Abstract
This article belongs to Concepts of the digital society, a special section of Internet Policy Review guest-edited by Christian Katzenbach and Thomas Christian Bächle. 1. Introduction The concept of decentralisation traverses multiple contexts, fields and disciplines.
Highlights
The concept of decentralisation traverses multiple contexts, fields and disciplines. We begin this multidisciplinary discussion on decentralisation with describing the technical definitions and motivations for decentralisation in network engineering
Under various labels, such as ‘web 3.0’, ‘re-decentralisation’, or ‘blockchains’, various communities have been trying to implement techno-social systems where technical decentralisation is consciously used to pursue social, economic, or political goals. In practice such projects often involve and depend on centralised infrastructures or decision-making, or produce centralising effects. Rather than this necessarily being a critique of such projects, we argue that the coexistence of different systems in practice presents an opportunity to develop more nuanced analyses of the properties, benefits and downsides to both centralised and decentralised technical architectures
There are a number of motivations for decentralisation that stem from information security engineering
Summary
The concept of decentralisation traverses multiple contexts, fields and disciplines We begin this multidisciplinary discussion on decentralisation with describing the technical definitions and motivations for decentralisation in network engineering. Blockchain created a global network of value transfer outside of existing institutional frameworks Under various labels, such as ‘web 3.0’, ‘re-decentralisation’, or ‘blockchains’, various communities have been trying to implement techno-social systems where technical decentralisation is consciously used to pursue social, economic, or political goals. Such projects often involve and depend on centralised infrastructures or decision-making, or produce centralising effects. We catalogue the drivers of decentralisation, and point to those ofthidden factors, which may limit the uncritical, cross-domain application of decentralisation as an organisational schema to implement, as opposed to imagine alternative modes of social order
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