Re: “the Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.” That comment was originally made about USENET, in the "alt.humor.funny" episode at Stanford in the early 1980s. Due to some political correctness issue, the newsgroup "alt.humor.funny" was blocked at Stanford's main USENET gateway.
USENET is an eventually-consistent database system. When USENET nodes connect, each has a list of groups it knows about. For each group a node knows, it tells the other end what item sequence numbers it has. The node being asked then provides any items the asking node doesn't have.
This really does route around censorship. Almost all the USENET traffic went through the main Stanford USENET gateway, but a few machines on campus made occasional USENET connections to outside machines. That was all it took to keep the Stanford USENET machines in sync with the outside world. Anything deleted at the main gateway was filled in over other links.
That's where the line came from. From the days when we really had distributed networking.
A subtlety is that more effective censorship was possible in USENET: by forging corrupted or redacted versions of particular posts, or, to an extent, with cancelbots. (The second is potentially less effective because people could configure systems to ignore cancel messages, but the former could work really well because USENET never had a content-integrity mechanism, so you could certainly convince nodes that they already had an article and hence didn't need to retrieve it again.)
USENET is an eventually-consistent database system. When USENET nodes connect, each has a list of groups it knows about. For each group a node knows, it tells the other end what item sequence numbers it has. The node being asked then provides any items the asking node doesn't have.
This really does route around censorship. Almost all the USENET traffic went through the main Stanford USENET gateway, but a few machines on campus made occasional USENET connections to outside machines. That was all it took to keep the Stanford USENET machines in sync with the outside world. Anything deleted at the main gateway was filled in over other links.
That's where the line came from. From the days when we really had distributed networking.