The Symbiotic Meaning of Power Balance: How Decentralization Protects Progress Without Sacrificing Efficiency

We face a paradox that defines our era: we desperately need powerful forces to drive progress—whether technological, economic, or cultural—yet we deeply fear what happens when any single force becomes too powerful. This tension between progress and safety is not new, but the dynamics have fundamentally shifted. In the 21st century, the traditional mechanisms that kept power distributed are failing, and we must deliberately design what I call a “symbiotic” solution: a framework where multiple centers of power not only coexist but strengthen each other through mutual constraint.

The symbiotic meaning of this approach lies not in enforcing weakness, but in architecting systems where concentrated capability serves distributed interests. This is more than political theory—it’s a survival strategy for preserving human agency in an age of exponential technological change.

The Three Powers We Fear, and Why We Need Them

Our discomfort with concentrated power typically crystallizes around three distinct entities: government, business, and the organized masses we sometimes call “the mob.”

We recognize that governments maintain the infrastructure of civilization—courts, police, rule of law—yet we recoil from their capacity for coercion. Governments wield a type of power that no CEO or activist could match: the ability to imprison, to ban, to reorganize entire societies. This is precisely why political theory for centuries has grappled with what scholars call “taming the Leviathan”—enjoying state protection while preventing tyranny.

Similarly, we depend on businesses for innovation, efficiency, and the products that improve daily life. Yet as markets consolidate, we watch corporations shape culture, manipulate behavior through addictive design, and distort governments toward their interests. The pattern repeats: early industries thrive on user enthusiasm (gaming was once about fun and achievement; crypto began with genuine libertarian ideals), then gradually pivot toward maximum extraction. Video game companies shift from engagement to “slot machine mechanics.” Prediction markets shift from “improving collective decision-making” to sports betting optimization.

The third corner involves civil society—the non-governmental, non-profit realm where collective action happens. We celebrate independent institutions, Wikipedia, grassroots philanthropy. Yet we’ve also witnessed mob justice, cultural purges, and spontaneous coordination around destructive goals. The ideal version emphasizes “diverse institutions excelling in their domains”; the reality often shows monolithic movements pursuing single agendas.

Each force brings genuine value. Each poses genuine danger.

The Economies of Scale Problem: Why Winners Take Everything

The core problem is mathematical. Economies of scale mean that if Entity A has twice the resources of Entity B, Entity A can achieve more than twice the progress—and will reinvest profits to expand further. By next year, Entity A’s resources might be 2.02x those of Entity B. Over time, the advantage compounds toward monopoly.

For most of human history, two forces prevented this descent into permanent hierarchy. First, diseconomies of scale: large organizations suffered from coordination costs, internal conflicts, and geographical friction. A massive government struggled to administer distant territories; a giant company couldn’t execute faster than smaller competitors.

Second, diffusion effects: ideas spread through labor mobility, reverse engineering, and trade. Underdeveloped regions could catch up through access to technology. Industrial espionage was rampant but effective. The “turtle” was constantly being pulled toward the “cheetah.”

That balance has shifted. Modern technology eliminates many diseconomies of scale—automation handles coordination, cloud infrastructure eliminates geography, proprietary systems lock competitors out. Meanwhile, diffusion has weakened: you can read about how something works but cannot modify closed software; you can observe but not replicate proprietary business models.

The result: the gap between leaders and followers doesn’t just persist—it accelerates.

The Symbiotic Solution: Forced Diffusion

If concentration is the problem, then deliberately promoting diffusion becomes the solution. Governments are already experimenting with this, though sometimes unsystematically:

Policy-level diffusion:

• The EU’s mandatory USB-C standardization directly weakens “proprietary ecosystem lock-in”
• U.S. bans on non-compete agreements force employee knowledge to diffuse to competitors
• Copyleft licenses (GPL) ensure that derivative works remain open, preventing privatization of public-spirited software

Market mechanisms:

• A “proprietary degree tax” (inspired by carbon border adjustment mechanisms) could levy higher taxes on proprietary products and zero taxes on open-source contributions
• Intellectual property “Harberger taxes” could incentivize companies to actually use their IP rather than hoard it

Technological diffusion: The most elegant approach involves what Cory Doctorow calls “adversarial interoperability”—building products that work with existing platforms without permission. Examples:

• Alternative social media clients that let users post, read, and filter content independently
• Decentralized exchanges that bypass centralized financial chokepoints
• Browser extensions that strip AI-generated content from platforms

Much of Web2’s value extraction happens at the interface layer. By creating alternative interfaces that interoperate with existing networks, users access the network’s value without enabling the platform’s rent extraction.

Sci-Hub exemplifies this principle: it forcibly democratized academic knowledge and measurably shifted the power balance toward researchers and developing nations.

