The Bane of my Existence, Part 1: Centralization

Hello Dear Reader,

Since this is a new blog, I thought I'd start it off with a theme that tends to come up again and again in my thoughts recently. There are two things I really don't like. No, that's an understatement. I really really despise them, see them everywhere and cannot help thinking we would be better off without them. The two things being barriers and centralization. For this first article I will focus on the second of the lovely pair.

Centralization refers to situations where many entities depend on one. We all depend on our governments for policing. We (almost) all depend on Microsoft for Windows and Office. We all depend on Georgie Bush to not start a nuclear war. The banking system not to go bankrupt. The reason this approach to organization is very popular is that it is easy and obvious. We all appoint someone to do something. Oddly enough, large scale centralization is not found in nature. Nature does everything in a very distributed manner. So why has nature in its wisdom rejected centralization? The one problem with centralization is that it creates a single point of control. When we are dependent on that someone, we are subject to their whims. If I am dependent on Facebook to connect to my friends, then Facebook says how I can and cannot communicate with my friends. I can complain until I am blue in the face but at the end of the day there is little I can do. If Facebook decides to change their policies to what they feel is right and I wrong, I have no options.

In fact it gets worse than that. When Facebook decides to delete a person's account, their social life may be impacted, especially if they are a U.S. college student. Also, when Facebook for some reason or another is unavailable, our information and connections are unavailable with it. The latter two examples are not merely a single point of control. They are a single point of failure, which is the second problem with centralization. You may be willing to accept handing out a measure of control in exchange for a service. Are you prepared to deal with that service becoming unavailable and/or unrecoverable though? Two more examples: A state goes down, people dependent on it are left out in the cold. And this is not a metaphor for the people living in Siberia when the Soviet union collapsed. More recently, Microsoft decided to shut down MSN Music. What's that got to do with anything you ask? Well, Microsoft's ingenious leaders had made it so all music that had been purchased from said store had to be periodically re-authorized through the store for fear of evil pirates. A brilliant strategy of penalizing your paying customers, but some had been willing to go through the humiliation in order to do what they thought was right, ergo, get digital music legally. When the music retailer shuts down guess what happens? Music purchased = bye bye. Depending on a centralized provider does not seem such a good idea any more.

The thing is, something always, ALWAYS goes wrong eventually. It may take years or decades but it does. Decentralized systems are built to withstand failure where centralized systems are in denial of it. That is why centralized systems have not survived in nature. Decentralization is not simply a nice thing we would like to have. On a grand scale it is linked to our survival and is something we should be actively pursuing and researching. Do we know how to achieve it in all the facets of our life? Certainly not, but moving to a decentralized world does not only require more new research and technology. It requires us changing our worldview and with it, our models of interaction. And that to me is the greatest barrier we face.

I would like to see this as a discussion, so please go ahead and add your thoughts. As has been this blogs' standard practice all these years, you are encouraged attack the ideas above with a vengeance. The point is to find (and maybe correct) the flaws be they syntactical, factual or logical. However if you cannot find something to disagree with, by all means go ahead and agree. Who am I to stop you?

Sincerely Yours,
Alexandros

UPDATE: A new point sprung to my attention that I don't think warrants another post so I will add it here. Another problem with centralization is that centers tend to collude to protect each other. We have seen a lot of support from state to business, and a lot of support from business to state. All this does is prevent the failures from renewing the system so that the zombies can keep walking until they all face a crisis so large that will make them all collapse together. Problem is, the longer you delay the renewal of the system, the larger the chances of a general collapse. As I wrote in the main article, centralized systems are in denial of failure and are therefore bound to be its victims.