Attention conservation notice: An economistic argument that computer networks are nigh-doomed to effective centralization, by someone who is neither an economist nor a computer scientist. Arcane, speculative, and not actionable even if correct. You would be better off spending your time reading a book.
Drafted in 2018, and deliberately not much updated. Posted now because I found myself re-using the joke of the subtitle in an e-mail.
Twitter is awful for many reasons, but not the least of them is the way it makes its users feel forced to keep using it. (One such complaint among many.) Early visions of how it could contribute to a beneficient or at least harmless ecosystem, such Steven Berlin Johnson's (*), presumed that it would be much less sticky, a more old-fashioned website people could leave. Now, more recently Johnson has written a spectacularly wrong-headed piece hailing blockchain as a blow for re-decentralizing the Web.
Of course, the primary working example of a block chain is Bitcoin, which is heavily centralized in holdings, in processing power, and in exchanges. And there are economies-of-scale reasons to expect this would be true of anything using either proof of work or proof of stake. But suppose the problem with Bitcoin is just that it's not got a very compelling use:
imagine if keeping your car idling 24/7 produced solved Sudokus you could trade for heroin --- @Theophite, 16 August 2018and that nobody has a use for blockchains, not really.
Git repositories, on the other hand, are the part of the blockchain idea that's actually good for something: a way of tracking changes, with many authors, where it is very, very hard to go back and alter history without being caught. And git repositories are things that are in-principle easy to copy and move around, and could be hosted on any machine running HTTP (or, heck, FTP). So why does Github exist, let alone hold the position it does?
The answer, I think, comes in two parts. The first is that focal points are subject to increasing returns via network effects. The second is that search engines create and/or amplify focal points. Put these two together, and you get a very strong tendency for any particular line of activity --- be it trading solved sudokus for heroin or open-source software development --- to concentrate in just one, or at most a few, online locations.
Incidentally: This doesn't necessarily lock in first-mover advantage, because other forces can overcome this (revulsion, technical superiority), but it does mean that it will be very hard to avoid having at most a few dominant locations at any one time. It also means that the transitions between dominant locations will be brief.
If we really wanted to re-decentralize, we'd have to (1) get rid of focal points, or (2) get rid of search engines as we've known them, or (3) somehow make search point to a distributed, decentralized focal "point" (focal blob? focal rhizome?). I therefore strongly suspect we are not going to re-decentralize. But then I didn't expect the Web would centralize as much as it has, despite having literally learned my Brian Arthur and Paul David at my father's knee, so what do I know?
*: To be clear, I have been a fan of Johnson's books since Interface Culture and Emergence. I am picking on two of his essays, but that's because I think he is too ready to find encouraging signs for a certain vision of how the Internet could transform the world for the better. To be clear, I share the vision, but now hold out little hope for it.
Posted at March 06, 2026 22:50 | permanent link