Every social website (I include forums in this category) is, at its core, someone's experiment in autocracy. There's no escaping this, however much power users might appear to have, the admin will do what the admin wants and mods are gods.
Whether this implies anything by extension about the nature of governments or militaries I leave as a futile thought exercise for others.
You are right, but I am not sure which social model would fit to everybody as comforting. Many people are offended by Anarchy and it remains a question to me if communities would actually be able to manage themselves or not. Do you have some more food of thought to share, that's quite interesting? :)
I don't have any real insight. If any user at all could ban or unban anyone else then it might be chaos. The autocratic nature of it comes from the fact that someone and not everyone controls the code and the server. How could you have true equality on a social site without giving users a dangerous level of privilege?
Whether this implies anything by extension about the nature of governments or militaries I leave as a futile thought exercise for others.