It’s pretty interesting to consider the intersection between what counts as “people” and “technical” problems.
For example, concurrent version control systems (like perforce) were horrible. This can be thought of as a technical problem, but it was actually right at the intersection of something technical and a people thing. What git understood is that having a canonical repo was a people issue, and it correctly abandoned a central “source of truth”… basically no amount of technology can fix what is a people problem, so no repos are “special” or “the one” from a technical point of view. It then forced people to sort their shit out. However, because of this insight, git was able to get the technical aspects spot on. It correctly recognized that what was needed was the right data structure. Git is extremely simple software, that basically does two things really well: branch and merge, but it needed the right data structure.
I think talking about centralization (APIs and infrastructure) vs decentralization (protocols) as a people vs tech problem is exactly the same sort of thing, and to get the correct view on it you have to really mail in detail where the people/tech problems begin/end.
For example, concurrent version control systems (like perforce) were horrible. This can be thought of as a technical problem, but it was actually right at the intersection of something technical and a people thing. What git understood is that having a canonical repo was a people issue, and it correctly abandoned a central “source of truth”… basically no amount of technology can fix what is a people problem, so no repos are “special” or “the one” from a technical point of view. It then forced people to sort their shit out. However, because of this insight, git was able to get the technical aspects spot on. It correctly recognized that what was needed was the right data structure. Git is extremely simple software, that basically does two things really well: branch and merge, but it needed the right data structure.
I think talking about centralization (APIs and infrastructure) vs decentralization (protocols) as a people vs tech problem is exactly the same sort of thing, and to get the correct view on it you have to really mail in detail where the people/tech problems begin/end.