What do you guys think of the following argument? (Apologies in advance if it’s too technical)

TLDR: effective complexity matters, not just ideal complexity, and the current level of technological advancement likely enables horizontal structures to have a higher effective complexity than hierarchical structures

It all starts from the fact that complex problems need complex solutions (Ashby’s law of requisite variety), and societal problems are complex. Decentralized systems are more complex than centralized ones, and decentralized planning is more complex a market that is just based on price signals. This would then in theory justify decentralized governance over centralized governance and a decentralized planning economy over a market economy.

This justification is not really new. However, this justification only really considers ideal cases. In reality, just like hierarchical systems have an information bottleneck via lossy data compression as information travels upwards, horizontal systems can have an informational bottleneck through noisy raw data when people don’t communicate or coordinate effectively. These information bottlenecks essentially translate to an effectiveness of a system.

I doubt that the following is very original, but the effectiveness of an information bottleneck is essentially directly influenced by the current level of technological advancement in society. However, the effectiveness from a horizontal information bottleneck scales differently with technological advancements than the effectiveness from a hierarchical bottleneck. At low levels of technology, hierarchical systems may have a higher effective complexity, but at high levels of technology (which we are at or approaching) systems approach their ideal complexity, such that horizontal systems would have a higher effective complexity.

This is all to say that while previous anarchist or horizontal societies over the long have been defeated or replaced by more hierarchical systems due to a variety of reasons, one important reason to consider is that maybe technological advancement weren’t at the level yet to enable large scale horizontal societies. I don’t know when technology advanced sufficiently to enable large scale horizontal societies, but I’d definitely we are at that point now.

Looking forward, this also frames the development of information technologies and coordination methods as one of the most important aspects that an anarchist movement should actively try to develop. I would think that a society should to try to optimize for its current effective complexity while being forward to looking to try to continue increasing its effective complexity. So, while certain hierarchies may be temporally justified based on the level current technologies (even in some future), we should always be trying to develop technologies or methods that enable the effective complexity of horizontal structure to surpass that of their hierarchical alternatives