Rethinking decentralisation

The term »Decentralisation« buzzes around the ether of academic research, newspaper articles, blog posts, YouTube videos and of course: project presentations at design schools. It has grown in popularity along (and because of) new technologies emerged which strived from a growing need for a change in the dominance of a few powerful companies in a sector one could insufficiently call the communication sector.

Most of these techniques originate in the digital computer world of codes and protocols, for example the Blockchain protocol, which is the underlying architecture of the famous Bitcoin-Blockchain, which is a digital currency and promises a ›super-safe‹ and ›super-uncomplicated‹ way of transferring money (or better: »coin«). And so do since the initial white paper release in 2008 various other digital currencies. They are based on something called a distributed ledger, which is similar to a conventional database, but distributed on multiple servers, so there is not one server that holds all the information, but many. Therefore such a server would be harder to attack (this, of course, is an insufficient and shortened explanation for blockhain-technology, I left out the hashing part and all that, but you can look that up on many other sources). In case of Bitcoin, it is not the bank, as a central organ, that validates the parties correct account balances, it is the network with all its nodes, that verify a persons assets.

We are living in an information society.

So Blockchain offers a new way we strucutre the flow of information, which is arguably one of the main resources of our age. Vilem Flusser offers two ways of what living in an information society could look like. It could on one hand mean to focus on the production, distribution and processing of information, on the other to focus on intersubjective mutual fulfilment. The crucial difference between both, lays in the way that information flows: When information is distributed in unidirectional bundles, where some content creators push more and more content into the system to multiple, anonymous recipients, we would speak of the first to be the case. In the other case information would be flowing in a much more private, rather small and specified and therefore peer-to-peer way. Flusser wrote this in ’96 so it could definitely need some updating, but the general distinction of those two foci on the way we want to treat information and live in an information society are as relevant as ever. One could argue that in a way the blockchain technology is already a step towards this second (maybe more desirable) way of living in an informated world. The real impact of blockchain technology remains to be seen, yet some proclaim a whole new version of the internet which will fundamentally change the way we see and interact with the internet.

But there is more to decentralisation than currencies and the cold and relentless world of finances and investments with the ultimate desire to create as much revenue as possible.

The Bitcoin way of defining Decentralisation still is deeply rooted in an understanding of the world as a place of fight and war. Where one can only thrive when battling others and taking what is theirs: the survival of the (one) fittest. There is a risk, that the blockchain narrative becomes the one dominating the way decentralisation is seen, which would be embedded in a capitalist system that sucks up all its transformational power. But the story can also go in a different direction. The way in which we look at decentralisation as a mode of living and organising our communities can be connected to something else, something livelier and not plain binary-technical at all: matsutake.

Such a proposition offers Ana Tsing in her anthropological study of the ecosystems matsutake-mushrooms build and live of ›a mushroom at the end of the world‹ (2016). She researched the ecologies matsutakes create.

Looking at mushrooms and how they create communities of human and non-human companions, there comes (or should say intrudes) another crucial issue of the current age: The problem that we are living on a seriously damaged planet. Not that the planet would care, but the human race is about to destroy its own habitat and possibly make it inhabitable. Which is why some are relating to this age as the ›Anthropocene‹, the age of the anthropos, where the greatest changes in the environment are related to and caused by humans.

To face this challenge, learning from the way the mushrooms and its companions live can be a way to escape the current fatal ideas of what living means, that led us into this miserable situation.

This process of learning will go beyond the idea of creating a supplement for styrofoam or other structures. It is a more metaphorical way, but metaphorical to a degree where the metaphor becomes a guideline or instruction for a precarious life, a life without the promise of stability.

The mushrooms pops up everywhere in a multitude of discourses, same as it does growing in the forest after long days of raining. It seems as if this way of appearing in most unexpected places is deeply written into the mushrooms DNA and is therefore happening in both the ideological world and the biological world. It crosses boundaries and categories. So, what if both worlds are not so separated and different from each other? What if we can live like matsutake? What does it mean to life with matsutake?

It would mean a live full of precarity, constant change and readapting. A life making the most different kinds of partnerships and allies, not following one single telos, not being in the infinite quest of becoming the greatest species by oppressing and controlling all the other ones. It would be a calmer live in the shady and moist places, down below, close to the floor; places full of live.

In the 18th century the enlightenment split the world in two by declaring the one side to be rational and the other to be wild. Knowledge over the world would be found via logical, technical, mechanical or mathematical thinking. The world as it was found was analysed and fragmented until we even split the atom and the human was sure, he/she (mainly he) had finally won control over all the wilderness, of undisciplined and uncivilised being, humans from there on knew as nature: as other and fundamentally different. From there on two things were very clear for human: 1) it is structurally different, and, more important, inherently more intelligent and therefore of higher value than all other creatures on earth. 2) Declaring creatures as human with all the fragile ›distinguishing‹ attributes that come with it, is a really excluding practice. This bifurcation of humans and everything else, this dominant distinctive border is a key factor in the way we see ourselfes and other creatures.

Short notes on fragile human attributes:

Lets proclaim the following: To this point, the human is the dominant race on planet earth, it has through its intelligence managed to govern earthly resources and extinguished and domesticated most of the other creatures buzzing around in this messy place. It is the most successful species and therefore can be called the overall winner of a game where the rules, set by itself can be summarised as the survival of the fittest.

Can this be true? Looking at the state the world is in, it is not far fetched to say that the human species is the only one destroying its own livelihood, which already presents a valid reason for questioning the factors ›intelligence‹ or ›reason‹ in depicting something as human and therefore special or of higher value.

Human attributes are being softened and opened to others everywhere. AI (even just basic computational processes) have shown us that even thinking or deciding can be simulated to a degree where the distinction can hardly be made, or where asking for it is particularly fruitful. The human as a concept becomes blurred – we should embrace that and take the chance!

The same blurring categories and fields can again be learned from the matsutake entangling the categories of natural and cultivated. Its natural habitat is not what is commonly understood as natural at all, it grows in cultivated forests. Yet it remains uncultivable in farms. Which can lead to quite high prices, yet its unpredictability makes it impossible to create a real business around the harvesting of it. This also forces the people relying on them to live in a similarly precarious way as themselves. Human intervention formed the way the mushroom lives and vice versa. So getting a grasp of what the mushroom can mean to us, one has to ditch the idea of an ever ongoing never ending progress, never ending and predictable growth – the one story we have all been following since Déscartes.

Where does all this thinking and writing about bitcoins and mushrooms possibly lead? What does it all have to do with decentralisation? The prevailing story, that drives the decentralisation debate at the moment is dominated by fiscal epistemes. It is one carrying baggage of an universe of norms, ways of thinking and handling the world, that had this very world go into a fatal direction and divided us from what we call nature. To think decentralised can also mean to reterritorialize the categories of nature, human and technology, to think of everything as a network and that living inside this network offers endless ways of intersubjective fulfilment.