The Symbiotic Path Forward: Can Decentralization Coexist With Progress?

Vitalik Buterin offers a provocative answer to one of tech’s central tensions: must we choose between speed and freedom, concentration and innovation? His analysis suggests there’s a third way—one built on recognizing how different power centers can balance and strengthen each other rather than clash.

Three Fears That Define Our Era

Modern society sits uncomfortably between three poles of authority. We depend on governments to maintain order, yet recoil at their capacity for arbitrary control. We benefit from corporate efficiency, yet watch as mega-firms homogenize culture and extract value at will. And while we celebrate civil society’s independence, we’ve witnessed how leaderless movements can devolve into mob dynamics just as easily.

The tension isn’t new, but its scale is. In previous eras, geographic constraints and coordination friction naturally limited how much power any single entity could accumulate. A monopoly faced natural resistance. A regime’s reach had physical limits. A movement needed proximity to organize.

Today? Those brakes are gone.

The Corporation Problem: More Than Just Greed

Businesses aren’t evil by design—they’re optimization machines. As they scale, that optimization increasingly conflicts with user welfare. Early-stage industries thrive on enthusiasm: gaming built on fun, cannabis bred for medical efficacy, crypto projects with genuinely decentralized distribution. Over time, the incentive structure flips. Games monetize addictive mechanics. Cannabis strains concentrate psychoactive compounds. Token allocations favor insiders. The culprit isn’t malice; it’s that larger entities benefit enormously from “shaping the environment” around them—whether through regulatory capture, cultural influence, or ecosystem lock-in.

Scale creates another problem: homogenization. Ten thousand small businesses produce diverse architectural styles, countless game genres, varied approaches. One mega-firm produces sameness at scale. The uniformity of global cities reflects this dynamic: Starbucks doesn’t just serve coffee; it replaces local alternatives faster than local alternatives can innovate.

Investors accelerate both trends. A startup founder might rationally stop at $1 billion in value—enough wealth without the reputational cost of ruthless expansion. But investors comparing returns across portfolios will fund the aggressive player aiming for $5 billion, systematically rewarding ruthlessness over conscience.

Government’s Coercive Advantage

Governments’ fear factor dwarfs corporations’. A CEO can’t execute you; a state can. This asymmetry drove centuries of liberal political theory around one question: how to enjoy government’s order-keeping benefits while constraining its abuse potential?

The answer crystallizes into a single principle: governments should write rules, not play games. They should be referees, not competitors pursuing their own interests.

This has taken many forms—libertarian minimalism (no fraud, theft, murder), Hayekian constraints on central planning, separation of powers, subsidiarity, multipolarity. The specifics vary, but the logic holds: when government abandons neutrality, power concentration follows inexorably.

The Mob’s Invisible Machinery

Civil society’s strength lies in its fragmentation—thousands of institutions pursuing different missions. Yet “populism” inverts this: charismatic figures uniting millions around opposition to a common enemy, creating the illusion of “the people” as monolithic force. The mob’s danger isn’t its size; it’s its uniformity of purpose.

How Economies of Scale Reshape Power Distributions

Herein lies the core paradox: progress demands scale. America’s 20th-century rise and China’s 21st-century acceleration both reflect this truth. Yet unchecked scale leads to inevitable concentration—if Entity A has 2x resources of Entity B, by next year it may have 2.02x, creating exponential divergence toward monopoly.

Historically, two forces prevented this outcome:

Diseconomies of scale: large institutions suffered from internal friction, communication costs, geographic coordination challenges.

Diffusion effects: people migrated between firms carrying knowledge; industrial espionage reverse-engineered innovations; countries caught up through trade.

But the 21st century is changing these rules. Automation reduces coordination costs. Proprietary technology prevents reverse engineering. Geographic distance matters less. The cheetah (scale leader) is accelerating while the turtle (laggard) finds the rubber hand pulling it growing weaker.

The Diffusion Imperative: Four Concrete Strategies

If concentration is structural, diffusion must be forced. Several mechanisms show promise:

Policy-level interventions: The EU’s USB-C mandate, non-compete bans that force tacit knowledge diffusion when employees leave, copyleft licenses that force open-source inheritance of derived works.

Taxation innovation: A “proprietary index tax” modeled on carbon border adjustment mechanisms—rate private, closed systems higher; zero-rate technology sharing.

Adversarial interoperability: This Cory Doctorow concept means building tools that interface with platforms without permission. Third-party printer ink. Alternative app stores. Browser extensions that reprocess feeds. The key: “users can remain in the network while avoiding platforms’ extraction.”

Diversity frameworks: Glen Weyl and Audrey Tang’s concept of facilitating collaboration between differences—allowing large groups to share scale benefits while avoiding single-goal-driven consolidation.

The Ethereum Case: Can Decentralization Scale?

Lido, Ethereum’s largest staking pool, manages ~24% of network-staked ETH. Compared to any other entity holding 24% of critical infrastructure, Lido generates surprisingly little concern. Why? Because Lido isn’t a single entity—it’s a DAO with dozens of operators, dual governance giving stakers veto power, and explicitly decentralized decision structures.

This model offers a template: not just “how do we monetize?” but “how do we decentralize?” Some cases are easy (English dominance over TCP/IP generates no backlash). Others are hard—applications requiring clear agency and intention create pressure toward centralization.

The symbiotic solution means retaining flexibility while avoiding power concentration. It’s harder than either pure centralization or pure decentralization, but it’s necessary.

D/acc: Making Fragmentation Safe

Pluralism faces a theoretical trap: as technology advances, more entities gain capacity for catastrophic harm. Weaker coordination means higher odds someone eventually uses it. Some conclude the answer is hyper-concentration.

Vitalik proposes the opposite. Defensive Accelerationism (D/acc) means building defensive technologies that evolve alongside offensive ones—and crucially, making them open and accessible. This reduces security anxiety that otherwise drives demands for concentrated power.

The Moral Framework: Having Without Dominating

The traditional moral binary holds: either don’t be powerful (morality of enslavement) or become maximally powerful (morality of the master). A third path exists: become powerful and empower others, but don’t consolidate control.

This requires two parallel efforts: maintaining high diffusion externally and building systems where power can’t be leveraged into dominance internally. Lido demonstrates this is possible.

The challenge ahead isn’t ideological—it’s architectural. How do we design systems where growth and progress remain possible without asymptotically approaching monopoly? How do we build the institutions that force diffusion rather than hoping it happens naturally?

That’s the real question. And it has no simple answer.