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Data Together: Decentralization Readings

  1. Sarah Friend. Decentralization and its Discontents
  2. Angela Walch. (2019) Deconstructing 'Decentralization': Exploring the Core Claim of Crypto Systems
  3. Kleppmann, Martin & Wiggins, Adam & Hardenberg, Peter van & McGranaghan, Mark. Local-first Software
  1. Brancati, D. (2006). Decentralization: Fueling the Fire or Dampening the Flames of Ethnic Conflict and Secessionism?
  2. Elinor Ostrom. Green from the Grassroots
  3. Rachel-Rose O’Leary. This North Syrian School Is a Baby Step Toward a Blockchain Society
  1. James C. Scott. (1998) Seeing Like a State
  2. Jessica J. Prentice. The Most Dangerous Notion in Reinventing Organizations

OPTIONAL

  1. Adi Robertson. How the Biggest Decentralized Social Network is Dealing With its Nazi Problem
  2. Darius Kazemi. Run Your Own Social
  3. Longer talk of Sarah Friend. Decentralization and its Discontents

Themes

  • Decentralization is achieved in the absence of centralization
  • Trust and autonomy, facilitation practices, are necessary to decentralization
  • Technical vs social use of "trust" vs "trustless", "decentralized"–what applies across these definitions, and what dividing line must be maintained?
  • The temptation to over-trust technological framings and outputs
  • Practices of care and humanity
  • "We were sucked in for political reasons. And then the cryptography keeps us connected, because it seems to make good on some of those promises."

Notes and Questions

  1. Sarah Friend. Decentralization and its Discontents
  • 3 guiding q's
    • What is decentralization?
    • Do we want decentralization?
    • Are there limits to decentralization?
  • Defining decentralization: draws from political and then organizational contexts. So what is our context and how is it defined there?
    • We may bring several contexts and several definitions– technical on a protocol basis? Organizational? Archival?
  • Broad range of claimaints to "decentralization"
    • Characterization of a free market as by-nature decentralized– rational actors operating without centralizing system
    • Mao for decentralized socialism: "locally self-completed industrial system"
  • Lorentz curve & Gini coefficient used to measure decentralization of wealth
    • Applied to cryptocurrencies shows intense disparities
  • Why not centralization
    • "Our terms of service reserve the right for us to terminate users of our network at our sole discretion."
  • Governance & censorship: "Is there anything such that you would stop participating in the network?"
    • Nazis, child porn, etc.
  • Motives– broad umbrella! So many reasons to be interested
  • "Networks centralize for efficiency and decentralize for resilience"
  • Scalability trilemma
    • Decentralization (can run in small compute env at each user node)
    • Scalability (ability to process transactions efficiently)
    • Security (resources needed by a hacker)
    • "Decentralization is a stat we could lower to improve the other two"
  • Decentralization of manufacturing
    • 3 major RAM producers
    • Tech sensitive to localized natural disasters
  • Connection between centralization and specialization (bus factor!)
  • Process of the developers is not decebtralized, shown by Lorentz curve on open source projects commits per dev starting here
  • "Who and what are we serving with our particular decentralization?"
  1. Angela Walch. (2019) Deconstructing 'Decentralization': Exploring the Core Claim of Crypto Systems
  • Points of centralization in a mostly-decentralized system
    • Not really decentralized unless all the subsystems are decentralized, e.g. software dev process centralized to small group of developers
    • Concentration of wealth
    • Power of an exchange to include/disinclude
  • Decentralization conceptualized as a tool for disruption & revolution, break up existing power structures
  • Disambiguating "distributed" vs "decentralized": "decentralized" = nodes controlled by different parties, not necessarily true for distributed
  • Insights into decentralization
    • Decentralization is non-binary; it is multifaceted and each facet is on a spectrum
    • Decentralization changes over time
    • Decentralization can be used to hide power
  • Example of Bitcoin centralized decision making: 11 developers knew about a major bug and made a patch & decision to deliberately keep some info about that bug hidden (Does this show centralization of power? Or could it show decentralization of initiative?)
    • "..if some things have to be kept secret from others, the system is not decentralized." (19)
    • "moments of crisis uncover where actual power lies in a system"
    • curious if there's a conflation of coordination with "centralization"
  1. Kleppmann, Martin & Wiggins, Adam & Hardenberg, Peter van & McGranaghan, Mark. Local-first Software
  • These principles articulate an ideal more than they do an existing software practice
  • Local-first means that though info can be on the cloud, your local copy is primary & it's a backup (vs: cloud is primary and yours is a cache)
  • Faster work b/c no need to bounce to remote server
  • Work is not trapped on one device, there's data sync
  • Network is optional to function
  • Collaboration seamless and supportive of varied workflows (e.g. suggest vs direct edit), Google Docs a key example
  • Should be archivable to be legible even if a service is no longer running
  • Privacy and security through end to end encryption: cloud service cannot decrypt
  • You own the data: can access, modify, copy

With data ownership comes responsibility: maintaining backups or other preventative measures against data loss, protecting against ransomware, and general organizing and managing of file archives. For many professional and creative users, as introduced in the introduction, we believe that the trade-off of more responsibility in exchange for more ownership is desirable. Consider a significant personal creation, such as a PhD thesis or the raw footage of a film. For these you might be willing to take responsibility for storage and backups in order to be certain that your data is safe and fully under your control.

