Decentralization
An annotated collection of 6 books, papers & essays on decentralization, spanning 1945 to 2025. Featuring works by Friedrich Hayek, Nicholas Negroponte, Tim Berners-Lee and 3 more — each with editorial commentary oriented to digital product practice.
The Use of Knowledge in Society
The knowledge relevant for economic decisions is dispersed across society — never concentrated in a single mind. No central planner can aggregate it well. Markets work because they are a decentralised mechanism for proce…
Being Digital
The shift from atoms to bits as the fundamental decentralising force. When information becomes digital, the costs of copying, distributing and transforming it fall to zero. Industries built on the scarcity of physical ca…
Weaving the Web
The story of the World Wide Web told by its creator. The most relevant thing is not the technology but Berners-Lee's insistence that there was no grand plan — only a problem to solve (sharing information between CERN res…
The Future of Work: How the New Order of Business Will Shape Your Organization, Your Management Style, and Your Life
Malone extends his 1987 paper with Yates and Benjamin to argue that technology is pushing organisations toward radical decentralisation — not as an ideology but as the inevitable economic consequence of falling communica…
What Technology Wants
Technology as a force with tendencies of its own: toward decentralisation, accessibility, complexity, diversity. Kelly argues that the technium — the total system of technologies — has a direction, and that organisations…
AI's Use of Knowledge in Society
The title is a direct nod to Hayek (1945). Brynjolfsson and Hitzig argue that AI can shift the optimal locus of control in organisations through two channels: by codifying local knowledge that used to be tacit, and by ex…