THE DECENTRALIZATION OF EVERYTHING
As we continue into the third decade of the 21st century, many of our biggest challenges in society and business still originate directly from our inability to creatively collaborate to solve many significant and very threatening cross-border problems (pandemics, climate change, availability of water and food, and many more).
We’ve experienced hundreds of years of volatility around the cycle of centralization and de-centralization of systems, relationships, organizations, institutions and decision making. In recent years, it seems a long wave of centralization has reached its peak in social, industrial, financial, technological and geopolitical spheres. We can now see the influence of centralization and scale in new digital businesses that collect and sell data on behaviors. (Consider how large, powerful, and intractably indivisible businesses like Google and Facebook have become.)
But just as tides shift according to the gravitational pull of the moon, we also are seeing the emergence of a cycle of de-centralization and distribution of resources. Powerful distributed technologies such as IoT, edge computing, blockchain, AI/ML and more are once again demonstrating the power of decentralized systems, relationships and interactions, and potentially setting the stage for a new era of large-scale collaboration and problem solving.
Just as the extensible, technology-neutral nature of the Internet has allowed it to scale so dramatically and gracefully with minimal central administration, we are once again seeing a similar evolution occurring with the Internet that has the potential to enable problem solving at scale for some of our most intractable problems.
The bit, the byte, and later the packet made possible the entire enterprise of digital computing and global networking. Until the world agreed upon these basic concepts, it was not possible to move forward. The next great step for the Internet—completely fluid information and fully distributed interoperating data and information—requires an equally simple, flexible, and universal abstraction schema that will make information itself truly portable in both physical and information space, and among any conceivable information device.