A Farewell to Arms
Tales of Two Worlds · What does a decentralized world look like? (part 5)
This is part 5of Tales of Two Worlds. Here is part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4.
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Tales of Two Worlds
Stories of Two Worlds — through the lens of the Centralized vs. Decentralized dualism:
Centralized vs Decentralized
- Society vs. Network
- People vs. Sentient & Autonomous Agents
- Social Activity vs. Network Effect
- Clustering increases efficiency & potency vs. Clustering decreases efficiency & potency
- Organizations trump people vs. Agents trump clusters
Fifth story: A Farewell to Arms
Organization trump people
vs.
Agents trump clusters
Give me a fulcrum and I will move the whole world.
- Archimedes, circa 250 BC
In 5 minutes, I’ll tear that whole goddamn building down.
- Trinity, circa 2199 AD
Our stories are getting intense, as they are approaching series finale. And they should be. Can you imagine two worlds splitting? Or colliding? This is beyond biblical. This is going to be a planetary event that will affect all of us. But for the first time in history we are not just pawns beholden to the giants. We are actors with our own skins in the game.
Every story is a story of morality. And morality has no middle ground. Mortality is brutal. Morality is unforgiving. The stakes are always high on morality. Morality is what built houses, cathedrals. Morality is what builds empires. Morality is good at building monuments.
However morality is not what it built. Not houses, not cathedrals, not even empires. Morality does not really care what it builds: houses, cathedrals, or empires; because it also takes them down all the time. That’s how morality keeps its mojo. But morality does care where and how it builds those monuments, small and large.
Let’s dive in. The schism of centralized vs. decentralized dualism. I am sorry but as the tension gets red hot you’ve got to take a side. That is what morality is really about: taking sides. I am not kidding when I say we all have skin in the game.
Morality reigns supreme in the centralized world. In the beginning there was nothing, just the void. To build a world out of the void you need to build structure. Morality is the architect of structures. And this is how morality builds structures out of the amorphous void: just build boundaries. Build walls. But walls crumble. Structures collapse. It’s really a challenge to build everlasting structures — just ask the Egyptians. I guess that’s why human race wandered in the wilderness for eons, living in caves, with occasionally mud huts to boot. It is only when humans figured out a way to build not only houses but monuments did human civilization really take off. You need stronger structure for security. Morality creates security through redundancy — building excessive structure. Empires are sense or idea of security throughout time, such as monuments. So empires are not merely buildings, empires are monuments. monuments are order. Empires are order. And order is more lasting than any single empire. Wait a sec, you say — didn’t pyramids last longer than all empires? Sure, but pyramids, or any monuments built with stones, mean nothing when the order that built them is gone — stone buildings mean nothing without order. Order is civilizations’ enduring memory; without it, we are lost. Nevertheless, when the empire that built the pyramids is long gone, we’ll also forget what exact order the pyramids were built for. Hence order can still be forgotten. What persists is the idea of order. And the idea of order is strengthened by building evermore grandier monuments, piling on evermore excessive structures. So order is just the idea of order, an illusion. Human history is littered with forgotten monuments of dead empires. Empires need find order a new home.
And this is where the genius of morality comes into play: where else to build an order?
In people’s collective minds.
Yes, that’s where — in people’s collective minds morality builds lasting order. And that’s where we got nailed. Because morality survives, preserves and just generally stops at nothing, across and beyond lifetimes. Our minds are simultaneously sustained as well as imprisoned by morality. Order built by morality is an indefinite life sentence for our collective minds.
I exist because I remember. But do I have to always remember? Do I have to be beaten and forced to remember? Do I have to remember the same thing all the time? Do I have to remember things I don’t care, or things that I don’t want to remember in the first place? What if I want to forget for a change, just so I can build in my mind something new to remember? What if what you forced me to remember gets in my way to think freely? Do you know what it is like to live without forgetting, without the freedom to let your thoughts wander, without the ability to tell what memory is real or false? That’s how someone with OCD, bipolar disorder or schizophrenia lives. It is believed that those mental conditions are the result of certain neural network pathways in patients’ brains getting reinforced excessively due to various pathological conditions (such as biochemical imbalance induced by drugs, trauma, or sometimes due to heredity); and those excessive neural pathways are excessive cognitive structures that will reduce mental patients’ cognitive space and time for their mind to wander about.
Unfortunately for us, that’s generally how morality works. That’s how morality builds order in our collective minds. Remember how structures are built? Structures are walls. Boundaries. Compartments. Whatever you call it. Morality imposes structure by indoctrinate and emphasize certain ways of thinking — rules, as we’ll see later. The more rules and importance there is to them, the more restricted one’s thinking and human experience could become.
