The Revolution Will Be Decentralized

Power once flowed directly from “divine right”. Medieval Europe operated under a simple premise / lie: God appointed kings, kings appointed nobles, and the rest served.

This hierarchical system persisted for centuries until merchants began accumulating wealth that rivaled aristocratic fortunes; the rise of banking houses like the Medici in Florence demonstrated that power could stem from capital rather than heredity.

The Industrial Revolution shattered the equilibrium entirely. Steam power and mechanization created unprecedented concentrations of economic might. Factory owners accumulated wealth that dwarfed aristocratic fortunes, while masses of former peasants became wage laborators in urban centers. This transformation sparked the first serious questioning of power’s legitimacy since the divine right of kings.

Two competing narratives emerged. Classical liberals argued that free markets represented natural law — that private property and voluntary exchange constituted the highest form of human liberty. Their intellectual descendants would become champions of laissez-faire capitalism. Critics like Marx saw wage labor as merely feudalism repackaged, arguing that true freedom required collective ownership of production.

This intellectual split hardened into seemingly irreconcilable positions. Capitalism promised freedom through markets. Socialism promised equality through state control. Both claimed to serve democracy while accusing the other of enabling tyranny. This binary dominated political discourse for over a century, shaping everything from labor laws to geopolitics.

Radio and television created new forms of social control and influence that transcended traditional economic power. Information itself became a currency. But it was the birth of the internet that would truly transform power dynamics. A system designed to survive nuclear war through radical decentralization would ironically enable unprecedented consolidation of both economic and social control.

The old binary of capitalism versus socialism failed to capture this emerging reality. Neither market competition nor state ownership adequately addressed the novel forms of power emerging from digital networks. As the twentieth century drew to a close, the world stood on the brink of a transformation that would rival the Industrial Revolution in its impact on human society.

The Cold War accelerated this transformation. The arms race between capitalism and communism spawned unprecedented investment in technology and information systems. The Pentagon’s ARPA network laid groundwork for decentralized communication protocols. Bell Labs’ transistor and Unix operating system established new paradigms of computation. IBM’s mainframes transformed corporate operations.

These innovations created new concentrations of power that transcended traditional economic and political boundaries. Military technology transferred to corporate control. Government-funded research became private intellectual property. The distinction between state and corporate power began dissolving into what President Eisenhower termed the “military-industrial complex.”

Television networks demonstrated the raw power of information control. CBS, NBC, and ABC shaped public consciousness through centralized broadcasting. The ability to influence mass behavior through media proved more valuable than traditional means of coercion. Corporate advertising refined mass persuasion into a science.

Early computer networks revealed even greater potential for power consolidation. Database technology enabled corporate and government surveillance at scale. Credit scoring systems established algorithmic control over financial opportunity. Customer relationship management software turned human behavior into mathematical models.

But these systems remained fragmented. Corporate databases couldn’t easily share information. Television networks couldn’t track individual viewing habits. Government surveillance systems operated in isolation. The infrastructure for total information awareness existed in theory but lacked practical implementation.

The internet’s core protocols promised to break this stalemate. TCP/IP enabled universal data interchange. The World Wide Web created a common interface for information access. Email standardized digital communication. These systems were designed for resilience through decentralization — a distributed network with no single point of failure.

This technological revolution emerged precisely as the capitalism-socialism binary collapsed with the Soviet Union. Francis Fukuyama declared “the end of history” — the triumph of liberal democratic capitalism as humanity’s final form of social organization. But this declaration came just as new forms of power were emerging that would transcend traditional political and economic categories.

The Great Convergence: How Digital and Democratic Power Became One

The Twin Transformations of Power

Two profound transformations demand our attention. First: the rapid concentration of internet infrastructure and platforms among a handful of tech companies, majority owned by individual billionaires and the ultrawealthy. What began as a distributed network, designed to survive nuclear war through its decentralization, has crystallized into a series of walled gardens. Each is controlled by corporate giants who shape our digital lives with algorithmic precision, determining what we see, how we connect, and increasingly, how we think.

Consider the architecture of modern digital life. Five companies control the cloud infrastructure powering most online services. Three companies dominate smartphone operating systems. A single company handles 92% of internet searches. Another company owns four of the six most-used social media platforms globally. This concentration extends beyond consumer services into the fundamental infrastructure of the internet — from content delivery networks to domain registration systems.

