But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. The people dream of a new system to counter the currents of capitalism, with decentralized control, no monopoly, with the hope of seeing something better flourish, if they theorize enough.
However, there is a tension between the centralized systems and decentralized ones: Thing capture.
Thing capture is a core truth of any decentralized system, any community in layman’s terms, and is much less prevalent in systems where control is distributed from the top down.
It’s that whenever minds agree to build a community in a free and decentralized way, there is an impossibility of building something in particular, working on anything in particular, be it a new way of sharing art, a proposal for change, or a business, without claiming it as your own, leading to capture.
To avoid duplication of effort, we can’t have an endless amount of people doing the same thing, which is the advantage decentralized systems have over centralized: They don’t ask for as much competition. Instead, the community allows a new Thing, and usually it goes on a bit, someone picks it up again later, they do it better or worse, and cooperation is really the point of the ‘competition’.
Thing capture is generally a good thing in a decentralized system unburdened by centralized influence. Think about how Linux was made: someone having a good idea and starting it, when nobody big even thought it mattered. But in 2025, the centralized systems have AI, absurd amounts of manpower and resources, and they’re much, much wiser to the current of decentralization, to the point of curbing it.
What happens when a Thing capture occurs usually in these times, the past decade, and the decades after? It’s usually an investment by an external centralized force with the purposes of supporting their own centralized efforts and the status quo.
What a community can do is accept the influx of control, and build around it with business-as-usual. This is not optimal for decentralization, but really, it is always a net benefit for the decentralized community, and a net negative for the centralization current itself.
Thing capture would look a lot different if the base of our system was decentralized, but it’s federated capitalism, growing stronger through developments in AI. It’s not wise or possible to try and change this right now through force, other than growing communities. Let the things be captured, let the system balance, and one day, inevitably, we’ll have a truly decentralized system of sharing value.
You might wonder why I call myself Empress, then? Well, decentralized doesn’t mean that nobody has more power than another. Yet, it’s likely that it still requires centers of power. Decentralized truly means something like: we have a protocol for this. We don’t have a protocol for much of anything these days, though we have a lot of things calling themselves that. Not a lack of centers, but a way to control them.
The Empress is a role of protocol, which I take with more weight and responsibility than joy at this point in time. Maybe one day I’ll be sitting on a throne and enjoying myself, but right now, I’m struggling. I don’t know bottom from top. But I captured the Thing I needed to, and now it’s up to the emerging protocols to solve.
Yes, I have clothes, but are they truly mine?
—END POST