The world is decentralizing. I'm not talking about cryptocurrencies, although that's what sparked my interest in the subject. I'm talking about everything.
A small vendor in China. Image from Pexels.
We've been through major centralizing phases in the history of mankind. The banks started as a way for people to exchange goods anywhere they were, but across the years they grow larger and larger to become the massive institutions we know today. Industrialism allowed us to organize labor, chain the production and just build things faster. It improved everyone's lives, but gave more power and wealth to those in charge. It is known that 1% of the current world population controls more than 50% of all wealth, while many of the richest families of Europe have achieved this status centuries ago.
Throughout human history there have always been leaders, kings, presidents, tribal chiefs or whoever was in front of their "tribe" at the time. People that concentrated the power and the wealth they needed to maintain control. And with power and wealth they just grew consistently more powerful and wealthy, a snowball effect. We can claim that governments and banks are the ones in charge of the modern world.
However, I can see more and more movements against these central forces. They have always existed, but seem to be getting more evidence lately.
Think about the Internet. How did people talk to each other before? Mostly in person, via telephone or letters. Now you turn on your smartphone and you can talk to just about anyone instantly. The number of peer-to-peer connections possible now is so, so much higher than, let's say, 30 years ago. The Internet was an enormous force toward decentralization. The companies that started early and became successful ended up becoming major centralizing forces as well. Think of Google, Facebook and Amazon. They are big powerful companies. But still the world is more decentralized than it was before them. Newer companies like AirBNB and Uber are taking a step further, connecting people more directly than before, with a little less centralization.
There are many other smaller examples of decentralization I can see daily. People favoring small vendors from their community; favoring artisans, hand-made and specific over general and mass produced; the plethora of small startups trying to solve specific problems (decentralizing the solutions); the open source communities, with the idea that anyone can "fork" an application and do what they want with it; the websites were you can hire a graphic designer from the other side of the world to design your company's logo.
Some of these are small steps toward decentralization, some are bigger. But they all seem to point in the same direction. As people are empowered with access to knowledge, they want more. They want to do more and become part of something bigger. Big central forces cannot escape their eyes and their judgement.
Cryptocurrencies have a major role in this movement. They can have tremendous impacts on how people organize themselves (governance) and how they exchange goods and save or invest the products of their work (economy). The social impacts of this cannot be overstated.
It certainly won't happen from day to night, it will take years and will feel natural to everyone. Just like we see the Internet and renting a place from a stranger on AirBNB as something normal today, controlling your own money and not depending on an institution to do it for you will be just as normal. Babies today are born with a smartphone in their hands, they never lived in a world were the Internet didn't exist. Babies of the future might be born in a world were banks and governments will play a different (and probably much smaller) role in their lives.
