"Decentralization": Everyone's palace is rising from the ground

In the technical field, "decentralization" is a high-frequency word. Bigwigs like to say it, and the media like to use it. It seems to be a bit cliché, and it is difficult to see its deep meaning. Some time ago, I went to a press conference and suddenly saw a sentence on the PPT of Luoji Siwei CEO Tuo Buhua. I thought this might be the best interpretation of "decentralization" in the dimension of the Internet, that is: "Everyone's palace is rising from the ground."

In fact, the word "palace" undoubtedly captures a certain essence. Today, let's talk about "decentralization" and what it is in a more macro dimension.

Intuitively, the birth of the Internet has been a process of continuously accumulating power to individuals. Everything serves only "me". This is even more true in the mobile era, which places everyone at the center of the world. The best visual example is undoubtedly the mobile map. As writer Nick Bilton said in "Flip the World", "You go in any direction on the street, and no matter which direction, the whole picture will move with your position. This is a major change. In the paper world, maps and locations are based on places or landmarks, not your location. From now on, you are the starting point, and the digital world follows you, not you behind it."

This reversal does not stop there. As you know, the benefits of capital and technology are benefiting everyone. In the words of Tuo Buhua, "When people become the center of the world, everyone becomes a 'king.' Our generation of entrepreneurs is to build a magnificent palace for the king."

When an ordinary person living in a big city can dispatch hundreds of drivers, chefs, and even storytellers at any time, and build private stables, imperial kitchens, and Hanlin Academy at extremely low cost - sometimes even the predicament is quite similar to that of the king. For example, in information acquisition, when private reading compiled by big data replaces what traditional editors consider to be "appropriate content", everyone will more or less fall into the information cocoon mentioned by Sunstein in "The Information Utopia", and thus have fewer "unpleasant" words.

It is not difficult to understand that "all industries are service industries". What is really surprising is that the way resources are allocated and aggregated has largely shifted from deterministic methods such as authority, national will, and even capital to each specific person.

I forgot who said that the 19th century belonged to empires, the 20th century belonged to big companies, and the 21st century undoubtedly belongs to individuals - just like the little blue dot on the map on your mobile phone that moves with you. You no longer have to focus on a specific landmark. Whether you are the "kings" being served or the ambitious entrepreneurs, you just need to stand where you are and shout "I want". If someone responds, then resources will surely gather around you.

In fact, the reversal of resources is an inevitable result of full cooperation between people. Common sense is that the economic prosperity of modern society is closely related to the continuous promotion of collaboration by humans. The result of the refinement is naturally to weave an increasingly interdependent network, and this network is destined to continuously amplify the value of a single point in the process of evolution, thus giving birth to the "king" mentioned by Tuo Buhua.

Therefore, the meaning of "decentralization" emerges: due to the decentralization of the "center" (a good recent example is the return of Bitcoin), a huge network can be woven from the bottom up in any field, and its ultimate goal is to restore the full picture from near to far.

  Just as Bitcoin transforms trust in power into a mathematical problem; in my opinion, starting from the perspective of any node, taking it as the center, splicing and restoring it from near to far into a meshed world is a fascinating structure because it occurs in any field.

I watched a TED talk. The gist of it is that for a long time, humans have been used to describing different cognitive systems with a top-down tree structure: species maps, knowledge systems, legal systems, organizational structures, etc. As a visual symbol that emphasizes symmetry, perhaps due to its natural position, the tree diagram very intuitively reveals humans' obsession with order and generalizability. Of course, this is an illusion of "everything is under control", and reducing different centers to a network structure may be closer to the truth.

The speaker at TED gave several examples from different fields: for instance, the dense bacterial network between species connects seemingly unrelated species, weaving them into a biological network; modern neurology believes that there are no such strict divisions within the brain, but it is just an interconnected neural network; in the Internet era, corporate transformation is also learning from terrorist organizations, with decentralized power and individual independence, weaving a network of value.

Personally, I think the best example is the universe.

Although there are too many unsolved mysteries in the universe, it is generally believed that there is no spatial center of the universe (except Wudaokou), and the planets are connected to each other through gravity and other forces to form a network. Any point can declare itself to be the center of the universe (from this perspective, the so-called "geocentric theory" and "heliocentric theory" are more of a mathematical problem), just as it is said in "The Big Bang: A Universal History of the Universe": "The Big Bang happened everywhere, there is no 'center' here... Every galaxy group seems to be moving away from us. If an observer looks back at us from these distant stars, he will see the same scene and may also think that he is at the center of the expansion."

Well, whether it is every "palace rising from the ground" on a micro scale or every planet on a macro scale, the so-called "decentralization" may just be a nested model, or it may really be the law of all things. Who knows? But what is certain is that only by upgrading our cognition to this level can we have a better understanding of "decentralization".