I agree that the informational boundaries (I’d probably identify them as bottlenecks) for computer systems are not nearly as well defined as they are in computer systems and that is a good differentiator as most of my experience is with computer systems. I’d also point out that most sandwich counters use queues, which is a common tool to throw at distributed systems in computer systems as well.

As far as async communications being hard, that’s very subjective. I’m a firm believer in Rich Hickey’s differentiation between Easy/Hard and Simple/Complex. They’re orthogonal concepts. I think what makes that complexity hard for some people when designing asynchronous systems is that they want to recreate synchronous systems with the same invariants rather than using a toolkit more suited to asynchrony. So ease is largely about familiarity imo, even if the systems do tend to be more complex.

I’d say a similar dynamic exists for designing anarchist systems as well where people will attempt to recreate hierarchical dynamics within horizontal organizations and get frustrated when things don’t directly translate.