Just to be accurate in case this comment scares folks away - it's 61 pages including all the appendices and bibliography, but 46 pages and 3 chapters of the core content.
From skimming the TOC and first chapter this seems more about dynamics
and fluidity than structure. It's a frustrated lament of all -archies
and the idea that meaning in software comes out of the structure of
its form or production.
I guess that's why we call it *soft"-ware in the first place.
Malleable, reconfigurable, flexible, easily re-writable. extensible...
If software has a problem today it's that it's ceased to be soft. Big
Tech would rather we had appliances than general purpose computers, and
that we "deploy apps", controlled from the mother-ship, than "run
programs". As social infrastructure rather than personal utility,
software becomes about fixing and preserving power relations, rather
than enabling new ones. It becomes ossified into structures - and the
anarchic ones may be as dogmatic as the hierarchic ones.
One thing the human race should have learned from history is that once you start restricting individual freedom, you know where you begin but you don't know where you end.
You don't want corporations to use your software, fine, fuck Google. Then one day you find out that the police may use the software, so you add "law enforcement" to the list of fields of endeavor you want to restrict.
Then it's the military, and that's where the definitions get tricky. The "Cooperative Nonviolent Licenses", just as an example, would have probably not been usable by the Anarchist Confederal militias in the Spanish Civil War.
A think tank promoting nuclear energy uses the license, is that fine? How about a neo-nazi nonprofit?
Soon enough the list of groups you don't like is gonna get long.
With remarkable consistency across space and time, those lists have historically grown from “the capitalists” to “their allies” to “the counter-revolutionaries” to “the enemies of The People“ to “the enemies of The Party”
Why do people think these things get respected? What ultimate authority is omniscient in this way? The fact is that if I can access the source then it is effectively FOSS, especially if I'm a military.
Please take a long hard look at how the implicit assumptions behind these discussions do not line up with reality and then move on to building the web of trust with me :P
A "do not use this software for evil" license is morally identical to one that states "only use this software for evil".
The best licenses are those that just say "there you go, do whatever you want, but don't fucking sue me." (That means pretty much all mainstream open source licenses)
No, the best licenses are the ones that say "there you go, do whatever you want, but pay it forward", like the (A/L)GPL. It's an astute solution to the free-rider problem inherent to large gift economies: once you pass the scale where individual reputation is the driving factor in engagement with the economy, it's easy to accumulate a parasitic group that takes from the generosity of others, but not only offers nothing in return, but expands itself to deprive more resources from the economy at large.
Copyleft licenses are a defense tool against those parasites. You're free to use the software, anyway you like. You're free to modify the software in anyway you feel fit. The only restriction is that if you choose to share it with others, than you grant them the same freedoms you've been so generously given yourself.
> Soon enough the list of groups you don't like is gonna get long.
That follows, because there is a lot of evil in this world. If I want to make a token gesture (which I realistically have somewhere between a limited and no ability to enforce against a bunch of armed hooligans like the police or military) against that evil, that's my prerogative.
Maybe, but evil vs good is very subjective and leads to paradoxes like the “anti-capitalist software license” not being usable by one of the most popular examples of anti-capitalism in history, namely the CNT militias in revolutionary Catalonia.
> a bunch of armed hooligans like the police or military
Your hooligan is someone else’s freedom fighter though. /me looks dramatically in the general direction of Kiev
"Not being usable" is an odd phrasing. 1) if they asked, after my initial shock of "omg, 1936 called" I'd happily license it to them, and 2) by the time you're in an armed resistance software copyright is the least of your concerns.
But more importantly, people being able to have varying opinions does not make all opinions correct, just, or even respectable. Ethics are universal: they are the framework from which we judge the actions of both ourselves and others. An assertion that "Doing good is doing what you think is good" is a cop-out, and an (absurd) ethical argument in of itself. Evil people are perfectly capable of rationalizing evil to themselves, they don't need radical subjectivists cheerleading from the sidelines.
Anarchism is something which ought discussed more. Essentially the elimination of all unnecessary hierarchy and domination. For example we can make the workplace a democratically run institution, with shared profits. I think it’s an ideal which we ought to strive towards, which might only be realised in some future century.
>The consistent anarchist, then, should be a socialist, but a socialist of a particular sort. He will not only oppose alienated and specialized labor and look forward to the appropriation of capital by the whole body of workers, but he will also insist that this appropriation be direct, not exercised by some elite force acting in the name of the proletariat.
