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

XMPP chat: https://movim.slrpnk.net/chat/lowtech%40chat.disroot.org/room

Sister community over at lemmy.sdf.org: !permacomputing@lemmy.sdf.org

There's also a wiki: https://permacomputing.net/

Website: http://wiki.xxiivv.com/site/permacomputing.html

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schmorpel

What is Permacomputing? (damaged.bleu255.com)

submitted 1 year ago by schmorpel to c/permacomputing

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Permacomputing is a term originating from the demoscene, known for squeezing the most out of very restricted computing resources, such as the 4k intro with a maximum executable file size of 4096 bytes.

Permaculture uses methods that lets nature do the work, minimizing the reliance on artificial energy. Heikkilä sees similarities between how both permaculture practitioners and hackers find clever solutions to problems. He writes that the existence of computers can only be justified by their ability to augment the potential of humans to have a strengthening effect on ecosystems.

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[–] schmorpel 5 points 1 year ago

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.