Whats decentralised right now?

Is decentralisation a recipe to success? While we are surrounded by centralisation many things in the mainstream are already decentralised.

• Culture: Everyone chooses which cultures to embrace and what that means.
• Music, Poetry, Literature, ... : We can all record songs, write books, .. and publish them
• The Internet: Not much to say here ...
• Life and Families: We can all decide to bring new life into this world
• Charities: Choose what you want to support or do it yourself
• Small Business (to a certain degree): Many firms competing with each other (a good example is craft beer brewing)
• Friendship: A fully decentralised peer network of support
• Trust: Everyone choses who to trust building a dynamic network for trusted information
• Good manners: Rules how to act in public that we agree to follow voluntarily

All of these are by design borderless and agnostic towards their participants. Being decentralised makes them resistant against attempts to establish centralised control and most of them have existed and adapted to evolving environments since many generations.

In contrast some centralised structures we see in everyday life

• Governance: Making laws
• Police: Enforcing laws
• Regulated markets: Few big players dictate what happens (example: medicine, finance)
• Surveillance: Collecting data and providing it to a central authority

These are typically local, and suffer collapses on few generation time-scales. They also tend to establish their authority by force.

Comparing both lists we see that decentralised systems are what makes life great, while centralised systems are seen as a necessity that nobody really likes. Opposed to everyday perception many structures are actually already (and since a long time) fully decentralised, we just dont perceive them as such because they are just the norm for us.

We dont need and we wont accept any central authority to sign friendships, controlling families, dictating culture, ...
It will be the same for governance. What saved it until now was the byzantine generals problem. Now that one is solved its only a matter of time until we get rid of the last centralised structures.