There are a number of cooperatives that are very successful. Not in a capitalist way but providing the workers a honest and good life with much more freedom them usual companies. There is a good example in Brazil https://www.researchgate.net/publication/344119511_Flasko_A_...
Unfortunately they have to compete under the conditions of capitalism, which don't favour workers or enterprises that make worker happiness a priority, making long-term sustainability a huge challenge.
This idea, sometimes called "capitalist realism", that there is no feasible alternative to capitalism is completely unsupported by evidence. It is an ideological position, not an immutable fact of nature.
I always bring up Mondragon corporation. They've been up and running in some capacity since 1956, 66 years.
There are some criticism lodged against their operations, in that some employees are not worker-owners, but simply workers. I'd call this "slack", and I'd suggest "slack" is largely an artifact of a lack of other cooperatives. There is of course the fact that buy-in does cost money, which I would argue would necessarily set a floor for "tenure" in many cases.
Having said that, they have evinced a certain special robustness in the face of crises - in the 80's (iirc) for example, rather than laying people off, they sent them into their education programs.
Mondragon is a great and promising example; I tend to feel that, considering all the headwinds, for any alternative structure - statewise, organization-wise, etc, to succeed in even a small way is to be celebrated - and studied.
> Essentially the elimination of all unnecessary hierarchy and domination.
Not necessarily. Please see my other top-level comment in this thread.
Anarchy has a lot of definitions and sub types. Anarchy as complete lack of structure is always used to attack and denigrate it by its opponents, but it's not an inherent characteristic of anarchism itself. Anarchy does not have to mean everybody decides and we put everything to a vote.
Anarchy means you can leave whenever you want. Nobody forces you. No one has the monopoly on violence.
Free software is anarchic. It might have strict rules, and a tyrannical maintainer than only merges what he wants, but it's still anarchic because you can fork it.
Most people tend to be in anarchic relationship with each other, because no one can force something upon the other. That's something only the government does.
In fact, making money and profit does not have to be anti-anarchic. It's certainly against anarcho-communism, but that's just a subbranch of a wider social theory.
> Anarchy as complete lack of structure is always used to attack and denigrate it by its opponents
And has been for 150 years. There's a treatment of it in the Conquest of Bread where you get the impression that Kropotkin was already tired of it at the time.
> Not necessarily. Please see my other top-level comment in this thread.
You missed the glaring modifier UNECESSARY.
> Anarchy has a lot of definitions and sub types. Anarchy as complete lack of structure is always used to attack and denigrate it by its opponents,
You are the one who is taking “hierarchy and domination” to be synonyms for “structure”. Indeed: that anarchy is without structure or order has been a way to denigrate it since basically forever.
I've been thinking about this a lot, after doing a lot of reading on anarchic theory this summer and my comment from yesterday saying that the Linux kernel is great because there's a benevolent "dictator" at the top, and the Linux desktop sucks because there is none: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33163760 and below
Anarchism doesn't have to mean flat structure. It's my opinion that you can have a perfectly anarchic software organisation with a leader. Linux is anarchic. You're free to leave whenever you want. There is no coercion. But if you stay, you obey the rules of the head honcho, Mr. Torvalds himself. Linux is more anarchic than Valve, which funnily enough its famous flat structure was discussed in a repost today.
To me anarchy means no coercion. Anarchy does not have to mean disorganised. In fact, with no visionary at the top, the result is often mediocre.
Sorry, I don't have much on topic to contribute, just that I've been thinking about this a lot recently, and this post is serendipitous.
Anarchism means the abolishment of coercion _and_ hierarchy, especially authority. This doesn't mean structureless, but structure and organization via free association to your point.
Linux in production as a people org is definitely NOT anarchistic by any definition I can muster because Linus _is_ the head honcho - it is not a freely associated group skeptical of authority because he holds all authority and the keys (even without coercion, which he could readily employ). People don't get to make collective or individual decisions that don't go through the authoritative hierarchy to some degree.
Another point you made somewhere else about being able to fork the codebase gives the software itself an opportunity to allow for more anarchistic setups, but in its current state is relatively far from it in my opinion.
Happy to discuss this more because it's a fascinating topic and I like finding folks who want to engage in dialogue around this.
