Capitalism is *all about*, at its core, building decentralized systems which on inspection turn out to be centrally controlled, or controlled via a "one dollar one vote" democracy of the five or six richest people in the system (in other words informal centralization, without the committee that makes the decisions having a name).
The decentralized internet systems that capitalism builds reflect this. There's lots of examples of it. Bitcoin, Ethereum, Bluesky.
@mcc a thing i need to keep communicating to folks is, in almost all cases, centralisation is cheap, decentralisation is expensive.
here's how I like to think about it:
decentralisation is great, better, more humane, more resilient, easier for more people to benefit from, etc, etc but it comes at the cost of significant redundancy, integration, and communication overhead. if you don't have an external source of revenue/resource to cover this cost, to either:
- artificially lower the buy-in and upkeep of the system, and/or
- effectively force it to stay decentralised while also warding off lower cost monolithic competitors,
it's going to amalgamate through sheer thermodynamics. and if there is only one source of ‘free energy' then that just means the system is already effectively centralised, whether or not that's even the intention of the source.
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