The mechanism of this consolidation follows a predictable pattern. Companies achieve initial dominance through genuine innovation or superior service. Network effects create natural monopolies. These companies then use their market position to acquire potential competitors, copy innovative features, or simply price competitors out of existence. The venture capital model accelerates this process, pushing startups toward acquisition rather than independent growth.

Parallel to this digital consolidation, we’ve witnessed the accelerating capture of democratic institutions by wealthy interests. As economic inequality has grown, political power has increasingly reflected the preferences of economic elites rather than average citizens. The voice of the demos has been drowned out by the sound of digital cash registers.

This capture operates through multiple channels. Direct campaign contributions represent only the tip of the iceberg. Super PACs and dark money groups channel unlimited funds into electoral politics. Corporate lobbying shapes legislation at every level of government. Think tanks and policy organizations, funded by wealthy interests, define the boundaries of acceptable political discourse. Media companies, owned by the same economic elite, frame public debate within narrow parameters that never threaten fundamental power structures.

Research confirms this power shift. Studies show that policy outcomes correlate strongly with elite preferences and barely at all with popular opinion on issues from taxation to regulation. When the preferences of economic elites conflict with those of the broader public, the elites win about 75% of the time. Democracy has become a puppet show, with economic power pulling the strings.

These trends are typically treated as separate problems requiring separate solutions. Digital rights advocates focus on tech monopolies and privacy. Democracy reformers target campaign finance and lobbying. But this division misses the fundamental unity of modern power — and plays directly into the hands of those who benefit from both forms of concentration.

Consider how digital platforms amplify political influence. Social media algorithms determine which political messages reach which audiences. Search engine rankings shape public understanding of political issues. Digital advertising systems enable precise targeting of political messages, while opacity shields these influence operations from public scrutiny. The same companies that dominate our digital infrastructure also control the channels of political discourse.

The reality is that these trends aren’t merely parallel — they’re symbiotic. Each creates conditions that accelerate the other, forming a plutocratic power cycle. Digital monopolies generate unprecedented wealth, which translates into unprecedented political influence. This influence prevents effective regulation of digital monopolies, allowing further concentration of both economic and political power.

This cycle manifests in concrete ways. Tech companies spend millions lobbying against privacy legislation and antitrust enforcement. Their executives rotate between government positions and corporate leadership. Their platforms shape public perception of political issues while their algorithms determine which voices get heard. Meanwhile, their vast data collection enables ever more precise manipulation of both consumer and political behavior.

The result is a new form of power that transcends traditional categories of public and private control. Unlike previous concentrations of power, this system operates largely through consent rather than coercion. It shapes behavior through the subtle manipulation of information flows rather than direct force. And its impact on human freedom and democratic governance is already more profound than any previous system of control.

Anatomy of the Power Cycle

The Three Gears of Modern Power

Imagine three massive gears grinding against each other in perpetual motion. Each turn concentrates power more tightly, creating an accelerating cycle of control that reshapes society itself. Understanding this mechanism reveals why traditional reforms have failed and points toward more effective resistance.

The first gear is Technical Control — ownership of the platforms and infrastructure that increasingly mediate human interaction. This includes everything from social networks to cloud services to payment systems. But Technical Control runs deeper than visible platforms. It encompasses the hidden infrastructure of digital life: cloud computing services that power other companies’ operations, content delivery networks that determine what loads quickly and what doesn’t, domain name services that control access to websites, app stores that govern mobile software distribution, and payment processors that enable or disable economic activity.

This infrastructure layer creates chokepoints for controlling the digital economy. Amazon’s AWS hosts over a third of all cloud services. Google and Apple’s app stores determine which mobile applications reach users. Cloudflare handles security for a vast swath of the internet. This deep infrastructure control enables both overt censorship through content removal and subtle manipulation through algorithmic ranking, load times, and search results.

The second gear is Financial Power — the accumulation of capital and market dominance that comes from controlling critical digital infrastructure. This manifests through multiple mechanisms. Direct revenue flows from platform fees and advertising generate enormous profits. Data collection enables targeted advertising and behavior prediction, creating additional revenue streams. Network effects and high switching costs lock users into platforms, ensuring steady income streams.

