In 1994, Umberto Eco famously wrote that the Macintosh was Catholic and that DOS was Protestant. While he was mostly speaking in jest, I am increasingly convinced that modern internet platforms have as much to learn from religious history as they do from corporate history.
Bitcoin and the crypto ecosystems, for example, have a lot in common with decentralized religions like Judaism and Sikhism. Meanwhile, the centralized social platforms have a lot in common with religions like Catholicism.
Given those parallels, the history of religions gives some clues as to how these platforms are likely to evolve over time, and the pitfalls of each.
I believe that no religion is perfect. At various points in history, in many places, one dominant religion has—through state decree or just power dynamics—ended up dominating entire populations. But we are stronger for living in diverse communities where different communities of belief collectively strengthen the whole, just like a good alloy.
When you think about the technology world against that backdrop, the optimistic outcome for technology is the development of a patchwork of different inter-related but separate platforms, where the strengths and weaknesses of each are balanced out at an overall social level. It is easier as an individual to use multiple technological platforms than it is to believe in multiple religions. So this vision of techno-diversity should not turn out to be too far-fetched.
As an aside, I look forward to feedback on this column even more than most. I am happy to wade into topics I don’t know much about, but likely this column takes the cake for me in terms of both proposing ideas in an area in which I am not an expert, and over-generalizing to make a point.
Bitcoin and Judaism/Sikhism
In speaking of decentralized religions vs. decentralized tech protocols, I am going to mostly speak to Judaism, which I know more about than other religions (if still little).
In Judaism there is no central authority. Instead, everyone in the community agrees to a series of written and immutable protocols in the form of a bible. And that written code has evolved shockingly little over 5,000 years—and especially so since the 3rd century CE.
Does that remind you of anything? It sounds a lot like bitcoin. The idea in Judaism is that the Torah is the law, and it is not in heaven, but instead grounded on earth to be interpreted (and debated) by man. God may have handed down the original code, but it is not His to edit anymore. That is one way to understand all the Satoshi-as-God memes running around the internet. In Judaism, God, like Satoshi, set the top spinning and then walked away.
Judaism is durable, surviving in many hostile environments. It also creates a lot of embedded trust between people within its population, which ends up being expressed in certain parts of the economy effectively. There have been many scholarly papers on why, in many cities globally and throughout history, Jews have come to dominate the diamond trade, for instance. Trading diamonds effectively requires a lot of trust and implicit credit.
The religion also has some relative weaknesses (depending on what you think the goal is). Because it is decentralized it is very hard to grow. It is difficult for Judaism to rapidly coordinate a global response to new competitive situations. There is no real budget for growth efforts, and no single organization that can coordinate a rapid global response.
Perhaps most informatively, Judaism has been forked several times—into things like Christianity and Islam, which adapted the core code of the religion and then modified it in various ways that suited their ends. Many of the fork then added centralization and the ability to support evangelism as features.
We have already seen forks of many crypto projects, of course. But if religion is any guide, it will be the forks that take some of the core ideas—and dare I say add centralized components—that will lead to faster, if more brittle, growth. Time will tell which platforms will emerge and try to be the Islam or Christianity of Bitcoin.
Centralized Social Platforms and Catholicism
Let’s use Catholicism as our stand-in for a religion with highly centralized infrastructure, based around Rome and specifically the pope.
In a lot of ways, Catholicism turned out to be one of the “ultimate” forks of Judaism, if you look at the global competition for religious market share and power. It took a decentralized platform in the form of the Bible, added new sections, and then over time consolidated power in an organization and a leader that allowed for rapid growth, evangelism and dramatic projection of power over politics and Europe and beyond.
The similarities between Catholicism and centralized social platforms is hard to miss. Catholicism was able to consolidate massive resources to use for intentional global expansion, just as centralized social media does. Because Catholicism is so centralized it is able to make quick decisions in response to global and political climate changes and play a role in politics.
Further still, Catholicism was able to adapt and subsume local rituals and cultural elements to speed its expansion (like the adaptation of pagan tree worship to the Christmas tree). We all know that social platforms tend to copy one another as they look to grow and expand to meet the interests of different sub-populations.
Finally, of course, Catholicism also gives local church leaders a platform to project ideas and politics from “the pulpit” weekly—probably both intentionally and unintentionally—much as social platforms do today.
These are all powerful elements in a centralized religion. The challenge, as has happened throughout history, is that when you have so much centralized power, there is a lot of risk at the leadership level. Throughout its thousands of years of history Catholicism has gone through many periods of poor (and corrupt) leadership, with disastrous consequences.
That is the problem with centralized structures of all types. They are powerful because they have resources and are nimble, but can be very risky.
In centralized systems, trust isn't embedded in an immutable set of laws but in a centralized organization. As a result, if people don’t trust leadership, trust in the organization can erode far more rapidly than would be the case in decentralized systems.
Catholicism currently finds itself in a highly dominant position outside of the first world, but is relatively weaker in developed countries. It will be interesting to see what happens to large social platforms and whether they follow that same pattern or not.
A Historically Enlightened Path Forward
There is, of course, one big difference between technology platforms and religions. It is difficult to be a member of multiple religions, but it is quite easy, in theory, to use multiple technology platforms.
This, hopefully, is the happy path forward.
There are certain things that require an enormous amount of baseline trust, stability and immutability. Religion teaches us that for those, the obvious choice is decentralization.
But solving problems and making improvements requires groups to be nimble and globally coordinated. No decentralized body is going to solve global warming fast enough, for example. For those types of things, religion suggests centralization is needed.
I am making some sweeping generalizations, of course, and I apologize for skipping over a lot of important nuance in discussing world religions and religious history. To me, the key in thinking about religion and technology is to realize there is a rich history to draw from in thinking about the choices between distributed and centralized platforms.
Hopefully in the coming years, thinking about religion will help us know where to embrace decentralized technologies, where to choose centralization and speed, and what to do when those two approaches come into natural conflict—which religious history suggests they will.