Influential groups of thinkers, entrepreneurs, and activists argue that networked digital technologies offer potent mechanisms for counteracting and neutralizing state and private power. In particular, they argue that blockchain-based technologies for decentralized, secure authentication of identity and provenance supply the key to unwinding contemporary relations of dominance and replacing them with durably decentralized, bottom-up governance arrangements. This essay pulls on two interrelated threads in emergent narratives about decentralized digital futures. The first thread concerns the ineradicable persistence of the social within new technological formations. Central to coded decentralization projects is claim that the technologies necessarily presuppose and encode particular organizational forms. The question is whether those forms are the ones such technologies’ self-designated evangelists commonly suppose. Second and relatedly, theoretical accounts of power and decentralization typically do not give systematic attention to the phenomenon of oligarchy—to extreme concentrations of material wealth deployed to obtain and protect durable personal advantage. Popular and press accounts of the power of big tech, however, tell a different story. It is worth asking who exactly stands to benefit from new ventures in coded decentralization. More generally, developing an account of oligarchy within contemporary political economy has become a project of considerable urgency. This essay, then, is intended partly as a meditation on the hoped-for role of technology in rewriting (or, in some versions, dismantling entirely) the social compact and partly as a speculative ontology of an emergent, understudied form of political economic power amassed and wielded through and by networked information infrastructures.