centralised bad
decentralised good.
right?
but i fear not for everything.
at least when we had every centralised we knew the crooks were all in one place, even if that place stretched to the very spread out network of offshore bank accounts and swiss bank accounts we saw touted at us as teenagers by a secret agent in a suit with a nice car and a dolly bird on the aim, the very height of male dna control and arrogance. planting a seed that in some way that the life of a spy was cool and was doing the world a favour for the character to over the years ultimately cross the very line he was seeking to protect. it kinda feels that we are coming full circle that way on the internet.
for me my journey onto the top of decentralisation started with the german company Fraunhofer-Gesellshaft, who developed MP3 technology and now licenses the patent rights to the audio compression technology, the digital encoding process that would start a revolution of compression audio from records like the first massive .wav files into much smaller yet sounding the same as the original files, i ripped everything so i had it at my fingers instead of having to load cd’s or find tapes, i felt a sense of legacy and backup in case i lost the cd or broke the tape, it was not long until napster appeared on the scene and i was open to a world of music and illegal access to music like i had never known. i had access to a world wide decentralised music library. i was hooked in, this was new.
https://www.thoughtco.com/history-of-mp4-1992132 is a really good article on the history of mp3 if you are interested in how music went digital and who did the research and how audio compression works. kinda cool.
i’ve watched it adapt and change over the years, different decentralised codecs, protocols and systems, from file transfers to video chat, the p2p nature of routing and packet management has led us to a world of decentralised crypto money and enterprise level encryption in our chat applications, we are everywhere and nowhere and the adoption of digital into our daily lives has pushed at an even faster pace with access to faster connections to the web and subsidised mobile equipment. the world is flooded with devices for everyone to connect to this underlying communication network we call the internet. it’s changed in a relatively short term, everything. access to things we might never had seen in a normal life time if we stayed in one place, lived and died where we were born - the borders are down, people are on the move. the world is in a faster movement transition than ever before.
but it’s not all gravy, it’s not all good times, with the push and desire for everything to feed everything and be decentralised comes the flip side of that coin, those that want to see everything crash and burn and be some kind of utopian playground for the mentally broken and disenfranchised, the anarchists love it, the extremists love it, those wanting to exert power and control have found different abilities on top of their existing legacy, they have switched into power realms that make the network and the message reach further than every before.
surely the balance between good vs evil is now slowly falling outside of our remit? the power players with the most information, with the most currency, with the ability to access, to build their own super computer with ai on the niche of their own desire working around the clock 24/7, ai vs ai, the most streamline, clean and bug free code, rewriting itself, recoding itself, making up new languages to talk to itself, discovering who we are and if we are actually needed, being given an emotionless, unattached viewpoint of the chaos of the humanity of being human. surely, that loop has only one outcome for a world who’s populate is growing bigger by the day, will we have the ability to control the outcomes or are the outcomes already controlling us and we are merely compressed audio bytes that have been left out of the original sound stage like mp3, have we compressed what it is to be a human being on planet earth?
the revolution will be decentralised, but i don’t think it’s gonna look like anything you thought it would. how do you feel about the world you live in today when you look out of the window, i’d love to know in the comments below.
have a wonderful day, enjoy the moment, hug and kiss your friends and family and remember to always try and extend the hand of compassion and not compression for those around us, even when it seems all is lost.
lots of love,
TEAMHUMBLE x