Decentralization is the new disruption—the thing everything worth its salt (and a huge ICO) is supposed to be doing. Meanwhile, Internet progenitors like Vint Cerf, Brewster Kahle, and Tim Berners-Lee are trying to re-decentralize the Web. They respond to the rise of surveillance-based platform monopolies by simply redoubling their efforts to develop new and better decentralizing technologies. They seem not to notice the pattern: decentralized technology alone does not guarantee decentralized outcomes. When centralization arises elsewhere in an apparently decentralized system, it comes as a surprise or simply goes ignored.

Here are some traces of the persistent pattern that I’m talking about:

• The early decentralized technologies of the Internet and Web relied on key points of centralization, such as the Domain Name System (which Berners-Lee called the Internet’s “centralized Achilles’ heel by which it can all be brought down or controlled”) and the World Wide Web Consortium (which Berners-Lee has led for its entire history)
• The apparently free, participatory open-source software communities have frequently depended on the charismatic and arbitrary authority of a “benevolent dictator for life,” from Linus Torvalds of Linux (who is not always so benevolent) to Guido van Rossum of Python
• Network effects and other economies of scale have meant that most Internet traffic flows through a tiny number of enormous platforms — a phenomenon aided and exploited by a venture-capital financing regime that must be fed by a steady supply of unicorns
• The venture capital that fuels the online economy operates in highly concentrated regions of the non-virtual world, through networks that exhibit little gender or ethnic diversity, among both investors and recipients
• While crypto-networks offer some novel disintermediation, they have produced some striking new intermediaries, from the mining cartels that dominate Bitcoin and other networks to Vitalik Buterin’s sweeping charismatic authority over Ethereum governance

This pattern shows no signs of going away. But the shortcomings of the decentralizing ideal need not serve as an indictment of it. The Internet and the Web made something so centralized as Facebook possible, but they also gave rise to millions of other publishing platforms, large and small, which might not have existed otherwise. And even while the wealth and power in many crypto-networks appears to be remarkably concentrated, blockchain technology offers distinct, potentially liberating opportunities for reinventing money systems, organizations, governance, supply chains, and more. Part of what makes the allure of decentralization so compelling to so many people is that its promise is real.

Yet it turns out that decentralizing one part of a system can and will have other kinds of effects. If one’s faith in decentralization is anywhere short of fundamentalism, this need not be a bad thing. Even among those who talk the talk of decentralization, many of the best practitioners are already seeking balance — between unleashing powerful, feral decentralization and ensuring that the inevitable centralization is accountable and functional. They just don’t brag about the latter. In what remains, I will review some strategies of thought and practice for responsible decentralization.

Hat from a 2013 event sponsored by Zambia’s central government celebrating a decentralization process. Source: courtesy of Elizabeth Sperber, a political scientist at the University of Denver

First, be more specific

Political scientists talk about decentralization, too—as a design feature of government institutions. They’ve noticed a similar pattern as we find in tech. Soon after something gets decentralized, it seems to cause new forms of centralization not far away. Privatize once-public infrastructure on open markets, and soon dominant companies will grow enough to lobby their way into regulatory capture; delegate authority from a national capital to subsidiary regions, and they could have more trouble than ever keeping warlords, or multinational corporations, from consolidating power. In the context of such political systems, one scholar recommends a decentralizing remedy for the discourse of decentralization — a step, as he puts it, “beyond the centralization-centralization dichotomy.” Rather than embracing decentralization as a cure-all, policymakers can seek context-sensitive, appropriate institutional reforms according to the problem at hand. For instance, he makes a case for centralizing taxation alongside more distributed decisions about expenditures. Some forms of infrastructure lend themselves well to local or private control, while others require more centralized institutions.

Here’s a start: Try to be really, really clear about what particular features of a system a given design seeks to decentralize.

No system is simply decentralized, full-stop. We shouldn’t expect any to be. Rather than referring to TCP/IP or Bitcoin as self-evidently decentralized protocols, we might indicate more carefully what about them is decentralized, as opposed to what is not. Blockchains, for instance, enable permissionless entry, data storage, and computing, but with a propensity to concentration with respect to interfaces, governance, and wealth. Decentralizing interventions cannot expect to subdue every centralizing influence from the outside world. Proponents should be forthright about the limits of their enterprise (as Vitalik Buterin has sometimes been). They can resist overstating what their particular sort of decentralization might achieve, while pointing to how other interventions might complement their efforts.

