The Imperative of Distributism

What is Distributism?

Distributism is defined as

an economic theory asserting that the world’s productive assets should be widely owned rather than concentrated.

It is closely related to the concept of localism.

This post argues the urgent need for an effective worldwide movement for distributism for the purpose of enabling economic and social freedom for current and future human generations. The most critical component of this movement is a concrete, practical information and economic infrastructure not dependent on any central authority for its operation.

The Problem

Concentration of Power

Concentration of power in a few hands - whether it be physical power, financial power, or political power - acts to disempower individuals and local communities. When only a few people have the ability to have a meaningful material impact on the world, the human life is debased from creativity and freedom to subservience and tyranny. Current trends of concentration of power can not continue unabated if human flourishing on earth, with dispersed power in all hands, is to be realized.

The Economy

The most fundamental effects of concentration of power are expressed in the economy. A person’s ability to find work, produce a good or service, and thus earn a living are dependent on a host of factors. The more centralized an economy, the less power the individual has to impact those factors. Factors include:

• Regulation: A government body may limit what a person is permitted to do. In the best case, regulations act to protect others from antisocial action. In the worst case, regulations act to protect powerful interests who have obtained regulatory capture of the government to further their own ends.
• Supply chain: Generally, the more complex a good or service being produced, the more complex the inputs required. For example, producing a microchip may require hundreds of inputs, while producing a piece of furniture may require only a handful. Whether inputs are readily obtained is impacted by the complexity of the supply chain. The more “gates” an input must pass through to get to the point of usage, such as foreign government regulation, tariffs, and physical delivery mechanism, the more opportunities there are for the supply chain to break down.

The Internet

The internet has unlocked the potential to share knowlege anywhere in the world near instananeously. The printing press, invented in 1440, had only a tiny fraction of the power of the internet, but it transformed our world. We are on the fast track to somewhere. Whether that somewhere benefits all people, or only a tiny fraction of people, is anything but certain.

Currently, the internet is centralized. Everything down to our network topology follows a hub-and-spoke model. If a hub is is disabled, all connections to that hub are inoperable. Concentration of the power to disseminate information is built into the structure of the current internet.

The Solution

Distributed Network Topology

We must rebuild the internet from the bottom up. The new internet cannot follow the hub-and-spoke model. It must be a peer-to-peer mesh, where the breakage of any one connection does not cripple the network, but rather, traffic is re-routed through other connections in the mesh.

Fortunately, an enormous number of creative engineers have already started implementing this vision. In particular, libp2p for the network layer, IPFS for the persistence layer, and IPLD for the data sharing layer have begun to lay the foundation for this new internet. The movement behind these efforts is sometimes called web3.

What we currently lack are devices and applications that are accessible to laypeople who want to participate in the new web. This is to be expected - we are at the beginning of this movement. However, given the increasing power of the centralized web, web3 dreamers cannot be complacent. We need to increase the power and reach of the web3 stack, now, with as many hands and voices as possible. The additional components needed are:

1. Large-scale Marketing to bring awareness to our vision of empowerment and freedom
2. A suite of highly accessible software applications, usable by a layperson, to participate in the network
3. Widespread deployment of the physical layer of this network, via a wireless mesh, using readily-available hardware

Localism

Localism promotes the empowerment of individuals and communities to govern themselves and make decisions according to what is best for that community. While complex supply chains, networks, and regulatory frameworks are brittle and prone to capture by the holders of centralized power, simple supply chains, networks, and regulatory frameworks are not.

Free information

Survival in a world with finite requires capturing some of the value produced to sustain one’s livelihood. However, some resources are so universally needed and fundamental, that they should be free. For instance, free access to wikipedia has provided value orders of magnitude greater than the effort required to provide it. Robust availability of knowledge via the decentralized web should be no different.

Coupled Information and Application

The quote “Knowledge is Power” is only partially correct. Knowledge plus application is power. Empowerment of individuals regardless of locale, wealth, or background requires access to tools that assist in end-to-end production of goods and services.

Linked Data and Education

Education of a person, which is the absorption of a set of abstract concepts for the purpose of personal empowerment, is a complex process. Effective education requires accessibility. Accessibility of information requires physical access via a network, personal literacy in the language of the information, and clear end-to-end delivery of concepts. Linked data provides a structured layer on top of unstructured data that enable more rapid absorption and translation of information for a variety of applications.

Distributed Identity

Trust on the internet today is mediated by a public key infrastructure dependent on a handful centralized, trusted certificate authorities. Compromising these centralized authorities would mean compromising the system. A distributed naming and certificate authority, such as Handshake is needed to decentralize the system.

Content signing

Content published on centralized media platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, Medium, Youtube, and others, does not make use of digital signatures, which would prove that a piece of content was in fact produced by a known identity. Because the distributed web cannot rely on centralized methods of access control, but rather anyone, anywhere, can publish content to the network, digital signatures are a basic requirement to verify the authenticity of content and maintain trust in the network. Signing of digital content will require the use of standards such as Javascript Object Signing and Encryption (JOSE)

Conclusion

Empowerment of individuals to substantially impact their own life circumstances - and engage in creative pursuits - without arbitrary barriers requires distributism. The rise of the internet contains in it the opportunity for radical freedom and creativity via distributism, but also the opportunity for profound tyranny via concentrated power. The task forward is clear. Let’s get to it.