Alternatively, it could be our fault for creating a world in which that fast growth in knowledge is required. We didn't have to pursue technologies that make the centralization of power and control easier and easier.
There will always be people looking at any advancement and figuring out how to leverage it to expand their personal capability to project power. Nothing is immune to it. Even primitives of decentralization can be leveraged in a way that defacto centralization is the inevitable outcome.
You don't research things that can't be centralized. You just don't centralize. The cost there though. Is then you have to accept certain things just ain't gonna happen.
Newcomers to the technology clamoring for it to be more centralized is a daily occurrence. It seems almost entropic, the push towards centralization. It seems to require constant effort to keep it decentralized.
True decentralization and censorship resistance requires taking the bad with the good. I'm the case of Mastodon, if I can't be censored for sharing my views on technology, politics, or sports then the person wishing to sharing illegal photographs of threats that may be illegal in some jurisdictions can't be censored either.
It raises the very interesting question of whether freedom of speech is an all our nothing concept. Very few people would support the idea of being able to say literally whatever you want, but can you really have freedom of speech at all if someone else gets to draw the bounds with which your speech much stay?
As we start to build trust economies (which really may only be the way forward), we have to start valuing integrity and discretion, or... as you say, all or nothing.
I think this has something to do with Jefferson's "the cornerstone of democracy rests on the foundation of an educated electorate", and maybe, just maybe why they insisted on educating it. I wish they'd have made it a constitutional right, along with the right to free speech.
(edit: Bing chat says, "It is true that some of the founding fathers, such as Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and Benjamin Franklin, were strong advocates of public education and believed that it was essential for a democratic society. However, they did not explicitly include it in the Constitution, perhaps because they faced opposition from other delegates who favored state sovereignty or feared federal interference. Or maybe they thought that it was implied by the preamble, which states that one of the purposes of the Constitution is to “promote the general welfare” of the people. In any case, the lack of a clear constitutional right to an education has left room for debate and controversy over the years, and has resulted in significant disparities and inequalities in the quality and accessibility of education across the nation."
If it does, it will be our fault for not progressing fast enough in terms of knowledge.
There is no world in which we could, or would want to limit our growth in terms of scientific knowledge. Not to mention the fact that to do so would mean ceding full totalitarian control.
Even the concept of progress as a goal seems misguided and risky. We shouldn't assume something is better simply because it isn't what we had before. "Not worse than what we had before" is a great goal but one that requires effort and focus, it isn't a given law of the universe that all change is good simply because it's change.
Or we could try to progress everywhere, including in areas of safety from technological risk.