Incentives are extremely powerful. People will game any situation to do what they are incentivized to do.
In today's world, equity is a strong incentive. If you own part of an asset, you will get rewarded with money/status/fulfillment if you help that asset's value grow.
If we look at history, equity has been very concentrated (and still is). First, kings and emperors owned everything they could conquer. Rarely was the value shared with the people who worked and lived there. Later, we created companies to share equity between partners. Next, we got public companies, and employee equity (tech companies mostly).
Equity became slightly less concentrated but is still far from decentralized.
The next phase of incentives is customers becoming shareholders, merely by being customers. The weak current model of this is kickstarter. You almost inherently 'feel' that buying a product on kickstarter for the early access is not as strong of an incentive as getting some shares in the company. Buy this product as one of the first 1000 customers, get $500 worth of stock in this company. Hell yeah.
The extreme of this is Sam Altman's American Equity idea:
"I think that every adult US citizen should get an annual share of the US GDP."
I do not disagree.