or even checks.
And if Meta shits itself I don't even notice except to make fun of it.
I don't believe payment processors have the same number of payments every second, so Amex and MC have to be sized for the largest spike (+ some) that they can endure, and so unless Visa fell right when they were already maxed out, they'd likely continue.
And Visa has fallen before; if it was anything like a long-term failure, you know all the other processors would be spinning up as much extra capacity as they could. And many stores still have the paper machines for credit slips.
https://www.wired.com/story/visa-outage-shows-the-fragility-...
Can you give an example?
100 years ago, there was one major employer in my area (east London), a few grocers and bakers, people's activities were tightly controlled and linked to family status. Participation in all elements of economic and social life was tightly controlled by a small clique of economic, clerical and political elites.
People think about centralisation as a corporate or government thing and a unitary national authority. But it's not. It's part of every later of society. When we lived in tribes, the chief had totally centralised power over almost everything. Villages were the same with an overlord somewhere you'd never see. Towns were lighter but still quite centralised. Modern cities and urban life is about as decentralized as it is possible to be.
That's my understanding of centralisation. Sorry it's not better explained.
The power of unenclosable carriers offered by breakthroughs such as Holochain https://holo.host is breathtaking.
I agree. A centralized system will seek to expand to further consolidate control & create cartels which often act against the interests of those outside of the cartel. A system of decentralized components that becomes centralized can be forked to create alternative systems that address the interests of those who maintain the alternative systems.
It's like forest garden management technique...using fire to create new growth & biodiversity. The mature forest has less biodiversity & will eventually die out on it's own, but a fire will clear the less "fit" organisms leaving space for new organisms to grow.
> The power of unenclosable carriers offered by breakthroughs such as Holochain https://holo.host is breathtaking.
Is the Holochain api/architecture stable or is there still churn?
Perhaps you have it confused with another project.
DHTs (such as underlying Holochain) are scale-free, but also automatically heal from attacks.
Most importantly, they operate essentially unimpeded even in the face of successful network partitioning attacks.
All while each "agent" (You) retain complete cryptographic control of your data and identity.
And, if/when you want to migrate your data (exfiltrate), re-package the functionality (create new clients, or integrate multiple networks), or even completely fork the entire application -- all of this is at your fingertips, and no entity can stop you.