What if... ?

I have always been in love with the concept of distributed and decentralised services. Those two concepts are aligning almost perfectly to my political an philosophical point of view. And this short note is not much about software, but more as a note to remember myself how much spoiled by centralised services we are.

On the airplane to Stockholm, It was hard to explain to my boyfriend how much we are relaying on centralized services, without talking about the centralised fallback and backup solutions. I made a simple “question-game” to explain this concept and try to find a fungible solution to solve the main problem. It is a series of “what if… ?”. With that question, any action is in not possible anymore, until a fungible solution is found. The goal of the game is to find something easy to find and replace, and that would make the action possible. Here is a simple example we made:

1. You are cooking a delicious cake with eggs. 🍰
2. What if you have no eggs?
   You go buy some more. 🛍
3. What if the main super market is closed?
   You find an open one, from a different chain/brand. (Backup solution) 🏪
4. What if all of them are closed?
   You then just go to your neighbour and ask if he has an egg. (Second backup) 🏠
5. What if you live live alone in the desert?
   You go and find some chickens! 🐔

The last answer in this simple case is a “fungible solution”, it will answer to all of the questions and it will solve the problems in future cases. It would be my dream to have a chicken in my flat just for a few eggs.

Try with something, anything: try to avoid anything related to payments or it will lead you easily to something like gold, Bitcoin, or pure exchange. Keep the answers and the questions related to the main problem (lack of eggs, for example). You will easily understand how, sometimes, we are relaying on one single source for all our needs. We are used to it and badly spoiled by it.
Because we are lazy.