Overcentralization
28/01/2026
Mycenae
In the height of Bronze age Greece, the economy was structured into a palatial system involving all trade and goods moving through massive "Palaces", vast fortified citadels at the center of each region.
The farmers would farm the crops, the smiths would smith the metal, the leatherworkers
would work the leather. All of these goods would be taken into the citadel, sorted,
and distributed amongst the people, with the excess being stored or traded off.
In this way, everyone got what they needed in the right amounts, provided they were
also contributing to the economy.
The greatest and probably most famous of these palaces was Mycenae. It was situated about 150 km south west of Athens (which was at the time much unlike its state in the Golden Age [~5BCE], and was at this point a rather small town), and was most notably ruled by the (cursed) line of Atreus.
Now, during the 12th century BCE, these Palaces experienced a phenomenon known as the Post Bronze-age Collapse. The exact causes of this widespread event are speculated upon to this day (there are over 20 possible theories), but the gist of it is that some event, likely a natural disaster or famine or combination of many other things happenned, and the economy across the entirety of Greece collapsed completely.
Whatever happenned, it caused the few Palaces spread out across Greece to stop operating.
As a result of the vast overcentralization present in the palatial system, everything went down when the citadels fell.
The Internet
You remember that time a couple months ago when Cloudflare went down and so did half of the internet that runs on it? What about that time when AWS shat itself for a day or so and took down the other half? I'm being ambiguous with the times because, well, this sort of thing literally can happen at any time. If some bad code gets pushed to prod, or power goes out and your 5 UPSs broke, or some shark decides that fibre optic looks tasty and cuts some random island off from the internet, vast numbers of services integral to the operation of the world can just... go.
Reminding you of Mycenae yet?
What if I reiterate the idea of everything having to go through the center and come back out again.
More than just generally, this is about you and I. If your router breaks, there's a leak right by the switch down the road, or a squirrel decides to gnaw into your line... Over. No more access to your backups, no more Minecraft server, no more Wikipedia, nothing but what you have right there in your house.
Decentralization
So why not put it in your house?
You can buy some pretty solid "ewaste" on ebay for well under 100$. An old mini PC, small server, or some rPis. Add in a few cables and a switch, that's a pretty solid foundation for a home server.
Then build. Add jellyfin, immich, truenas. Host your own Minecraft servers. Expand- proxmox, docker, kubernetes. The entirety of wikipedia is under 100GB. You can get 100GB for 15$. That's 15$ for the entirety of human knowledge. Or even for free, just host it on whatever you're reading this on.
And once you have all that, who needed the internet anyway?
Vale.