(2022-12-16) Brander Web2 Has A Bad Emperor Problem

Gordon Brander: web2.0 has a bad emperor problem. In his book The Origins of Political Order, Francis Fukuyama describes a political dilemma called the bad emperor problem

Under a good emperor, there may not be obvious day-to-day differences between living in an empire and a democracy.

But a bad emperor is catastrophic. You realize with dawning horror that your life exists at the pleasure of the emperor. No checks, no balances, no exit.

Most of today’s internet is made up of centralized platforms ruled by emperors. (themepark)

the differences start to show when the s-curve saturates. This is where we are with web2

In a sense, this drama around Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover is just a symptom of an aging paradigm.

Decentralized systems make this class of catastrophe impossible, or at least very unlikely.

Of course, decentralization introduces many other challenges, but I suspect in trying to solve them, we do our future selves a favor.