Thus structurelessness becomes a way of masking power, and within the women’s movement is usually most strongly advocated by those who are the most powerful (whether they are conscious of their power or not). As long as the structure of the group is informal, the rules of how decisions are made are known only to a few and awareness of power is limited to those who know the rules. Those who do not know the rules and are not chosen for initiation must remain in confusion, or suffer from paranoid delusions that something is happening of which they are not quite aware.

“The basic divide at work here is between those capitalists that make money by selling access to content, and those that make money by controlling the content distribution networks,” explains sociologist Peter Frase. “For content sellers like the music business, extremely harsh intellectual property laws are desirable because they create the artificial scarcity on which their whole business model depends. Companies like Facebook and Google, in contrast, mostly make their money by controlling the platforms on which people distribute various kinds of media, and selling access to their user base to advertisers.” For the latter group, looser copyright laws don’t pose a threat to their profits but actually facilitate them; the more copying and sharing happen, the faster their revenues grow.