The Centralized Mindset and the Rise of Decentralization
Following the latest events, it is evident that we are arriving in the Era of Decentralization. Whether a throw-back on former Communist states having transitioned from the centrally planned to market-based economies, business insiders with their articles on shifts in corporate organizations from top-down hierarchies to decentralized management, or just media flooded with news about decentralized finance and its impact of centralized banking systems. Going further, the science sector is experimenting with distributed models of the mind while technology promotes distributed computation. All with a common denominator — the meaning of everything becomes constructed by many instead of being imposed by a centralized entity.
Centralization has been around for so long that the decentralized currents cause a great deal of resistance. Of course, on a deep level, there is a strong attachment to the centralized way of thinking. People’s minds work mostly based on the unconscious (or subconscious), which means that the vast majority of people do not make conscious choices of what patterns of behavior and thinking they follow. When they see a certain pattern, they assume it is all there is due its persistent usage.
Human mind may assume that all species of the animal kingdom, too, have leaders, just as humans do. That is not the case. Most bird flocks are not led by a leader (a centralized entity). The individual birds, while flying, react to the movements of the birds nearby. Together they form a system organized into a pattern which arises from simple rules and interactions with immediate system components (other birds). And as it happens, there is always a bird that appears to be a leader just because it happens to be located in the position assumed to be a leader position. But if you ever saw a bird flock, you know it often changes direction. This would render many birds leaders depending on where the flock is heading and how the components compute. The flock is thus organized without an organizer and coordinated without a coordinator. Yet, most humans assume there is a leader, simply due diligence of their own unconscious patterning.
The plain assumption of centralized control is a phenomenon we can call a centralized mindset. It is not a misconception of those scientifically naive. It sits deep in the psyche of nearly everyone. Revising theories of systems, asserting new thinking about their organization which reveal that what we might observe and automatically understand as centralized (e.g. “birds have leaders“) might be only due to our projection. Such bias can be observed in many system theories throughout the history of science, giving us the evidence of the deeply rooted system of human thinking.
Examination of the Centralized Mindset
In many ways, the pervasiveness of the centralized mindset is not surprising. It has been the foundation of every system used by humans for as long as we can remember. So why do we even shift? What happened that is bringing the Era of Centralization to an end and why are we prompted to substitution? What is so unique about the current circumstances? And why did centralization manage to persevere for so long?
Historically, the centralized mindset has been embraced by everyone on the grounds of living systems designed by the centralized God-like entity. This is not a statement of religious truth, this has been the belief about the state of evolutionary events until now. Science, operating from the ‘argument from design‘ on the grounds of complex systems and complex objects could not have possibly been created by random chance. Instead it was logical to assume (and observed in universal design) that all systems and objects have to have a maker. This is a centralized optics of a linear progression from the maker to the creation. In the 19th century, there were no other explanations for complex systems to emerge with such organized precision. Science held onto these beliefs for a long time due to the lack of an alternative. The workings of the economy is also viewed strongly through the lens of centralization. Assumption of singular causes for complex phenomena comes from the externally positioned source of power — governmental control, is inherited as a foundation of human existence. Naturally, governments have been playing a large role in economies, but to a degree we tend to overestimate the true impact they truly have over our lives. Unless they possess the total power of the authoritarian order, they do not define the character of deliberate actions of defined sub-entities to an extent we think they do.
These commitments to centralized approaches generate the belief of a centralized designer. Was a corn field planted by a farmer? Is the ballet performance created by a choreographer? Moreover, people who participate in social systems with hierarchical systems where authorities serve as models are not aware of the organizational model they follow. We can ask if these are natural and truly emerge as structures based on competence of the individual agents that put some of them as ‘in charge‘ and others ‘as following‘. Our organization into systems is, of course, deeply influenced by the way we conceive ourselves. Our psyche is composed of millions of interacting entities, which makes our perception of ourselves scattered. Yer we still aim for a unified perception of self as a singular entity. This is a convenient survival tool and very necessary to keep the illusions at bay. But truly, we are many different actors in one, with many different intentions, yet also in charge by the self. The centralized mindset may thus be viewed as an aspect of ego, a lasting remnant of egocentrism, that is being currently challenged on a collective level.
Decentralized Thinking
In a way, people do have experience with decentralized systems. They appear abundantly in the natural world and even in the human social matrix. But observation and experience are different things, and do not necessarily lead to forming an intuitive approach towards participation. It is indeed an obscure shift, for it may seem like a contradiction. How is it possible to design a decentralized system when by definition, that is exactly what we are not supposed to be doing? And is that at all what this really is — a lack of a designer?
Once again, we need to reshuffle our thoughts around it — that is the point of this article after all — because there are ways to design a decentralized system: We can design the behavior of many individual components and then let them form patterns as a result of their interactions. This way of designing is different from what we are used to, because the designer only controls the actions of the components, but not the whole. The role of a designer in this case is not responsible for the final design, because that is not what is being designed at all.
One of the tools to create a type of a decentralized design is called Cellular Automaton, which is a computational tool used in public key cryptography. Cellular automaton has been proven as an extraordinarily rich framework for exploring self-organizing phenomena. Simple rules for each cell sometimes lead to complex and unexpected large-scale structures. Tools for decentralized design are extremely helpful in studying collective behavior, such as traffic jams. Traffic flow is a great example of a group phenomena that to a degree mimics the behavior of a bird flock. Following simple rules forming behavior based on reference points of the immediate environment: (1) if there is a car close ahead of you, slow down, (2) if there are not any cars close ahead of you, speed up, unless at the speed limit, (3) if you detect a radar trap, slow down.
Two Paradigms
Throughout the process of making sense of decentralized systems and the phenomena of self-organization, it is important to consider levels. Individual components of objects interacting on one level gives rise to a new type of objects on another level. Interactions can be molding and cause formation of clusters (bird flocks) and in many cases, the behavior of the objects on different levels may vary.
Shifting from the centralized mindset starts with the exposure to the workings of the decentralized systems and its benefits. Here we also need to consider leveling. To explore decentralized systems, we need to require our brains completely to be able to ‘compute‘ on the same level with others. At the moment, we are given plenty of new resources, tools and media to begin this process of assimilation to see the world in new ways. New computational media hold the promise for reshaping the model of thinking — the mindset. Currently there are two paradigms in which we exist resulting in a massive parallelism. These new paradigms represent duality and offer epistemological possibilities, using new tools to make sense of the world when the old tools do not anymore. A new decentralized framework can help make sense of many new world phenomena.
Title gif: The Brain from Planet Arous (1957)