I've said it for years and I'm sticking to it that you can't solve political "problems" (real or otherwise) with technology.

Not for the masses and not sustainabl,

It's always easier to have a paper say "do this" than finding a tech to circumvent it.

Politics is fundamentally people business and involves lots of people who can't or won't understand the details of what is going on but who may still be interested in the end results.

i also want believe the same, but i am increasingly disillusioned that there's a political process that is capable of reforming it - think about the fact that no one asked for these measures of censorship, but they keep creeping in, as though some vested interest has been pushing it through at every opportunity.

So the lack of ability to solve this politically has made technological solution the only out.

You can definitely create political problems with technology. Why can't technology have a role in solving political problems too?

The problem is when tech people try apply tech to political problems crudely, without understanding or without caring about the human aspect of it. You need sociologists and political scientists to study what impact a technology will actually have, and normal people to see how they feel about it, not just programmers who may incorrectly assume that e.g. designing an open and secure protocol will automatically and directly map to creating an open and secure society.

For example, in this case, the blunt approach is "How do we design a protocol that can't be censored/monitored?" The answer is TOR, which as parent comment noted, is socially a non-starter. But maybe a better approach could be, "How do we design a protocol which removes the incentives/makes it politically untenable for people to censor/monitor it?"

One way you might approach this is to create a system that's organically useless for bad actors. Clearly different platforms have different levels of "safe" and "awful", due to their structure. Could we design a platform with such strong prosocial incentives that authoritarians are not able to fearmonger about it?

Another approach could be to chain common citizen rights to authoritarian interests. For example, the US government cannot backdoor AES, because doing so would also compromise their own communciations. Can we make it so authoritarians are forced onto the same boat as us for our other communication technologies too, and therefore disincentivized from weakening our privacy because doing so would damage theirs too?

ActivityPub, ATProto, and blockchain could also be seen as technologies that are designed to create a social structure that incentivizes specific political outcomes, with varying degrees of success.

It's people business. So you design around questions like "Where is this technology going to put different types of people, and how are they going to feel about that?"