But Financial Power extends beyond direct revenue. Platform control enables acquisition of potential competitors before they become threats. Venture capital increasingly flows to companies positioned for acquisition rather than independent growth. The resulting market concentration creates economies of scale that make competition nearly impossible. Companies can operate at a loss in new markets, subsidized by profitable sectors, until competitors fail.

The third gear is Political Influence — the ability to shape policy, regulation, and public discourse through both direct and indirect means. Direct influence operates through traditional channels: campaign contributions, lobbying expenditure, revolving doors between industry and government. Tech giants now rank among the top spenders in Washington, with lobbying budgets that dwarf traditional industries.

Indirect influence proves even more powerful. Control of communication platforms shapes public discourse and opinion formation. Algorithmic content promotion determines which political messages reach which audiences. Campaign micro-targeting enables precise manipulation of voter behavior. Data collection provides unprecedented insight into public sentiment and behavior patterns.

Each gear turns the others with ruthless efficiency. Technical Control generates Financial Power through platform monopolies, network effects, and data exploitation. Simply controlling the infrastructure of digital life creates unprecedented opportunities for wealth extraction. Social media platforms generate billions in advertising revenue while paying nothing for the content that drives engagement. Cloud services providers extract rents from companies dependent on their infrastructure. Payment processors take a cut of every transaction they facilitate.

This Financial Power then translates into Political Influence through campaign contributions, lobbying, media ownership, and the revolving door between industry and government. Money has always influenced politics, but the scale of wealth generated by digital monopolies creates influence that would make Gilded Age robber barons blush. Tech companies can spend hundreds of millions fighting regulations while barely denting their cash reserves. Their executives become major political donors and influential voices in policy formation.

Political Influence, in turn, reinforces Technical Control through favorable regulation, weak antitrust enforcement, government contracts, and policies that entrench incumbent advantages. The regulatory capture is so complete that tech giants now effectively write their own rules. Section 230 protections shield platforms from liability while allowing them to maintain editorial control. Privacy regulations are written to advantage incumbent firms with resources to handle compliance. Government contracts for cloud services and surveillance systems create deep dependencies on private infrastructure.

This creates what systems theorists call a “positive feedback loop” — except there’s nothing positive about it for democracy or human freedom. Each turn of the cycle concentrates power further, making reform increasingly difficult. Traditional regulatory approaches fail because they target single gears rather than the entire mechanism. Antitrust action alone can’t break the cycle if political influence remains intact. Privacy regulations can’t succeed while companies maintain technical control of infrastructure.

The cycle’s efficiency explains why power concentration has accelerated so dramatically in the digital age. Previous forms of corporate power faced natural limits from physical infrastructure and geographic constraints. Digital infrastructure enables global scale with minimal marginal costs. Network effects create winner-take-all dynamics that rapidly concentrate market power. Data collection and algorithmic control enable unprecedented behavior manipulation and prediction.

The Manufacture of False Choices

The genius of this system is in how it divides potential opposition through carefully constructed false dichotomies. Take the supposed choice between “nationalism” and “globalism.” The reality is that both local democracy and international cooperation are threatened by plutocratic capture. Yet this false choice helps elites pit populations against each other while consolidating transnational power networks that transcend national boundaries.

The standard framing of “government versus private sector” obscures how captured state power and corporate power have effectively fused into a single system. The revolving door between Silicon Valley and Washington isn’t a bug — it’s a feature of modern plutocracy. When tech executives become regulators and regulators become tech executives, the distinction between public and private power becomes meaningless.

The “innovation versus regulation” dichotomy paints any attempt at democratic oversight as anti-innovation, ignoring how monopolistic concentration actually stifles genuine innovation and competition. The tech giants have become masters at wielding “innovation” as a shield against accountability while simultaneously using their market power to crush or acquire any truly innovative competitors.

The false choice between “security” and “privacy” has proven particularly damaging. This manufactured dichotomy has been used to justify ever-expanding systems of surveillance and control, despite mounting evidence that mass data collection does little to enhance public safety. Instead, it creates vast repositories of personal information ripe for abuse by both state and corporate actors.

