The Intrinsic Perspective
If I compare my experience on the web now to that of 15 or 20 years ago, the obvious difference is centralization. Almost everything has been centralized, from where I consume entertainment to where I listen to music to how I get my news to how I interact with other web denizens. That the internet trends inexorably to centralization is neither a good or bad thing, more like a force of nature—one might as well argue with a hurricane.
Of course, there’s been a lot of bad from this tendency. Centralization is why spying on your privacy is such big business, centralization is what forces culture wars, and it is sometimes the creation of a strangling monopoly that can lead to stagnation. Over the past 15 years, centralization of the web has concentrated discourse into a small number of companies, who often abuse their power with impunity.
But centralization on the web has had some obvious positive effects as well—ease of use, the beautification of user-interfaces, the streamlining of communication, the streamlining of basically everything. There’s a really good reason why centralization happens, which is that it is, from a user’s experience, preferable. And decentralization has its downsides: it is terrible for throughput, for audience building, for reaching critical mass. Of course, something like Bitcoin takes precise advantage of these things by being slow and ponderous as a tradeoff for being immutable, but writing, well, writing serves a different master.
