[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.