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jl6 3 days ago [-]
There’s a lot to love about more mindful and resilient and ecological use of computing, but I wish they would build a consensus around that instead of bolting on extra politics. It’s a symptom of polarization… you can’t have independent causes, they have to align to a bunch of other causes too, each one taking a slice off your support base until you’re left with the tiny, powerless intersection that already agrees with you. It’s the self-torpedoing recipe that makes the omnicause so impotent.
jamilton 2 days ago [-]
I think it's a mistake to view any politics as bolted on. I think it's unlikely some people were interested in "mindful and resilient and ecological use of computing" completely apolitically, with no other political or ideological background.
This principles page doesn't seem to have any irrelevant politics to me.
bccdee 2 days ago [-]
> There are huge environmental and societal issues in today's computing, and permacomputing specifically wants to challenge them in the same way as permaculture has challenged industrial agriculture.
Permacomputing seems like a body of values and practices that is extremely grounded in a particular political perspective.
It's odd to regard permaculture, degrowth, anarchism, decoloniality, intersectional feminism, etc. as completely orthogonal. They're all part of a shared tradition of thought—not an "omnicause," but an ecosystem. You won't find a lot of people who love intersectional feminism but hate decoloniality. Appropriately enough, plucking a single plant from the earth and then dismissing the rest of the garden is exactly the type of blinkered thinking which permaculture discourages.
xantronix 2 days ago [-]
I might be biased, but, I'm curious to know if there is any specific part of the Permacomputing Principles page that stands out to you as particularly political above the rest. I don't think the intent is polarisation by any means, but I can see how this sort of movement would be a difficult pill for most to swallow. I still see plenty of value in laying down those grassroots for a future moment when the necessity for permacomputing may become much greater from a survival standpoint, or in the very least, maintenance of some sort of status quo of having people connected and with enough computing resources to continue meaningful work or maintain precious data.
myrmidon 2 days ago [-]
> [...] permacomputing is an anti-capitalist political project. It is driven by several strands of anarchism, decoloniality, intersectional feminism, post-marxism, degrowth, ecologism.
xantronix 2 days ago [-]
Fair, I was only looking at the page linked in the HN submission.
I guess at this point, I think it's fair to say:
1. They're not the central authority on permacomputing. You can implement the principles however you like.
2. If you find the principles objectionable simply because you saw an explicit statement of political alignment on their main page, maybe that's worth examining within yourself.
so tackling emergent discussions on equality and justice of our bloody past is a non-go... why do you think "permacomputing" started to exist in the first place? to make rich people have more durable products? /s
mathgladiator 18 hours ago [-]
I'd be happier with more durable products!
myrmidon 2 days ago [-]
Discussions on colonialism and sustainable computing are completely unrelated topics by themselves (as is post-marxism).
You can advocate for sustainability, right-to-repair, privacy etc. while being strongly capitalist just fine.
The point is that the page puts "correct" political alignment very prominently, excluding a large intersection of people otherwise interested in the non-political parts of the movement.
jefurii 2 days ago [-]
Sorry to break it to you, but computing is totally related to colonialism. Where do you think the materials that go into a modern computer come from? It'd be nice if all that was mined in the good ol' U.S. of A but it's not, and that's where we get connected to colonialism. Not to mention labor.
myrmidon 1 days ago [-]
What do you mean by colonialism? If industrial production/mining in lower wage countries is "colonialism" to you, then I strongly disagree, and so would most dictionaries.
Colonialism, to me, implies exerting direct political control over a territory (without allowing it democratic participation) and ressource/value extraction against the will of the local population.
Assembling phones in China/buying silicone in Brasil does neither.
>You can advocate for sustainability, right-to-repair, privacy etc. while being strongly capitalist just fine.
you really can't. I mean I get the point that maybe anarchism or feminism are more contingent when it comes to their idea of perma-computing, but you cannot advocate for radical ecology and long-lived computing under the logic of capital.
The entire point of capitalism is to constantly shove new things into your face, that's how you get fast fashion, new phones, more energy consumption, capital reproducing itself. You won't get a computer that runs a thousand years on a solar panel so to speak under the logic of the market economy.
I think intersectionality goes a bit too far sometimes but the degrowth aspect is central to what they're advocating, and there's no degrowth capitalism. See also Kohei Saito's book on the topic (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_in_the_Anthropocene)
myrmidon 2 days ago [-]
The entire point of capitalism is to incentivise people to do things that other people are willing to pay for.
Induced demand is a second order effect of that at best, and both ecological concerns and negative growth are demonstrably compatible with capitalism: Just consider leaded gas/CFC and per-capita primary energy consumption as direct examples.
The big problem with sustainability/climate change in general is not that countermeasures/solutions are incompatible with a capitalist system, the problem is that too many people are too selfish to sacrifice any form of past/present/elsewhere observed luxury in order to achieve that goal.
Barrin92 2 days ago [-]
Demand, mass society and mass consumption/production aren't just a second order effect. Payment and incentives you have in pre-capitalist society. What defines the modern world is capital accumulation, hence the name. And capital will never go where it cannot grow. There is no VC company that funds a degrowth social media platform that has the explicit goal of slowing communication down and reduce the commercial value of its investment.
It is true that right now you de-facto have places that experience degrowth and are capitalist at the same time, but that's transitory. Firms do not go where they shrink, debt will increase, labor will emigrate, privation will increase, and then you'll have a crisis. You can't stand still or shrink under the current regime. If a perma-culture is something you want to pursue you'll need a new form of social ownership and production.
mrtesthah 2 days ago [-]
This is probably more of an attempt to make computing relevant to that “intersectional” subset of people who only consider a topic to be relevant if it relates to colonialism in some way.
packetlost 2 days ago [-]
I actively don't want these people infecting spaces they shouldn't be though. If that's all they care about out they should be in spaces about that
2 days ago [-]
mrhottakes 2 days ago [-]
I think you don't want to engage with the political implications of technology and computing. That's fine, but it's not on the permacomputing folks, and it doesn't make the topics irrelevant to sustainable computing.
phillmv 2 days ago [-]
>You can advocate for sustainability … while being strongly capitalist just fine. […] excluding a large intersection of people otherwise interested in the non-political parts
the far-right is literally trying to make it illegal for companies to say they're taking environmental concerns seriously (i.e. ESG bans in tx, fl, etc). in 2026, sustainability is not apolitical.