You can define anarchism to mean the abolishment of hierarchy, but you would be distancing yourself from most anarchist movements. One prominent counter-example would be the Kurdish Workers' Party based on the philosophy of Abdullah Ocalan. It is an anarchist organization with a strict hierarchy. By anarchism, we usually mean the movement that started in early European socialism, developed through Marxism but split with state socialists and distanced themselves from Lenninism, along with all the related movements that developed from it. It has a particular culture and history that has always stood against enforced hierarchies because they get in the way of natural hierarchies that develop through social processes as people make collective decisions and assign temporary leadership roles through defined processes.
The PKK is not an anarchist organization. They have some similar political viewpoints but they are by definition not anarchist for many reasons, especially the points you make about having a strict hierarchy and leader.
More to your point though, sure, it's a praxis vs theory thing. There often will be agreed-upon hierarchies and leadership situations in an anarchist system but the point is they don't get to have coercive power and their authority is consensus-based.
If you exclude organizations like the PKK, which ones would you consider to be the true anarchists? How about the Industrial Workers of the World, one of the most prominent international anarchist organizations? You can read the constitution at iww.org, and it mainly defines the organizational hierarchy.
I'm curious about your perspective, because when I've seen this argument before, it seems to be based on a personal literal interpretation of the world anarchism as the negation of hierarchy, as if the etymology of the term is more important of the history of the movement. If you have a deeper insight beyond that, it's worth explaining!
Another definition that might be helpful comes from Noam Chomsky's "What is Anarchism?"
"...anarchism is a tendency in human development that seeks to identify structures of hierarchy, domination, authority, and others that constrain human development. And then it seeks to subject them to a very reasonable challenge: Justify yourself, demonstrate that you're legitimate, and maybe in some special circumstances or conceivably in principle. And if you can't meet that challenge, which is the usual case, the structures should be dismantled, not just dismantled but reconstructed from below."
This thread seems to get derailed into the age old anarchistic debate "organization or not", also sometimes named "platform or not". My take on it is that this debate is usually theoretic in nature (in particular in this thread), and that anarchism is very much not a theory and actually a praxis. A core principle is also to refuse bottom-line-truth and dogma to keep being relevant in day-to-day struggles. Hence the unifying principles of the anarchistic nebula elude any objective definition (one behave "like an anarchist" only if a couple other ones says so, not that this would be sufficient tho).
And of course, the IWW is an anarchist organization - I haven't read the entire constitution but skimming it doesn't describe an actual hierarchy, simply a structure and process of delegation and consensus-based decision-making of job duties and organized geographic branches. In fact, they explicitly decry it in favor of grassroots and worker empowerment.
From the article you linked, “the Zapatistas have rejected and defied political classification.” I think they main issue is that they have a deep indigenous tradition outside of socialist anarchism, although they have clear intersections of thought.
Intentional community development is one of my projects right now, so I appreciate the reference!
I think what you’re describing is something better than anarchism because it has a lot less historical violent baggage associated with it and probably deserves a new name. It might get one if it grew enough. It would probably still involve hierarchies based on consensus and clear limits on scope and time. More arrangements like these would do a lot of good, and I hope we get more of them!
I would agree that the linux kernel is not anarchist, because only one mainline production version is released- the most recent with Rust, for example. I actually think the wish to view linux as a binary "joined" or "not joined" to the mainline branch is actually a false dichotomy. A better way for software developers to research new software would be to re-examine the purpose of monolithic kernels, and re-evaluate why they are used in the first place. I would say monolithic kernels are more of a convenience, rather than a necessity. I wrote a blog post on this yesterday: https://iotmote.substack.com/p/exokernels-unikernels-and-sin...
Edit: There are other projects that the Linux foundation supports or affiliates with. One is https://xenproject.org/developers/teams/unikraft/ So I wasn't suggesting that the main kernel is the only one, but I think software developers and the tech news websites that cover them could balance the coverage more on different tools that seem to be more "future-proof"
> Linux in production as a people org is definitely NOT anarchistic by any definition I can muster because Linus _is_ the head honcho - it is not a freely associated group skeptical of authority
I disagree. This is not my definition of anarchy.
But the problem with anarchy itself is that it's such a vast subject there is no real and singularly accepted definition. So it tends to create a lot of small subtheories anyone can freely subscribe to. That's very anarchic :-)
In fact this underlines my point and my disagreement with you: anarchism is being free to choose. The kernel, being free software, is anarchistic. You're not free to direct and overrule Linus, but you're free to become your own Linus and fork the kernel.