These false choices serve a crucial function: they prevent natural allies from recognizing their common interests and joining forces against the shared threat of concentrated power. By fragmenting opposition into separate camps fighting separate battles, the system maintains its equilibrium.

The Digital Distributist Alternative

The Origins and Evolution of Distributism

Distributism was born from the ashes of the industrial revolution’s transformation of human society. As factories devoured England’s countryside and corporations swallowed small businesses, a radical question emerged: was there an alternative to both industrial capitalism and state socialism?

For centuries, European economies were organized around guilds — associations of craftsmen who owned their tools, controlled their labor, and passed skills through apprenticeship. The average person wasn’t wealthy, but they often owned the means of their livelihood, whether a workshop, farming tools, or trading rights. This system wasn’t perfect — guilds could be exclusionary and hierarchical — but it provided a degree of economic independence that would become rare in the industrial age.

The guild system operated alongside the commons — shared resources that provided supplementary income for many families. Common lands offered grazing rights, foraging opportunities, and small-scale farming. This hybrid economy meant most families had multiple sources of income and various forms of economic security, even if they weren’t particularly prosperous by modern standards.

This changed dramatically with the enclosure movement. Common lands were privatized, forcing peasants into wage labor. The process began slowly in the 16th century but accelerated dramatically in the 18th and 19th centuries. Parliamentary enclosure acts transferred millions of acres from communal to private ownership. This wasn’t simply a change in property rights — it represented the systematic destruction of an entire way of life.

Simultaneously, the factory system arose, concentrating productive property in fewer hands. Water-powered mills and steam engines required capital investment beyond the means of individual craftsmen. The economies of scale offered by mechanization made traditional workshop production uncompetitive. By the 1800s, most people had become wholly dependent on wages, lacking any productive property of their own.

Karl Marx saw wage labor as inherently exploitative, advocating collective ownership through state power. His analysis of capital accumulation and worker alienation resonated with many who witnessed the brutal conditions of industrial life.

Meanwhile, free-market theorists argued that industrial efficiency required concentrated capital, claiming that the resulting economic growth would eventually benefit everyone through higher wages and cheaper goods.

But a third perspective emerged, crystallized in Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum. This document responded directly to the “labor question” that dominated political discourse. Unlike both capitalists and socialists, who accepted the separation of workers from productive property as inevitable, Leo XIII questioned this fundamental assumption.

The encyclical argued that private property was a natural right — but one that should be widely distributed rather than concentrated. This sparked Hilaire Belloc’s decisive work “The Servile State” in 1912. Belloc argued that both capitalism and socialism led to servitude — capitalism through wage dependency, socialism through state control. The solution wasn’t redistribution of income, but redistribution of productive property itself.

Belloc’s analysis went beyond moral arguments to examine historical dynamics. He showed how the concentration of productive property created political power that further entrenched economic concentration. This aligned with Catholic social teaching’s principle of subsidiarity — the idea that social matters should be handled at the most local level capable of handling them effectively.

Belloc and his intellectual companion G.K. Chesterton developed this into distributism. They envisioned an economy of small property owners, drawing inspiration from medieval guilds but adapted for industrial society. Families would own their means of production — be it land, tools, or shops. Larger enterprises would be structured as worker cooperatives. Local economies would be privileged over national ones. Their vision acknowledged the efficiency gains of some forms of large-scale production but insisted these could be achieved through cooperative ownership rather than corporate concentration.

This wasn’t mere theory. The Catholic Land Movement established agricultural cooperatives across England, helping families acquire small farms and develop self-sufficient communities. In Nova Scotia, the Antigonish Movement created a network of cooperative enterprises and credit unions that transformed the regional economy. Led by priests and educators at St. Francis Xavier University, this movement combined adult education with cooperative economic development, demonstrating how distributist principles could revitalize struggling communities.

The most dramatic validation came from Spain’s Mondragón Corporation, founded in 1956. What began as a small worker-owned cooperative in the Basque region grew into a network of over 100 cooperatives employing nearly 80,000 people. Mondragón’s success proved distributism could work at scale, combining worker ownership with industrial efficiency. The corporation includes manufacturing, retail, financial services, and education, demonstrating how cooperative ownership can function across diverse economic sectors.

