first of all, absolutely great and detailed post. appreciate you sharing your thoughts.

I think facebook will survive as a centralized entitiy. Not only will it survive, it may actually flourish. It has a great product and can cannibalize any new centralized innovation that happens in the social media space. It has a massive user base that no one has been able to draw it away from facebook. and as time passes, it continues to attract millions more in developing and frontier nations. It has a great first mover advantage and product and it has worked and should continue to work.

Big corporations using data is not a new thing. The cambridge analytica scandal has been blown out of proportion because people still can't digest clinton losing or brexit in the UK. what cambridge analytica did was marketing. Multi-billion dollar corporation dupe consumers into buying useless products every single day and into buying their product. Democrats and republicans were using marketing tactics to make people choose their candidates. Up until election day, democrats were fully convinced that elections are fair, and after they lost, they have been going out of their way to prove they weren't.

So cambridge analytica is not facebook's problem even if the political class wants us to think so.

Moreover, with centralized organizations, decision making is easier. a decentralized apple during steve jobs time may have been a completely different entity today than what we know of.

Lastly, i think blockchain makes transactions immutable. I am not sure if they make user data completely secure. A distributed ledger shared between nodes can be hacked at one of the nodes and data can be leaked (i am not sure if it is impossible or just difficult). please correct me on this if i am wrong. DAOs do seem to show that they can improve governance. Although, running an organization isn't always logical and programmable and should not always be democratic. this should not, however, stop the evolution of a DAO, given that more often than not, simple rules can be used to run a number of mature organizations effectively - through a democratic process as 99% of the decision making follows a standard approach.