Commercial software does not allow to do that, because of the existence of copyright, patents and intellectual property laws.
I agree that it is fascinating to explore those ideas, especially in a tech and "capitalist" context like this one. Far too much anarchist theory is based upon a rejection of technology and monetary incentives, which I think are not at all incompatible.
Ok, I'm going to mince words here because they're important for this topic.
Anarchy does not equal and must not be confused with Anarchism. At the risk of sounding condescending, which truly isn't my intention, I'd strongly encourage you to read the respective Wikipedia pages to get a better sense of the definitions that actually are shared and understood. Nuances abound but the foundations are clear and widely accepted.
By these definitions, Linux as a people organization can't be anarchistic. Since Anarchism/Anarchy are states of societal organizations, "software" as a concept also can't really be anarchistic, even if it can be governed as such.
Anyway, I completely agree that commercial software does not have the same capability for the reasons you describe, and I also agree that much thought and time are wasted in anarchist thought on the rejection of technology and monetary incentives and more people should talk about the practical application here!
There's more to it than that. To some extent, we can only discuss anarchy in relation to modern day states. The idea with anarchy is that hierarchies that do end up existing through natural social relationships have as little coercion involved as possible, and be less formalized and centralized than in a state to avoid the inevitable consequence that a state will seek first and foremost its own continuation and calculate everything else based on that premise
Another way of looking at anarchism(or at least how I like to look at it) is to consider that even though humans form structures and hierarchies all the time(e.g.: we make a group and I take the first in line position and the rest follows), this structure/hierarchy/authority can and should be allowed to be questioned, changed, etc(e.g.: You know that I'm going the wrong way and intercede, pointing out, maybe taking the position, etc). This "impermanent" nature is very important because then when you consider the effects of hierarchization, 'solidification', etc, their consequences look a lot like a lot of the problems we see everywhere. I.e.: I decide I'll kill whomever tries to take my position as if it was always mine by birthright or some shit and not a `socially built and agreed upon` one, and if you think of it, looking back, any human structure needs a social agreement otherwise there's gonna be a fight or break-up because humans are social creatures, BY NATURE. Plus, coercion isn't just when I threaten everyone that disagrees with me, if I make up a story/ideology/religion that says everyone must obey me, that's just another form of coercion too.
In this sense, Linux is anarchic because people follow the cool guy doing work upfront for us but at the same time since he's "opened it up" there's a statement that it's not his, and there's also mechanisms through which he's unable to take it away or that others could take his position if he does a bad job, like, shouldn't whats socially created also be socially owned? In Linux case I think it works because the answer was 'yes' from the get go. In this sense, there's just no contradiction at all between anarchism and the situation described, one of the conclusions you could get to is that humans are and have always been anarchists. From this we can also derive "anti-state" because one could argue that most humans didn't even wanted to form or become subject to states, that a lot of what went on there was coercion. The principle wasn't applied and challenging it should be no big deal.
Anarchism is definitely not disorganised, quite the opposite.
44 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 96.3 ms ] thread* Critique of the Gotha Programme, 25 pages
I guess that's why we call it *soft"-ware in the first place. Malleable, reconfigurable, flexible, easily re-writable. extensible...
If software has a problem today it's that it's ceased to be soft. Big Tech would rather we had appliances than general purpose computers, and that we "deploy apps", controlled from the mother-ship, than "run programs". As social infrastructure rather than personal utility, software becomes about fixing and preserving power relations, rather than enabling new ones. It becomes ossified into structures - and the anarchic ones may be as dogmatic as the hierarchic ones.
You don't want corporations to use your software, fine, fuck Google. Then one day you find out that the police may use the software, so you add "law enforcement" to the list of fields of endeavor you want to restrict.
Then it's the military, and that's where the definitions get tricky. The "Cooperative Nonviolent Licenses", just as an example, would have probably not been usable by the Anarchist Confederal militias in the Spanish Civil War.
A think tank promoting nuclear energy uses the license, is that fine? How about a neo-nazi nonprofit?
Soon enough the list of groups you don't like is gonna get long.
Please take a long hard look at how the implicit assumptions behind these discussions do not line up with reality and then move on to building the web of trust with me :P
The best licenses are those that just say "there you go, do whatever you want, but don't fucking sue me." (That means pretty much all mainstream open source licenses)
Copyleft licenses are a defense tool against those parasites. You're free to use the software, anyway you like. You're free to modify the software in anyway you feel fit. The only restriction is that if you choose to share it with others, than you grant them the same freedoms you've been so generously given yourself.