These practical experiments revealed key principles for implementing distributist ideas. Successful initiatives combined ownership reforms with education and technical support. They built supporting institutions like credit unions to provide capital access. They developed governance structures that balanced democratic control with operational efficiency. Most importantly, they showed that alternative economic models could compete successfully with traditional corporate structures while providing greater economic security and autonomy for workers.

Digital Distributism: A Practical Vision

This is where Digital Distributism enters the picture. Classical distributism, developed by thinkers like G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, recognized that political democracy requires economic democracy — that concentrated economic power inevitably corrupts political systems. Their solution was to advocate for widespread ownership of productive property.

Digital Distributism updates this framework for the internet age, recognizing that digital infrastructure is now as fundamental to human flourishing as land was in the agricultural era. It offers a comprehensive alternative to digital feudalism by reimagining how we structure and govern the technologies that increasingly mediate human existence.

The implementation of Digital Distributism rests on three foundational pillars: infrastructure commons, data sovereignty, and algorithmic democracy. Each pillar requires specific technical and organizational structures to function effectively.

The infrastructure commons approach begins with core internet protocols and extends to application-layer services. Email provides the archetypal model: SMTP, POP3, and IMAP protocols enable communication across providers while allowing user choice and control. 

This pattern can extend to social networking through protocols like ActivityPub, which powers platforms like Mastodon and Pixelfed. These federated systems demonstrate how decentralized networks can achieve global scale while preserving local autonomy, an alternative to centralized social media, where users can choose their communities, set their rules, and maintain ownership of their digital presence.

Warpcast, built on the decentralized Farcaster protocol, creates a radically different model for social interaction. It combines the familiarity of traditional social platforms with blockchain technology and decentralized identity. Users own their content through portable social graphs, while developers can freely build new clients and experiences on top of the protocol.

Bluesky is a decentralized social networking protocol that aims to create a more open and interoperable ecosystem for online communication. It’s designed to address the issues of data silos, walled gardens, and centralized control that have become prevalent in today’s social media platforms by enabling users to easily switch between different social media services while maintaining their connections and content.

Practical implementation requires both protocol development and supporting infrastructure. Protocol standards must be openly developed and maintained by democratic governance structures similar to the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Supporting infrastructure includes domain name systems, content delivery networks, and hosting services structured as user-owned cooperatives rather than corporations.

The Matrix protocol offers a working example of this approach. It provides decentralized real-time communication while enabling end-to-end encryption and user control. Organizations can run their own servers while maintaining interoperability with the broader network. The protocol’s governance structure balances innovation with stability through an open development process.

Personal data sovereignty demands technical infrastructure for secure data storage and identity management. Projects like Solid, developed by World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee, demonstrate how personal data pods can give users control over their information while enabling selective sharing with services. Decentralized identity systems like DID (Decentralized Identifiers) provide standards for user-controlled digital identity without relying on corporate providers.

The InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) shows how content-addressed storage can create resilient data networks resistant to centralized control. Integration with existing applications requires standardized APIs and data portability requirements enforced through regulation.

User-owned alternatives to cloud storage demonstrate practical viability. Nextcloud enables organizations to run their own cloud infrastructure while maintaining compatibility with standard protocols. Cooperative hosting providers like IndieHosters show how essential services can operate under democratic user control.

Algorithmic democracy extends beyond open-source code to governance structures for recommendation systems and content moderation. Practical implementation combines transparent algorithms with user control over filtering and ranking. Reddit’s open-source code base and community-driven moderation provide partial models, though true algorithmic democracy requires deeper structural changes.

PeerTube demonstrates how video platforms can operate with transparent recommendation algorithms under community control. Each instance can modify its algorithm while participating in the broader network. Federation enables content discovery across instances while preserving local governance.

Each new protocol, each independent instance, each decentralized application creates another crack in the walls of digital feudalism.

Democratic content moderation requires clear processes and appeals mechanisms. Mastodon’s instance-based moderation shows how communities can set their own standards while maintaining network connectivity. Standards bodies like the Digital Standards Organization can develop best practices for transparent moderation.

