Just a comment on "tribal" structures. There's a question here of how much tacit regulation exists here, which potentially makes the appearance of lack of hierarchy deceptive: power and hierarchy may be tacitly embedded in shared beliefs and rules that need not be explicitly formulated because they are already taken as unquestionable by all participants (I'm not necessarily saying that's the situation with your present-day example). But one of the characteristics of modern societies, the disembedding of communication from particularized contexts and the development of "any-context-at-all"-capable discourse and sign systems, continues, even in a more intensive form, I think, into a networked age. When a Japanese web aggregator picks up my blog post for his newsletter and I retweet his link to my followers, we are, yes, framed by the ensemble of technologies, but substantially unconcerned by any embedded, tacit, local considerations about the protocols of proper communication (eg. you first speak to the oldest in the room, or you make eye contact with everyone, or you avoid eye contact with your superiors, or you use the "vous" rather than the "tu" with this person, etc.). So network organization isn't just tribal organization purged of its negative characteristics, eg. patriarchy, but rather it mobilizes (potentially) new degrees of freedom from both given social hierarchies and organizational frameworks AS WELL AS embedded codes, received customs, and tacit regulation. I think that "as well as" is the crux, the really novel thing to think through. Or in other words, what would the loose, affiliative relations that you see in societies not organized by formal governance and rules be like when coupled with thoroughly post-conventional means of communication, which wasn't the case in tribal organizations, despite their "anarchic" appearance?