Order built by morality is a prison for our collective minds. And that’s how empires are built as well. That’ how the centralized world is built. The centralized world order is just as simple as that — a prison for the collective minds of humankind. We are slaves to this centralized world order.
And the form this world order takes? It’s called organization. The organization takes many other shapes: church, firm, state, etc. Many have regarded the establishment of these forms of order a towering success for human societal achievement but ever since the beginning of these institutions, the narrative of the centralized world towards them has been quite troublesome — a trait sometimes exhibiting a schizophrenic nature — the conflict between order and freedom. This conflict, another dualistic schism within the centralized world, is a perpetual war constantly pulling societies toward chaos and destruction. The memories of these cycles of youthful exuberance and senile gloom, daring hope and howling despair, wonders of the great pyramids and heaps of ruin buried and forgotten, littered throughout the short span of human history. Sweet dreams become nightmares. Great expansion ends with great depression. Why is that?
I call it the first shock of enlightenment. When humans first built societies with their collective minds, they discovered what a bigger and dangerous world they live in. Furthermore, we don’t see us as part of nature anymore — and that’s the whole point of enlightenment, isn’t it? We are Us, versus the Others — nature, unknown, even other humans and their societies. It is terrifying to realize the power of nature. And this realization only strengthens the pompous Us, making Us arrogant and belligerent toward Others, which in time caused our eventual downfall. We can see that this is a dualistic schism — Us vs. Others. But this mirage of the threat of Others was completely created out of our own regrettably hallucinated psyche in reaction to that first shock of enlightenment. Desperately seeking a collective subconscious peace of mind — a balance — the psyche of Us created our first religion, the worship of the omnipotent external force. But this omnipotent external force is really just a hallucination of Others. And organization is just the rope to gird the rest of Us into that house of worship, in the name of protecting our society. Those who drenched in the power of that omnipotent external force worship soon became addicted and wanted more, eventually tore up the society they swore to sustain and protect, thus fulfill the cycle of dualistic struggle. Such is the truth behind the origin of organization, a fallacy birthed by hallucination. The centralized world is a hallucination.
That hallucination needs an anchor to pass as an assemblance of reality. And that anchor becomes organization. Organization is a fixation. And this fixation, an ancient faux pas realized by many thinkers of past, has proved very difficult to fix. It is like a barb sunk deep into the human psyche and any attempt of removal is always painful and destructive. So we accepted this condition, this dualistic hallucination. We accepted both ends of the barb — organization and counter-organization, which is anything we are taught to fear — chaos, Others, or both. You can’t remove one without the other — such as anode and cathode; force and counterforce. Attempting to remove or fight one of the duo always backfired — like putting out fire with oil. Organization always gets strengthened when challenged, even when it is defeated. Failed organization gave way to more powerful future organization. That is why all revolutions fail eventually. That is also why we get to where we are today — we live in an age of super organizations due to the evolutionary sum of all successful and failed organizations of the past. Which means we live in a super hallucination. We are scared to death of ourselves on a lonely but quite insignificant planet at a corner of a vast cosmos that doesn’t really care ab0ut us. Fear incapacitated us. Fear consumed us. But fear is not something you can fight, eradicate or cure. Any competent psychiatrist can tell you that effective treatment of fear is not fighting it but try to live with it. In order to do that we need to find the root cause of our quintessential fear — namely chaos and others — and tell ourselves: let’s try to make peace with them.
That root cause is morality. Morality is the detonator of fear. So let’s disarm the bomb, and make peace. I’ll give it a go.
Organization, and centralization, has so deeply ingrained in our collected human experience that it is very hard to imagine a world without them. But is it really? Morality is about setting and fixing rules; but who gets to set the rules? Organizations trump people. How did that happen? Fear. We relinquished our rights of setting the rules. Out of fear we gave those rights to organizations. It’s time we take those rights back. But what’s the alternative? Whom to trust if not organizations?
How about Us?
How about a decentralized world where everyone of us is able and free to set the rules and best rules spread and get adopted by others freely, without any coercion by the act of making copies of the best rules as well as executing them? That sounds nice, right? But why, many would rightfully suspect and ask, didn’t the early humans adopted the very naturally decentralized way in the first place? We don’t know what really happened but I guess the early humans tried and failed. The reason is simple: for decentralized rule setting to be effective the message propagation mechanism must be reliable and robust, which is not possible in early human history, and not even so much so in the advanced industrial age. The reliable, robust and precise propagation of message is only possible and practical in the information age, with the advent of the Internet. So the Internet is where we are going to build a decentralized world with a different set of rules than that of the centralized world; where agents trump cluster.
