It’s official - the most libertarian, freedom promoting, anti-authoritarian society in history is now reorganizing itself around strong central government. And if my intuition is correct, that says something interesting about the future of real world societies as well.
From its design as a tool to help communication survive nuclear attacks, to its evolution as an distributed web of information, the internet is all about decentralization. And that decentralized nature has unleashed an explosion of creativity and innovation across the world.
But something is changing, and it’s happening very quickly: we are starting to empower specific organizations and companies with central control.
We used to all host our own web servers. Now it’s generally far more efficient to let Amazon do it for us. Five years ago we used to communicate through our own email servers. Today an increasing chunk of that communication is now happening on managed communities like Facebook and Twitter (and soon Google Wave). These communities have very specific and pronounced structures (laws) that govern everything from how the system acts, to who can participate in it.
And to a large extent these laws are widely beneficial. Unlike email, users on Facebook have a (somewhat) validated identity. There is also a centralization of spam-prevention, abuse procedures, content formatting, and even structure to profiles that maximizes the efficiency of finding and retrieving information.
And it’s not just Facebook, the same thing is happening with Twitter, which is using centralized management and control to improve the experience of un-managed platforms like blogging and SMS. In fact, the biggest critism of Twitter today is that its not exerting enough control.
And while my libertarian blood cells coagulate at the thought of centralization and its inevitable abuse and inefficiency, that doesn’t seem to be happening online. What does seem to be happening, unlike with real world governments, is that these strong central players are organically rising and falling (ahem, MySpace) based on the effectiveness and responsiveness to the people they are governing.
I’m far from a political scientist, but it’s a common belief that as societies advance they form governments to maximize the quality of life for their citizens. The same seems to be true for the online world. The question is what happens as the two worlds increasingly become one.
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