Decentralization. Is it what we want?
There are examples in history, namely in early Mesopotamia, where states grew to become centralized beyond their means and sometimes experienced collapse in the form of decentralization. As far as we know, humans have now reached an age of globalization where which all the problems that lead to collapse in previous states are being magnified. Our global financial situation and the environment is in dire need of attention and clearly if we look around, things are not working.
One of the major pillars of the world we live in is being disrupted, and with it comes a whole new set of problems and opportunities. Decentralization has become the THEME of Blockchain technology and is shaking the core of what makes the world go around. Crypto has given us a new way to "free" our money, or as we say digital assets, and it's this ability to replace the old guard that has a lot of people on edge or excited. But the question to ask is: Is this decentralization potentially "state" ending? And how will it effect us all?
This rumination of mine is a culmination of material I'm reading and has me thinking about getting to the root of it all. We hear a call for a New World Order everywhere, and without thinking conspiracies or facts one could imagine the result of some major (technological) change as a defining feature of bringing into existence this "new world" and base it on any number of theories. When I contemplate order out of chaos I think about previous empires and how they might have been able to reinvent themselves with a certain knowledge of this"build until collapse" cycle and use it to rebuild again (with having already experienced many incarnations of a "new world". With all that in mind I come back to Blockchain - and technology in general - and what role it has to play in the coming decentralized future. I'm not 100% sure but I am fascinated by the opportunity to control my financial assets and conduct business. It's unclear how this will all play out so it's important to keep putting the pieces together and prepare accordingly.
It was Neil Postman who spoke about the hidden dangers that come along with the quick adoption of new technology. I think History also has a great many lessons to lend us in this regard, so in closing I'd like to just say that although we all might be sick of the current state things in the world is important for the educated among us to weigh all the options and ask the important questions when it comes to implementing or adopting new technology.
- What is the problem to which this technology is a solution?
- Whose problem is it?
- What new problems might be created by solving the original problem?
- Which people and what institutions will be most seriously harmed by this new technology?
- What changes in language are being forced by these new technologies?
- What sort of people and institutions gain special economic and political power from this new technology?
Side note: In the future will archaeologists be able to find and extract all our history from our hard drives? Probably not as much as we could figure out from looking thousands of years into our past. A lot of our lives are now in digital form we could end up losing much of our collective history if (or when) we face an extinction level event.
Day 12
The End