(it's _never_ been apolitical but i will spare you that lecture.)
myrmidon 2 days ago [-]
Most of the far-right are idiot contrarians (my personal view) and they have no claim on capitalism.
Just because far-righters are against sustainability does not mean you have to be a post-marxist anarchist (or w/e) just to be for it.
phillmv 2 days ago [-]
> does not mean you have to be a post-marxist anarchist
if you oppose a far-right project, what are they going to call you? lol. here is your membership card for the cultural marxist party, welcome aboard comrade!
i just think it's folly for people to complain that "not destroying the environment" is a partisan issue in 2026. being a nice person is a partisan issue in 2026.
dvdkon 2 days ago [-]
Despite what "far-right" groups may claim, politics isn't one giant us-versus-them war; I refuse to stoop down to their level.
The US right likes to call their opponents pedophiles, but it would be ridiculous for anyone to adopt that label for themselves because of it.
myrmidon 2 days ago [-]
> if you oppose a far-right project, what are they going to call you?
In Germany literally "linksgrünversifft", which loosely translates to filthy green/left advocate.
Which is, critically, completely unrelated to both communism and anarchism; while a lot of the political spectrum opposes the far right, only a tiny fraction are actual communists or anarchists (at least in Europe).
I do feel your pain that a significant part of modern politics involves completely indefensible, irrational and irresponsible positions, but that still does not mean you have to be marxist/anarchist or even anti-capitalist just to oppose that idiocy.
monkaiju 2 days ago [-]
I mean, not really. You could be somewhat capitalist I suppose, but certainly not "strongly" if for no other reason than that "capitalism" is defined by goals that are inherently misaligned with the others listed (sustainability, right-to-repair, privacy). You could only be capitalist insofar as you believe that companies pursuing those claims will perform better in the market, and even that gets blurry around "right-to-repair" because the word "right" would mean its something the market wouldn't be allowed to alienate you from, so a force outside of capitalism would be enforcing that.
tekne 2 days ago [-]
To be fair -- IP is a regulation (it is not, in fact, natural to be able to prevent someone copying data on their own hard drive) -- so one could imagine variants of a free market which are less regulated and yet more (or less) friendly to repair/modification/hacking.
A lot of our current state of affairs is as much a symptom of regulation as of deregulation (most laws are really regulation) -- and it's unclear whether the world would be better off with more or less overall (the answer is probably "it depends" -- though I myself lean towards less)
MSFT_Edging 2 days ago [-]
From wikipedia:
> Politics is the activity of settling affairs in an organized society.
Not sure how any strongly held belief doesn't resolve down to politics.
Politics is life whether you want to accept it or not. Ignoring it is ignoring your place in society and the direction it takes at large.
No decision is truly apolitical.
perching_aix 2 days ago [-]
I did not make past the first few paragraphs of the page due to it being a fancyword-salad, but I can see a quote from it here in the comments, and I see why you'd say this. The rest of my comment is more about what you wrote in the general case.
Unfortunately this is a two way road.
The more topics political factions gobble up, the worse this becomes. You may or may not have experienced completely benign words becoming very politically charged for example, same effect.
If you strip a subject from every related concern, it will feel pointless. People just won't have any way of relating to it. So these are diametrically opposed interests at their terminal points.
What I found works best is there being a movement on each respective polarized side instead.
nyc_data_geek1 2 days ago [-]
The whole idea that pushing back against resource exhaustion and planned obsolescence is inherently apolitical is bunk, in fact. Politics are only "extra" and "bolted on" when you are comfortably benefiting from the status quo
HerbManic 2 days ago [-]
I see you are playing the role of Cassandra today. Unfortunately, there are a lot of people in tech that are just covering their ears saying "la la la la! I CANT HEAR YOU!!!" as they don't want to hear these things.
They aren't bad people, not even close. We all do this to some degree. Its just that we all think we are the good virtuous people and yet all of us have some form of negative impact on the world, especially in the Western world.
zahlman 2 days ago [-]
> Unfortunately, there are a lot of people in tech that are just covering their ears saying "la la la la! I CANT HEAR YOU!!!"
They are doing nothing of the sort. They are telling you that they have heard the argument countless times already, and disagree with it as strongly as ever.
I reject the implicit definition of "politics" required to make the argument (which does not agree with common use, even if dictionaries may fail to capture the subtlety); and I reject the notion that your side should be entitled to define the terms. Everyone knows what it means to "get political", and there is strong consensus that it does not include "let's go about the rest of our lives as we were already planning to do".
> Its just that we all think we are the good virtuous people and yet all of us have some form of negative impact on the world
There is no contradiction between "being the good virtuous people" and "having some form of negative impact on the world".
By my back of the envelope calculations, we produce something like 300kg of CO2 annually simply by breathing. I would prefer to continue to live, however.
anon7725 21 hours ago [-]
> By my back of the envelope calculations, we produce something like 300kg of CO2 annually simply by breathing. I would prefer to continue to live, however.
The CO2 that you exhale came from elements that were fairly recently part of an animal or vegetable - ie part of an active and ongoing carbon cycle, rather than deposited into the ground 100M years ago and pulled out to be inserted into the system.
Carbon cycles aren't bad - they're fundamental to life on Earth, obviously. It's making the system unstable by continuous addition that causes the problem.
mrhottakes 2 days ago [-]
Correct. Technology is inherently political, and it has been for all of human history.
zahlman 2 days ago [-]
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keybored 2 days ago [-]
People balk at this not being an independent cause. Yet I’m skeptical.
