[__MatrixMan__]

I've always had a sort of knee jerk reaction against distributed systems that enforce global consistency at the protocol level. Wherever there's a conch to have or not have, also there will be the haves and the have nots.

Better, says my gut, to let either sides of a contradiction compete for legitimacy in the eyes of whatever local audiences are relevant.

Assuming consensus from the get go just doesn't seem to square with how large groups of people actually work.

So I hope that these alternatives work out for them because I'd like to have more examples to point at when I try to express this.

[SkyMarshal]

Haha, good Lord of the Flies reference. Yes let's decentralize all the conchs, make them all local.

Though, due to positive feedback and winner-take-all effects in complex systems like human economies, I don't believe that's a stable equilibrium. The critical resources of systems will concentrate and consolidate over time. The question is whether there's any way to manage that in the architecture or protocol to minimize the resulting harm, or whether it's better not to try.

[__MatrixMan__]

I'd be skeptical of arguments that it's better not to try.

Once the winners take all, they tend to redecorate such that their power is easy to keep and hard to lose. Once they've done that, they don't have to worry so much about continuing to display whatever merits made them winners in the first place. No need to deliver on whatever promises made. No need to support whatever products sold. You're on top, your enemies are pre-crushed, you can now relax.

I agree that protecting our ability to revoke their legitimacy is not a path to a stable equilibrium. It'll take work to ensure that they can not in fact relax. But I think it's work worth doing. Much like how a farmer selects cultivars based on their desirable properties, so should should the masses wield their ability to revoke legitimacy and artificially select a more desirable culture among their leadership.

...which is why consistency is the wrong part of the CAP theorem to preserve. It makes it possible for the powerful to forbid states where they're later not powerful by labeling those states "inconsistent". If you have consistency, revoking their legitimacy means abandoning the protocol.

If inconsistency is possible, you don't have to rebuild anything. Instead just reconfigure your part of it to trust different people.