Reflections on Distrusting Decentralization

 with apologies to ken thompson

I keep hearing a lot about how decentrlised systems can solve the massive loss of trust we are witnessing in large scale central organisations (technological, like hyperscale companies, and social. like national governements, and even economic, like banks).

I call 100% bullshit on this

(said in Natasha Lyonne's great voice, maybe we could ask her to do an audio book of Frankfurt's book on bullshit, or even graeber's book on bullshit jobs).

not that many people havn't lost trust in central agencies. that's been a factor of life for millenia - probably amongst many creatures, not just humans - i imagine the first deer to get hunted by humans suddenly found another threat to add to their collection. and tribes and nations invaded suddenly, or betrayed by "friends", "family", states in treaties etc. or banks going broke. or rivers and mines drying up.

sure, central things can lose trust, and, as the cliche has it, they will find it much harder to regain.

(though notice, people don't say often that it will never get regained, just that it is a lot harder to gain than to lose).

so what about decentralised systems and trust?

well, the answer is built into that oxymoron. a "system" isn't decentralised. it represents, at minimum, an agreement to follow a set of rules. Who makes that agreement? Answer, the participants. They buy into the API, the protocol, the rules of engamgent and behaviour. And they can renege on it. They can stop obeying the law, they can start a run on the bank, they can over-graze the commons, they can get together and gang up on a smaller group, they can go amok, or form a mob, or start a revolution. 

At some point the decentralized system must have some central component, even if it is virtual.

So why would I trust such a system more than a central system? I don't think I should. The problem is that there are no coordination points which means if I am in that minority, even just one person being ostracized, I have no redress, no recourse to recompense. There's no resource I can point to, to offset the misuse of decentralized power by the unruly mob. 

In syndics (socially anarchic systems), there are meta-rules of engagement that are supposed to mitigate misbehaviour. for example, you are not supposed to engage with people (nodes in the net) with whom you have no overlapping interests (i.e. no resource conflict, no need to enage). If you do, then the metarule makes that mishaviour in everyone's interest. Now there should be a people's court to try the misbehavioung group and decide on a suitable redress (which might be ostracism) - sounds tricky? yup. did it ever work? Maybe for a short time in Catalonia a long long time ago. 

How would that work in a distributed communications (or energy) system? Not well if you ask me. we only have one "space" for comms, and we only have one planet. There's got to be some root of trust (or multiple roots is fine), so you can anchor redress (for example). 

Of course, you can build a hierarchy, which at the leaves looks like a decentralised system, but really, what you have is federated.