One of my facebook friends posted this version of the political compass graph, and it's pretty much spot on in terms of the organisational structuring each political position espouses.
Guess which of those 4 graphs represents how the internet is structured (still waiting for it to be shut down after 20 years...)?
Let me make some commentary about it:
Firstly, let's be clear, top to bottom, right to left, it's Communism, Fascism, Anarchocommunism and Anarchocapitalism at each corner. Vertical represents authoritarianism, horizontal represents consensus rule.
Pink - Authoritarian and Centralized
gives you a system where the central node is extremely expensive, because despite having one 'dot' representing it, every node it connects to, it has to have a receiver for. This central cluster of endpoints fails all at once. If it goes down, the whole system becomes disconnected.
Blue - Authoritarian and Decentralised
gives you a system where those central nodes can fail, some of them, but the central central node, if it fails, all the other subnetworks are disconnected.
Green - Libertarian and Centralised
gives you a system where every node must have the budget to cope with a communication budget that is factorial to the number of deciders. Just to give a concrete example that Steem/Hive users will understand, this is why there is only 19 top witnesses. Each additional witness costs time in sending messages and at a certain point it would exceed 3 seconds in the best conditions.
It's 3 seconds because at 19 nodes in the conditions of a global internet with typical peak average latency of 400ms (ping to the opposite side of the world), is about 10x as much time as 19 nodes forming a consensus can take. Note that Tendermint consensus has better finality (graphene blocks can be reversed as long as 8 hours after being minted), and its comfort zone is around 5 seconds, because finalizing is about 3x as expensive as deciding in the first place (in terms of communication cost).
This is why, despite being nice and fast and responsive and working well, I doubt that such a network can cope with more than about 100k users, if you sacrifice block time to about 10 seconds and 150 nodes, because of the distance between the users and the governance.
This is also why there is a remarkably high number of UBI proponents in the graphene network community. This is their preferred network topology. It really only works well up to about 10,000 nodes. By that I mean individual humans. Look at the userbase numbers of the platforms. Circa 10k users regularly active. Even with 4 different variants all working on similar models, we still haven't seen wide adoption, and that's probably because of this topology/logistics issue.
As an amateur mathematician, and moderately skilled distributed systems engineer, I can tell you about the limitations (already am) and that society cannot run on completely connected networks. Even nanotech, micrometer wide technology cannot solve the latency problem caused by so many message cycles, on that scale, imagine how ridiculous it gets on the internet?
In libertarian circles, we point out the absurdity of a system where there is collective property. The absurdity comes from how does any individual get the right to speak in the first place if their own body is not private property, and then if it is, why does that change and where does it change, toothbrush? car? house? Without speaking, how do you vote.
Well, the illustration makes it clear that all has to happen at once, and good luck resolving the cacophony into a mandate.
Yellow - Libertarian and Decentralised
Basically, this means that each individual is sovereign and chooses who to associate with and cannot be obliged to anything without causing a harm to another and thus requiring a remedy to produce justice.
The real world operates mostly on the decentralised side. Even inside a modern microprocessor, the concurrency problems are now starting to obstruct further progress at improving performance. At 5ghz clock, the speed of light now dictates that one part of the processor has to wait for another part before a command can be completed.
I'd like to suggest even that we should change the terms a little. Decentralised and Concurrent are the same thing. They mean that there is multiple actors with different viewpoints and we have to devise a protocol whereby they don't interfere with each other. I have been doing a lot of study of how to program concurrent systems, and it's assuredly outside of the average person's understanding how things work when you have multiple active agents within a system who must agree from time to time in order to synchronise processes.
I'd like to go even further to suggest that as an amateur distributed systems researcher (maybe I am professional, idk, I don't think there is some certificate to really prove it), that in reality only the yellow quadrant matters, and that everything else is pure theory and especially the green, requires incredible amounts of processing and connectivity to operate to spec, and the other two have huge stability problems that are very binary... 99% ok, then 1%, ARMAGEDDON.
Open, decentralised systems tend to be more like 80% ok, 20% wobbly, 0% armageddon. The engineering tradeoff between armageddon and wobbly should not be taken lightly. Our whole world depends on this question. The technical answer is unquestionably, wobbly > armageddon divided by 1 billion. But politicians sell 1% armageddon. Libertarian anarchists are selling 20% wobbly.
It's not surprising we have trouble selling it, because we point out the 20% wobbly. And it's really hard to convince people that a system that is 1% armageddon brittle is potentially TEOTWAWKI style armageddon, the sucked into a black hole armageddon, the earth smothered in dust from comet strike armageddon, or the most spectacular, nanotech nano-acid armageddon where the whole solar system is decomposed into a borg dyson sphere.
20% unstable is actually life. 1% armageddon is guarantee of death, potentially within your lifetime. Fortunately, not planetary, as these centralised systems have yet to reach that scale. But they will, maybe you could even say, they are at apotheosis right now.
The history
The history says that the most durable human societies have obeyed the freedom/decentralization decree of nature. 9000 years of archaeological data of the old city of Jericho says they never had a centralised government.
For 300 years a decentralised legal system in Iceland eliminated the blood feuds and vendettas of times past, of what here in the chart could be described as 'blue' - authoritarian and decentralised, the possibility of being loyal to a chief in another district. A tiny country, really, maybe this was a population of total 200,000, but they were happy until the catholics barged in and started coercing and blackmailing people into tithing instead of pledging tributes to their preferred (not necessary to be local) chieftain.
The short sharp and nasty history of National Socialism, which spanned about 8 years in total before totally destroying itself, is an example of this Blue, but trying to become Pink.
The Pink, however, is more durable. The edges, full of obedient, fearful subjects, tolerate long periods of isolation and the slow times to response caused by the centralised communication and decision making system. But eventually, the channels become so banked up with unresolved issues that you have a Glasnost and Perestroika and a more moderate, decentralised system (russian federation) takes over. But as I mentioned, this is also unstable, to the degree it demands coherence (consensus) within it.
The Russian and Chinese both have taken similar approaches with this. They declared strategically powerful regions within their territory to be very loosely obedient to the central diktat. Shanghai, Shenzen, Murmansk, and several others I haven't bothered to memorise, regions that the normal excessive demands of government oversight over business are hugely relaxed.
So in information system/distributed systems terminology, you would say that these two systems have switched to decentralised authoritarian network patterns by increasing their consensus convergence time (the delay between far flung arms of the system coming to agreement with the center).
But who cares??
Once you understand the patterns going on, behind the politics, you realise, that the politics are an obstruction to human peace and prosperity. Every single one of them. The more sovereign the individual, the more stable and wealthy is the system. This is why Switzerland does so well. Its convergence rate is allowed to be almost nothing (ie, never agreeing, never harmonized).
Meanwhile, the EU is trying to push convergence on the whole of europe. Germany and Netherlands are bleeding wealth, balkans and mediterranean nations are getting subsidised, and the rest are gently bleeding wealth.