Another approach might be to regard decentralization as a process, never a static state of being — to stick to active verbs like “decentralize” rather than the perfect-tense “decentralized,” which suggests the process is over and done, or that it ever could be.

Guidelines such as these may tempt us into a pedantic policing of language, which can lead to more harm than good, especially for those attempting not just to analyze but to build. Part of the appeal of decentralization-talk is the word’s role as a “floating signifier” capable of bearing various related meanings. Such capacious terminology isn’t just rhetoric; it can have analytical value as well. Yet people making strong claims about decentralization should be expected to make clear what distinct activities it encompasses. One way or another, decentralization must submit to specificity, or the resulting whack-a-mole centralization will forever surprise us.

A panel whose participants, at the time, represented the vast majority of the Bitcoin network’s mining power. Original source unknown

Second, find checks and balances

People enter into networks with diverse access to resources and skills. Recentralization often occurs because of imbalances of power that operate outside the given network. For instance, the rise of Facebook had to do with Mark Zuckerberg’s ingenuity and the technology of the Web, but it also had to do with Harvard University and Silicon Valley investors. Wealth in the Bitcoin network can correlate with such factors as propensity to early adoption of technology, wealth in the external economy, and proximity to low-cost electricity for mining. To counteract such concentration, the modes of decentralization can themselves be diverse. This is what political institutions have sought to do for centuries.

Those developing blockchain networks have tended to rely on rational-choice, game-theoretic models to inform their designs, such as in the discourse that has come to be known as “crypto-economics.” But relying on such models alone has been demonstrably inadequate. Already, protocol designers seem to be rediscovering notions like the separation of powers from old, institutional liberal political theory. As it works to “truly achieve decentralization,” the Civil journalism network ingeniously balances market-based governance and enforcement mechanisms with a central, mission-oriented foundation populated by elite journalists — a kind of supreme court. Colony, an Ethereum-based project “for open organizations,” balances stake-weighted and reputation-weighted power among users, so that neither factor alone dictates a user’s fate in the system. The jargon is fairly new, but the principle is old. Stake and reputation, in a sense, resemble the logic of the House of Lords and the House of Commons in British government — a balance between those who have a lot to lose and those who gain popular support.

As among those experimenting with “platform cooperativism,” protocols can also adapt lessons from the long and diverse legacy of cooperative economics. For instance, blockchain governance might balance market-based one-token-one-vote mechanisms with cooperative-like one-person-one-vote mechanisms to counteract concentrations of wealth. The developers of RChain, a computation protocol, have organized themselves in a series of cooperatives, so that the oversight of key resources is accountable to independent, member-elected boards. Even while crypto-economists adopt market-based lessons from Hayek, they can learn from the democratic economics of “common-pool resources” theorized by Elinor Ostrom and others.

Decentralizing systems should be as heterogeneous as their users. Incorporating multiple forms of decentralization, and multiple forms of participation, can enable each to check and counteract creeping centralization.

Headquarters of the Internet Archive, home of the Decentralized Web conferences: Wikimedia Commons

Third, make centralization accountable

More empowering strategies for decentralization, finally, may depend on not just noticing or squashing the emergence of centralized hierarchy, but embracing it. We should care less about whether something is centralized or decentralized than whether it is accountable. An accountable system is responsive to both the common good for participants and the needs of minorities; it sets consistent rules and can change them when they don’t meet users’ needs.

Antitrust policy is an example of centralization (through government bureaucracy) on behalf of decentralization (in private sector competition). When the government carrying out such a policy holds a democratic mandate, it can claim to be accountable, and aggressive antitrust enforcement frequently enjoys broad popularity. Such centralized government power, too, may be the only force capable of counteracting the centralized power of corporations that are less accountable to the people whose lives they affect. In ways like this, most effective forms of decentralization actually imply some form of balance between centralized and decentralized power.