Technical infrastructure must be matched with economic models that support sustainable development. Wikipedia’s structure as a non-profit foundation demonstrates how critical digital infrastructure can operate outside the profit-maximization imperative. Platform cooperatives like Resonate show how streaming services can operate under user ownership.

Funding mechanisms for digital commons include membership fees, voluntary contributions, and public funding. The success of projects like Wikipedia proves that essential digital infrastructure can thrive outside traditional corporate models. Development can be coordinated through digital cooperatives that share resources and expertise across projects.

Legal frameworks must evolve to support these structures. Recognition of data rights as property rights, interoperability requirements for platforms, and cooperative ownership models for digital infrastructure require regulatory changes. The European Union’s GDPR and right to data portability provide starting points for stronger digital rights frameworks.

Education and skill development form crucial components. Users must understand both their rights and the technical tools available for exercising them. Community technology centers, following the model of Nova Scotia’s Antigonish Movement, can combine technical training with cooperative development.

The key: separating three elements that are often conflated: technical architecture, governance, and ownership. Technical architecture can be centralized for efficiency where appropriate. Governance must be distributed to preserve freedom and prevent abuse. Ownership must be widely held to ensure democratic accountability and prevent the concentration of power.

On the technical front, we need continued development of decentralized alternatives to key infrastructure. Building user-owned social platforms, distributed storage systems, and privacy-preserving protocols. It means creating open source alternatives to proprietary services that respect user rights and community governance.

Policy reform must support these technical efforts. Breaking up digital monopolies represents just the beginning. We need strong data rights that give individuals real control over their information. We need interoperability requirements that prevent the formation of closed gardens. We need privacy protections that limit surveillance and data exploitation. Most importantly, we need policies that actively support the development and adoption of distributed alternatives.

But technical development and policy reform aren’t enough without broader social movement building. People need to understand the connection between digital rights and democratic power. Tech reformers and democracy advocates need to recognize their common cause and work together. This means education, coalition building, and direct action against concentrated power. It means supporting alternative platforms and services even when they’re less convenient than monopolistic offerings.

Simply put, it means signing up for Pixelfed, Mastodon, Warpcast, Bluesky, Matrix, etc. It means choosing the discomfort of imperfect tech over the system destroying, bland perfection of billionaire-subservient tech.

Progress on any of these fronts makes progress on the others easier by disrupting the Plutocratic Power Cycle. Small wins cascade into larger changes as the system’s self-reinforcing nature works in reverse. Each victory for decentralization weakens the forces of concentration.

The Stakes: Digital Democracy or Digital Feudalism

This isn’t a question of better technology or incremental democracy. It’s a question, a fundamental question of human freedom in the digital age. The fusion of technological and political power creates unprecedented capacity for control. Unless we reverse the concentration trend, we risk entering a new feudal age.

Consider how much of daily life now depends on digital systems. Our communication, commerce, entertainment, education, work, social connections, political discourse, and access to information all flow through corporate-controlled channels. Whoever controls these systems increasingly controls human society itself. The choice isn’t between chaos and control, but between distributed and concentrated power.

No amount of algorithmic control can prevent the dialectical progression of history. The ultrawealthy’s monopoly on information, like all monopolies, contains within itself the seeds of its own destruction. The question before us is not academic — it is revolutionary.

The good news is that concentrated power is inherently unstable. It requires constant effort and resources to maintain. Distributed systems are more natural and resilient. We don’t need to build something entirely new. We need to strip away the artificial barriers and controls that enable concentration. The means of resistance are already in our hands — the protocols exist, the code is written, the ideas are proven, the models work.

What we need is the will to use them. To paraphrase Chesterton: The digital distributist road has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult and left untried.

The revolution toward digital democracy begins with individual choices. Every person who moves to decentralized platforms weakens the grip of tech monopolies. Every contribution to open source projects builds alternative infrastructure. Every act of resistance against surveillance and control helps shift the balance of power.

But individual action is not, is never enough. It must be coupled with collective organization. We need coordinated efforts to build and promote alternatives. We need political movements that understand the connection between digital and democratic power. We need communities dedicated to practicing digital distributism in their own operations.

The infrastructure of freedom won’t build itself. But neither did the infrastructure of control. Every system of power depends on the daily choices of millions of individuals. Will we shape the change toward digital democracy or submit to digital feudalism?