this post was submitted on 02 Jun 2024
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Hmmm and who controls the tech allowing this decentralized society?
No one, there are already plenty of protocols defined for distributed computing and are made open source. In a hypothetical lib left social network, If you want different networks, that's fine, you just have to make your own protocol. It's like how countries shouldn't have borders, or how computing platforms shouldn't lock you in or out of others (take apple/Mac OS as an example, versus Linux)
Then it's up to individuals to verify the source code and choose to be a node operator. Not everyone needs to be a node operator, just enough on that the common skilled worker can partake should they need to
If you don't like the "rules of governance" of whatever network you're in, that's fine, go to a different one you do like, or make your own with your own rules. If it's actually a better system of "decentralized digital government", you'll attract people into your Network.
Consumer grade tech is more than capable of achieving this. You don't need cpus with 2nm transistors (which are heavily gatekept by oligarchs), there's plenty of open software and hardware protocols/designs to prove not only this concept works, but has been done before by now.
The only problem in the past was with solving the identity problem and preventing Sybil attacks, but that's becoming less of a concern for other reasons (which I could elaborate further on)
That works for social media like Lemmy but what about tech for trading goods or keeping the lights on? What about the Internet infrastructure?
This a great idea to build off of and advocate for rights. But it's as possible in reality as the classical liberal "state of nature".
So, I emphasized trustless and decentralized in social organizations. "It just works for social media" isn't exactly addressing what I was getting at. For example, Lemmy has a bot account problem. All that freedom makes it harder to prevent that problem.
But if you're talking about how a government is a system of voting bodies that authorize some action given state (policy), and authority is delegated by some means - say, voting - then the botting problem of Lemmy is not just "something that doesn't work", it's a critical failure which would enable fraud.
So, when I brought up Sybil attacks, I was trying to avoid a long winded digression including arguments from Microsoft on Decentralized ID. But the point being, it can be decentralized. Policy is action given state but action is delegated to people inevitably. But when you vote, would you rather trust a person to count those votes or a trustless automated system?
I'm talking about you said you want to use tech "to make up for the inefficiencies of decentralized economics". It's not about making open source software that works. That's easy. The question is who controls the wires? We can already see where ISPs and countries can check everything passing through their system. What's to prevent someone from gaining control of a critical mass of physical nodes and blocking traffic from anyone who doesn't pay them a "fee"?
You're talking about the software but you're forgetting that it all runs on hardware somewhere in a windowless building. Even if you decentralize that, you've still got the problem of gatekeeping. How long before each node requires .1 pennies per packet? How good is long distance trade going to be when just making the offer costs a significant amount?
Again, those are my ideals. Realistically, not everything can be decentralized in a trustless way.
That said, much of our current system of signing documents to verify it was done by a certain Identity can be automated. Enforcement and neorealism are a separate issue to mitigate, but the delegation of authority to humans can be automated without human involvement
I think the ideals of anarchy left are great. But we should treat them more like classical liberals treated their, "state of nature". It wasn't a goal, it was a guiding metric. The progressives of the time theorized that humans are naturally good and that's why we can have democracies. That's a huge simplification but it's to make my point. Instead of actually trying for anarchy we should be trying to use and mold government to achieve outcomes.
For example anti-capitalism. If we tried to go into anarchy one of the biggest dangers is actually corporate feudalism. Where corporations become the default law. Instead we should be regulating corporations and making it clear that anything other than normal business under a 5 percent market share is illegal. We should be requiring unions. Then with the government itself, we get it out of our daily lives. Other than taxes and voting, it should not be something we interact with regularly. Armed police should not be a ubiquitous sight. We should be able to grow our own veggies without the government showing up to stop that.
There's so much we can do, that complete disengagement from the project of the state seems to me to be counter productive to actually helping people. In another example, one of the most powerful tools we have are Unions. But without government protection we know cooperations will do everything up to and including murdering their work force to prevent unionization. And yeah we can murder them right back. But there's always guns for money, so that's not a winning battle.