The Short and Long of It: social coordination in times of crisis
How COVID-19 exposes the false tradeoff between coordination and liberty, and why decentralized infrastructure is the long-term solution.
We’re a few weeks into what’s clearly going to be the defining crisis of our generation, and the arguments about how to respond are already calcifying into familiar camps. Libertarians warn about government overreach. Authoritarians point to China’s effective (if brutal) containment. Tech optimists pitch surveillance-based contact tracing. Civil libertarians sound alarms about emergency powers that never get rolled back.
Everyone is arguing about the tradeoff between effective coordination and individual liberty. Almost no one is questioning whether the tradeoff is real.
The tradeoff as we understand it
Here’s the conventional framing: responding effectively to a crisis like COVID-19 requires massive coordination — testing, contact tracing, resource allocation, movement restriction. This coordination requires centralized power. Someone needs to make decisions, enforce compliance, and aggregate information. The more power you give to central authorities, the more effective the response. The less power you give them, the more freedom people retain but the less coordinated the response.
This is the eternal tension of governance, and crises sharpen it to a point. In normal times, we can tolerate some inefficiency in exchange for liberty. In a pandemic, inefficiency kills people.
So we make pragmatic compromises. We accept surveillance in exchange for safety. We grant emergency powers. We hope those powers get rolled back when the crisis ends. (They usually don’t.)
Five things that are true
Before arguing for a different framing, let me lay out what I think is actually going on:
1. Global interdependence isn’t going away. The fantasy that nations or communities can wall themselves off from global problems is just that — a fantasy. Pandemics, climate change, economic contagion, information warfare — these problems are structurally global. Any solution that requires isolation is not a solution.
2. Interdependence requires massive coordination. You can’t respond to a pandemic without coordinating testing, treatment, resource allocation, and behavior change across millions or billions of people. This is a hard coordination problem by any measure.
3. Centralized infrastructure enables abuse. This isn’t a prediction — it’s a historical observation. Every centralized surveillance and control apparatus, no matter how well-intentioned at creation, eventually gets used in ways its creators didn’t intend. The NSA programs revealed by Snowden started as counterterrorism tools. China’s social credit system started as a financial trust mechanism. Emergency powers granted in crises persist long after the crisis ends.
4. Institutions’ incentives diverge from participants’ over time. The institution managing the coordination infrastructure starts aligned with the people it serves. Over time, it develops its own interests: self-preservation, power accumulation, budget expansion. This isn’t corruption — it’s structural. Organizations optimize for their own survival, and that optimization eventually conflicts with their stated mission.
5. This dynamic harms everyone. Not just the people being surveilled or controlled — everyone. When trust in institutions erodes (because the erosion of trust is rational, given the pattern), it undermines the capacity for future coordination. The NSA revelations didn’t just violate privacy — they made it harder to build legitimate public health surveillance infrastructure because people (correctly) don’t trust the government not to repurpose it.
The false tradeoff
Here’s the thing: the tradeoff between coordination and liberty is only inevitable if the infrastructure for coordination is centralized. We’re forced to choose between (a) voluntary coordination that’s ineffective because it can’t compel participation and (b) centralized coordination that’s effective but abusable because it concentrates power.
This is a false dilemma created by the architecture of our infrastructure, not by the nature of coordination itself.
Decentralized infrastructure as the long-term answer
Imagine a different architecture. During a pandemic, you share your health data — test results, symptoms, location history — with a coordination system. But the data lives on infrastructure you control. You can see exactly who accesses it. You can revoke access when the crisis ends. No central authority can repurpose the data because no central authority holds it. The coordination happens, but the infrastructure doesn’t create a permanent surveillance apparatus.
This isn’t science fiction. The building blocks exist today:
- Tor and onion routing enable anonymous communication.
- WebRTC enables peer-to-peer data exchange without central servers.
- Blockchain networks enable decentralized record-keeping and governance.
- IPFS and content-addressable storage enable decentralized data hosting.
- Cryptographic access control enables selective, revocable sharing.
What doesn’t exist yet is the integration of these technologies into usable, scalable systems that regular people and institutions can use. That’s the work — not inventing new primitives, but assembling existing ones into infrastructure that makes the tradeoff between coordination and liberty genuinely unnecessary.
The short and long of it
In the short term, we don’t have this infrastructure, and we need to coordinate now. That means pragmatic compromises with centralized institutions. Use the contact tracing apps. Support emergency measures. Accept that imperfect coordination is better than no coordination.
But — and this is the crucial “but” — don’t mistake the short-term compromise for the long-term answer. Don’t accept that effective coordination requires permanent centralized surveillance. Don’t let emergency measures become permanent fixtures. And most importantly, invest in building the decentralized infrastructure that makes the tradeoff obsolete.
The crisis will end. The infrastructure we build — or fail to build — during and after it will determine whether the next crisis forces the same terrible choice. We can build coordination systems that don’t require choosing between effectiveness and liberty. We just haven’t done it yet.
The short-term response requires pragmatism. The long-term response requires building something fundamentally different. Both are necessary, and confusing one for the other is how we end up permanently sacrificing liberty for temporary safety.