Imagine this permaculture computing thing in an alternative reality. Very environmentally friendly—but very narrowly about computers. It has nothing to say about the usual individualistic moralisms, like recycling—and reuse/repurpose/recycle!—, anti-consumerism, not littering. In fact some of the local members are “pigs” and litter the street next to their headquarters. The broad membership are not vegetarian or vegan, not to any larger degree than the general public. They are just very concerned about sustainable computing.
Would this make sense to outsiders? No, I think we are very used to environmentalists caring about all things related to the environment. Sure, some people who care about veganism/vegetarianism (for animal or env. concerns) might say that it’s better if people drop meat some days of the week rather than none of them. That’s a thing. But on the whole I think people don’t balk at environmentalists “aligning” with all environmental causes instead of being inclusive, like: oh sure, you care about sustainable computing but not about sustainable food production, that’s fine. Welcome.
I think this is specifically about having a focused political message. Because having one-hundred litmus tests for individualistic behavior is totally fine... within the political mainstream thought.
awongh 2 days ago [-]
It's extremely hard for me to separate where we are now from the way that Moore's law dictates a pretty insane level of planned obsolescence for chips and therefore everything with a chip in it.
If we make batteries replaceable or whatever other thing, how much do we change this fundamental dynamic? I feel like it's not very much.
People are kidding themselves if they think somehow recycling ewaste or reusing your last-model iPhone is some kind of sea-change that will fix the environmental impacts of tech.
It also doesn't seem defensible to say we should just slow progress down- isn't that a world where we never get iPhones and AI? How could a computing field that moves slower than Moore's law even work?
I dislike a lot of these wasteful dynamics but I also don't know what the alternative is. Consumer tech and computing is still the poster child for the proponents of global free market economics for good reason. It's one of the least extractive, least wasteful, highest profit margin sectors of the economy.
It's just saying a lot about how wasteful the other sectors are that tech is so wasteful.
zahlman 2 days ago [-]
> How could a computing field that moves slower than Moore's law even work?
Moore's Law has been breaking down for years already (to the point that people shift the goalposts as to what the actual quantity is that improves exponentially), so it's strange to ask. There are known physical limits that will prevent it from continuing indefinitely; and we aren't even that far away, to my understanding.
awongh 2 days ago [-]
Moore's law is ending but the power laws of increased capacity and capability of computing in general continues at a similar rate- so this isn't a question of the specific technology of how many transistors you can fit in a given area.
Moore's law is just a stand-in for the planned obsolescence of all computing related things almost since computers were invented, and the fundamental tech question is always, when thing x gets 10x cheaper/faster, what new use case gets unlocked? Right now it's AI model capability. Maybe also battery tech.
The idea of the slow growth of computing smells to me like the Bill Gates quote about 640k of RAM being enough for anyone.
scared_together 2 days ago [-]
> How could a computing field that moves slower than Moore's law even work?
We’ll probably find out soon, because even ignoring the environmental concerns there is a limit to how small transistors can get.
dwaltrip 2 days ago [-]
Let's pick one example: E-waste.
It’s a negative externality.
We can argue about the magnitude and the details, but the basic fact remains.
There are ways of dealing with negative externalities. Some work better than others. The details do matter a lot. And we definitely need better ways of tackling problems like this, especially when the cost is less immediate. The more diffuse, temporally removed, downstream, hidden, or controversial it is, the harder it is to get people to take the problem seriously. Let alone actually do anything about it.
We can take on these challenges. Or we can largely ignore them / throw our hands in the air, and watch the consequences unfold.
As much as we are able to, I’d like to try the former. Computing can still move forward and innovate at a rapid rate.
awongh 2 days ago [-]
We should definitely be doing better, and it's also clear that these negative externalities are not being priced in at all.
I do and would want to buy tech that I'm not coerced into to throwing away after a year. It's insane to be how many objects today have batteries that are sealed inside and are meant to be thrown away after- that should be regulated.
But that seems to me to be an implementation detail rather than aspect that's worthy of an entire manifesto.
I do think the political aspects of things like Ring and Flock cameras and Palantir are super important (the reenforcing of existing power structures part).
But I don't get the folding in of this idea that not consuming computing devices is part of the solution- Like I said, it feels like the planned obsolescence of all computing devices and software is fundamental to the field.
2snakes 2 days ago [-]
Can we combine centrifuge element extraction with metal shredders? Crush all that ewaste and then make some things from it: recycling loop.
HerbManic 2 days ago [-]
> It also doesn't seem defensible to say we should just slow progress down- isn't that a world where we never get iPhones and AI?
Honestly, that sounds kind of OK. A lot of the things I use a smart phone for are things that have been imposed on me rather than chosen.
Also if we never had smart phones I doubt social media would have such a grip on peoples minds nowadays. It would still be there but toned down a lot.
stackghost 3 days ago [-]
Consider that the venn diagram of "people likely to be negatively impacted by climate change" and "people who belong to historically marginized or discriminated groups" has a lot of overlap. It's little wonder to me why permacomputing, having its roots in environmentalism, attracts people who spend a lot of time and energy on social justice causes.
But still: It's okay to enjoy the mindful and resilient and ecological aspects and not enjoy some other aspect.
jl6 2 days ago [-]
Taking some parts and leaving others is exactly how intersectionalism should work: at an individual level. You throw your lot in with the orgs and movements you like, and leave or oppose the ones you don’t. The intersection is within you.
Unfortunately the fashion is now for orgs and movements to declare their own intersections, which does nothing to further the core issues, while actively repelling those outside the intersection (which, by the time you’ve intersected a bunch of different things, is nearly everyone).
There is nothing inherently “post-Marxist” or “decolonial” about the core ideas here (scare quotes because these are extra-unhelpfully underdefined terms). Framing the project this way just signals that non-post-Marxists (etc.) will not be welcome, which makes it quite hard to enjoy the good bits for people who have been pre-declared to be the enemy.
Successful orgs are laser-focused on their core purpose.
camgunz 2 days ago [-]
I think there are successful orgs that do both. The pro-life movement in the US was laser focused on that issue, but it was a manufactured campaign by the Republican party to capture evangelicals. You can't say the Republican party is laser focused, but they're also pretty successful.
I guess I would say, I'm not sure what the basis of your critique is. I guess if you want to sit back and watch a more centrist permacomputing organization push those values without you doing anything, that doesn't seem like a fair ask. If you do want to do something, you could probably make your own website/etc. "Please tailor your activism to my aesthetics/politics" is kinda self-centered.
philipallstar 2 days ago [-]
> The pro-life movement in the US was laser focused on that issue, but it was a manufactured campaign by the Republican party to capture evangelicals.
This is silly - people are pro life all over the world. E.g. this guy in the UK[0].
When we showed up with the anti-abortion message at first we failed. The evangelicals who had attended our seminars by tens of thousands when we were launching the first series just were not interested in the abortion issue. At first we were looking at empty seats in places like the Grand Ole Opry we’d filled a few years before.
It took a lot of hard work to change that apathy on the “issue.” And oddly what in the end gave the series credibility were the Republican political leaders who saw the chance to cash in on the issue. The fact they began to pay attention to Dad and me got evangelical leader’s juices flowing: They coveted our new access to power!
The pro-life movement is huge among trad Catholics, and Catholicism is its roots. I think evangelicals came along pretty early. The Republicans aligned naturally, their base being heavily Christian.
fmbb 2 days ago [-]
I think you have the timeline confused.
The pro-life movement is older than the Reagan era courting on Christians to grow the Republican base. So it was not a Christian base that caused a shift, it was the other way around.
__MatrixMan__ 2 days ago [-]
> Successful orgs are laser-focused on their core purpose.
If putting up a some kind of flag or another is gonna keep people who would otherwise interfere with my core purpose from showing up, that might be the most expedient option for getting shit done. It's like: I'm not religious, but I'll wear a cross if it keeps the vampires at bay.
bccdee 2 days ago [-]
"Intersectionality at an individual level" is poison for a social movement. If everyone lends their support only to movements that benefit them personally, that creates a fragmented ecosystem of niche groups that accomplish nothing. Strength lies in solidarity—in big-tent alliances of disparate groups.
The drawback with a big tent is that small subgroups inside that tent may have their concerns ignored. For instance, black women in early feminist movements were treated poorly, but what were they going to do? Start a schism? That'd be a setback for everyone.
Intersectionality is a second-order tool that protects the interests of smaller sub-groups within a big tent. You're wrong to assume that everyone outside the intersection is "actively repelled." When an environmentalist group says they're anticolonial, feminist, BLM, etc., environmentalists are typically fine with it. Sure, it does turn some people off, but that's a feature, not bug. If your group gets co-opted by people who reject some of these values, it makes it difficult to work together with groups that do focus on issues affecting indigenous people, women, etc.
auggierose 2 days ago [-]
> Successful orgs are laser-focused on their core purpose.
I think that is capitalist ideology (“make number go up”), not a fact for a non-capitalist definition of “success”. So, you just might not be part of the audience they care about.
Personally, I think there is a certain divide between capitalist and collectivist mindsets that cannot be bridged easily. In the end, it is either-or. In the end, one will win, and the other will lose. That does not mean either mindset is unable to acknowledge and incorporate methods and practices from the other, but it does mean that, in the end, you have to decide what to do when those values clash.
2 days ago [-]
botanrice 2 days ago [-]
Consider me (a real person) a case study in exactly this occurring.
Never heard of permacomputing until right now. Super intrigued, very interested in the topic... Saw that whole line of "anti-capitalist, post-marxist, etc." and just got turned off, man. I don't even disagree with any of the principles of those intersections I just don't want to join a movement that labels itself that way.
monkaiju 2 days ago [-]
Maybe thats by design? If the org believes that for this to actually be effective it is inherently anti-capitalist, then it would probably want to keep people who are only there for the surface level vibes and dont understand that to stay away.
I've definitely been a part of orgs, in my case working with homeless folks, where people vaguely want to help but become hindrances when the struggle tries to actually start to address core issues like police abusing homeless folks instead of just being a food distro where they can get their pic taken and feel like they did something.
botanrice 2 days ago [-]
that's a valid analogy for sure, I get that and see your point. But I'm not sure it applies 1:1 here, though. Whereas the systems you refer to are often structured around this idea of like corporate contribution for good feels, this permacomputing is a novel idea & upstart movement that they want to spread to more people with the goal of a more sustainable society and thoughtful use of electronics.
> more sustainable society and thoughtful use of electronics
This is where I feel there is a difference and disagree with their overt statement of ideologies as the core of the movement. Any environmentalist worth their salt should celebrate any action or idea that just generally supports getting more people to care about, get involved with, or want to protect the environment -- regardless of their age, sex, background, whatever. See: national parks.
And then in the sense of sustainable use of electronics. Who is more sustainable in this sense than the old white dude who runs the computer repair shop or the indian dude running the phone repair place? If I'm on board with permacomputer, I want to look at these guys as the experts in long-lasting & recylable use of electronics... but what's the overlap between those guys and intersectional feminism, ya know?
> Maybe that's by design?
hey man, if they just want a group built around their values to make friends and take on the machine that's fine. who am I to say they shouldn't? anyone should gather with who they please. It's just a shame to turn people off from a movement by defining such a narrow intersection of beliefs, as the OP comment here says. I also would argue that it doesn't have to be strictly *anti-*capitalist as much as pro-socialist/communist/whateveridk.