But reality mocks us. Remember the movie Back to the Future II? When our hero Marty discovered that the future, year of 2015, was ruined by his high school bully Biff? If I had Marty and Doc Brown’s time-travelling DeLorean, I want to go back to 1990 and tell a jubilant Sir Tim Berners-Lee that his gift to humanity, the Web, was stolen and ruined by some of the biggest bullies in human history. All around the world, the Web is owned by just a handful of big corporations, completely supplanting a diverse Internet of early times. These web and big data duopolies and oligopolies hook a generation of us to their “free” services and made us their blood hosts. The Web has drifted away further and further from the originally decentralized Internet. So no agents trump cluster — it is still organization trump people on the Web, just with volume cranked up high.
Now the question is, can we fix this future or reality, like Marty fixed the future in Back to the Future II movie?
Yes, It is possible. We don’t even need the time machine. We just need to fix morality with a new way of setting rules — decentralization. Let’s see how.
First, from earlier discussion we know that morality is about taking sides. In other words, morality is where you stand and from there your point of view (POV) or reference point is based. Morality is a reference framework for the rule setter. This is important because how the final rules look like depends on where you base your reference framework. And that’s where your morality really stands. We already know that the morality of our current centralized physical world stands at a dualistic schism in an obsession of power dwelling on a hallucination of fear. And the reference framework for this power obsession? That’s anchored on the root of the fear: the hallucinative omnipotent external force — and its supposed counter-force: the resources of this world. So morality, the reference framework, the world view, is a value view: a resource-bound value view.
Morality is a value view.
This revelation is key to understand how rules become what they are in our world, as well as how evolutionary path of technology is tampered to serve the rules of morality — the value view of this world. This value view angle also helps us understand where the struggle is, and where battles are fought. Technology is neutral, but it is not innocent. The struggles of our centralized world — the unquenchable thirst for power is a perpetual war, and no one remains innocent in a war, not even technology. The duopoly of the Web and Big Data is not an innocent technology evolutionary endgame but a deliberate war prerogative to secure the victory for the control of an absolute, ultimate power — to permanently build a prison for all human minds (like the Matrix). The battle for the Web has already been lost. But the next battle, the battle to tame A.I., has just begun. We can already glimpse a light from the terrifying fusion of the Web and Big Data duopoly and some rudimentary A.I. (web user behavioral tracking aided by machine learning technology) actively pursued by almost every big web entities. Looks like we have little chance in winning this next battle either, if we fight by the same morality. However, if history has taught us anything, it is that winning is overrated. You “win” by not fighting any stupid war. And all empires have the tendency to wear themselves down by miring in perpetual wars.
Let’s forget the old world and their wars for just a moment. I proposed that we tame A.I. in a parallel and hyper-dimensional decentralized world beyond the Web. But before anything we still need to build that decentralized world first. So, ditching the morality of the old world, what new value view and set of rules would we adopt?
We should start fresh. Unscrew us from the double spiral descent into the destructive pit of fear and self-oppression. We should unapologetically renounce the resource-bound value view. Resist the urge to control and coerce. We will adopt a mind’s communal energy value view, as proposed in previous posts. However, all the hard years of addiction to longing for power and possession of resources have altered our brain, indoctrinated us into a habitual centralized thinking that it is quite hard for most of us to come clean and seeking an alternative methodology, namely, the decentralized way. As anyone went through rehabilitation could tell you -
Letting go is hard.
Our rehab process is wrought with relapses. One minute we were hailing bitcoin as our decentralized savior, the next minute we are chasing centralized crypto exchanges for IEOs (Initial Exchange Offerings). The world just seems to be going on a big bender before the end. Ironically, the world’s biggest decentralization “movement”, ICOs (Initial Coin Offerings), were pumped up by the very resource-bound adrenaline rush (a.k.a. greed) that a truly decentralized world would vie to rehabilitate. It’s like the patients at a rehab center were doped into a drug binge as treatment. No wonder it quickly hit a big blunder last year (2018). As the ICOs wound down, some people lost hope in the decentralization movement and waited no time to revert back to embrace the centralized ways and regime. Not only couldn’t they see the prospect of a parallel, hyper-dimensional decentralized world, they also go out of the way to proclaim that decentralized systems are inefficient, incapable to scale and generally too weak to stand on their own feet and must rely on and assimilate into centralized institutions to function and survive. Some are promoting a hybrid approach — those are the “blockchain everything” crowd — as if applying the “blockchain” sticker to anything in our centralized world would make it decentralized. Some insist that decentralization is a fad; they prefer the good old distributed system moniker — although decentralized systems are distributed, most of the so-called distributed systems in our centralized world are very centralized systems. You can see that rampant confusion regarding decentralization runs amok in our time. That said, it can be regarded as a positive sign that rehab is making progress. People know something is wrong with their centralized world, they want to come out clean. As for the confusion? Just remember:
Decentralization is not about technology. It’s about morality. It is a value view.
