Centralised vs Decentralised

Decentralization is not as important as distributing power. Period. Of two extremes, (A) distributed power and democracy working in a centralized fashion is WAY better than (B) decentralized situations with extreme power inequalities.

Look at the example of Wikipedia. It's not decentralized, but power is distributed reasonably well, and there's lots of checks and balances.

We need to embrace the best ideas like score voting (aka range voting, see http://rangevoting.org ), facilitated consensus with fallbacks (such as to score voting), and we need to embrace free/libre/open values that permit the freedom to fork and go off and do something else even if we don't always want fragmentation. People deciding to consent together to centralized forms of organization is perfectly fine in itself. We just need continual effort to avoid corruption and power imbalances.

shameless self-promotion: we're trying to find the right balance with all this in how we structure the co-op for Snowdrift.coop

Thanks Arron. So when power is voluntarily aggregated from a decentralised (distributed) base, centralisation is often beneficial. Decentralisation and centralisation (distribution and aggregation) being complementary. Albeit decentralisation does not guarantee distribution, nor centralisation aggregation, but they necessary structures.

This is definitely a fetishisation on the structure/process of decision making.

The main result of this is that noone is trying to search for new forms of organization. Nor are the main proponents interested in hearing the drawbacks of each structure.
This has been transformed from a logical problem to a religious belief.

The only solution I see to this is that the remaining people that have kept their senses intact try to research and build new structures (that preferably use the internet for com) and being built in such a way that they are infectious like the GPL license was and is.

@xekoukou - I liked your comment in general, but do you really think that "noone is trying to search for new forms of organization"?

I do believe that we are a minority and even we, have our own belief system that makes the conversation difficult.

From my experience, there are very few people that can be unassuming. The ones I know, I can count them with one hand.

I highly recommend readying the writings of Pieter Hintjens. He was an activist of open software, he is a bit eccentric in his writings, I don't agree with all of what he says, but his ideas on fairy tale theories and scientific ones are spot on.

Any true scientist should first of all believe that his theory is wrong. http://hintjens.com/blog:81

@xekoukou - thanks for the Hintjens link. I agree with your partial agreement, but at least highly entertaining and thought-provoking.

I feel from his writing though a sense and projection of personal superiority. Such a sense can be as misleading as many of the other problems he mentions.

Centralization and hierarchies can be useful. I personally think decentralized solutions are more desirable, when they're similarly effective. So I'd suggest that we need to understand when particular systems are/aren't effective.

Thus a blend of both topologies requires to look at the requirements and desireables.

Federation, not decentralized/centralized. This way, users can become servers, but don't have to.

Much easier to abuse the majority in a centralised system. And a centralised resource itself often creates its own misuse or criminal value. Most centralisation has been a 1% agenda.

hey @geoffrey nice to see you pop up here after you randomly called me the other day... you never sent me an email though ;)

Here's a powerful article I came across that explains several downfalls of hierarchy. In a nutshell, hierarchical institutions are functionally psychotic, detrimental to those who work within them and systematically stupid.

@stevenpalmer The article is valid for hierarchies which reward unethical behaviour. However, it does not apply to benign hierarchies. Ethical leadership is a very useful tool. Please be careful not to encourage meritocratic leadership to be thrown out with the bath water. We have a dire shortage of ethical leaders and frames to support them.

@geoffrey I suppose ethical leadership relies on benign structure. I'm not sure how a 'benign hierarchy' would work, sounds contradictory, hierarchy creates power imbalances and power distorts communications.

Just thought I'd remind everyone here about Jo Freeman's excellent text, "The Tyranny of Structurelessness" from 1971. I find the list of principles at the end quite relevant to discussions about centralisation and federation.

To compliment that @denjello I found some footage from such experiments on a societal scale.

"Strong personalities came to dominate the weaker members of the group, but the rules of the self-organising system refused to allow any organised opposition to this oppression."

and How Silicon Valley became the Man

"The New Left, believed in doing politics to change politics, they embraced bureaucracy, hierarchy, believed in organizations. The New Communalists on the other hand believed in turning instead to small-scale technologies, with which to kind of change our minds."

So the 60's counter-culture was too reactionary towards existing institutional principles and structures. As such there was a lack of political strategy and supporting apparatus to embrace equality and solidarity. We then become dominated by a pernicious turning away from politics, a turning toward the self as the basis of political change, but this ignores all the systems that make the world possible. Power to people instead of power to the people, which ignores the structural differences between different kinds of people.

@richarddbartlett has made a post here that nicely clarifys the questions related to this post, of structure and tech-determinism.

Zeynep Tufekci makes a similar point to Astra Taylor's in this TED talk: How the Internet has Made Social Change Easy to Organize, Hard to Win.