What do you think?
beepbooptheory 2 days ago [-]
People are generally not "post-Marxist" or "decolonial," concepts/frameworks are. These are just theoretical markers, not something necessarily one identifies with in the way you suggest. And I would be curious to know why you are so certain that none of the "core ideas" of permacomputing have bearing to either of these things, if you believe they are so underdefined. Little bit of kettle logic there, no?
This is such a genre of comment on here when you can Ctrl-F 'Marx' on the content, and it just really comes off uncurious and reflexive every time. Like, why is the burden on the authors and not you to sort through the things you care about and don't? Why is it not an opportunity to learn? Do you even care to know where they could possibly be coming from? If there is ever some kind of overlap between something you can get behind and something for whatever reason you feel is bad or "underdefined," doesn't that stir even a bit of curiosity, a chance to learn? Even if it's just sharpening what you already know?
You don't have to end up agreeing with it, but to frame all this as advice on how to "be a successful org" is just not great here imo.
jl6 2 days ago [-]
When I don’t put salt in my coffee, it’s not because I’m uncurious about what salt is, and nor does it mean I don’t appreciate salt in other contexts. But if a coffee shop only sells salted coffee, the burden is definitely on them to understand why they have so few customers. (And for my part I’ve seen enough shops that claim to be coffee shops but are actually salt shops).
beepbooptheory 2 days ago [-]
Sure, but you're the one saying that you've actually never tasted salt either way, that salt is "underdefined," so I guess I don't know why the coffee shop should care or how they could even anticipate what you project salt to be.
And I gotta say, its just so telling that we jump here so naturally to a metaphor of an enterprising business and its customers. Like could there be anything that exists in the world where you are not a patron whose tastes must be catered to? Not everything you have a strong opinion on needs to be socketed into the genre of Google review.
wfurney 2 days ago [-]
Exactly, their introduction seems broadly applicable:
> Whether you are a tech specialist, someone who uses a computer for daily tasks, or deals with technology only occasion, there are steps that you or the group you are involved in can take to reduce the environmental and socio-economic impact of your digital activities.
Sounds great to me, but then they have these:
> To mitigate this situation, this principle calls us to step outside the capitalist model of perpetual consumption and growth.
> The history of computing is deeply intertwined with capitalism and militarism. From playing a role in warfare and geopolitical power struggles to driving the automation of labor, computing has significantly contributed to the increased use of resources and fossil energy. The latest example of this trend is the construction of hyperscale data centers for running generative AI. Despite the promise of increased efficiency, the Jevons Paradox applies: higher efficiency tends to lead to greater resource use. Efficiency is often presented as a technical solution to a political decisions about how and why we use computing —without questioning the extractive business model.
The authors here (fairly or not) signal their in/out group preference. And the implication is that "those not willing or unable to step outside the capitalist model are not able to sufficiently apply the principle to affect change in the way we are wanting."
They're smuggling in an omission of technologists who recognize the benefits of a capitalist system compared to a collectivist one. It reads like they are trying to be careful, but still end up significantly limiting their potential audience.
People with strong capitalist beliefs may be willing to volunteer their time at a repair cafe or in taking other action to incrementally move their communities in the direction they're advocating for. But it seems to me like they would not even want those people to be a part of their movement. If I recognize the historical injustices that marginalized groups have faced but I still believe that a capitalist system is generally preferable to a collectivist one, would I be supported by this movement? I think that I doubt it.
EDIT: I missed on this on their homepage:
> With that said, permacomputing is an anti-capitalist political project. It is driven by several strands of anarchism, decoloniality, intersectional feminism, post-marxism, degrowth, ecologism.
> Permacomputing is also a utopian ideal...
Utopian? No thanks. I expected this to be a technological movement first with politics snuck in, but it sounds like it is the opposite.
iamnothere 2 days ago [-]
Much of fringe politics is a social club/hobby. You can really see this in action when fringe groups stumble upon an opportunity to grow support among the mainstream, but then they choose to squander it on counter-signaling to drive away people who aren’t perfectly aligned.
The “Just Stop Oil” people are a great example of this. There’s a lot of headwind behind green energy and moving away from oil, but the activists suck all that air out of the room with destructive stunts and focus the story on themselves.
bccdee 2 days ago [-]
The way people talk about Just Stop Oil is interesting. People often say, "Just Stop Oil is doing activism wrong," but I never hear anyone talk about orgs that "do activism right" because the public never talks about them at all.
Like them or not, Just Stop Oil is very good at making headlines and stirring up controversy, which is their goal. If you go into a party with a megaphone and shout about beavers, everyone will eventually be talking and thinking about beavers. Conservatives use this strategy to manufacture controversies like "critical race theory" all the time. As a radical group, simply being in the headlines benefits them.
iamnothere 2 days ago [-]
At least in recent years, conservatives don’t usually do radical stunts like throwing junk on paintings, which may be why their activism has been more effective lately. Conservative activists do often say things that cause controversy, but the public seems more forgiving of words alone versus things like defacing art or blocking traffic at random.
Note that I said blocking traffic at random. Targeted roadblocks are actually effective (such as in the ICE protests/interventions) and were also used to great effect by Canadian truckers. (Speaking of the Canadian truckers, maybe you noticed how the useless and constant honking was the thing that turned the public against them.)
This idea that attention alone, even negative attention, is enough is one of the worst mistakes of modern activists, particularly on the left, and it’s completely derailed their effectiveness in many cases.
hdndjsbbs 2 days ago [-]
What would an apolitical "permacomputing" look like? The premise is to reduce consumption and conserve resources. It's about recognizing the externalities associated with technology. You can't just do that in a vacuum.
If you just want "MacBook with socketed RAM" there's already other people doing that. You don't need this to be that.
myrmidon 2 days ago [-]
You can recognize externalities and deal with it just fine without abolishing capitalism. See leaded gas or CFCs for example.
stackghost 2 days ago [-]
Neither leaded gas nor CFCs were eliminated because of capitalism. They were eliminated in spite of it. Companies got dragged kicking and screaming into compliance because of regulatory oversight, which is anathema to pure capitalism.
myrmidon 2 days ago [-]
Neither leaded gas nor CFCs were eliminated by communism, nor did communist governments do a particularly good job at eleiminating their use in an extraordinarily expedient way or anything.
In fact, leaded gas and CFC elimination in communist regimes happened exactly the same way (via regulation/treaties).
Regulations are universally needed to account for negative externalities-- just look at soviet superfund site equivalents (like lake Karachay) and tell me with a straight face that communist administration solves those problems by itself "without dragging anyone kicking and screaming".
wfurney 2 days ago [-]
Thanks for your comment. I’m not very familiar with permacomputing so am trying to understand it more. I wouldn’t say im advocating for an apolitical movement necessarily, as much as it being open to incremental (instead of revolutionary) change. If permacomputing is fundamentally an anti-capitalist movement then obviously it doesn’t make sense to include capitalists in it, but I’m not sure it needs to be. I guess I disagree with the idea that capitalist systems are unable to reduce consumption/conserve resources.
It seems like this site had a “neoliberal” wiki entry but it got removed, or I at least I can’t access it, I would be interested to see it
beepbooptheory 2 days ago [-]
I just want to say, I appreciate you directly getting to the actual ideological disagreement here. If you want to conceive of and fight for a neoliberal permaculture.. well that's something different than what this site is about for sure but I personally would be ready to find some common ground here.
wolvesechoes 2 days ago [-]
> I expected this to be a technological movement first with politics snuck in
Then you are naive. Everything that is concerned with how people organize themselves, where and how they allocate resources, how they are supposed to make decisions, what values they should uphold etc. is politics.
wfurney 2 days ago [-]
Thank you for your comment. I certainly am not familiar with permacomputing, so I accept your characterization and understand I have more to learn. With that said I feel like you haven’t really engaged with my argument, just sniped at me with a borderline insult.
The goal of my comments on this site is to learn more by engaging with others who may know more than me. Here I tried to point out ways in which the movement may be alienating itself it by excluding capitalists. If it makes me naive to not realize that was its core purpose, so be it
tolerance 2 days ago [-]
> Like, why is the burden on the authors and not you to sort through the things you care about and don't?
It isn't a one-way street. The authors have already, in fact, sorted through what they think a reader/participant does and does not care about.
> Why is it not an opportunity to learn? Do you even care to know where they could possibly be coming from? If there is ever some kind of overlap between something you can get behind and something for whatever reason you feel is bad or "underdefined," doesn't that stir even a bit of curiosity, a chance to learn? Even if it's just sharpening what you already know?
This doesn't read like a fair assessment of the negative responses that this page is receiving, at least it doesn't in this case. Or you're missing the entire point.
Not everyone disagrees with things out of ignorance. They may have done their due diligence to investigate what the concepts and frameworks at play are about. Assuming otherwise is a good way to ensure that what you agree with is impervious to debate save for what can be held among "fellow travelers".
The author's of this page are being very direct with their orientation and intentions here. I think even to the extent that their language is "underdefined" there is enough space for someone to reliably speculate about what the substance behind it entails and then come to an educated conclusion about whether they find those things objectionable—in spite of the existence of some principles that they agree with. The degree to which they find the objectionable to affect the unobjectionable can also lead a person to make a conclusion about the organization's viability.
You don't have to concede to these objections, but to frame all this as advice on how not to disagree obviates justifiable dissent.
beepbooptheory 2 days ago [-]
If you are a capitalist or imperialist or whatever, its perfectly alright to oppose yourself to this. The thing I target here is this feigned confusion that these things are even applicable followed by some friendly advice on how they could have broader appeal. I just think if you aren't ignorant, than you would be engaging with it directly rather than just blustering at its very inclusion here.
Please, dissent away! I have only seen dismissal so far.
tolerance 2 days ago [-]
That sounds fair. I would add that it's also the duty of an organization to educate their audience about why their additional interests are relevant to the broader one that serves as its base, which the wider audience may be intrigued by already.
permacomputing.net doesn't achieve this.
Again, communication isn't a one-way street.
The polarity that the upfront inclusion of their politics is obvious in the discussion here. People are either keying in on that or talking about permacomputing in general and indifferent to the group's stated politics. Are the people engaging in the former wrong for that? Tangentially, are the latter critically engaging with the subject in every aspect presented?
Is there anything provided by the website that explicitly piques their curiosity in the way that you encourage? Did the author(s) even care enough to externally link to pages that they are confident would explain what those frameworks mean in such a way that a skeptical visitor may be persuaded to figure out their relevance to permacomputing in general? If not to be entirely persuaded, but at least exit with a more cogent grasp of their own perspective on the practice?
I do like the point that you're making, I just think there's a shared responsibility in this dynamic that should be addressed. Not everyone went to a liberal arts school with a rigorous critical theory curriculum.
If your [their] politics are so important to permacomputing—something that any kind of "nerd" ought to be able to participate in—then you [they] should be able to explain why that is the case. Explain why as effortlessly as said politics are introduced and as fluently as they disappear from the foreground in deference to a rhetoric that positions them as a reliable source about the subject.
Feigning confusion in opposition to a thing that may be valid isn't any less vain than feigning shock that valid opposition exists. Insularity begets them both.
tolerance 2 days ago [-]
I think the issue being highlighted here is how polarizing causes are advanced and detract from a reasonable one that is supposed to be the pith of an organization.
> It's okay to enjoy the mindful and resilient and ecological aspects and not enjoy some other aspect.
I don't object to this in the most general sense. But I also think that a little tact can go a long way from the organization's side to anticipate where the public can't exercise it on their own.
zozbot234 2 days ago [-]
There's strong first-principles reasons to think that left-wing radical politics does a significant disservice to historically marginalized or discriminated groups. Historically the proper and most effective response to maginalization and discrimination was developing strong, enduring social ties (arguably, these social ties are what defines a "group" to begin with, especially on very long-run, even generational timescales), which in practice is now coded as a "right wing" value.
thrance 2 days ago [-]
> which in practice is now coded as a "right wing" value.
In practice? You mean, rhetorically, surely? The right wing is doing whatever it can to marginalize and disenfranchise anyone it doesn't like (and that's a lot of people). In the end, do you think marginalized people feel more included in the community in progressive cities or MAGA ones?
Jensson 2 days ago [-]
> The right wing is doing whatever it can to marginalize and disenfranchise anyone it doesn't like
No it doesn't, do you mean the American right? There are so many right wing parties in this world, the American right is just a small fraction of them. Maybe we mean the Switzerland right? There aren't many poor people in Switzerland.
thrance 2 days ago [-]
The right is defined by its opposition to progressive ideas. No matter if it's American or Swiss or whatever. It will always champion reactionary ideals, seeking to marginalize some groups to further its appeal.
It's funny you mention Switzerland, surely you must have seen their far right's party compaign posters? The ones with the sheeps or rotting apples? How is that not marginalization and stigmatization?
2 days ago [-]
aleph_minus_one 2 days ago [-]
> The right wing is doing whatever it can to marginalize and disenfranchise anyone it doesn't like (and that's a lot of people).
The same holds for the left wing.
zozbot234 2 days ago [-]
MAGA is structurally a lot closer to a radical political movement than to right wing politics in the traditional sense (which, to be fair, is mostly dead in the U.S. and that's a huge problem that the left also has a lot to answer for). I don't know how you can possibly read my comment as advocating for MAGA, especially the varieties of it that are most overtly and blatantly hateful towards marginalized groups.
cestith 2 days ago [-]
In European terms the moderate right is still well represented in the US - by the leadership of the Democratic Party. The fact that there are a lot of liberals, progressives, and leftists who vote for or even belong to that party doesn’t mean they are an ideologically left party in their policies. It’s a symptom of a self-serving, self-sustaining two-party system. This is why there’s so much infighting and such acrimony within the party. There’s a real tension between people like Mamdani or Ocasio-Cortez on the one hand and the sort of Democrat that can win a general election someplace like Oklahoma.
thrance 2 days ago [-]
MAGA is just the logical end-point of any right-wing ideology. Just like every far right party in the world, it wasn't birthed in a vacuum. It's just amping up the same rhetoric that has been the bread and butter of right-wingers for half a century: perceived unsafety, anti-immigration sentiment, destruction of social nets in pursuit of these ever-elusive trickle-down economics, scapegoating of minorities...
I don't know how "radical" you can call it since it was popular enough to get the White House and most of congress. Twice.
I really don't see what in right-wing ideology has ever served the cause of minorities and marginalized groups, even before MAGA.
cestith 2 days ago [-]
It served the minority in South Africa during apartheid. It did so, of course, by using state power to marginalize the majority. Conservatism becomes more complex than just “small government” when it’s combined with colonialism and racial supremacy as the status quo to conserve.
wizzwizz4 2 days ago [-]
It is? The left-wing radicals I'm aware of are all very big on community. My understanding of the corresponding "right-wing" value is that community should be a certain way (with the radical right-wing value being that it must be a certain way, for various incompatible versions of "right way"). The radical left-wing response would be an insistence on the validity of other forms of community (notably including relationship anarchy: polycules, queer-platonic relationships, etc), the promotion of community organising (such as unions, food distribution networks, mutual aid networks, communes), and so on – which I can understand might appear to be an opposition to "community", if your understanding of "community" is narrowly-defined (e.g. as referring to the traditional practices of your cultural group), but the radical left-wingers certainly don't think they're opposing community.
If you're thinking of corporate activisty types, the sort of people who promote hamfisted "everyone with light skin has internalised racism" mandatory training, then I'd wager the "corporate" part has something to do with what you've observed. I would certainly call such people "aspiring-radical", and I might even call them tepidly left-wing (especially with respect to the US's Overton window), but I think "left-wing radical" might be a misnomer, since the radicality is unrelated to the left-wing nature. There are strong first-principles reasons to expect that this politics does a significant disservice to members of the groups it's nominally attempting to help (and that's before you factor in the backlash we're currently seeing).
But I've never found the "left-wing" / "right-wing" dichotomy to be helpful for anything other than identifying The Enemy™ (which I consider a generally counterproductive activity), so take what I say here with a pinch of salt.
aleph_minus_one 2 days ago [-]
> The left-wing radicals I'm aware of are all very big on community. My understanding of the corresponding "right-wing" value is that community should be a certain way (with the radical right-wing value being that it must be a certain way, for various incompatible versions of "right way").
The same statement holds for left-wing radicals: they insist that their community should be a certain way (with the radical left-wing value being that it must be a certain way, for various incompatible versions of "right way").
wizzwizz4 2 days ago [-]
The same statement holds for left-wing radicals on the internet, who rigidly police the boundaries of their fractious communities. I don't see this behaviour from, for instance, the local anarchists, who mostly seem focused on improving the material conditions of the downtrodden in the community, strengthening local ties, and promoting bottom-up logistics. (And, of course, there are people who seek to accomplish the same goal through right-wing methods: increasing employment, promoting local businesses, and providing grants to those who require them.)
Maybe the difference is not left versus right, but "my community" (trying to recruit people into your imagined better society) versus "the community" (acknowledging that we all live in the same world, and meeting people where they are)? Or maybe it's just that the people doing the actual boots-on-the-ground work tend to care more about doing the actual work than about fracturing over ideological disagreements. ("Leftist infighting" long predates the internet, after all: https://existentialcomics.com/comic/165.)
aleph_minus_one 2 days ago [-]
> Maybe the difference is not left versus right, but "my community" (trying to recruit people into your imagined better society) versus "the community" (acknowledging that we all live in the same world, and meeting people where they are)?
