Daily Dispatch 37 - On Politics and Decentralized Apps

Some thoughts on political ideologies and DApps

Daily Dispatch 37 - On Politics and Decentralized Apps
Photo by Tobias Kleeb / Unsplash

I can't help but think that left-wing ideology is born out of naivete. Because it takes a certain degree of naive optimism to think "oh, maybe we can organize ourselves better, maybe the unknown is positive".

Meanwhile, right-wing ideology is born out of fear of the unknown. It takes fear to think "life is complex enough, I want to have more certainty about things, about my neighbors, and how to conduct myself to minimize personal risk".

So this is how I see both sides:

  • We need tradition to govern our lives up to a point while keeping an open mind to new ideas
  • Following either to the extreme seem like a bad idea.
  • Going full-on Neomania(Loving new things just for the sake of them being new)  degrades tradition and the "knowns" in society, opens up everything for questioning, and decays social order. If we don't know what to expect from a neighbor, they are no longer part of the same tribe, and therefore possible enemies.
  • However, going full-on tradition will stop us from innovating and creating new, better ways of conducting ourselves/businesses/communities.

Those are my two cents on the matter.


On another topic I was asked "Why are DApps useful", and here's my response:

  • It all boils down to the principle of Robustness of Systems. Have a single point of failure (if all your cloud services are on AWS, if it ever goes down, your business goes with it).
  • So how do we improve our systems beyond that point?
  • We can divide among several cloud services, using Oracle Cloud, Azure, and Google cloud, so that if one service goes down, you can still recover and offer your products).
  • Then there's the next level of paranoia on top of it. What if every service goes down? Or do all of them become mafia and just raise prices beyond what's profitable to my business?
  • That's where DApps have an edge, it runs on the internet and on each computer where the app is installed, the only way for the service to completely be shut down is if the internet itself gets shutdown (or energy, whenever there's a civil war and all that).

So it's all about how much paranoia you have, or in better words, how much risk you are willing to take in proportion to the work you have to put into your system to make it more robust.