One of the key promises of the internet remains unfulfilled: decentralisation. Over the past decade, the web in particular has become something horribly centralised. As Tim Eastman put it, it has become:

a group of five websites, each consisting of screenshots of text from the other four.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Much of what we created in the early days of the internet is throughly decentralised. The web has no centralised controlling point. Neither does email. There are also moves at the technology plumbing level to recreate that decentralisation. For example, the Social Web Foundation is a new consortium of companies exploring ActivityPub, a standard for decentralised social networking.

But what if we could use the internet’s inherently decentralised nature to impact the physical world more directly? Remember, the very technological underpinning of the internet is decentralised — which is part of its resilience. And, it’s what allows us to connect millions of devices and allow them to communicate, without central control.

Powering decentralised energy

At NEXT24, Arash Aazami made the case that we’re standing on the edge of a transformative moment in our relationship with energy. With a little imagination and courage, we can move beyond our current uneasy relationship with power, thanks to its financial and environmental costs, and into a future of incredibly cheap and abundant energy. But to do so, we need to turn our backs on centralisation.

Power generation is accelerating away from a small number of centralised plants, and back to distributed generation. Houses with solar panels, farms with wind turbines: these are the future of energy generation. Our existing energy networks are built for command and control of a limited number of large-scale plants.

His contention was that, to unleash the potential of renewable energy, we need a new system of distributed management — possibly managed via AI — that could make energy cheap and abundant again. And, of course, save the planet in the process. Talk about making a virtue from a necessity.

Harnessing decentralisation with AI

Again, the plumbing is not new. The internet can do distributed management, and we already have the AI to make it work. All it takes is the will, and the ability to make the case to the existing power structure. None of this will be alien to anyone who has worked in digital transformation.

And that extension of the idea of AI allowing us to handle distributed objects in the real world was also touched on in Dr Ivan Poupyrev’s work on creating LLMs trained on the real world. We’re still in the early stages yet, but there’s a real opportunity here to take the lashings of data being collected, but not used, from all the smart and connected objects out there, and use that for more distributed planning and organisation.

This has the potential to start solving some of the last roadblocks towards autonomous vehicles. And they might need renaming: they’re being “autonomous” in the sense that the passenger doesn’t need to drive, but “connected” in the sense that the car may well be talking to a citywide traffic planning system, informed by AI.

The politics of decentralisation

This could be a challenge: those in power find it difficult to give up their positions of command and control. Centralised power attracts people who like to wield such power, and prying their fingers off the (metaphorical) levers of control might be hard.

But it’s doable. How do we know? Well, politicians are even less likely to give up power, and yet, in places, they’re being persuaded to do exactly that. And Jon Alexander has made it his mission to persuade more of them.

He cited the example of Taiwan, where a model of participatory democracy allowed an unusually good Covid-19 response earlier this decade. Most countries have moved towards a model of centralised government. The petty rulers of towns and districts have seen their power slowly ebb away to the centre. While some countries have seen some decentralisation of power, it still tends to be on a large scale. For example, in the UK we’ve seen devolution of some decision-making to the constituent countries of Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. And then further decentralisation of power to some of the major cities.

The engaged citizen

Now, the technology already exists for much greater involvement of the wider public in decision-making. The idea of representative democracy — sending a local delegate to a national assembly — made perfect sense in the pre-digital era. But digital tools allow us to convene much more local assemblies of concerned citizens. And then we can capture their discussions and ideas and feed them back to the centre.

This is what Alexander calls the “citizen narrative”, a radical reinvention of today’s consumer narrative where large, centralised organisations make decisions, and most of us are passive recipients of them. Instead, we can have a more involved relationship with decision-making, in a more sophisticated and involved way than the over-simplicity of a referendum.

Time for a decentralisation shift

We’ve noted before that digital transformation tends to come in two waves:

• First, we digitise existing processes
• Then we remake those processes using digital
  

So far, though, these transformational efforts have been deployed largely within companies, organisations, or industries. Do we have the courage — and can we find the commitment — to rethink some of our civic systems to take advantage of decentralised technology?

And, if we can, what could we create with the new energy it unleashes in our societies?

This image was generated with the assistance of AI.