Will Decentralization Stop Pandemics?
When you stay long enough with one industry your everyday thinking become inevitably affected by it. That what has happened to me, when, after working full time for several years in blockchain, I’ve recently tried to come out with some justification for slow and highly inefficient govs reaction to the outbreak of SARS-CoV-2.
My first thought was the following: Would a decentralized society, for which so many first-generation blockchain enthusiasts advocate, be more efficient in preventing and stopping the virus spread among population?
There are, actually, quite a lot of papers, which try to model and compare the behavior of different managerial systems under the stress scenarios. For example, check this one dubbed “Centralized vs Distributed Fault Localization” of Columbia University.
Link: https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/978-0-387-34890-2_22.pdf
It, basically, matches the performance of three fault localization approaches in complex communication systems: the “Centralized”, “Decentralized” and “Distributed”.
Author’s conclusion is (p.260): “Our comparison proved that the decentralized approach generally has considerably less complexity than the centralized approach, and can provide the same or better solution accuracy.”
Of course, that by far is not the first research, arriving to the similar conclusion. It also can be easily understood on the intuitive level by remembering some historical lessons (such as the spectacular crush of the Soviet Union) or by imagining what might happen in case of a local county major fire incident if all firefighters would be administered from Washington DC (think Hurricane Katrina).
In the past several decade it’s become more and more obvious that big, central governments around the world have been gradually converted into gigantic corporations run by the managerial elite mostly filled in by baby-boomers and generation xs, which attention is almost completely absorbed by the immediate profit-taking and their personal carriers considerations.
Therefore, using the same models, which were applied to “managerial systems”, in case of big govs (lets call them “gov-corps”) might not require from us a drastic stretch of imagination.
From the systemic point of view, stopping the virus is mostly about timely finding and localizing it. Gov-corps using silos systems would inevitable spend more time on transferring, verifying, storing and processing information, than any type of decentralized, algorithmic consensus based ones.
If a whole society consists from a multitude of independent, data transparent (think DLT/blockchain) self-managed territories populated by the closely tight social groups (sells) it becomes so much faster and easier to find and timely isolate one of them where the outbreak first happens.
Moreover, the decentralization always encourages the self-reliance in production of basic goods and services on which local population can rely in case of temporary isolation. Therefore, closing one of them would not immediately affect billion of people around the world leading to simultaneously and drastically reduced production in several key industries.
That’s, of course, not what we have now in our over-centralized world, where we continue to outsource even the most critical to our own existence functionalities to the higher and higher human-based corporate / govs “authorities”.
No wonder that the price, which we are paying for that unwise managerial strategy might also be very high in case when even the smallest fault occurs in our gigantic, pyramidal social fabric.
Disclaimer: Obviously, we have never really had any practical experience with applying DLT to managing countries or even cities and all of my previous mental excursions remain theoretical. So, please, use your own knowledge, imagination and judgment to form an opinion of your own on this highly contentious medico-political issue.
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