grains

Permacomputing

Permacomputing is an emerging practice around sustainability and resilience of computing systems. The concept draws inspiration from the ideas of permaculture.

The permacomputing community is concerned about designing simple, durable and repairable systems, as well as extending the lifespan of existing, "obsolete" technology, both chips and software.

The term isn't widespread yet. I follow the discussion happening on Permacomputing.net and merveilles.

Quotes from Permacomputing.net #

Principles:

IMPORTANT: let's not have any misunderstanding. Permacomputing is a political project. It is driven by several strands of anarchism, feminism, post-marxism, degrowth, environmentalism. We're not here to help you greenwash your new sustainable ICT ideas, green AI, innovative art+science projects, ecological web3 funding, circular crypto carbon credit backoffice, and other nonsensical technosolutionist forms of climate denial. Please go elsewhere :)

https://permacomputing.net/contribute/

Today Google places its data centres in the vicinity of, for instance, a windfarm and purchases its energy there. In Eemshaven, the Netherlands, Google constructed a hyperscale data centre and made a deal with a local energy provider to purchase all of the energy produced by a local windfarm. Microsoft did something similar when building a datacenter in Hollands Kroon, purchasing all energy produced by a local windfarm for 10 years. According to the provider, Nuon, the energy could power 370.000 households. These windfarms have received subsidies by the Dutch government with the goal of achieving green energy and emission targets, but because they end up solely covering the energy demand of newly constructed data centres, representing additional instead of existing energy use, no progress is made and taxpayers are indirectly sponsoring Google’s green public image.

The overarching problem with the sustainability reports of large corporations is not just the misleading statistics, its the focus on CO2 emissions. Their impact is bigger than emitting CO2; additional problems are the production of their hardware, their land and water use, the ewaste they produce and of course the thing that all this focus on CO2 emissions is trying to hide from public scrutiny: their business model; based on growth, that through surveillance and targeted advertisement, stimulates overconsumption and thereby overproduction and its destructive impact on the planet. Let’s not get too stuck on CO2 emission metrics, turning the issue into a tidy accounting problem, it shouldn’t distract attention from the bigger picture!

https://damaged.bleu255.com/Degrowth/

Design for Disassembly ensures that all elements of a product can be disassembled for repair and for ?end of life. This allows for and encourages repairs, with the result that a product's life cycle is prolonged; and it allows for a product to be taken apart at the end of its life so that each component can be reclaimed.

https://permacomputing.net/Design_for_disassembly/

A bedrock platform is a hardware platform or a universal virtual machine that can be expected to remain compatible with any software that has ever been written for it. Bedrock platforms can be used to prevent software rot.

https://permacomputing.net/bedrock_platform/

The use of punched cards and mechanical devices for "enhancing natural intelligence" was already suggested in 1832 by Semyon Korsakov and in the 1910s by Wilhem Ostwald. In these suggestions, each punch card would contain an idea or a "micro-thought", and a mechanical device would assist in finding and connecting them. Emanuel Goldberg (1930) and Vannevar Bush (1945) combined this concept with a microfiche viewer/searcher.

https://permacomputing.net/intelligence_amplification/

Lifespan maximization is the extension of hardware lifespan by the users. It may be supported by planned longevity from the manufacturer's side, but it rarely is.

Broken devices should be repaired. If the community needs a kind of device that does not exist, it should preferrably be built from existing components that have fallen out of use. Chips should be designed open and flexible, so that they can be reappropriated even for purposes they were never intended for.

https://permacomputing.net/lifespan_maximization/

In hardware, reusability is of utmost importance. In order to maximize component longevity, it should be possible to reappropriate them to different purposes.

In software, the question of reuse and reusability is more complicated. Software can be constructed and discarded without waste (it's just patterns of electrons), so it can't be compared to hardware in this case. You don't need to feel sorry for programming something from scratch, because the replaceability of software is what computers are all about.

https://permacomputing.net/reuse/

Salvage Computing is the art of utilizing only already available computational resources, to be limited by that which is already produced. It's about figuring out how to make the best possible use out of the millions of devices which already exist.

Scavenge-friendly electronics are parts that are no longer manufactured, but that are available by the billions in landfills. Those who can manage to create new designs from scavenged parts with low-tech tools will be able to preserve electronics.

https://permacomputing.net/salvage_computing/

Smallnet or SmolNet (also known as Small/Smol Internet/Web, etc.) is a movement of small-scale Internet networking that emphasizes the smallness of the servers (including low system requirements) as well as that of the user communities. It can be regarded as a counter-movement to the centralization and bloatedness of WWW.

https://permacomputing.net/smallnet/