Conversation

To the extent social science has true "mysteries" on par with those in physics, one big one is whether the idea of radically decentralized societies are actually possible, or just a recurring conceit every generation rediscovers for itself around the promise of new technologies.
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People get hung up on definitions and "decentralized" vs "distributed" vs "anarchy" vs "leaderlessness" but I think people know what I mean... it's the sort of attempt that typically fails a la Jo Freeman tyranny of structurelessness or Holacracy.
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It's the P=NP proposition of social science. The absolute least interesting response is "markets, you invented markets." Though "blockchains" is arguably worse. To imagine that's what we're talking about is a kind of perverse obtuseness.
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Equally, to believe that it is impossible because "humans are naturally hierarchical" and derp on about Great Men and natural monarchism is a different kind of perverse obtuseness... in this case with Straussian rather than populist characteristics.
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There are three kinds of failure of imagination around this mystery: 1. Believing this is an ill-posed idea rooted in ressentiment 2. Believing this is "already solved" and corresponds to something familiar. 3. Turning it into a moral question (good/bad rather than true/false)
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As I've grown older, with more power/agency of various sorts, I've gotten more interested in this idea, not less. Leadership typically feels like a burden to those capable of it. Hierarchical effectiveness feels limiting to those good at it. Only those bad at power crave it.
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ie. this isn't (just) ressentiment, though there's some of that. To dismiss yearnings for decentralized leaderlessness as mere ressentiment is to basically fail to grok the idea entirely.
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Similarly, this is NOT already solved, and does NOT correspond to something that already exists like markets, or rule-of-law or "superlinear cities" or whatever. Though communes and holacracy type attempts seem inept and cringe attempts at it, they're reaching for something real
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And finally, the least imaginative response is to turn it into a normative question. Whether decentralized polities are good or bad is entirely secondary to me.
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The question is whether they are even possible in a meaningful way. As in, examples can be created that persist and function as long as other comparable mechanisms of organization, with comparable levels of non-degenerate output.
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Non-degeneracy is the key criterion for me. It is trivial to produce a "decentralized community" that nominally checks off the feature list, but produces nothing more complex than online conversations. The question is can it do more? Can it wage wars or launch space programs?
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I do think several examples come close for brief periods, both positive and negative. Like periods in open-source projects or guerrilla wars or festivals. But it's not a well-developed or fully-theorized form of organization compared to say corporations, markets, or republics.
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I mean, come on, starlings are stupid swarming little feathered rats, but don’t you think there’s some intriguing possibility here?
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One of my weird biases is that I think “unnatural” things that actually exist (as opposed to merely being proposed) are more interesting than the underlying “natural” things they rest on. It’s an anti-trad bias.
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Replying to @doriantaylor and @vgr
I would argue that bigger orgs/cities are socially unnatural but productively superior in some domains, which is why they emerged and stuck, ~10k years ago. So if decentralisation is to be durable it would have comparable productivity at its core. Ie the moon launch example.
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Low Orbit Ion Cannon (Botnet that DDOSes websites) OR SETI@Home that shards compute of detecting 👽 OR FoldIt for protein folding OR Mechanical Turk Glimpses of decentered activity with non-trivial outputs Even NASA moon missions were highly decentered endeavors
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