2025_06_18 article – the dangers of centralization and abstraction
*reflection on the system design of reality and how it intersects with programming and code*
the dangers of centralization and abstraction
- More vulnerable to attacks
- The internet was initially designed to thwart this
- Compare to governments and empire system design
- Also a pattern in evolution, redundancy and variety are critical to preventing mass extinction
- AI is becoming a centralized substitute for thinking, which is dangerous because if everyone depends on it we’re in a rough spot if it falls
- Remember how scientists used to use rulers and graph paper and now rely on calculators?
- Military industrial complex is a behemoth because there is too much centralizing, there used to be healthy munitions company competition that kept government spending on this down
- Industries are often entirely threatened when too many acquisitions are made in the industry
- Medical disasters and scandals are bad in proportion to how much everyone marches in lockstep-
- Supply chain attacks in programming
- Schools damaging children with bad curriculum like “sight reading ” and now the US literacy rates are way down
- Food production having poisoning and recalls, and food supply being vulnerable to attack
Of course, I am not an anarchist. Here are some benefits of centralization
- Things get done faster, by a *lot*
- Bad things *can* be cleaned up efficiently if you know what you are doing
This applies to:
- education
- abstracted variables
- governments and authority
- – medical systems
- databases
- codebases
- food production
- many other things
However, it does mean if you mess up, you mess up *bad*.
So be careful how you structure your code, and keep rigorous backups 😉
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