  1. Brancati, D. (2006). Decentralization: Fueling the Fire or Dampening the Flames of Ethnic Conflict and Secessionism?
  • Decentralization to localized gvt a win where it increases local participation but bad where it highlights differences between regions
    • Win more elections, greater influence on policy
    • Reinforce local identity, produce legislation that favors one group over another
  • Regional vs ethnic parties an important distinction
  1. Elinor Ostrom. Green from the Grassroots
  • Importance of enacting climate change policy at several layers of locality (city/state/federal/international)
    • We need to be able to evolve & adapt bc of high uncertainty
    • Research shows overlapping policies are more effective than a single overarching policy
  • 30+ states and over 900 US cities have created plans despite lack of federal plan
  1. Rachel-Rose O’Leary. This North Syrian School Is a Baby Step Toward a Blockchain Society

…North Syria’s governance structure, which consists of communes where people come together to take decisions at a local level. It’s here, Maxmud says, where blockchain can play a unique role. Using a distributed ledger for public accounting, communes can make their spending transparent and better manage collective resources

  1. James C. Scott. (1998) Seeing Like a State

Any large social process or event will inevitably be far more complex than the schemata we can devise, prospectively or retrospectively, to map it. (309)

  • Importance of "improvisations, missteps, and strokes of luck" for success even in systems where rigid heirarchy is emphasized

…the schemes that did not collapse altogether managed to survive thanks largely to desperate measures either not envisaged or else expressly prohibited by the plan." (310)

Formal order … is always and to some considerable degree parasitic on informal processes, which the formal scheme does not recognize, without which it could not exist, and which it alone cannot create or maintain.

  • Work-to-rule strike: workers perform their tasks exactly according to rules (no improvisations or creativity) and thus productive work ceases

  • This is a reason why authoritarian control is dangerous & unproductive

  • If we interact primarily in digitally mediated & built-environment spaces, what impact does that have on the availability of creativity? What important improvisations are not possible, given that code is a set of rules?

  • Different measurement & classification types: imposed (central) & standard vs. local & useful. e.g. classifying plants by utility rather than genus

  • Practical knowledge derived through experimental solutions to a problem at hand

  • Connection to stewardship: (on derivation of practical knowledge) "these cultivators have a direct, vital stake…" (324)

  • Cases of practice preceding science b/c cause & effect of a local practice can be perceived by a motivated observer even if mechanism is unknown (325)

Metis … is the mode of reasoning most appropriate to complex material and uncertain tasks where the uncertainties are so daunting that we must trust our (experienced) intuition and feel our way. (327)

Where the interactions involve not just the material environment but social interaction as well– building and peopling new villages or cities, organizing a revolutionary seizure of power, or collectivizing agriculture– the mind boggles at the multitude of interactions and uncertainties (as distinct from calculable risks). (327)

  • Advocates a "strategic retreat" from comprehensive planning. More about learning how to learn to build and doing it incrementally
  • Veillees in France: gatherings to swap local knowledge
  • Metis not evenly distributed, intersectional issues where concentrated into guilds, fraternities, etc.
  • Metis disappears as easier, cheaper solutions (e.g. pesticides) become available. This leads to centralized control– e.g. pharmaceuticals that can only be made in a lab via secret formula displace knowledge of natural, distributed, and freely available functional natural remedies
  • Capitalist profit requires efficiency + control (336) (not sure I followed this argument)
  1. Jessica J. Prentice. The Most Dangerous Notion in Reinventing Organizations

contemporary conventional farming as derived from European history can be seen as the predict-and-control approach to food production, whereas permaculture is absolutely about sense-and-respond

Holacratic domains function in an analogous way [to usufruct]: they flow from use, familiarity, need, and negotiation. Ownership, in this sense, is less an exclusive possession than an explicit and privileged stewardship.

In these small communities, where the network of family relationships was so dense and complex, public opinion so important, and social values so deeply ingrained, a strong and visible government was superfluous. (Margolin, "The Ohlone Way")

…I believe that the headman received his leadership in the first place through the natural tendency of the members of the tribe to go to the most able member for advice. (Mayfield)

Another feature of the hunter-gatherer way of life is a deep respect for individual decisions. There are experts rather than leaders, men or women whose skills are revered; but decisions about whether to follow their lead or take their advice are matters of individual choice. (Brody)

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