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RE: Strike that taxi from the record
In theory, the “commission” Uber gets is 20% or 25% depending on the date you became a “partner”, or as it’s called in the real world, “employee”. That’s the figure that Uber uses to sucker in new drivers and deceive them into thinking they’ll be making around $30 an hour, for just kicking back and driving a car around and picking people up. But, they always fail to mention all these little costs that Uber gets per ride from each passenger, as well as driver, in addition to their “commission”. Uber charges a “service fee”, a “booking fee” and any other charges they can get away with to fleece their passenger and drivers. Source
Ride-sharing apps might not be the "best" example of "decentralization".
No, as I think I mentioned, they are centralized, however the change in mindset of both driver and consumer is leading to further steps away from the centralized points, it just takes time and likely a few more innovations in tech and another economic crash or two to drive consumer behavior in a different direction again.
Ok, I must have glossed over that.
So it feels like you're suggesting, "decentralization is inevitable, just like it is inevitable that ride-sharing apps will replace taxis".
But if you compare taxis and ride-sharing apps, ride-sharing apps are MORE centralized than taxis.
For example, there are thousands of individual regional taxi companies around the world as well as thousands of (heavily invested) individual owner-operators.
And on the other hand, there are only a handful (3?) of ride-sharing companies driving them out-of-business.
This is the pattern of history, regional warlords (organizations/businesses) compete and the more powerful ones take over more territory until they have a de facto monopoly.
It's actually a very rare anomaly when a power monopoly gets fractionalized.
Inevitability seems to favor CENTRALIZATION.
putting it in bold, doesn't make it true :)
For the first time in the history of humanity, there is the possibility that ordinary people are able to communicate, collaborate and organize themselves at scale. Centralization might be the default, but it doesn't have to be centralization of the organization, it can be centralization of the entire community, and all the nuance and variation it contains.
I see it as more of an alignment problem up until this point and going forward, we will increasingly have access to tools that have never existed before. Using the past to predict that the future will be identical uses the assumption that nothing has changed in the environment and, everything changes.
Well, I certainly hope you're right, but, well...
Free access to data (like steemit) seems to be a goldmine for AI propaganda machines and more specifically, for their OWNERS,
Demand different, get a different supply.