waves of decentralizations

Evolutionary dynamics always start off well-defined and centralized, but overtime (without any exception) mature and decentralize. Our own history is full of beautiful exemplifications of this fact. In historical order, we went through the following decentralization waves:

• Science decentralized Truth away from the hegemony of Church.

• Democracy decentralized Power.

• Capitalism decentralized Wealth.

• Social Media decentralized Fame away from the media barons.

Today, if you are not powerful, wealthy or famous, there is no one but to blame yourself. If you do not know the truth, there is not one but to blame yourself. Everything is accessible, at least in theory. This of course inflicts an immense amount of stress on the modern citizen. In a sense, life was a lot easier when there was not so much decentralization.

Note how important social media revolution really was. Most people do not recognize the magnitude of change that has taken place in such a short period of time. In terms of structural importance, it is on the same scale as the emergence of democracy. We no longer distinguish a sophisticated judgment from an unsophisticated one. Along with “Every Vote Counts”, now we also have “Every Like Counts”.

Of course, the social media wave was built on another, even more fundamental decentralization wave, which is the internet itself. Together with the rise of internet, communication became completely decentralized. Today, in a similar fashion, we are witnessing the emergence of blockchain technology which is trying to decentralize trust by creating neutral trust nodes with no centralized authority behind them. For instance, you no longer need to be a central bank with a stamp of approval from the government to a launch a currency. (Both internet and blockchain undermine political authority and in particular render national boundaries increasingly more irrelevant.)

Internet itself is an example of a design, where robustness to communication problems was a primary consideration (for those who don't remember, Arpanet was designed by DARPA to be a communication network resistant to nuclear attack). In that sense the Internet is extremely robust. But today we are being introduced to many other instances of that technology, many of which do not follow the decentralized principles that guided the early Internet, but are rather highly concentrated and centralized. Centralized solutions are almost by definition fragile, since they depend on the health of a single concentrated entity. No matter how well protected such central entity is, there are always ways for it to be hacked or destroyed.

Filip Piekniewski - Optimality, Technology and Fragility

As pointed out by Filip, evolution favors progression from centralization to decentralization because it functionally corresponds to a progression from fragility to robustness.

Also, notice that all of these decentralization waves initially overshoot due to the excitement caused by their novelty. That is why they are always criticized at first for good reasons. Eventually they all shed off their lawlessness, structurally stabilize, go completely mainstream and institutionalize themselves.