That follows, because there is a lot of evil in this world. If I want to make a token gesture (which I realistically have somewhere between a limited and no ability to enforce against a bunch of armed hooligans like the police or military) against that evil, that's my prerogative.
Maybe, but evil vs good is very subjective and leads to paradoxes like the “anti-capitalist software license” not being usable by one of the most popular examples of anti-capitalism in history, namely the CNT militias in revolutionary Catalonia.
> a bunch of armed hooligans like the police or military
Your hooligan is someone else’s freedom fighter though. /me looks dramatically in the general direction of Kiev
But more importantly, people being able to have varying opinions does not make all opinions correct, just, or even respectable. Ethics are universal: they are the framework from which we judge the actions of both ourselves and others. An assertion that "Doing good is doing what you think is good" is a cop-out, and an (absurd) ethical argument in of itself. Evil people are perfectly capable of rationalizing evil to themselves, they don't need radical subjectivists cheerleading from the sidelines.
>The consistent anarchist, then, should be a socialist, but a socialist of a particular sort. He will not only oppose alienated and specialized labor and look forward to the appropriation of capital by the whole body of workers, but he will also insist that this appropriation be direct, not exercised by some elite force acting in the name of the proletariat.
There are some criticism lodged against their operations, in that some employees are not worker-owners, but simply workers. I'd call this "slack", and I'd suggest "slack" is largely an artifact of a lack of other cooperatives. There is of course the fact that buy-in does cost money, which I would argue would necessarily set a floor for "tenure" in many cases.
Having said that, they have evinced a certain special robustness in the face of crises - in the 80's (iirc) for example, rather than laying people off, they sent them into their education programs.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zaJ1hfVPUe8 https://vimeo.com/161252994
Not necessarily. Please see my other top-level comment in this thread.
Anarchy has a lot of definitions and sub types. Anarchy as complete lack of structure is always used to attack and denigrate it by its opponents, but it's not an inherent characteristic of anarchism itself. Anarchy does not have to mean everybody decides and we put everything to a vote.
Anarchy means you can leave whenever you want. Nobody forces you. No one has the monopoly on violence.
Free software is anarchic. It might have strict rules, and a tyrannical maintainer than only merges what he wants, but it's still anarchic because you can fork it.
Most people tend to be in anarchic relationship with each other, because no one can force something upon the other. That's something only the government does.
In fact, making money and profit does not have to be anti-anarchic. It's certainly against anarcho-communism, but that's just a subbranch of a wider social theory.
And has been for 150 years. There's a treatment of it in the Conquest of Bread where you get the impression that Kropotkin was already tired of it at the time.
You missed the glaring modifier UNECESSARY.
> Anarchy has a lot of definitions and sub types. Anarchy as complete lack of structure is always used to attack and denigrate it by its opponents,
You are the one who is taking “hierarchy and domination” to be synonyms for “structure”. Indeed: that anarchy is without structure or order has been a way to denigrate it since basically forever.
the history of yugoslav workers self-management might interest you
https://transversal.at/transversal/0805/kuljic/en
I've been thinking about this a lot, after doing a lot of reading on anarchic theory this summer and my comment from yesterday saying that the Linux kernel is great because there's a benevolent "dictator" at the top, and the Linux desktop sucks because there is none: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33163760 and below
Anarchism doesn't have to mean flat structure. It's my opinion that you can have a perfectly anarchic software organisation with a leader. Linux is anarchic. You're free to leave whenever you want. There is no coercion. But if you stay, you obey the rules of the head honcho, Mr. Torvalds himself. Linux is more anarchic than Valve, which funnily enough its famous flat structure was discussed in a repost today.
To me anarchy means no coercion. Anarchy does not have to mean disorganised. In fact, with no visionary at the top, the result is often mediocre.
Sorry, I don't have much on topic to contribute, just that I've been thinking about this a lot recently, and this post is serendipitous.
Linux in production as a people org is definitely NOT anarchistic by any definition I can muster because Linus _is_ the head honcho - it is not a freely associated group skeptical of authority because he holds all authority and the keys (even without coercion, which he could readily employ). People don't get to make collective or individual decisions that don't go through the authoritative hierarchy to some degree.