Polycentrism and Collaborative Difference

Simply diffusing technology isn’t enough if every dispersed entity pursues identical goals. Glen Weyl and Audrey Tang propose facilitating “collaboration between differences”—allowing groups with different values to coordinate without merging into monolithic blocs.

This differs subtly from traditional diversity arguments. The goal isn’t representation; it’s harnessing the coordination benefits of large-scale organization while preventing those large groups from becoming single-minded entities. Think of how open-source communities remain competitive against centralized tech giants despite having fewer resources—because their distributed structure creates resilience that centralized organizations cannot match.

D/acc: Making a Fragmented World Safer

Decentralization creates its own risk. As technology advances, more entities possess weapons of catastrophic harm. In a fragmented world with poor coordination, someone eventually uses such a weapon. Some argue that concentrating power (creating a benevolent hegemon) is the only safety mechanism.

Defensive Accelerationism (D/acc) offers an alternative: build defensive technologies that scale with offensive ones, and distribute them openly to all. If everyone can defend, no one needs to surrender to a powerful protector. Security becomes possible without centralization.

Ethereum’s Lido: A Symbiotic Case Study

The theoretical framework gains clarity through practical implementation. Ethereum’s liquid staking protocol Lido manages roughly 24% of the network’s staked ETH—an enormous concentration. Yet the community’s concern level is far lower than for any centralized exchange holding equivalent power.

Why? Because Lido embodies the symbiotic meaning of decentralization:

• Internally, Lido is a DAO with dozens of node operators—no single point of control
• Dual governance gives ETH stakers veto power over major decisions
• The protocol is open-source; competitors can fork and improve it

Lido holds significant power without exercising hegemonic control. It’s not a passive surrender of power to users, nor is it power seized by insiders. It’s a designed system where capability concentrates but control remains distributed. This is what symbiotic structure means in practice.

The Ethereum community has wisely stated that even with these safeguards, Lido should never control all staked ETH. The goal isn’t powerlessness; it’s preventing any single entity from being “leveraged as a node of power concentration.”

The Moral Dimension: Rights Without Hegemony

Classical political philosophy offers a false choice. The morality of slave-keeping says: you have no right to become powerful. The morality of hierarchy says: you must become powerful. Both assume that power and dominance are equivalent.

A pluralist morality instead proposes: you have the right to impact the world, but not to exercise dominion over others. This reconciles two centuries of debate between “empowerment rights” (the right to develop capability) and “control rights” (the power to govern others’ choices).

Achieving this requires two paths working in concert:

1. External diffusion: dispersing the means of power so no entity monopolizes capability
2. Internal design: structuring systems—like Lido—so that concentrated capability doesn’t translate into concentrated control

Some domains make this easy. Few people object to English dominance in academic publishing, because English is a public good; no entity controls it. Open protocols like TCP/IP face no political resistance because they’re genuinely neutral.

Other domains—where application-specific intention matters—remain challenging. A decentralized justice system seems appealing until you need a rapid, coordinated decision. A decentralized AI defense system might lose to a coordinated attack. Retaining symbiotic structure while maintaining capacity for decisive action remains the central unsolved problem for pluralistic systems.

The Deeper Pattern

This framework structurally resembles Thomas Piketty’s analysis of wealth concentration (when capital returns exceed economic growth, inequality perpetually increases), but with a crucial difference. Rather than taxing wealth, we target the upstream sources: the means of production themselves.

This approach addresses the “dangerous core” of concentration more directly—the combination of extreme growth capability plus exclusivity—and might even improve overall efficiency by democratizing access to productive tools. More importantly, it works against all forms of power concentration (corporate, governmental, or emergent networks), whereas wealth taxes alone cannot constrain authoritarian governments or prevent new monopolistic entities from forming.

“Forcibly promoting technological diffusion through coordinated global decentralization strategy” essentially tells all parties: grow with us and share core technologies at reasonable pace, or develop in complete isolation.

A Framework for the Century Ahead

The symbiotic meaning of power balance, then, is this: we can have rapid progress without powerlessness; we can have distributed agency without paralysis; we can have competition without concentration.

This requires deliberately designing both our technical systems (open protocols, interoperable platforms, transparent governance) and our institutional frameworks (diffusion-promoting policy, adversarial interoperability protections, D/acc defenses) so that concentrated capability never becomes concentrated control.

It means that future projects must ask not only “how do we build a business model?” but “how do we build a decentralization model?”—how do we create systems where power is both useful and constrained, where we can do important things without creating new tyrants.

The Ethereum ecosystem, despite its flaws, offers a working prototype. Lido shows that you can manage a quarter of a network’s security while remaining internally democratic. But this is only the beginning. Scaling this principle across technology, governance, and finance will define whether the 21st century becomes more concentrated or more distributed—and whether rapid progress can coexist with actual human agency.

The choice is not between decentralization and efficacy. The choice is between symbiotic systems that achieve both, and monolithic ones that sacrifice freedom for efficiency. We are still early enough to build the former.