The battle for the soul of decentralisation

Whilst we cannot be certain when the Web3 version of the internet went mainstream, we can be sure it emerged as a vision for a new iteration of the internet that would be more decentralised, open and user-centric than the current Web2 model. However, decentralisation has been corrupted by the same concept it seeks to solve, and this has led to a fundamental misunderstanding of its original meaning. The Web3 term for this phenomenon is decentralisation theatre, which is a situation wherein a project pretends to be more decentralised than it truly is. Essentially, before the Web3 became the poster child for decentralisation, its spirit was embodied in the torrent sites that proliferated across the internet. Powered by peer-to-peer networks, these platforms offered a glimpse of a future where content distribution is decentralised - torrent sites (such as Pirate Bay and YIFY) epitomised decentralisation. Users could share files directly with each other, bypassing centralised servers. Once…