Permacomputing and What You Can Do

22 Feb, 2025

The age of computers has led us to the age of the e-dump. Miles and miles of digital and electronic waste which the global north dumps into the ports and beaches of the global south. It is an absolutely wicked sight to see the e-dumps of Ghana and realize all the health effects that exist within the bounds of this dump. Kids burning electronics to keep warm or play and adults using old computers to fish for anything worth selling. The ingenuity of these people should be commended, but most of all it sickens me that this isn’t higher on the priorities of the worlds technology freaks and companies. The incentive to always innovate, to throw away instead of recycling, to thirst for new technology instead of resilient technology creates the pressures to produce evermore e-waste – which the global north ships to countries like Ghana because we are ignorant to the scale of the problem.

So what are we to do? Practically there are increasingly radical measures which you could scale up to lessen your environmental impact. And before I go any further I would warn against individualizing this problem. It isn’t merely your fault that this happens. If you throw electronics away, it will likely go to one of these e-dump sites. But you alone cannot fix this problem.

The first thing is to realize the scale of the problem. Becoming informed and processing the information is the key to any start of creating change. It will require being very uncomfortable, which is a no-go for many people. That is very understandable. Many people would want to go vegetarian, but they would rather not understand the horror of what goes on in a factory farm. But there are levels of becoming informed.

• Facts and figures of the problem
• People’s experiences about living with the problem
• What can I do to stop contributing to the problem
• Witnessing the problem yourself etc.

While I understand that it can be uncomfortable to be informed (as has been documented by many genocide-scholars and climate denial scholars), it is essential that we put our own feelings aside for a minute and try to understand. We don’t make people visit death-camps or memorial sites because they are a romp, but because they are deeply troubling. Because they show humanities capabilities for destruction and killing. And while this information might cripple you or make you despair, that is the one thing that you are not allowed to continuously do. You cannot become active in despair.

After information you act. On e-waste you can support local organizations with time or money. Or you could demand support to actions such as the STEP-initiative. You can keep your stuff for longer. Have a computer that is old and falling apart? Fix it! Don’t know how to? Use a website like ifixit.com to find a manual and tools. You own your stuff and you should easily be able to fix it if you please. You can repurpose your old electronics. Have an old phone lying around? Jailbreak it (or just wipe it) and use it as an emulation device. You don’t need to buy one because your phone is more than powerful enough for a lot of different systems. Not gaming? Use it as an archiving device or your entertainment hub. Have an old tablet lying around? Make it a digital picture-frame if you want one. You can use it as your go-to remote for any smart-devices you own and never have to have bloat on your day-to-day device. It fills me with glee. So, there are plenty of opportunities to wipe an old phone and reuse it. Do think about whether or not you need to connect this device to the internet though, because that might be unsafe later.

But you see that there are easy ways for you to individually do something. What those things are is up to you, of course. More radically you can invest some time and energy into building your own systems and powering them on renewables. Teaching other people how to do little things. You can downsize the information load of regular systems you use everyday. Learn Linux day-by-day. And bully those who think this is a waste of time. It makes a real tangible difference.

All of these (and more) are things which require a little more time, tinkering, and (legal) tender, but are worth it if the results exceed the effort put in. Because the whole idea here is to build for resilience, minimization, efficiency, understandability and the recycling of computing. It is at this point that I tell you about the jargon-word and get on with it. What I am describing here is a kind of permacomputing. Permacomputing (borrowed from the permaculture movement) was introduced through Finnish programmer viznuts as an ethos, or a way of looking at computers. A computer, a phone, or any device have a couple of key characteristics:

• Devices use energy
• They are made of physical materials like copper, gold, and cobalt
• All devices are put together from materials and some labor
• The interaction with a device comes from software
• Any device will die if not maintained

It is a form of sustainable computing in which the goal isn’t the accumulation and progression of more energy-intensive processes, but rather systems where people understand how to use, fix, and recycle computers. I think this goal is a noble one and viznuts himself admits it is utopian, but as utopianisms go it falls right in line with other anti-primitivist (not technology rejecting) movements. I don’t believe that the age of the computer was a mistake. I don’t think that the information revolution was a mistake. It was our extractive (taking things from somewhere) and expansionist (bigger is better) mindset which led us to where we are now.

Preaching to choir, huh. If you’re still reading this, you most likely have found something interesting in the ideas or practical steps listed above. I think most people who use or actively read anything on BearBlog has at least the seed of the ecological within them. Whether or not this is true is of course debatable, but a platform such as this one which is built on minimal, resilient, and accessible technology is at least in part finding an audience among those who prefer a less-is-more attitude. Why use BearBlog when you can easily use sites which lets you Javascript the shit out of them and fill your website with trackers to mine data. BearBlog is built with a different philosophy in mind which attracts different kinds of people. To me, this is a wonderful opportunity to think about systems – how we make them and who are they for.

The idea is that systems are more than the materials and code that are built in to them ¹. There are these softer things which you agree to when you have to engage with the system. Call it a social-contract, trust, cultural mores, or values — these softer things are invaluable to the system. For our economic system to function, we have to believe in the value of currency. That is the meaning of fiat currency – which for those not in the know – is what every major currency is built upon. You don’t have an economy if people can’t trust one another. You can’t have transactions without trust and/or enforceable contracts. But you also can’t build trust and values on thin air. They are mutually dependent on each other.

But the next step is even more interesting, I think. Because the choices in physical infrastructure will contain within it the kinds of ways in which people interact with it, and in turn will teach (or attract people with) certain values. The internet is an example of this. The internet has a physical infrastructure of servers, cables, and protocols by which we communicate with each other, but it also has created an incredible community of people who value decentralization. You can also design a nation, a farm, or an energy-grid with much the same result². Is it the values which determine the physical infrastructure or is it the physical infrastructure which determine the value? Both! And neither.

Bearblog is hopefully a platform which will continue to attract curious and depth-seeking people who care about the platform’s sustainability before anything else. While I think the growth of this platform would be cool, I think it is more important to keep a living community which cares about each other and the site needs to be priority numero uno. You cannot expand for expansions sake. It is wasteful, but more importantly it kills the foundation of what makes smaller-projects fun and interesting. On the front page or the discover-tab you can (at the time of writing) find a top-post of someone who argues against wanton monetization. Someone who advocates for self-expression, ownership, and cultivating small communities over rapid expansion. This is unheard of in the age of big-tech, but is common and cool here on Bearblog. And I think that is just great.

So think about design-philosophies and the values they attracts. Think about what attracts you to the stuff you use. And lastly, think about doing something, even if it is very little, to make a difference.

.dash

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#tech-essay