Decentralization and its Discontents
Duration: 00:09:42
Speaker: Sarah Friend
Type: Talk
Expertise: Intermediate
Event: Devcon
Date: Jul 2026
There is building movement to decentralize the web (or re-decentralize the web), and Ethereum plays a particularly significant role. Communities that engage with these technologies often frame decentralization as a moral good in and of itself - but to what extent has this claim been validated? We'll consider examples where censorship resistant networks are used to host content that is morally repugnant to their maintainers, at times when centralized networks are cracking down (stormfront.eth vs blacklisting by dns providers), cases where there is disagreement about what constitutes decentralization at all (POW vs DPoS), and seeming technical challenges that block decentralization (scalability and performance). The concept of decentralization appears, at least on the surface, to be the enemy of specialization - but yet the networks we hope to build are the product of specialized knowledge. Can we decentralize the building of decentralized networks themselves? Ultimately, I hope to make the point that decentralization without governance has few, if any, inherent moral qualities, and that we must consistently and intentionally consider not only how, but why and for whom, we decentralize.
