Who Will Regulate the Regulators?

in #paradox4 years ago

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Before jumping into this post, I would like to hold an informal poll:

Don't respond, just raise your hand: Who believes that Justin Sun and SteemIt Inc abused the STEEM blockchain?

I think that most hands are up.

My posts on paradoxes was designed to discuss how conflicts and paradoxes are used to justify centralization.

Many people, myself included, felt that Justin Sun abused the STEEM blockchain after acquiring SteemIt Inc.. Sentiments were so strong that the majority of users on the platform left to create HIVE.

Through the years, active participants in SteemIt built a variety of tools to counter abusive acts on the blockchain such as spam, plagiarism and other forms of abuse. The downvote is a central feature of this plan.

During, and after the hardfork, people began using these tools to express their various opinions. People for SteemIt downvoted and blocked the accounts of people favoring HIVE and visa-versa.

The paradox is that people used the tools designed to prevent abuse to engage in abuse.

This happens in the real world all the time. The people might support creating a strong police force to protect the citizenry. Ambitious leaders gain control of the police and start using the police to put down opposition and end up oppressing the people.

Anyway, there is a point to this post. The people at SteemIt felt that they were being abused the tools designed to prevent abuse on the blockchain; So, for day 33 of 100 Days of Steem, SteemIt Inc declared the creation of a "Community Abuse Reporting" system with the power to "determine if some form of sanction should be applied to the offending account."

SteemIt Inc would be set up as judge and executioner of the sanctions. To gain legitimacy, SteemIt Inc invited community members to participate as an informal jury in the new abuse prevention system.

SteemIt invites people to participate in a jury. Jury members who disapprove of SteemIt's actions are likely to be sanctioned. I don't want to be on that jury.

To recap the situation. Many long term users of SteemIt felt abused by Justin Sun and SteemIt inc and a conflict ensued. The people used the tools to prevent abuse against SteemIt Inc. against each other. People used tools designed to prevent abuse to abuse their opponents.

SteemIt Inc responded to the conflict by grabbing control of the regulatory systems and imposing greater centralization.

This is a common pattern: The leaders of a platform used a combination of conflicts and paradoxes to justify the centralization of power. This is an extremely common pattern of political behavior in the modern era.

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I think there is a false dichotomy at play. The presumed options are "We centralize power, or things go to shit." Meanwhile, groups like Steem Flag Rewards showed that grassroots action was possible and effective. Blacklists were developed to warn of abusive accounts. All that was still needed was a response to bid bots, and they began to change their behavior with the pre-Sun fork.

Decentralization works. The HIVE fork proves that responses to centralization are demanded by the community. We need choice, not a control scheme.

Power mongers, like Justin Sun, tend to go through complex mental gymnastics to justify their power grabs.

I am concentrating on paradoxes at the moment. False dichotomies tend to produce paradoxes and people see centralization as the only solution to the paradox.

Whenever you see a group of people stymied by an absurd paradox, there was properly someone who injected false dichotomies into the system.

BTW, it amazing how Sun's reasoning is similar to the large private equity funds that have come to dominate world markets.

Groups like Bain Capital use precisely the reasoning you described to justify their efforts to consolidate markets. They would start with a declaration that a market segment was fragmented. They would then build a huge capital pool to roll up the market claiming that this would impose discipline on the market. The private equity firm would make billions. The companies they created tended to be unstable and would cause entire markets to implode. Bain Capital was the driver behind the collapse of The Sports Authority, Toys Were Us, Gymboree and Staples and many more companies.

I've started examining some of these merger chains. The merger chains appear to do little more than concentrate wealth. The private equity firms tend to justify their actions based on false dichotomies as you mentioned.

Sun is not the only one.

False dichotomies fuel political discourse, too.

"If you don't like the police, next time you're in trouble, call a crackhead!"
"If you don't support the troops, feel free to stand in front of them."
"If you oppose the COVID-19 shutdown, it must mean you want people to die!"
"If you don't like Obama, you must be racist!"
"If you don't like Trump, you must be a commie!"

The left/right split is the greatest false dichotomy of all.

Progressives and conservatives both seek greater centralization. Conservatives are more prone to present their ideas as false dichotomies. Progressives like to present paradoxes with centralization being the only solution to the paradox.