Money and contracts has been decentralized with bitcoin.
Social hasn't yet been effectively decentralized, but it will be.
Decentralized is better when it comes to individual choice, curbing abuse of power, and resilience (no single points of failure).
But it's way worse when it comes to security. And no one's been able to decentralize security effectively yet, because a single top-down entity with an economy of scale has more resources to secure itself than expecting EVERY little host and their dog to upgrade to the latest version of Wordpress.
Social has been decentralized. I socialize with friends across a dozen digital platforms now.
Email, phone calls, SMS, WhatsApp/Viber/Kik/Snapchat, Facebook, Skype, Twitter. Then throw in a dozen other communities, ranging from Hacker News, to Stack Overflow, to Reddit or Imgur, and so on.
Social has been substantially decentralized. The only way it can be argued that it hasn't, is if you consider any corporate ownership of a platform to be by default non-decentralization (as opposed to having numerous available platforms being the decentralizing aspect).
It's not all that easy or cheap to decentralize the last mile. Things were not any more decentralized when most people used dialup, and they were definitely more centralized when the main users of the internet were on a few campuses.
Absolutely true. Getting a phone tap and the equipment required to monitor an active modem connection was sufficiently onerous for local and federal law enforcement that it was reserved for active investigations of high value targets. Hell, they couldn't even be arsed to track Mitnick down when he was on the Most Wanted list, it took a phone company tech and a pissed off security analyst from California to finally bring him down.
Decentralized does not imply secure. Obviously both are desirable, but one does not imply the other. Although some will (rightfully) argue that a centralized system can never be fully secure, so you might say that secure implies decentralized at some level.
Although, to be fair, of all the above only (the old) Skype and email come close to decentralization.
Communication has been decentralized by email.
Money and contracts has been decentralized with bitcoin.
Social hasn't yet been effectively decentralized, but it will be.
Decentralized is better when it comes to individual choice, curbing abuse of power, and resilience (no single points of failure).
But it's way worse when it comes to security. And no one's been able to decentralize security effectively yet, because a single top-down entity with an economy of scale has more resources to secure itself than expecting EVERY little host and their dog to upgrade to the latest version of Wordpress.