There is another reason for decentralization. That reason is what’s called permissionless innovation. If censorship is the thing you saw that now goes away, permissionless innovation is the thing that doesn’t exist yet. This is what the web had going for it early on, TCP/IP had going on, and even what Twitter had early on — which basically is, you can build whatever you want without asking anyone permission. Give you an example, when I built the browser — Mosaic — I never asked anyone’s permission. I didn’t have to go to the phone company for permission. I didn’t have to go to the tech companies. I could just build the code, deploy it, and it just worked.
These distributed systems, generally they have this characteristic that you can build whatever you want on top of them, which is to say they are distributed or there’s no central choke point. The other way to think about this is if you have a centralized system of any kind where there is this choke point, probably they’re not just censoring things that exist — probably they’re preventing things from being built that don’t exist yet. These are by definition things you can’t see. I could hypothesize examples, but we won’t know for sure until it’s possible to build because at that point what you’ll find is a thousand really smart and creative people will come up with ideas that you and I would never have thought of.
That was Marc Andreessen on the a16z podcast, One on One with Marc and Ben. Permissionless innovation is probably one of the most important concepts in political economy, and yet completely foreign to the Department of Defense. There’s no one to mourn the graveyard of weapon systems not developed due to the choke points in DoD approval processes. However, permissionless innovation was permitted before the 1960s in DoD.
Today, if a well-informed Program Manager somewhere has the insight and expertise for a new program, the requirements, funding, and acquisition processes are all out of his or her hands, requiring approval from dozens of offices. Particularly for a major defense acquisition program, that PM is stuck managing the program plan he or she was given.
Before the 1960s, the government operated by funding a bureau with broad discretion. An O-6 would probably control a division of that bureau with authority befitting the rank. All that O-6 would need is to know whether there is a sufficiency of funds available, inform his bureau chief, and then work with the contracting officer to get some experimental contracts going. This will then provide evidence as to whether there’s a real opportunity or requirement that requires larger investment and thus tradeoffs with existing priorities.
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