Technology

There is nothing about sharing computational resources that necessarily includes loss of privacy, transparency or freedom. With the correct systems in place (i.e. not controlled by one capitalistic company, fuck you Altman), that can all be fine.

Electricity definitely does hold a lot of personal information and cost of electricity very much changes my household behavior. For that matter, so does trash and recycling.

Centralisation doesn't mean monopoly. We could use legal tools to break down the companies into smaller parts, and let people vote with their wallets to use the compute services which meet their ethical terms. With more eco laws to make sure that it's not cheaper to be inefficient and externalise all the bad parts.

We can but dream.

It's a little bit funny to see people talking about the benefits of centralization on a website that was built to be part of a larger decentralized network. As if we're not here because of the problems with control and censorship in centralization. Reddit has a history of silencing leftist voices, yet those voices are more "free" to speak here on the Fediverse.

The entire point of the original structure of the internet was to build resilient communication networks for the military so if one node went down, a new path could be routed around the broken node.

Centralization absolutely leads to fascism because it gives all the controls to a handful of people who aren't responsive to democracy.

Our representatives do not represent our interests because they are so far removed from us. We honestly need far more representatives representing far fewer people (like maybe a few hundred per representative) because then a rep has to be on a first name basis with their constituents and understand them because there are so few they represent. Either that or we need to bite the bullet and go direct-democracy and just have senators and house representatives just be figureheads who help write bills, with citizens having the final vote on each bill.

Well... sometimes, in my view at least, centralization (or relatedly, government-run) things can be beneficial for society; specifically the things that aren't easily profitable, yet are a net benefit to all.

Medical research (into cures, not profitable 'treatments' requiring a lifetime prescription); public roads; food safety standards-enforcement. These things might not be profitable, but we all want them, so it makes sense that government might run them on our behalf, eg. centralized rather than all of use needing to do our own medical research, or maintain our own roads, or check our food in case it's been adulterated because no one sees a profit in keeping it healthy.

We burn resources faster when we centralize, in most cases, where applicable.

Centralisation is generally more efficient due to various economies of scale such as fixed capital costs, greater division of labour and larger R&D budgets. Since centralised facilities are more efficient, they will gradually outcompete and buy out / drive out smaller competitors. There are two ways to deal with the negative consequences of this tendency - (1) give smaller competitors an advantage by breaking up / penalising the largest ones, or (2) bringing the largest competitors under public control through nationalisation. But the centralising tendency itself is a sort of natural economic law that applies under most conditions.

The point of centralization is always about control.

This is a consequence, not a cause.