Is is though?

Maybe that's just a reflection of the organizations that have created said software.

yes, because it allows centralized control and that control is absolute.

Whether an organization decides to lock things down or not is a different discussion, but software itself is absolutely authoritarian in nature.

And the scary part is that it's absolute. If you have employees who shouldn't be doing a thing you make it company policy, but with software you flat out enforce it.

Software has its absolutes - and those are often good things. Security, ability for backup, redundancy, scalability. We value these things.

Whether those attributes are applied toward authoritarianism or freedom is largely up to the developer and the backers and users.

And over time we may have started with systems that are centralized because our abilities were young at the time, but distributed systems are very popular and often the goal. One example is version control systems: all the systems prior to Git/Mercurial and those after.

With social networks, the network effects are dominant, but I am hopeful that distributed systems will eventually dominate.

> Whether those attributes are applied toward authoritarianism or freedom is largely up to the developer and the backers and users.

That they can be applied at all makes software authoritarian in nature.

software enables something we've never truly had, which is automated, effective force at a distance.