The Future Will Be Decentralized
Who will control the next big thing online? Everyone and no
one.
By Tyler Cowen
February 7, 2021, 11:00 PM GMT
On the internet, as a friend recently reminded me,
everything looks permanent until it isn’t. As technology evolves, the most
profound and destabilizing change is likely to be the transition from
centralized internet services to decentralized ones.
Centralized services typically are run by companies or
institutions, such as Facebook, Twitter or Amazon. There is a command structure
and a boss, and changes can be made by deliberate decision. In this parlance,
even Wikipedia counts as centralized, though the editors and contributors are
scattered around the world.
Decentralized services are harder to define, but two simple
examples may be helpful. The first is email, which consists of networks of
rules and interconnections not owned by any one company or institution, even
though your email provider might be. The second is the World Wide Web itself, a
series of protocols with a huge amount of stuff built on top of it. Bitcoin
also operates in a decentralized way, unless a majority of the blockchain
miners decide otherwise, which is very difficult to pull off.
When I hear laypersons discuss the future of the internet,
the most common question is what kind of company or service is coming next.
Clubhouse, the audio discussion forum, is one recent innovation in social
media, and no doubt there will be more.
When I hear internet entrepreneurs discuss the future, the
biggest question is what kind of decentralized service or platform might be
next. The internet has gone through numerous fundamental changes since its
origins in the 1960s, and more smart people are working on innovation than ever
before. There is no good reason to assume the status quo is sacred; in fact
there is ample reason to suppose otherwise.
The technology entrepreneur Balaji Srinivasan predicts a
radically decentralized future. In his frequent Twitter postings, crypto and
decentralization will swallow the world, to paraphrase Marc Andreessen’s
decade-old claim about software. If Twitter censors some of its posters, users
can seek out new platforms that do not allow such intrusions.
Why not, for example, put social media on blockchains and
have efficient cryptocurrency micropayments to reward those who help maintain
such mechanisms? Censoring postings on such a service would be as difficult as
trying to overwrite a blockchain ledger, which is to say very difficult. (Indeed
such postings would be a blockchain ledger, albeit in a more digestible form.)
And instead of having to deal with the content rules of Twitter or WhatsApp,
perhaps you could customize and build your own rules.
According to Srinivasan, such exchanges — for not only money
but also information — will eventually evolve beyond easy governmental or
gatekeeper control. It may even be hard to recognize what money is anymore.
This is a world that would have made no sense if you had tried to describe it
to anyone a mere dozen years ago.
Another vertigo-inducing vision of the future can be
glimpsed at zora.co. If you are initially baffled — join the club! Think of
Zora as like Spotify, except for more than just music, and the creators keep
the rights and sell at prices they decide. It attempts to be an open-source
ecosystem for building the future of art.
If radical decentralization does come about, the concept
most in need of radical revision may be adjudication. Have you read those
stories of people who have their crypto wallets hacked and have no bank or
intermediary to go to for a refund? Or of those people who cannot remember
their crypto passwords and will lose millions in locked accounts as a result?
It is possible that this kind of thing will become far more common, and notions
of control will require a wholesale rethinking.
Having grown up in an analog world, I find these ambitious
visions both unsurprising and bewildering. On one hand, I have seen the
transition of so much activity to the digital world that another major
revolution should not shock me. On the other hand, (a possibly atavistic) part
of me likes knowing that someone or something is in control, whether it’s a
government, a bunch of people in Mountain View, or even just my dean.
“Life on the blockchain” feels alienating in a way that goes
beyond old-style Marxist concerns. (Remember, I am the kind of guy who prefers
to slip coins into the parking meter rather than download the app.) When I ask
myself what services I am really missing, I find I’m far more interested in a
new Chinese restaurant in my town than new open-source platforms to enable
innovations I will never quite understand.
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the
editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
To contact the author of this story:
Tyler Cowen at tcowen2@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story:
Michael Newman at mnewman43@bloomberg.net
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