Explore the DRC's Latest Opinion Pieces and Conversations
Welcome to the DRC blog, where we’ll be sharing insights and reflections on the themes that animate our work: how decentralized technologies are governed; what equitable data ownership might look like; how we can align technological progress with public values (and challenge it when it doesn’t); and where theory comes into contact with real-world implementation.
The Decentralization Conversation: Social Media
Through examples from social media, telecom history, and emerging protocols, this conversation examines the tension between convenience and control, why centralization persists, and how decentralized systems might restore resilience, diversity, and real choice in how we interact online.
When One Company Owns Your Memory
Search was once open, messy, and plural. Then PageRank turned discovery into a single chokepoint, and Google became the gatekeeper of the web. Social media promised connection, then collaborative filtering concentrated our attention on a handful of feeds optimized for outrage and compulsion. Both became monopolies, both rewrote society. Now, AI brings a new frontier: memory, the structured record of our lives.
Status Games: Social Media and the Gamification of Value
Status, unlike power or wealth, is a measure of social standing that must be conferred by others, and the Internet has enabled a plethora of quantifiable status measurements. These measurements of value are, however, inherently flawed. Conferring status creates inequality by definition and quantifying it exacerbates that inequality.
PRESS RELEASE: Decentralization Research Center Enhances its Advocacy with Key Team Addition
Kyle Bligen joins the DRC as Head of Policy and Public Affairs, where he will lead the organization’s advocacy before Congress and federal regulators on blockchain policy, digital asset market structure, and the future of artificial intelligence.
From Laws to Ledgers: Why Protocols—Not Policy—Must Tame Self-Sovereign AI.
In light of the current development of the “agentic web,” we are perhaps witnessing the birth of a new digital species: decentralized AI agents (DeAgents) that train, reason, transact, and even reproduce without human-in-the-loop.
What Did We Learn from the World’s Largest Hack?
What Did We Learn from the $1.5 billion Bybit hack as individuals and as an ecosystem? Research insights from an ethnographic investigation and forthcoming book on decentralised security.