this post was submitted on 22 Oct 2023
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Permacomputing
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Computing to support life on Earth
Computing in the age of climate crisis is often wasteful and adds nothing useful to our real life communities. Here we try to find out how to change that.
Definition and purpose of permacomputing: http://viznut.fi/files/texts-en/permacomputing.html
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There's also a wiki: https://permacomputing.net/
Website: http://wiki.xxiivv.com/site/permacomputing.html
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To really explain in depth what seems to be an approach of engineering and new age quackery would go too far here. I'll try to be short:
Solarpunk (the main topic of the instance where Permacomputing is at home) tries to imagine a (near and implementable) future where humans manage to live in harmony with nature, not to return some more primitive way of life of the past, but instead come up with a mixture of modern tech and traditional techniques of community land management, a lot of it copied from native land management techniques.
These techniques (often summarized under the term 'permaculture') aim towards a land management that is less energy-intensive than our current modern agriculture. This can be achieved by mimicking (or modifying) naturally existing ecosystems and turning them into food landscapes. A lot of resources in these landscapes are circled, instead of bringing in large external inputs.
A few people have taken this approach and apply it to computing, and try to redefine how we could use the internet in less energy-intensive and more human ways and work with what we have at hand.
I could have written your comment some five or six years ago, before I saw how permaculture worked and that it worked, but 'let nature do the work' is definitely a thing compared with how we got used to do stuff in the fossil fuel industrial era.