Decentralization is usually a mixed bag of values, principles, and overlapping benefits:
- sovereignty, aka agency and empowerment
- freedom, i.e., permissionlessness
- censorship resistance
- shared ownership
- resilience
A lot of us continue to pine^1 for the early Internet as some kind of utopia, or lawless Garden of Eden where everyone ran around naked and ate the fruits of barriers-free non-local interactions.
Of course, the early internet transformed the lives of people in oppressive societies, including lgbtq youth in otherwise free societies.
Also of course, being early provided space for norms to emerge in a state of grace, before having to defend against toxicity and attacks[^2].
And of course, some common threads appear to emerge of unjust predation: abuse of private data, value extraction, and entities becoming too powerful to be governed by the people.
So I want to explore Decentralization, as a guarantor of resilience against situations where we have to ask, Quis custodiet ipsos ...
