Delegative democracy or some form of representation was historically (and somewhat still) necessary because we have never perfected any process of direct democracy that is scalable. With the perfection of digital voting and encryption, maybe we will in the near future. Direct democracy was always the anarchist goal, but delegative democracy was necessary in order to get it to work on any large scale.

As for rules vs. rulers... If you perfect democracy and achieve a consensus-based system, then everyone is a ruler. But if everyone is a ruler, no one is a ruler—no one is ruled over by anyone else, autonomy reigns. There's a certain failure of language here that causes the dialectic to swirl and collapse in on itself as the distinctions lose their distinctness. It's kind of like the question of public ownership vs. private ownership in a Georgist (land value tax) framework. Do Georgists advocate private property or communal ownership? The answer is yes! The distinction starts to break down.