What about the claim that decentralized systems are inefficient, incapable to scale and too weak to stand on their own feet? These long running critiques of decentralized systems are all invalid. They are invalid mostly because they see those aspects of decentralized systems from a centralized, resource-bound value view. Like we discussed in the last article, just look at nature, especially the phenomena of life. Asking if something is efficient or not is a moral question. From an external, resource extraction value view, life is the most inefficient phenomena out there. On the other hand, from an internal, energy preservation and utilization value view, life is the most efficient energy system in the universe — in a life ecosystem, energy is preserved and utilized to the last drop — nothing gets wasted in life and nature.
What about scalability? The saying that decentralized systems can’t scale?
This is the oldest fallacy regarding decentralized systems. As we discussed earlier, human societies evolved and established organization to build ever sophisticated structures to survive and thrive. Early humans survived for a long time in decentralized, less orderly structured societies, but sophisticated human societies are not naturally decentralized because decentralized systems rely on speedy, effective and precise message relay — which is not possible before the information age. But the innate problem still exists, which is this — that an isotropic, indefinite hops message relay network structure (a mesh network) is never going to be as scalable as an opposite network structure — the anisotropic, finite hops message delivery network structure (a hub-and-spoke network) in terms of network operation cost (message relay incurs network operation cost). Then how does nature deal with this problem?
What problem? There is no problem. Every decentralized system in nature (lifeform) develops an equilibrium with its environment — they grow their network to an appropriate scale and generally do not overgrow beyond their natural capacity afforded by nature. Sometimes this balance or equilibrium gets tipped over — and you know what that is? A plague. An epidemic. A cancer. Scalability is only a problem for decentralized systems if you see it from a centralized, resource-bound value view — the urge of an insatiable greed to devour everything in your path to dominate your environment. The critique of bitcoin not being scalable enough to take on VISA payment network? Bitcoin is just fine as it grows into its suitable use case — as an infrequently transacted value store — how frequently do you need to trade your gold? As for taking on VISA, another decentralized cryptocurrency will evolve to fulfill the need of taking on VISA with just enough, adjustable, but not infinite scalability. The “one network to rule them all” fallacy, rampant in the blockchain scalability maximalists circle (The players of the TPS game as they are called), is an obsessive mindset born in the monopolistic web and big data world, where many of the entrepreneurs came from and so indoctrinated.
With these revelations and understandings we can now begin to tackle the difficult problem of rule-setting for decentralized system and decentralized world building. World building is a huge endeavor, but the basic rules for building a decentralized world are quite simple, as they should be:
Diversity. A decentralized world encourages growth into hyper-dimensions, instead of just growth in size in limited resource-bound space.
Self-Sovereignty. There is no coercion and you are your own sovereign. This is the bedrock for decentralization — you are what you can protect. Agents trump clusters.
Sentient value view. Our decentralized world adopts a minds’ communal energy value view instead of the centralized resource-bound value view. Being sentient is value.
Some additional notes about the above rules: diversity and the hyper-dimensional space to grow indefinitely gives us mental peace from falling again into the resource addiction trap; Agents trump clusters — not any cluster but centripetal clusters — such as those clusters that grow bigger by utilizing gravitational pull of all surrounding matter; sentient value view is important in building a new kind of economy distinct from our current resource-bound economy.
Of course, all the above rules are taken from the playbook of nature and life. Life survives and thrives in a self sustainable ecosystem. Decentralized world survives and thrives in a Self Sustainable Decentralized Economy — SSDE. We’ll explore SSDE in subsequent series.
Yet we are not here to make a truce. Our proposed decentralized world exists in a different, hyper-dimensional space which this centralized world (mostly) won’t overlap. But there is one dimension the two worlds jointly coexist — the Internet. The Internet is ground zero for our decentralized world. It is very important to secure this ground zero for our decentralized world. So there lies one last battle we must fight in this world — Net Neutrality. We must fight to at least preserve some diversity and decentralization even in the physical form of the Internet. Because after all, a “decentralized world” built and fully confined inside an AWS super datacenter isn’t very decentralized, is it? The stakes are high and we all have skin in the outcome of this battle.
Time is almost up. Let’s get the (wrecking) ball rolling.
