Decentralization Today
Authority is no longer centralized, even when it pretends to be. Governments, experts, journalists, courts — all speak with voices that no one fully trusts. Their declarations circulate alongside countless others, each comment, post, remix, and critique asserting its place. Everyone expects to participate, to leave traces, to shape meaning. Decentralization is no longer latent; it is performed in the flood of participation.
It appears in gestures of withdrawal: switching off, scrolling past, skipping over, ignoring. It appears in gestures of appropriation: pirating, stealing time, cutting corners, cheating with AI. It appears in gestures of over-identification: the joke-vote for Trump, both cynical and sincere, parody and demand. It appears in gestures of voice: everyone speaking, everyone contesting, everyone remixing.
Truth itself is decentralized. Not lost, but multiplied. A single news story, a court ruling, a historical claim — all circulate amid comment, critique, and counter-narrative. AI intensifies this: generating personalized truths, reflecting the multiplicity of users’ frames. No authority can fully determine what counts as real, and none can fully vanish from view.
Even war is decentralized. Gaza reveals the disintegration of legitimacy: courts, NGOs, rational instruments of order continue to speak, but their speech carries no force. Power asserts itself anyway, feeding on fragments of belief, exploiting the willingness of many to look away. Authority wields enormous violence, but without the stability of trust, its force is brittle, contingent, and volatile.
Decentralization is neither progress nor collapse. It is the splintering of order into competing fragments, none able to fully dominate, none able to fully vanish. It is the condition of multiplicity in which we now live: a field of gestures, refusals, voices, and contradictions where power both fractures and persists.
PETER 