Centralization vs. Decentralization

The Internet's eternal struggle

Ben Thompson writes,

In short, the analog world was defined by scarcity, which meant distribution of scarce goods was the locus of power; the digital world is defined by abundance, which means discovery of what you actually want to see is the locus of power. The result is that consumers have access to anything, which is to say that nothing is special; everything has been flattened.

This is difficult to get used to. Thirty years ago, Internet gurus thought that the middle man was going away. Musicians and writers would go directly to consumers, and get a higher share of compensation as a result.

Instead, as Thompson points out, the problem shifted. The publishers who supplied content via atoms were no longer a choke point.

the Internet commoditized content that was previously granted value by virtue of being bundled with a light manufacturing business (i.e. printing presses and delivery trucks), but it also created the opportunity for entirely new kinds of content predicated on reaching niche audiences that are only sustainable when the entire world is your market.

For navigating the ocean of content, we seem to have chosen a centralized solution, dominated by Google, Facebook, and others. Was that inevitable? Will it break down?

Corbin K. Barthold argues that centralization already has been breaking down.

On the internet, the mainstream media is struggling, while rightwing (or, at least, non-leftwing) media is thriving. The freshest outlets—e.g., Pirate Wires, The Free Press, Compact—are heterodox. The most interesting voices on Substack—e.g., N. S. Lyons, Paul Kingsnorth—are reactionary. Many journalists—e.g., Aaron Sibarium, Sanjana Friedman, Olivia Reingold, Julio Rosas—are doing serious investigative reporting from outside the liberal media bubble. …

Some conservatives worry that technology will eventually enable the government, corporations, or both working together to impose mass censorship and construct a social credit system. That might one day become a real concern. But for now, we actually have something like the opposite problem. Our immediate task is to overcome the disorientation wrought by an information explosion. Viewpoints are not scarce; they are abundant. The internet allows you to immerse yourself in almost any ideology you want. That creates its own set of problems, but they’re not problems to do with online censorship and the need for online “anti-censorship” legislation

Thompson says that the new AI’s put us on the cusp of a new era. He warns of

a world where a small number of entities “own” AI, and we use it — or are used by it — on their terms. This is the outcome being pushed by those obsessed with “safety”, and demanding regulation and reporting; that those advocates also seem to have a stake in today’s leading models seems strangely ignored.

The alternative — MKBHDs For Everything [I believe this refers to Marquez Brownlee, a YouTube “influencer:] — means openness and commoditization. Yes, those words have downsides: they mean that the powers that be are not special, and sometimes that is something we lament, as I noted at the beginning of this Article. Our alternative, though, is not the gatekept world of the 20th century — we can’t go backwards — but one where the flattening is not the elimination of vitality but the tilling of the ground so that something — many things — new can be created.

Some say that the world of AI is inherently centralized, because scale matters. Having more computer resources and more data makes for more powerful models. But if what matters is how people use AI, then the models could turn out to be like utilities that function in the background. Decentralization of applications could still emerge.