If you think that’s laughable, consider your relationship with Facebook or Google.
What would an anarchist think of Len Sassaman's idea for doing a scalable remailer that had a centralized component (if I remember correctly)?
What would an anarchist say about the design of the directory servers in Tor?
What would an anarchist say about using DNS to host a git repo on a website?
If the answer is that an anarchist would reflexively focus mindshare on the centralization because it is a priori unethical, then anarchism as an institution is a hindrance to software development.
A lot of things hinder software development: laws and regulations; skepticism of the community; lack of resources; technical constraints of existing hardware; trade secrets and patents to maintain an edge against competitors; ethics and morals incidental to the organization of society...
hell we're already in a place where people reflexively look at centralized services (and even decentralized services) and see future hierarchy.
not all hindrances are equal but
a) do you imagine anarchism to be a uniquely strong hindrance
b) do you consider that hindering of software development to be a sufficient issue to object to anarchy.
The hindrance is a developer reflexively prioritizing criticism of some centralized part of a design without fully understanding the design, because "centralized" necessarily equates to "bad" or "wrong."
Some of the back-and-forth with Moxie over federating Signal looked suspiciously like a case of that. I see a lot of similar discussions wrt FLOSS privacy/security software. To the extent that anarchy is responsible for the ideological bent that "centralized" is "bad,", I'd say yes, it's a problem that wastes a substantial amount of time and effort.
> b) do you consider that hindering of software development to be a sufficient issue to object to anarchy.
Maybe you can help me come to a conclusion. Where does the ideological bent come from that "centralization" equates to "bad" in FLOSS privacy software?
For all I know, it could be that most anarchists are opportunistic and savvy in how they use computers, and it's only the anarchist software developers who have the ideological bent I described.
so, uh
https://www.wired.com/2016/07/meet-moxie-marlinspike-anarchi...
