My favourite piece of irony is that one of the first political allies of decentralisation has historically been the Roman Chaotic Church, one of the most hierarchical organisations on earth. During the first industrial revolution it outlined the concept of Distributism[1] in the encyclical (mailinglist) Rerum novarum as a response to the growing social upheaval resulting from the increasing automation of labor and the centralisation of wealth in the hands of the few because of the economics of scale, and the thread this posed to the church. This publication has had a profound impact on society and was a direct influence on the general principle of European Law called Subsidiarity[2] that states that problems are best solved at a local level and only need super-state interference if the local level proofs insufficient. It makes me very skeptical about the direction the EU (and it member states) has taken with its increasing attention to data sovereignty and the host of projects and initiatives it funds in this space: blockchains, edge-computing, digital-twins, privacy-preserving-artificial-intelligence and what-not. The really successful decentralised projects where grass-root affairs, things like torrent, wikipedia and bitcoin, and stand in sharp contrast to the astro-turfing of recent ears where big and powerful institutions have usurped the idea if decentralisation to serve an agenda and to get elected. The Tor network is a counter example because it was funded my the US military, but I'd argue that investigative journalist are better served with a VPN hosted in a jurisdiction with bad diplomatic ties to their respective country of residence (some political awareness is always going to be faster and more convenient than crypto).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributism [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsidiarity