The problem with tech that I haven’t been able to work around is simple: in the current economic arrangement, the creation of technological devices and parts involves the exploitation laborers in the imperial periphery who live and work in forced or precarious conditions to extract finite raw materials and build components with extremely limited recyclability, all the while burning massive amounts of fossil fuels. When I buy, say, a laptop, who had to suffer for me to get that laptop for the price I purchased it at?

I generally care about efficiency when I’m writing software to ensure that people without access to the latest and greatest hardware would be able to use what I make, but due to Jevon’s paradox—which states that as efficiency of resource use increases, demand for that resource increases, rather than decreases—if I, particularly at my job, write software that is efficient by some metric, demand for the hardware would increase.

What if we just did less with less instead? What would it look like if we lived in a world that treated computation as the limited resource it is, and considered computers within the ecological context they are created and used in?

These are questions the permacomputing movement is attempting to answer. I found the Hundred Rabbits art collective a few weeks ago, as well as permacomputing.net, and I’ve been captivated with how much work has gone into a concept that only existing in my mind as scattered thoughts of thoughts not yet given to form. It’s something I intend to explore a lot more in the future, and probably on this blog! (I intended to do said exploration in this post, but I quite frankly want to post…something on my website to get myself to actually write and hemming and hawing over what to write is not as productive as just getting stuff out there).