> You see, "private property" was a step up from Feudalism.

Private property absolutely existed under fuedalism as well, albeit in a more limited form for most people. Serfs generally worked land privately owned by - or granted by the crown to - private individuals. Minor nobles had property rights equal to and exceeding those of private landowners today.

Property other than real estate was privately owned by serfs. This included all of their possession and in many cases and countries, their homes. They were usually nominnaly free to move elsewhere, though in practice this rarely happened for cultural and practical reasons.

> So basically the current system has led to a bunch of surveillance capitalism.

I agree completely with this, except for the "capitalism" part. Our current system has arisen in an increasingly regulatory environment, and most of the issues with it are directly attributable to that.

> In short ... your ideas of "private ownership" work on a small level but then you get these large corporations that continue "owning" things [...]

Ah, this strikes me as important. The concept of the corporation - or more specifically, limited liability - is 100% a product of our governmental system. One place where I break from the mainstream in a big way is that I believe that those responsible for a company should be responsible personally for damages caused by that company. How that breaks down between employees, managers, officers, and shareholders is left as an exercise for the reader but suffice it to say that when Exxon covers the Gulf of Mexico with crude oil I believe the damage caused by that should be remedied by everyone involved, including those who allegedly own a share of ownership in the company.

> even "intellectual property" of patents and copyrights

My position here is very adequately described by "Against Intellectual Property", by Stephan Kinsella

https://mises.org/library/against-intellectual-property-0

> But just what does it mean that I "own" 999 houses, and see no lessening of my ability to evict people ACTUALLY living in the house as squatters, just because I contracted with a bank and some "People with Guns" to enforce some "deed of ownership"?

It means that if people don't agree with your practices as a landlord, they shouldn't rent from you. If it's that egregious, homeowners should decide not to sell to you or to demand a higher price.

If people don't want to rent from you, you will have to lower your prices to maintain occupancy. If people don't want to sell to you, you'll have to increase your offers to continue to grow. Both of those things decrease profitability. When they intersect, then you'll have to start selling those houses to recoup your investment.

> Even John Locke [...]
> Even Adam Smith [...]

John Locke and Adam Smith are surely foundational, but they are hardly representative of our modern concept of "Capitalism".

For that matter, Thomas Paine is usually thought of as one of America's Founders; he'd likely be considered a Communist today based on the ideas he wrote about.

> It can be summarized like this: "Centralization is bad, and happens through enforcement of some rules. The resources to enforce rules should therefore not be deployed for unlimited value of ownership by accounts, they shouldn't even be centralized (e.g. proof of work mining elects one "consensus leader", or Facebook has a huge centralized server farm) to the point that you get these pathologies: the elites at the top are out of touch with the people who are ACTUALLY using the products / services. Same with politics / states / etc. Keep it decentralized whenever you can.

This statement is really interesting to me. I'm an Anarcho-Capitalist. Obviously, based on your post here, you and I have very different ideas of what an optimal socioeconomic system would look like.

... yet I completely agree with the statements "Centralization is bad" and "Keep it decentralized". I would go so far as to say that while our policy ideas aren't compatible, our worldviews are. We could likely work together to build something that worked well and that we both hated in equal measure. :)