"I don't believe ... the answers to our current situation reside in a political solution..."

I have come to believe this as well. Indeed, in my understanding, politics are irrelevant, and obsolete. I should clarify that I do have a political point of view, and reckon everyone does, but that regardless of those views, matters beyond our individual preferences, beyond politics, are effecting changes in the way power is wielded.

Decentralization is ongoing. As technology advances it is becoming able to be deployed by individuals to an ever greater degree. Particularly AI is delivering the power of institutions to individuals, and AI moderates all other technologies in an alarming way. Excel, the software, is a form of AI that delivers the power of a team of accountants to it's users. One person, using Excel, can do analysis that only a few years ago would have required a fleet of analysts. Excel (I am using it as a symbol of similar AI tech) is continuing to improve, and as it does, and means of interfacing with AI, along with the power of computers, advances, a breaking point is being reached. This ability to analyze and calculate is becoming so technical that it is necessarily being simplified to the point that the interface is disappearing.

I set up my first network in 1987, before Windows existed, before DOS was even commonly available. As networks became more complex the use of the software became more difficult, and as more devices and interfacing mechanisms were introduced, controlling networks was increased in complexity. However the GUI changed that, and networks became very simple, relatively speaking, for the end users to work in. The commands necessary to send a file to Bob over the network were mostly automated, and Alice didn't need to know how to format and write the command lines that executed the transfer herself. She only needed to use a shorthand, and the GUI did the rest.

As the complete individual control of software was rendered obsolete, more of the inner workings of software became obscure and ineffable. Along with this came virii and malware, hiding in those dark corners of programs we didn't need to precisely control anymore. Today you need to know almost nothing about network topology to use a smartphone to text your mom, and the operating systems themselves are malware, sort of dualities magically undertaking to make your communications facile, yet eliminating your privacy and security by spying on you for the overlords profiting from your use of their products.

But networks continue to evolve, and evolutionary forces necessarily determine how they do. As Bob and Alice are harmed by overlords spying on them, they increasingly seek to secure their communications to protect themselves, and that institutional power that has marked production, being the source of harm, is becoming obsolete as a result. Mesh networks, encrypted communications, and open source hard and soft ware are becoming the cutting edge of technological advance as individuals seek to survive and prosper. To prosper they need to control the tech they use to prevent malice from being part of it, and decentralization across all fields is beginning to eliminate overlords that are the societal malware causing harm.

Looking forward and applying what we have observed, it seems likely that soon we will be printing our own phones, and choosing our software from open source free libraries, while creating the communications network as an ad hoc system where each of us is both a node and the means to pass communications to surrounding nodes, rendering institutional instrusion and parasitism obsolete. Clearly this is not the intention of those overlords who are the beneficiaries of institutional power, but the harm they cause individuals by parasitizing them is naturally avoided and defenses evolve against that harm necessarily. Since it is the vector of institutional power that is the source of that harm, it is institutional power and parasitism that is becoming obsolete as development advances. These forces operate at a sub-societal level. They are primal forces, not societal, or institutionally determined - not politics, and not impacted by politics.

Using decentralized communications secure from parasitism is necessary for communists and capitalists, overlords and serfs alike. Institutions are becoming obsolete, as technology advances individual means of production across every field of industry. Institutional power is necessarily centralized and parasitic, and these limits are surmounted by physics, something institutions and political power cannot either command or ban. This evolution is a natural force, waves smashing on a beach, that only allows barnacles to survive in certain zones, and nothing else.

If we want to use the beach, we simply are mindful of the surf. We don't prevent waves and tides, we wait for low tide to use the lower beach, and stay higher when the tide is high. Our political bent doesn't change that at all. Capitalists and Communists alike use the beach the same way. This limits the siting of harbors, and restricts our launching of boats off the beach to certain kinds of boats in particular ways, and to certain times.

Similarly, society rides on the waves of technological development, and as individual means of production, mesh networks, and open source free software continue to develop, the erosion of institutional power is as natural and inevitable as the erosion of the bedrock of the beach, and just as sand is produced by tide and storm, so is a society of individuals empowered to associate freely by technology. Our politics can only ride the landscape, and thus decentralization renders politics obsolete in the end, as institutional power to project force cannot compel obedience in a decentralized landscape.

Barnacles cannot live on the sand, but must stick to rocks. Only those societies possible to impose on the shifting sand of decentralized industrial power are potential going forward, and our political desires are immaterial to this. Further, as transportation advances, eventually space travel will become available to individuals at their sole option. In the infinite universe, no collectivism imposed by overlords is possible.

We will be free, and the stars like sand in our toes.