Why I do not believe decentralization is possible.

In a society in which we have to face the brunt of the ever-increasing complexity of the world, few would dare trade convenience for freedom.

Lucid Dream by Huleeb

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I’ve made my views on the topic of decentralization pretty clear over the last few months. That said, I felt it necessary to summarize why I do not believe complete decentralization of any system to be possible.

It’s inconvenient.

It’s really as simple as that.

A large part of my skepticism around pushes towards decentralization is the fact that people generally prefer convenience. Decentralized systems are far from convenient as they usually demand a significant amount of technical sophistication on the part of the nodes(individuals in this case), and energy to prevent centralization.

Let’s say you wanted to manage your own email server effectively. You’d need to know quite a bit about how various computing protocols interact with each other. For this, you need to have put a significant amount of time into learning new technologies. The benefit of course is that it’s your own server. You are almost certainly assured that people who do not have the right to look at your messages, do not do so. But there are issues of initial cost and maintenance. So, you subscribe to a service like Gmail, and the whole ecosystem Google provides when you get a Gmail account. You get to play videos across devices, use said account to log into various unrelated apps, and so much more. But for that convenience, Google has a large say in what it gets to do with your account.

We usually have the tendency to push towards decentralization when we realize that large entities such as Google can do stuff we let them do, but would rather not want them doing. This tendency can be generalized with reference to other social institutions like governments and big banks. We realize that it’s mostly people like us with authority over what we do and as such seek to flee their grasp.

The problem isn’t the tendency to flee institutions in which power is entrenched, it tends to be what happens afterward. The problem, however, is that we fall back into the same cycle of choosing specific nodes that are more efficient than the rest. We get enamored by a specific set of groups, apps, and individuals with a specific set of values, processes, and functions often giving up on some of that freedom for a sense of efficiency.

This tendency isn’t wrong either. A large part of progress, and productivity demands that we select the best means of processing information available to us. This means that few academic institutions carry out a vast majority of the most significant research, or that a few companies output a vast amount of technological breakthroughs.

Centralized systems with their vast resources allow information processing on a scale largely unavailable to decentralized systems. Decentralized systems try to make up for this fact through protocols that allow for consensus but inevitably lead towards different forms of centralization prior to unconsidered.

Regardless of this, it doesn’t make the initial tendencies towards decentralizing certain systems worthless. In fact, I believe a more efficient solution to uninhibited power lies within this initial push. The push towards Democracy for instance allowed the theorization of alternate forms of governance and some may argue, economic progress. It has albeit ensured certain factions maintain vast power for generations although mostly legally.

What that solution may be is something I may write on later after a bit more thought. But as of now, it seems clear at least to me that any solution that believes itself to be a decentralized solution to the status quo is bound to be a centralized solution or die out if it doesn’t become one.

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