Big Brother is going distributed. We need to take decentralisation one step further, and claw back control from Big Brother and his little siblings. Limited bandwidth and processing power in personal computers has led many systems to offload work and data to centralised systems. But as customer computing resources have increased, we have not taken back processing to the privacy-friendly enviroment of our own PCs. If intermediaries are built, They will come.
New infrastructure brings new institutions.
The new Internet economy is thus still only partly decentralised. As thick and strong as walls can be built around these decentralised data resources, none are impervious to the familiar knock on the door, with or without subpeona, warrant, or regulation. We are stuck with partially-decentralised systems. The only privacy solution in this environment of intermediaries is anonymised or pseudonymised records. We should use the newly available processing power and bandwidth to create full disintermediation.