While Internet discourses tend to emphasize their networks’ structural decentralization, well-centralized authorities have played critical roles in shaping those networks for the better. Internet progenitors like Vint Cerf and Tim Berners-Lee not only designed key protocols but also established multi-stakeholder organizations to govern them. Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), for instance, has been a critical governance body for the Web’s technical standards, enabling similar user experience across servers and browsers. The W3C includes both enormously wealthy corporations and relatively low-budget advocacy organizations. Although its decisions have sometimes seemedto choose narrow business interests over the common good, these cases are noteworthy because they are more the exception than the rule. Brewster Kahle has modeled mission-grounded centralization in the design of the nonprofit Internet Archive, a piece of essential infrastructure, and has even attempted to create a cooperative credit union for the Internet. His centralizing achievements are at least as significant as his calls for decentralizing.

Blockchain protocols, similarly, have tended to spawn centralized organizations or companies to oversee their development, although in the name of decentralization their creators may regard such institutionalization as a merely temporary necessity. Crypto-enthusiasts might admit that such institutions can be a feature, not a bug, and design them accordingly. If they want to avoid a dictator for life, as in Linux, they could plan ahead for democracy, as in Debian. If they want to avoid excessive miner-power, they could develop a centralized node with the power to challenge such accretions.

The challenge that entrepreneurs undertake should be less a matter of How can I decentralize everything? than How can I make everything more accountable? Already, many people are doing this more than their decentralization rhetoric lets on; a startup’s critical stakeholders, from investors to developers, demand it. But more emphasis on the challenge of accountability, as opposed to just decentralization, could make the inevitable emergence of centralization less of a shock.

What’s so scary about trust?

In a February 2009 forum post introducing Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto posited, “The root problem with conventional currency is all the trust that’s required to make it work.” This analysis, and the software accompanying it, has spurred a crusade for building “trustless” systems, in which institutional knowledge and authority can be supplanted with cryptographic software, pseudonymous markets, and game-theoretic incentives. It’s a crusade analogous to how global NGOs and financial giants advocated mechanisms to decentralize power in developing countries, so as to facilitate international investment and responsive government. Yet both crusades have produced new kinds of centralization, in some cases centralization less accountable than what came before.

For now, even the minimal electoral accountability over the despised Federal Reserve strikes me as preferable to whoever happens to be running the top Bitcoin miners.

Decentralization is not a one-way process. Decentralizing one aspect of a complex system can realign it toward complex outcomes. Tools meant to decentralize can introduce novel possibilities — even liberating ones. But they run the risk of enabling astonishingly unaccountable concentrations of power. Pursuing decentralization at the expense of all else is probably futile, and of questionable usefulness as well. The measure of a technology should be its capacity to engender more accountable forms of trust.

Learn more: ntnsndr.in/e4e

If you want to read more about the limits of decentralization, here’s a paper I’m working on about that. If you want to read about an important tradition of accountable, trust-based, cooperative business, here’s a book I just published about that.

Photo by CIFOR

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Maira Sutton: Since the first browser was created by Sir Tim Berners-Lee over 25 years ago, the World Wide Web has grown to become a massive ecosystem of information that has democratized access to knowledge and culture on the Internet. But today, the Web is under threat.

More and more, we’re seeing governments and corporations control what and how we’re allowed to access online content. From state-mandated censorship to private copyright takedowns, an increasing number of websites are getting blocked or delisted. It’s also a honeypot for state surveillance and corporate data collection, where our private data is being harvested at will without oversight or accountability. Major platforms have emerged to monopolize many services on and off the Web, leading to a concentration of online activity within gated platforms.

The Web has enabled anyone with a computer to access any document hosted on public web servers. For some years, this was decentralized enough. But over time forces of control and centralization have enveloped the Web. In today’s world, the Internet has proven to be susceptible to censorship, surveillance, and siloization.

In response, computer scientists are developing tools that they hope will be the basis for an alternative, more distributed model that could withstand these threats. To strategize a path forward, over 100 technologists, academics, and advocates met at the Internet Archive in San Francisco for the Decentralized Web Summit. Many of the leading architects of the early Web were there, including Vint Cerf, one of the “fathers of the Internet” and even the inventor of the Web, Tim Berners-Lee.

The focus of the conference was on new, decentralizing technologies. Many of the tools involved distributed methods of publishing and accessing content, which is the most basic functionality of the Web. However, there were a host of other tools to purchase goods, crowd-invest in projects, and set and enforce contracts—all using various decentralized methods, many of which rely on blockchain technology.

In his keynote at the Decentralized Web Summit, Cory Doctorow urged the decentralized web movement to commit to principles before they are tempted to trade them away. Photo: Maira Sutton. Licensed under CC-BY 4.0

The highlight of the conference was Cory Doctorow’s keynote. In it he urged the decentralized web movement to bind itself to a “Ulysses Pact” where they can commit to principles when they still have the will and forthrightness to do so, before they are forced to make compromises and trade them away. He said it’s like going on a diet and deciding to throw away the cookies before you become desperate, hungry, and likely to give into temptation. Those working to build the new decentralized web must make sure the principles they uphold now go on to survive, and that one way to ensure this is to design them into the systems themselves. They can do this by emulating the GNU General Public License, which guarantees that software licensed with it remains free to be studied, copied, and modified.

He suggested two principles for the decentralized web. First, that a computer must always obey the owner’s wishes and that should always take precedence over any other command from a remote party. The second is that it should never be illegal for someone to disclose valid information about the security of a system.

These values may be somewhat technical as Doctorow was speaking to a more technologically-oriented audience at this conference. However, his message should also resonate with the platform co-op movement, in which people are building online platforms that share the value they create with their own users.

According to the International Cooperative Alliance, cooperatives are based the values of self-help, self-responsibility, democracy, equality, equity, and solidarity. Like other categories of cooperatives, platform co-ops strive to embody these values through practice. This includes having democratic member control over the platform and its capital, and supporting their community, such as through education programs and sustainable practices.

Much of the conference was fixated on how new distributed technologies have the potential to solve the problems facing the current Web. The question that kept arising throughout the event was how these “decentralized tech” companies were funded and organized themselves. This issue points to Doctorow’s keynote in which he called for the engineers to encode their values into the technology itself. If the organizations developing these technologies are ultimately incorporated as for-profit corporations that don’t have cooperative principles baked into their institution, it’s questionable whether they can truly be used to protect the interests of their community. If these companies already have a primary fiduciary obligation to their shareholders, then it’s uncertain whether any kind of “Ulysses Pact” they may make with their values could truly be public-interest motivated.

At the Summit, I gave a lightning talk addressing this issue: I argued that platform co-ops must play an important part in building a decentralized web. While networks have the potential to upend concentrations of power, they more than often maintain existing power dynamics. This has been made apparent through the emergence of mega-powerful Death Star platforms like Uber, Facebook, and the like. That’s why addressing the governance structures and values that constitute the institutions creating new Internet infrastructure—making sure they are community-driven, equitable, and sustainable—is necessary.

One of the workshops at the conference was focused on bringing gender equality and ethnic and racial diversity to the decentralized technology community. The organizers did address their awareness of the lack of gender and cultural diversity in the history of the Internet and see this as a problem. Diversity not only leads to more creative solutions to problems, but it also leads to better diagnoses about what problems to solve in the first place.

A working group was established out of the discussion, to plan for more active inclusion. It seems however, that there were was a lost opportunity to hold an open discussion about the flaws of the current Web during the conference. Instead, the Summit’s organizers built the conference’s agenda around a particular conception of what those were, and in so doing, missed engaging with a more holistic understanding of everyone’s varied challenges with the Web.

All of this does not discount the way in which the Web is in fact under threat due to its design, and that new tools and platforms could remedy these issues. But technology can’t fix nor avoid inevitable people problems. States and powerful entities will always try to censor speech and collect personal data, and corporate services will emerge to make online services addictive and easy-to-use to return a profit. That’s why the platform co-ops would fit well with the decentralized web movement. It would encourage those involved to reflect on how ownership, inclusion and access all play a role in determining the health and resilience of the next World Wide Web. Hopefully, that could lead to human rights and democratic principles to be embedded not only in the code, but in the guidelines of the organizations themselves.

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Illustration: Maira Sutton //  Licensed under CC-BY 4.0

Photo by Dean Hochman

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