I think that the medium shapes the resulting political characteristics of the system, yes the centralized network, where every user is easily traceable thus readily policed and censored, ends up creating totalitarianism, given how human nature works...
So we need to design a system that isn't easily traced, as an inherent property of how it operates, so that it's not possible for those who want to exert power over others, to do so.
Just as an example, using a radio/satellite data broadcasting architecture, where the receiver is untraceable, means that the government can no longer round up people for reading "forbidden" things anymore. That allows us to have a new darknet to replace Tor that's far more difficult for the government to police.
Again as an example, the content request can be transmitted anonymously using HF radio or LoRaWAN, being only a few bytes, and has no sender address. And the response can come down via satellite, broadcast to everyone, who also ends up storing it locally on their computer. That way we can reduce the number of retransmissions required. We already have a usable worldwide satellite data broadcasting network, you can see a list of recent transmissions at https://blocksat.info.
It's certainly enough bandwidth to support a text based darknet, which works in a similar way to how Teletext did, but with caching of content on your local hard disk. Which you can browse freely like the Internet.
The big disadvantage of the T420s/430s is the s batteries do not use standard cells. The T420/430, X220/230 (and I assume w series) battery packs use standard 18650 cells.
In the x220 battery packs the controllers are not locked down hard (the later x230 batteries appear locked down and cannot be reset the same way... likely need either special software or may be able to connect directly to flash). The controller (bq8030 or bq2090 or similar) nvram can be dumped and written using the laptops built-in battery management smbus.
I recently re-celled mine; dump the calibration nvram before starting (not the end of the world if you didn't). Buy whatever power tool battery is on clearance. Swap the 18650 li-ion cells. For a cheap and cheerful spot welder, you can buy a board with some FETs to switch power from a car battery. Restore the firmware. Run Lenovo battery calibration.
Lots of info at http://www.karosium.com/2016/08/hacking-bq8030-with-sanyo-fi... (no affiliation, but found it a great resource!). If you didn't save your firmware or starting from a toasted battery, compare and contrast to calibration dumps found online. TI also has general specs available on a similar controller.
The battery controller will set a bit to disable the battery when the cell voltages get out of sync when removing/adding cells (other ways of dealing with this too.... holding controller in reset, voltage in parallel). Restoring the nvram calibration data resets this. Finding most data in the dump was relatively easy by comparing to battery statistics available through ThinkPad tools. I have detailed notes and posted to comments at above site.
There's some debate on different cell charging profiles as the original cells were 4.1v versus modern chemistry being 4.2v and so potentially will end up undercharged... but I've had great success just dropping in and don't feel the need to squeeze out more capacity.
Took an afternoon to do....not necessarily worth it, but was a fun project to figure out. My 9-cell is back to 10 hours of runtime/way better than any aftermarket I've tried.
I've lost a few very good friends due to this. In-person and online interactions with the same person would vary wildly in tone and emotional intensity, like speaking to two entirely different people. The online interactions always pushed us apart, and the in-person interactions never failed to mend things, but of course those stopped happening over the previous year. I have to assume it's the same way with me toward others.
If I may entertain an idea without necessarily believing it, I would not be surprised if many of the accounts on major social-media sites like Reddit, Twitter, etc are non-human persons tasked with pushing one narrative or another (no specific implication intended/assumed). The "subreddit simulator" powered by GPT-2 bots has more than enough realistic-seeming conversations to make me not immediately reject the idea, since we've all seen how much better GPT-3 is and I assume private entities have even better language models than that: https://old.reddit.com/r/SubSimulatorGPT2/
My additional total-speculation is that all the NSA/FVEY surveillance of our everyday online conversations and interactions would be an excellent training set for such a hypothetical language model.
So we need to design a system that isn't easily traced, as an inherent property of how it operates, so that it's not possible for those who want to exert power over others, to do so.
Just as an example, using a radio/satellite data broadcasting architecture, where the receiver is untraceable, means that the government can no longer round up people for reading "forbidden" things anymore. That allows us to have a new darknet to replace Tor that's far more difficult for the government to police.
Again as an example, the content request can be transmitted anonymously using HF radio or LoRaWAN, being only a few bytes, and has no sender address. And the response can come down via satellite, broadcast to everyone, who also ends up storing it locally on their computer. That way we can reduce the number of retransmissions required. We already have a usable worldwide satellite data broadcasting network, you can see a list of recent transmissions at https://blocksat.info.
It's certainly enough bandwidth to support a text based darknet, which works in a similar way to how Teletext did, but with caching of content on your local hard disk. Which you can browse freely like the Internet.