# Decentralization
A technical and marketing buzzword use amorphously to refer to an unclear set of aspirations about a technology or community.

In information technology it refers to a type of network topology in which a system has no single point of failure and whose workload or actions are performed in parallel by multiple computers which provide a shared service.

The internet is the canonical example of a decentralized network.

This term is often falsely used interchangeably with "democratization", which has an orthogonal meaning.

## References

* [@diehl_decentralized_2021]
* [@schneider_decentralization_2019]
* [@bodo_decentralisation_2021]
* [@zhang_aesthetics_2019]