Very well said!
I like this concept of the state:
The State is the network of institutions that mediate and standardize the relationships and exchanges between individuals.
So far, in human history, we have only experienced societies that operated through trust in institutions or trust in tribalist gangs. What anarchists want is actually institutions without explicit rulers. Many anarchists have an oversimplified understanding of what is a state and the history behind political philosophy.
I will actually write a paper on a new metapolitical theory based on network theory and game theory.
Here's my poetic hint at what it encompasses:
All the world’s a network,
And all the men and women merely nodes;
They have dynamic stochastic payoff functions,
And each node contains multiple parameters.
An implication that follows this is that the conflict between statism and anarchy is an illusion. You're simply dealing with different centrality measurements and valuing certain parameters differently. Clustering is inevitable in social networks regardless of your political beliefs, and there are inherent mathematical attributes of clustering that cannot be brushed away by ideology.
It doesn't change the central formula that the use of force and anything that aids this is accessory to the crime. I agree, fundamentally humans have to run some kind of network, and it will naturally be somewhat hierarchic. But with the 'common knowledge' that the force of the state is necessary for peace, this centralisation is incentivised and rewarded, and the cost is incaclulable.
We need to have people willing to do things that might be ignorantly called 'violent', I say ignorant because it ignores the very basis of the meaning of 'violate' which is to initiate trespass upon the rights of another. Under most systems of jurisprudence, any response to this initial trespass is not violence, but self defence, since by violating the violator is thereby stating by their actions that the violated is in fact their property, since only property has no rights. This therefore makes the opposite and equal position, that then the defender has the right to treat the violator as property, and dispose of them. The defender is right and just. The violator is not.
The deceptive concealment of this right to violate, and its inherent claim of property rights over human beings, is the central premise of States. When you have a society where this is not the status quo, it cannot be called a state. Governance might be a term that can be used for this competitive regulation, and you are right in pointing out that parts of it necessarily must contain the star/tree network graph topology. But in a system where violence is shunned, and recognised for what it is, these star networks cannot grow large because the bigger they get, the more likely they are to cause disorder to arise, not least of all when the head (trunk, or centre) is cut off. The so-called 'power vacuum'.
It simply cannot arise if there is already the right of defence for everyone that is founded upon the sanctity of the individual. Those who sell their services of defence and use centralised chains of command, when these networks get corrupted, simply by the freedom to redirect funding to others who do not do this, as well as affirmation of the rights of disorganised groups (insurgencies) to eliminate this threat to peace and prosperity, such events will become rare and not be any longer the central pattern recurring over the history of humankind.
It inevitably, eventually must happen, and it is happening, and the decentralised communication of the internet is the core enabler of this happening.