Another point you made somewhere else about being able to fork the codebase gives the software itself an opportunity to allow for more anarchistic setups, but in its current state is relatively far from it in my opinion.
Happy to discuss this more because it's a fascinating topic and I like finding folks who want to engage in dialogue around this.
More to your point though, sure, it's a praxis vs theory thing. There often will be agreed-upon hierarchies and leadership situations in an anarchist system but the point is they don't get to have coercive power and their authority is consensus-based.
I'm curious about your perspective, because when I've seen this argument before, it seems to be based on a personal literal interpretation of the world anarchism as the negation of hierarchy, as if the etymology of the term is more important of the history of the movement. If you have a deeper insight beyond that, it's worth explaining!
Another definition that might be helpful comes from Noam Chomsky's "What is Anarchism?"
"...anarchism is a tendency in human development that seeks to identify structures of hierarchy, domination, authority, and others that constrain human development. And then it seeks to subject them to a very reasonable challenge: Justify yourself, demonstrate that you're legitimate, and maybe in some special circumstances or conceivably in principle. And if you can't meet that challenge, which is the usual case, the structures should be dismantled, not just dismantled but reconstructed from below."
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/noam-chomsky-what-is...
Defining it outside theory is an interesting take. But doesn’t praxis eventually require considering theory when a decision has to be made?
Also check out Intentional Communities: https://www.ic.org/
And of course, the IWW is an anarchist organization - I haven't read the entire constitution but skimming it doesn't describe an actual hierarchy, simply a structure and process of delegation and consensus-based decision-making of job duties and organized geographic branches. In fact, they explicitly decry it in favor of grassroots and worker empowerment.
Intentional community development is one of my projects right now, so I appreciate the reference!
I think what you’re describing is something better than anarchism because it has a lot less historical violent baggage associated with it and probably deserves a new name. It might get one if it grew enough. It would probably still involve hierarchies based on consensus and clear limits on scope and time. More arrangements like these would do a lot of good, and I hope we get more of them!
Edit: There are other projects that the Linux foundation supports or affiliates with. One is https://xenproject.org/developers/teams/unikraft/ So I wasn't suggesting that the main kernel is the only one, but I think software developers and the tech news websites that cover them could balance the coverage more on different tools that seem to be more "future-proof"
I disagree. This is not my definition of anarchy.
But the problem with anarchy itself is that it's such a vast subject there is no real and singularly accepted definition. So it tends to create a lot of small subtheories anyone can freely subscribe to. That's very anarchic :-)
In fact this underlines my point and my disagreement with you: anarchism is being free to choose. The kernel, being free software, is anarchistic. You're not free to direct and overrule Linus, but you're free to become your own Linus and fork the kernel.
Commercial software does not allow to do that, because of the existence of copyright, patents and intellectual property laws.
I agree that it is fascinating to explore those ideas, especially in a tech and "capitalist" context like this one. Far too much anarchist theory is based upon a rejection of technology and monetary incentives, which I think are not at all incompatible.
Anarchy does not equal and must not be confused with Anarchism. At the risk of sounding condescending, which truly isn't my intention, I'd strongly encourage you to read the respective Wikipedia pages to get a better sense of the definitions that actually are shared and understood. Nuances abound but the foundations are clear and widely accepted.
By these definitions, Linux as a people organization can't be anarchistic. Since Anarchism/Anarchy are states of societal organizations, "software" as a concept also can't really be anarchistic, even if it can be governed as such.
Anyway, I completely agree that commercial software does not have the same capability for the reasons you describe, and I also agree that much thought and time are wasted in anarchist thought on the rejection of technology and monetary incentives and more people should talk about the practical application here!
In this sense, Linux is anarchic because people follow the cool guy doing work upfront for us but at the same time since he's "opened it up" there's a statement that it's not his, and there's also mechanisms through which he's unable to take it away or that others could take his position if he does a bad job, like, shouldn't whats socially created also be socially owned? In Linux case I think it works because the answer was 'yes' from the get go. In this sense, there's just no contradiction at all between anarchism and the situation described, one of the conclusions you could get to is that humans are and have always been anarchists. From this we can also derive "anti-state" because one could argue that most humans didn't even wanted to form or become subject to states, that a lot of what went on there was coercion. The principle wasn't applied and challenging it should be no big deal.
Anarchism is definitely not disorganised, quite the opposite.