Every civilization starts with a question: Who gets to govern, the rulers or the ruled?
For centuries, we’ve cycled through empires, monarchies, and “representative” democracies that look more like oligarchies wearing designer suits.
Capitalism was supposed to be the great fix, the system that lets humans cooperate through peaceful exchange instead of coercion. And when it’s healthy, it is that.
But somewhere along the line, we forgot that capitalism is just software running on an operating system called governance. And when the operating system crashes, even the best code misbehaves.
We don’t need to delete the software. We need to rewrite the code.
Self-Governance Isn’t New. It’s Human Nature
Long before Bitcoin or blockchain, people were hacking governance with conversation and community.
Plato said a good society starts with mastering the passions of the soul. John Locke upgraded that idea, arguing that real power must flow from the consent of the governed.
America didn’t invent self-rule, but localized it. For centuries, African villages have built consensus through palavers while Buddhists have organized spiritual life through sanghas.
The Iroquois practiced federated decision-making, and Islamic communities still use shuras for participatory leadership.
These models didn’t need venture capital or social media. They rely on trust, dialogue, and shared purpose.
When America’s founders stitched together a republic, they weren’t creating something new; they were porting a long-standing open-source operating system into their own cultural context.
Let’s Not Confuse Freedom with Economic Systems
Early Americans didn’t worship capitalism; they managed it.
Their goal wasn’t wealth for its own sake. It was to prevent power from concentrating in one place. Alexis de Tocqueville nailed it: “Americans are forever forming associations.”
Collective individualism is the spirit of self-governance. And freedom doesn’t mean going solo; it means choosing your collaborators.
The founders built a Constitution not as a weapon of the strong, but as a firewall against public and private tyranny. When the code of capitalism starts to privilege monopolies, data oligarchs, or mega-retailers that hollow out local economies, it’s time for a patch update.
When Capitalism Forgets Its Users
Here’s the bug:
Modern capitalism centralizes power faster than it decentralizes opportunity.
Walmart didn’t just undercut small-town businesses. It outsourced self-governance to distant shareholders.
Venture capital, for all its innovation hype, often reshapes small startups into distorted growth machines that serve the spreadsheet, not the soul.
We’ve confused scale with success, and efficiency with equity.
The result? Empty storefronts, fragile local economies, and citizens who feel like customers instead of co-creators.
History’s Hidden Hackers: Guilds, Co-ops, and Community Builders
If you think decentralized economics is new, think again.
Medieval guilds were proto-DAOs. They trained apprentices, enforced quality standards, and distributed value fairly.
The Mughal kitabkhana system in 16th-century India managed production and trade like a decentralized supply chain.
China’s invention of paper money was a blockchain before its time—transparent, portable, and backed by trust.
Fast-forward:
- Mondragon Corporation in Spain is still one of the world’s largest worker-owned cooperatives.
- Germany’s community-owned energy co-ops keep profits local and power clean.
- Kenya’s M-Pesa turned a mobile app into a people’s bank.
The message: ordinary people know how to govern themselves even when larger systems fail them.
The Open-Source Economy: Transparency as the New Trust
Imagine if economies ran like open-source software.
Everyone sees the code. Everyone contributes. Everyone benefits.
That’s what blockchains promise—not crypto speculation, but a radical transparency that puts power in the hands of communities.
In open-source economics:
- Public ledgers make corruption hard and accountability easy.
- Local currencies keep value circulating where it’s created.
- Cooperative supply chains let artisans, farmers, and coders collaborate directly.
This isn’t about destroying capitalism, it’s about debugging it.
Turning opaque power into open participation.
Decentralization as Civic Therapy
When power decentralizes, citizens stop acting like dependents. They become collaborators.
Participatory budgeting, DAOs, and local co-ops aren’t fringe. They’re democracy’s reboot files. They give people direct input into how resources flow, blending old-school deliberation with modern code.
As Plato might say: governance begins with mastering your own appetites. But in the digital era, it also means mastering your data, your money, and your consent.
True self-governance looks like this:
A culture of digital responsibility paired with local accountability.
Why This Matters Now
We live in a time when the state spies, corporations hoard, and citizens scroll.
That’s not governance, it’s hypnosis.
The same technologies that centralize control can also liberate it. The same internet that breeds surveillance capitalism can also birth decentralized creativity.
The question is: Do we want to remain passive consumers of systems, or active contributors to them?
Capitalism isn’t broken, it’s misconfigured.
If we rewrite the code with transparency, cooperation, and local agency, we don’t get socialism. We don’t get libertarian chaos. We get something older and wiser: a living commons of self-governing humans.
From Capital to Cooperation
It’s a well known fact that when something becomes too rigid, it collapses. The river survives because it bends.
Our economy needs that same flexibility, a return to natural flow. Open-source economics is capitalism learning how to bend again.
When people share code, cooperate voluntarily, and hold each other accountable, governance stops being a top-down command and becomes a horizontal current that’s strong, self-correcting, and alive.
Self-governance isn’t utopia.
It’s the oldest human technology we have.
The next version of capitalism won’t come from Congress or Wall Street.
It’ll come from local code, transparent ledgers, and citizens who finally remember that freedom and responsibility are open-source too.
This essay was first published by The Advocates. Republished at Substack. Image by ChatGPT.
Looking for a great read? Check out Web3 Social: How Creators Are Changing the World Wide Web (And You Can Too!) to learn more about decentralization in a creator economy.
Posted Using INLEO
There are bits of decentralization in some interesting places both new and old.
New Bethlehem (in the US)
Lloyds of London
Visa
SWIFT
The FED (yes really)
John Lewis
United Reform Church
The Quakers
The FED is decentralized in its structure, but it is still a central manager of the U.S. economy. That's not full decentralization. The Quakers are much closer. Many Christian denominations are decentralized in some sense, but they are very often (as is the case with URC, it appears) exclusionary, meaning you must adhere to their special pet doctrines if you want to become a member. As a Christian, I object to that on principle as Christ is all and in all (Colossians 3:11). I'd be curious to see how decentralization is playing out in New Bethlehem. I'm guessing you mean the town in Pennsylvania.
The FED might be the the manager of the US economy and it might be central to it but that does not make it centralized. It only appears to be because it has physical assets. No one centralized authority runs it. That is why it often clashes with Governments or Presidents that want to control it. As such it can appear to have a political stance but that is more a reflection of those veiwing. People see what they expect to see as all their critiques will be accurate regardless of the political stance of the veiwer. If a person veiws it negatively they will find evidence for their assertions. If a person views it positively they will equally find evidence to support their assertions. That is true of everything decentralized. It was based on Quaker ideals. Many banks were founded by Quakers.
United Reform is exceptionally diverse as it is built on the Congregationalist idea. ie. An individual congregation decides what it stands for. They can include universalist concepts - as in the god worshiped does have to be the Christian concept of one. The only real doctrine is that the different congregations co-operate.
In New Bethlehem the concept collapsed but it was driven by decentralization. It was most famous for New Bethlehem Steel. All of this was an an extension of the ideas of New Lanark, which is in Scotland. Decentralized cotton mill town (also collapsed). Pennsylvania was very different to the other early states at the start. More open, as founded by Quakers.
Pennsylvania is very different today.
Yes, I imagine so.