[elvinyung]

I think a lot about this.

In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari talk about the opposition between the state apparatus and the "war machine" (their term for a nomadic/decentralized structure). They talk about how it seems like nomadic societies are primitive, but actually a lot of nomadic societies have "collective mechanisms of inhibition" to ward off the formation of a state apparatus, by preventing power from accumulating within any one party and "evening it out" among everyone.

The applicability of D&G's ideas on the war machine to our current problem of platform power is immediately apparent. A centralized platform is exactly like a state apparatus. In our situation the collective mechanisms of inhibition might be something like stronger/more proactive antitrust laws to break up/nationalize entities that become infrastructural components of the society.

But as you've mentioned, I think this problem of "uneven development" is a feature of any marketplace-like structure. In sufficiently large numbers, a power law tends to assert itself with no other checks on power. This is why blockchains by themselves won't solve the problem. The debate, then, shifts to be about whether this is a feature or a bug, which is something that I'm never sure about.

To close, another quote from ATP comes to mind ("smooth space" is another term they use for nomadic spaces):

> Smooth spaces are not in themselves liberatory. But the struggle is changed or displaced in them, and life reconstitutes its stakes, confronts new obstacles, invents new paces, switches adversaries. Never believe that a smooth space will suffice to save us.

[hestefisk]

Awesome to see others on HN loving D&G. But perhaps also power is cyclical. When the web was first popularised, it had the same potential as what DWeb has now. TCP/IP was written to be inherently distributed and provide resilient routing. Then, as soon as it starts to threaten existing power structures, forces kick in to try and stabilise it through control, surveillance, and ‘governance’. It becomes part of the rhizome, the rhizomatic system of power, that the new system (in this case TCP/IP / www) set out to challenge, creating an even more complex, ever-evolving rhizome of power (surveillance, paywalls, censorship). The same thing happened with other revolutions throughout history — the power base they set out to challenge, transmorphed into a similar power structure as an unintended consequence.

[elvinyung]

Well, I think this cyclical pattern shows exactly exactly why the thinking around the war machine is so important. Thinking about this very naively, to get closer to the kind of smooth space that D&G conceptualize, it is necessary to have some kind of homeostatic system that recognizes abstractly when power (and I'm using this term in a very naive, non-Foucauldian way) is being disproportionately concentrated in any one body, and corrects accordingly.

That said, as from my previous comment, I'm not totally confident that this kind of decentralization is even optimal, but that's a story for another time.

[lgierth]

> forces kick in to try and stabilise it through control, surveillance, and ‘governance’

Which is ARIN/RIPE/APNIC/AFRINIC/LACNIC and the DNS root zones, and ICANN on top.

Not to say that's only bad, just trying to illustrate that in this case, D&G's point is actually pretty tangible.