This is a valuable article. The elephant in the room in so many utopian discussions about decentralization is a total amnesia about our history, from the evolution of the net, to deeper political-economic history. One of the most powerful levers that the centralizers use to resist decentralization is their financial “capital” (ie large pools of money). For any other form of decentralization to work - from federated social media and chat to consensus decision-making and participatory budgeting - it depends on sustainable decentralization of economic exchange.
From the thread about kleptocracy on the Humante Tech Community forum:
To grow the solidarity economy, we need to work independently of capitalists without becoming allergic to money. Yes, capitalists use money to buy control of our work and we need to avoid that. But to do that sustainably, we need to find cooperative and distributive ways to manage money, fund projects, create secure livelihoods for workers, and so on. Dmytri Kleiner offers an unusual and valuable perspective on this, although I disagree with him on a few things (eg his take on copyright, copyleft, and his Copyfarleft concept are utterly wrong-headed IMHO).