It's funny how @Enso and I have exact opposite opinions about urban/rural. My 10 cents on why I don't believe urbanization has a bright future can be summed up in a two words: centralization and massification. Both great strategies to control and generate a plague (that's us), but aren't very great for humyns and non-humyns who are being controlled and massified; and not so good for experimenting with truly sustainable ways of living, not apart from nature but within nature, as that is the only way for any being on this planet to live fully.

10 billion is a lot, but for the better or the worse, I think nature will take care of that. When a body is infested by cancerous cells there's no other solution, either the body dies or it succeeds in disabling the destructive cells. And I think we're a really weak type of cancer, and Gaia will easily cleanse itself. Sorry for the apocalyptic tone, but I think we're beyond going back, and we should start thinking of #the-great-cleansing as inevitable, nor good or bad. Like everything that's centralized, urbanities have central points of failure, and if even a few of those points fail, the whole structure can crumble over night. A great example being the truck-driver strikes that happened last year in Brasil, which gave a glimpse of how fragile centralization can be. Being more locally self-sufficient within my community, I was unaffected by it. So ruralities should find ways of organizing themselves better economically and politically as it has more space for experimentation and it's modularity permits easier organization, and urbanities should start decentralizing if it wants to survive.

Now going back to the original question, I think @pospi and @noffle pointed out great ways to achieve truly decentralized communications across the Globe. I don't think I've got anything else to add :) Mesh all the way!

One thing I've talked about with @befree and @nicoechaniz in person, is that education is key to expanding #communitynetworks, which is not only a means of achieving communication sovereignty, but also political and economical inter-dependence.