The Internet origin story you know is wrong

This reads like a college student who was assigned a book review assignment and wrote it an hour before class.

There are other aspects of the origin story that seem to be myth. For instance, the idea that the Internet was designed to route around damage, and could also treat censorship as a form of damage, and therefore it was resistant to censorship.

I once spent a long weekend reading through the early RFCs. What I found was the obvious recognition of the fact that AT&T, which at the time had a monopoly on telephone services in the USA, was circuit-switched, whereas IP was being designed to be packet-switched, and clearly a packet-switched technology could be more decentralized than a circuit-switched technology. But that is the only shred of evidence I could find in favor of something like an ideology of decentralization. I could not find anything explicit in the design documents of the 1970s and 1980s.

As near as I can tell, the more grandiose claims of decentralization don't show up till the late 1990s, and those claims are not especially made by the technologists themselves (with the exception of Bob Metcalfe). It's mostly techno-utopians and libertarians who begin to make the bolder claims about how the Internet is fundamentally decentralized and resistant to censorship. People like Kevin Kelly, writing in Wired Magazine in the 1990s, made the most utopian claims about the decentralization of the Internet.

I've looked, and I've had trouble finding evidence of bold claims of decentralization, being made in the 1970s or 1980s, except in the very obvious case case that a packet-switched network is less necessarily centralized than a circuit-switched network. The myth gets built in the 1990s, and is then retro-imposed on the 1970s and 1980s.

Kind of depends on what we mean when we use the word "Internet". If we mean internet as a social/economic revolution, then sure, BBSs were relevant. If we mean Internet as a set of protocols, software that implements them, and hardware to run them on, then I don't see that BBSs had a lot of relevance (though they used sliding window protocols for file transfer such as ZMODEM/YMODEM).

maybe all the arpanet design docs are not public?

You won’t find anyone saying that censorship is the type of damage to be routed around, in a serious engineering way, because that’s more of a colloquialism than a true design principle. Asserting that it was almost seems like a straw man.

The concept of routing around censorship is more of a behavior by people using the applications that the Internet has enabled. There’s no RFC for that.