Why protests must be decentralized?

in #technology7 years ago

Jalikattu-protest_Reuters.jpg

For comparison, the best example I can take for a decentralized technology is Bitcoin's BlockChain. It is so powerful because,

  1. Blockchain was created to make decentralized peer-to-peer cash system a reality. No single party controls or governs the bitcoin or blockchain. There are set of defined rules that every participating node follows. People started participating in the network slowly after the white paper was published by Satoshi Nakamoto and the initial version of bitcoin wallet was out.
  2. It is impossible to change the rules of the network without the acceptance from majority of participants.
  3. Anyone can participate in the network by themselves without requiring any approval from anyone. Because of this unrestricted nature, miners and bitcoin nodes are spread across the world now making it one of the biggest network.
  4. Malicious nodes can be easily identified and ignored.
  5. It’s impossible to kill the entire network until you take down every participating node. Or until every participating node is voluntarily withdrawn from the network.

Similar to BlockChain, the best example I can quote for a decentralized protest is "Jallikattu Protest" that happened on January 2017 in the state of TamilNadu in India. Here is the wikipedia link for reference. There could be many more examples like this, but this is something I am aware of.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_pro-jallikattu_protests

  1. Protest started with a goal to solve a request of majority of people in the state. There were few awareness videos and songs to start with (like the original bitcoin whitepaper), but there was no leader controlling or organizing protestors. Few unknown people started the protest, others came to know about the protest through social media and started participating in the protest voluntarily. We can say the end goal is the real leader that united everyone.
  2. Once the protest started, few people tried to influence the group by broadening or modifying the goal of the protest. But majority of the people ignored it and just sticked to the original goal.
  3. Over the time, more and more people joined voluntarily and gathered in several regions within the state and the protest became very strong.
  4. Government tried to compromise with protestors by arranging a meeting with few random people (remember there was no leader) from the group. But it was not fruitful since they were not controlling the crowd, in fact no one controls the crowd. Even if those people were compromised and left the protest, others would not have cared about it. Some people tried to spread wrong news and they were ignored as well.
  5. To clear the protest, authorities had to either forcibly remove all protestors (million+) spread across many locations or solve their request. Forcibly clearing millions of people would be a guaranteed disaster, so the only choice was to solve the problem which made people to voluntarily withdrew themselves from the protest.

I am not saying we need to protest for every problem that we have. But if there is a right intent, a decentralized protest will be more successful than following a leader. In my opinion, a true leader should just spread the awareness and participate in the protest like other people. Centralization is always easy to destroy or compromise either in technology or in real life.

What do you think about decentralized protests? Please share your comments below.

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Sorry to say it, but I personally don't find the comparison with protests being constructive, but it is indeed an original point of view

Thanks for your comment @mejustandrew. In my opinion, architectural concepts can be derived from many real life examples and this attempt is just to show the correlation.

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