This post had so much potential, only to start going off the rails by making a straw man of libertarianism [0] and then crash and burn by ignoring that so many of the listed gripes are due to centralized authorities being themselves corrupt. The regulators he's referencing for the solution have also been corrupted by their own incentives - they create ever more bureaucratic restrictions on small-scale actors for the appearance of doing something, while failing to police large scale misbehavior because of too big to fail. Joe Businessman sells psychoactive substances? Make sure to prevent his access to the banking system! Golden Mansacks creates financial logic bombs to loot retirement accounts? Print trillions to bail out the metaindustry!
The example of an invisible hierarchy being not paying your "AWS bill" is straight up weird. If the entirety of a system is on AWS (and paid by a single account!), then it's not really decentralized now is it? In fact the whole post is weirdly biased towards the paradigm of centralized systems while claiming to talk about decentralization. Only boring-ass "web scale" businesses need to "pay out a fraction to one of the Big Cloud Providers". Grassroots self-hosted P2P communication - aka the original and everpresent Internet punk dream - does not.
I agree that the community which has grown around purported solutions to these problems doesn't seem poised to bear much fruit relative to the level of excitement. There is definitely some insight in this post and we're never going to change things without questioning assumptions to see where they lead, in many different paradigms. But I feel this post's train of thought would have produced much richer results if it had spent more time pondering before trying to synthesize a sweeping summary.
[0] The simplistic rules championed by many capital-L "Libertarians" and other cryptofascists are likely a setup for failure, but the general desire for individual liberty versus centralized authority is not.
The example of an invisible hierarchy being not paying your "AWS bill" is straight up weird. If the entirety of a system is on AWS (and paid by a single account!), then it's not really decentralized now is it? In fact the whole post is weirdly biased towards the paradigm of centralized systems while claiming to talk about decentralization. Only boring-ass "web scale" businesses need to "pay out a fraction to one of the Big Cloud Providers". Grassroots self-hosted P2P communication - aka the original and everpresent Internet punk dream - does not.
I agree that the community which has grown around purported solutions to these problems doesn't seem poised to bear much fruit relative to the level of excitement. There is definitely some insight in this post and we're never going to change things without questioning assumptions to see where they lead, in many different paradigms. But I feel this post's train of thought would have produced much richer results if it had spent more time pondering before trying to synthesize a sweeping summary.
[0] The simplistic rules championed by many capital-L "Libertarians" and other cryptofascists are likely a setup for failure, but the general desire for individual liberty versus centralized authority is not.