@Remittancegirl @corbden@defcon.social I suspect you may be running into the (widespread) problem of historical revisionism here.

I've been involved in some non-hierarchical movements, and absolutely without exception, any reporting about it (by eg. journalists) tried to declare someone a leader even though they weren't, with journalists frequently insisting that there *must* be a leader somewhere when we talked to them.

I think it's reasonable to expect that this has happened to historical movements too, and so decentralized movements would have been incorrectly reported as having a hierarchy, eventually making it into the historical record that way, and creating a false impression of every successful movement having been hierarchical.