The Story of Decentralization

It's Time for Some Needed Adjustments

Note: This post includes access to a digital collectible stored on a decentralized network from an original collage Johanna created. It’s free, but it’s a limited edition of just one hundred and only available to claim for the next 30 days. In the future, it may be your ticket to extra content, event access and other perks TBD.

A lot has been happening in the past few months for me as our little homestead has grown cold, farrow, frozen and — often worst of all — muddy. Not a lot is getting done outside and around the house, although I did drill some holes in our bedroom wall and learn how to run and crimp fiber optic lines in order to install wired ethernet connections around the house. (Yes, it’s a little ironic to be so wired in the house when not a single wire runs to the property from outside.

But it was necessary for a new career I started in October that has me spending a lot more time on Zoom calls. The job lines up well with an underlying theme of Our Uncertain Future that we haven’t really named yet - the concept of decentralization.

The company I work for builds decentralized networks and software that works on those networks, including blockchains like Ethereum. So it makes sense my colleagues are also decentralized, working from around the world without a single central office or headquarters. Hence, all the Zoom meetings and my new Cat6 ethernet crimping tool.

It was only after beginning my transition to this new career and industry a couple years back that I realized we were already practicing a kind of radical decentralization here at home. But first, what do I mean by centralization and why would anyone want to go in the other direction? Sounds lonely and excessively multi-syllabic.

Excuse Me as I Seize a Chance to Mention the Roman Empire

Photo by Alex Person on Unsplash

We probably started to centralize our civilization sometime around when agriculture first came on the scene and access to things like water sources, mills and even the fields themselves became key to prosperity. We sought to cooperate and share or sell resources rather than wandering around as bands of self-reliant hunter-gatherers constantly taking turns being either hunter or hunted. The Hunger Games taught us all how exhausting this must have been. And on net, this shift was surely an upgrade. Building great things often requires staying put longer than a few weeks or a season.

And build we did. The Greeks and the Romans built great societies radiating out from capitols in Rome and Athens; with aqueducts delivering water from large reservoirs, roads bringing goods and people to and from the empire’s different loci of power, and even primitive sewage systems attempting to consolidate cleanliness into a single, central effort.

So as we trundled into the modern era, we continued to use this more-or-less centralized model to build out new infrastructure and technologies as they came online, from electricity and gas to telephone lines and broadband and now even social networking. Power for thousands of homes may be delivered from a single plant, water from a nearby treatment facility, access to your followers via the servers of a single Big Tech company, etc.

Every day, we are constantly tapping into these key flows — water, electricity, supply chains, information and more. One defining feature of modern life is our reliable ability to take all these things for granted. During Covid we got to experience life with one of these flows restricted (supply chains), leading to the scarcity of some oddly specific products like toilet paper. I still haven’t figured out what that odd chapter says about our society. 

Is This Still the Best Way?

Being able to access steady, reliable flows of water, power, food, fuel and whatever else we might need to survive and thrive is a trademark development of modernity. But it’s a system that depends too much on largely centralized systems, which often distribute critical resources unevenly. As a result, our aging infrastructure is growing increasingly subject to failures, especially around the more fragile edges of the network it serves.

We’ve all experienced some version of this with power failures. The more remote your location is, the more frequent and longer outages tend to be. Just ask the folks in Puerto Rico about their experience after Hurricane Maria. There’s growing distrust in our central institutions (some cases may be more justified than others), and given our level of technology, this centralization feels less necessary than ever. 

Photo by Jan Huber on Unsplash

The electrical grid is a bit of an absurdity when taken as a whole system: a vast network of wire connecting nearly all built structures on the planet to huge generators powered mostly by fire, turbines and the occasional nuclear reactor.

It is a strange accident of history that we literally made an industry of splitting microscopic amounts of toxic minerals in two to generate energy long before it became commonplace to simply put some glass on your roof that harvests electricity from the same fireball in the sky that supports all life on the planet. 

Fortunately, those magic glass panels continue to get cheaper, more efficient and more accessible. Even more magical is the fact that connecting these decentralized energy sources to the centralized grid can help make it more resilient.

Water and some of those other key flows like fuel for heat can be trickier, but nature has some built-in decentralizing forces we can tap into — rain and the process of photosynthesis that can be found doing its thing anywhere light shines, to name just two.

For centuries, more forces were driving us to centralize than go in the other direction. But conditions, incentives and vibes are now shifting.

We centralized our systems to come in out of the wild, but we became so used to this tendency that we overdid it. Now we have the means to claw back some independence and value for ourselves to maximize human thriving like never before. Stay tuned for the next chapter in the story of decentralization, which is just beginning.

To participate in this journey in a small way, we’ve created a digital collectible (yes, it’s one of those NFT things) from an original collage that Johanna created. It’s free, but it’s a limited edition of just one hundred that’s only available for the next 30 days. It’s stored forever on a decentralized database, which means that as long as you hold it in your digital wallet (it is transferable), it also acts as proof you were an early member of the community we’re building here. In the future, it may be your ticket to extra content, event access and other perks TBD.