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"How can we punch harder or more effectively?"

Good question, I don't know.

Ultimately this is a personal question each person should ask themselves, know what they want, what they're capable of and decide what to do, if anything.

This question implies that's what's going on in the streets is not good enough, that it can be better.
I'd tend to agree, but I'd also question that. The amount of precincts burnt, courthouses, a youth jail construction site, etc. Sure, there's always room for improvement, perfection enemy of the good, yadda yadda, maybe in next 100 years there will come a chance to improve it, or maybe this is the last chance, and things will have changed so much by then. We don't really know all the ways one thing could lead to another, so ultimately, hindsight will tell.

We're not steering crowds or commanding hurricane goon squads. The movement building homework due date has passed, and now came the time of mobilizing. All the same things that have been talked forever by activists, strugglistas, the Real movement or movement of the real, whatever you want to call it.

What are the recent trends? Covid accelerated the transition into telework, the technology was there, it was mostly a cultural thing that stopped the full transition. Plus you know, resistance to change because people get kinda lazy when forced to learn new tedious software, extra work for same or less pay. Courts have been seeing cases through video conference, schools have taken classes through zoom. And much more that we’ll be discussing for years to come, but not now.

What I’ll point to now is, increasingly the places and the ways that “power is held” (a poor phrase, since it’s actually relations of submission and domination, and is more akin to flows, but it’s a shorthand to get a quick idea across) are decentralized, or at least moved away from the now vacated symbols of power; precincts, courthouses, stores...soon we could imagine a world without prisons, everybody on house arrest, similar to a permanent quarantine to contain the contagion of revolt (a cliche thing to say since forever). Everyone will be entertained or bored on the internet, maybe discussing things like this to pass time.

"Alternately, should we heed Uncle Ted and punch somewhere else instead?"

Ted was thinking of Techno-Industrial Society, most people protesting don't have this as their enemy, most don't even have the police as enemies, much less the state. The principle of hitting elsewhere while police and federal alphabet soup agencies are distracted elsewhere is sound, yet knowing the principle by itself gets you nowhere. It's like seeing an opening in some sport you're watching from the t.v. Knowing what was the move the athlete had to do to win the game does not make you a high level athlete. If you're like Ted, this whole situation doesn't change your targets. If you're an anarchist arsonist, it would be convenient for you to avoid the protests to get less eyes and phone cameras on you. You don't want to be all over TV and twitter with couch-potato death-squads cyber-snitches on the case.

Antenna relay attacks have recently become more popular. Those that have carried them out had good reasons and they made them public. Yet, they recognize that they quickly get repaired right after, progress continues. A pettier version of that attack would be going for the telecom boxes in streets and be a nuisance in neighborhoods all over the place. Even pettier, destroy your own computer, router and belongings.

Natural disasters knock down the electric grid like it’s nothing, and they repair it in a matter of months at worst. A Ted K type person, who went after scientists, not their laboratories, or their inventions, would attack the grid repairmen. They’re unarmed and vulnerable, they’re few and precious, working overtime after disasters. Training new ones takes time, experience is invaluable. How many can you kill before they catch you? Congratulations, now everyone will use the available diesel or gas generators, or solar for a while. Police and army will manage, they still have guns and networks of influence. There will be a clusterfuck and more chaos, good on you, but there’s a reason you went after the easy targets.

That’s the problem with this metaphor. Society isn’t a body, it doesn’t die if you cut off its head. The fists keep punching after you dismember the soft bits and castrate the dangly bits. Cultural change is messy. Sometimes it happens slowly, sometimes in spurts. War is messy, sometimes it obliterates thoroughly, most times it’s just a continuity. You can take actions that are clear-cut to you amidst the chaos, at most you can attack a few times during your lifetime, if that’s what you want to make of it. Very few have a lifetime full of exploits. A lot get jailed for the first little thing they do, get long sentences where they struggle to barely stay alive, and people outside struggle so that their names don’t get forgotten. But this isn’t a fight that you can win by defeating your grand opponent. If you’re going against the world, you've already lost from the start, unless you consider yourself a champion for such defiance, regardless of outcomes.

True that cops aren’t “the world”, specially if you delimit it to cops in a specific area, but think of a country in the world in which cops are not the status quo. It seems like any place willing to abolish police or the army in an area would eventually be targeted by the surrounding police or armies. It’s true, the police can’t be everywhere at once, and neither can you. It’s easier to evade them than to destroy them all or make them all surrender. When people live unruly lives of evasion, they make a joke of the police. Riot police are geared up for static confrontation, they’re not geared to moving around long distances endlessly. You win the fight against “a police” by moving outside its jurisdiction or sphere of influence. By doing so you’ll likely fall inside the jurisdiction of another. You can move from gap to gap of “no man’s land” of underground networks. This is less exotic than it sounds, it’s everyday business for many, and it’s as shady as it sounds. Drug traffickers etc. don’t beat cops by engaging in constant frontal battles against cops and the army, federal agents etc. They evade and are ready to shoot while they gas it. They literally have submarines to go “under the radar”. The question left to ask is "watchu gonna do when they come for you?".