The Men in High Towers problem is an analogy of situations where problems are solved in isolation. This isolation encapsulates all types of situations where those who are solving the problems (solvers) will be ignorant to the true needs of those they are solving the problem for (sufferers).
Imagine a small world or city where there are 2 types of people. The Ruling class and the Serving class. The Ruling class lives in a constructed-tower or floating-city that is high up in the sky whilst the Serving class lives on the ground.
As their names specify, the Serving class exists to see to the needs of the Ruling class.
The 2 classes likely speak different languages. The Ruling class also observes the Serving via binoculars or other far-sight devices. It is critical to keep in mind that communication between the 2 classes is extremely minimal.
Without adding too many more variables, the analogy goes as such:
The Ruling class observes the Serving class from a great distance and then enacts measures and other legislation under the guise of helping the Serving class
So what we have here are scenarios where a Ruling class have minimal information (where information = physical distance) of the happenings of the Serving class but enact measures that they assume will benefit the Serving class.
Before discussing the applicability of this problem in the real world, we should first highlight a few criticisms of the problem itself and address them.
(in no specific order, they are)
Although originally written for "rich people trying to solve world hunger" (see first point), the applicability of the Men in High Towers problem can and does extend to a variety of situations.
In summary, the Men in High Towers problem is open to criticism and further input. It was thought up whilst pondering about failed policies of wealthy people trying to help the poor (but doing so from a vantage point that did not give them insight into the true issues). Time was spent researching existing eponymous laws but none were found that reference this issue. If you do find an existing concept similar to this, please inform us.
The problem should also not be used as a justification to forego charity work. Instead, we should be critical of the charity work that we do and make sure that it actually benefits the recipients more than pandering to our egos.
A big part of the reason that Molus exists today is because of my ponderings regarding decentralization.
I have spent ample time researching software like: ZeroNet, IPFS, Scuttlebutt and other projects associated with federation or P2P
2 things seem to always pop up with these projects:
After spending a few years on a Linux machine, I can safely attest to being someone who is aware of apt-get update
or pip install
or whatever other commandline knowledge is required for installing/managing software on servers.
I am by no means a solid SRE, System Administrator or "DevOps" person, but I can get by.
The average non-tech person does not have (or even feels the need) to possess such skills. To be able to manage a portion of services for some specific software, will always require some technical knowledge. This is evidenced by the ever-simpler torrents scene for pirated content. Once you knew how, torrenting was easy.
Going from: login to Windows > open Chrome browser > land on google.com > search for Facebook > click, redirect and then proceed to login to Facebook
To being able to successfully use torrents was the difficult part and a steep learning curve for most.
The well-meaning intentions of advocates for decentralization will always face this stumbling block.
The 2 important keywords here are:
Ignoring the gradual decline of IRC and other chat protocols, let us assume that Matrix.org is successful in getting people back to chatting on federated servers. The important observation is the eventual re-centralization on top of the most popular federated servers. IRC could have been a million small communities running their community-based chatrooms. Instead, we have 10-100 popular IRC servers, with Freenode being the most well-known among casual techies.
I suspect Matrix.org will face a similar problem, as the convenience of just joining their network will trump the efforts of managing your own servers for your own community.
You have to ask yourself if history will keep repeating itself as we attempt to decentralize communications, only for convenience of the end-user to cause re-centralization.
Keywords to take from here:
The learning-curve of any decentralization technology is inversely related to its adoption-rate.
Faced with the dilemma of running their own version versus using existing infrastructure, the user will always choose the latter for convenience.
Expanding on the theory:
This theory can be bashed, scrutinized and discussed. It is based on personal observation, which has bias. It is not based on broad empirical data.
It does serve as a means of justifying the existence of Molus and our experimental organizational models.