Both for left-wing and right-wing people, it's about who is in-group vs out-group [1]. The only difference is by which values, psychometric and socioeconomic traits, ... left-wing vs right-wing people decide who belongs to their respective in-group vs out-group.
> The left-wing radicals I'm aware of are all very big on community
Yet they are unable to build or keep one, due to the need to track all signs of thought heresy.
zozbot234 2 days ago [-]
> If you're thinking of corporate activisty types, the sort of people who promote hamfisted "everyone with light skin has internalised racism" mandatory training, then I'd wager the "corporate" part has something to do with what you've observed.
The thing about corporations is that they internally run on politics and a fixed hierarchy of command and control. No different than a resolutely "anti-capitalist" government office! You can think of this as an 'anarchist' observation if you want, but it's just a fact of life. So when we see corporate activism come up with such hamfisted ideas that we wouldn't see in less "activist" corporations, this has to tell us something about the merit of the underlying politics.
Anyway, the thing about traditional communities, in this context - the ones that "have to be a certain way" because they've been that way for generations - is that they have immense inertia; they create real social ties that can bind people together and make them resilient even in the face of very real, structural, systemic oppression. I don't see "polycules" as achieving that in the near term, even though that kind of fluid free association is undeniably the very earliest step towards what I'm thinking about.
A traditional community is not going to just dissolve when the going get tough, or when interpersonal conflicts arise (and such conflicts are inevitable in large-enough groups!): they uniquely encourage people who might otherwise dislike each other to cooperate for collective benefit. There is great value in that, which is not often acknowledged.
thrance 2 days ago [-]
> Anyway, the thing about traditional communities, in this context - the ones that "have to be a certain way" because they've been that way for generations - is that they have immense inertia; they create real social ties that can bind people together and make them resilient even in the face of very real, structural, systemic oppression.
I really don't know where you're pulling that from. Jim Crow America wasn't a good time for black people. Women got lobotomy after showing the first signs of depression. Gay people were demonized at every occasion.
A return to this awful social hierarchy is MAGA and the right's ultimate goal, no matter how unrealistic. They're dismantling the Civil Rights act piece by piece, just last week they've been able to gerrymander the black vote away thanks to SCOTUS.
Like it or not, every social progress in this country has come from the left.
zozbot234 2 days ago [-]
> Jim Crow America wasn't a good time for black people. Women got lobotomy after showing the first signs of depression. Gay people were demonized at every occasion.
Many of these things were actively advocated for by the Progressive movement, back in the early 20th c. (Lobotomies came a few decades later, but were ultimately rooted in the exact same ideas about the primacy of 'science!' and trusted institutions over people's lived experience and the deep reality of enduring traditional values.) Studying that history in depth is an excellent way to disabuse oneself of the naïve notion that Progressives are inherently the good guys.
dragonwriter 2 days ago [-]
> Many of these things were actively advocated for by the Progressive movement, back in the early 20th c.
Yeah, the early 20th Century American Progressive movement has no connection to the late 20th-early 21st century American progressive movement, the latter of which adopted “progressive” not in reference to the earlier movement but in reference to "progress” in contrast to what its members perceived to be increasing static defense of a corporate capitalist status quo by other elements of the American liberal movement from which it emerged. It is a essentially a social democratic movement, which is about as far from the early 20th century movement's technocratic elitism as you can get.
bccdee 2 days ago [-]
You are parroting criticisms made by antiracists and intersectional feminists who are themselves part of the contemporary progressive movement.
This is like when laypeople say "economics is all hogwash because humans aren't rational actors": They are citing behavioural economics as if it disqualifies the field of economics rather than being part of the field.
thrance 2 days ago [-]
These progressives and modern ones share nothing but the name, and you now it perfectly well.
eigencoder 2 days ago [-]
The progressives back then may have been wrong, but the progressives today have it all right!
keybored 2 days ago [-]
This by itself looks like a popular topic here (judging by the votes to comment ratio). But as is expected the topic gets derailed because people would like resilience, mindful use, and ecological care truly by themselves, not within a particular whole, or certainly not the whole that is proposed.
But people like this genuinely think that these things are causally interconnected. And that treating them as separate things is counter-productive. They are not on a mission to make as small an intersection as possible. They want to solve the problem. But they think that the Whole that needs to be considered is much larger than you would think.
As a detached and hypothtical example: what does the non-political and anti-fossil fuel environmentalist cause look like in a city which is built on the fossil fuel industry? There isn’t one. Making it non-political is impossible. There are clear competing interests at play. You could make an environmentalist club where you volunteer to clean up litter. The grocery clerk as well as the oil executive are just as likely to join that club. But it wouldn’t have anything to do with the anti-fossil fuel cause.
Another hypothetical example. Being anti-war. Can such a group be anti-imperialism? To avoid Western blinders, just imagine Russian imperalism. What would a Russian anti-war but not anti-imperalism group look like? Clearly you cannot call the Russian invasion of Ukraine “imperialistic”. The war apologist would say that it is necessary to denazify Ukraine or something. So what are you fighting for? Allow wars that are imperialistic but advocate for more non-combatant aid in terms of supplies and health personel? I mean that would be “anti-war” in terms of reducing suffering. But it could never, ever hope to end any war.
There are people that are radical. They think that certain problems have root causes. So they get at the root of the problem, as they see it. This idea of having many loose causes doesn’t make sense in their world view. It’s like fighting weeds by trimming the edges every day. The weeds will always be there.
botanrice 2 days ago [-]
Using your own final example: could you not argue that if you trim the edges every day to fight weeds (read: practice permacomputing as a daily lifestyle), then over time the weeds may never grow to their fullest extent? And that if you get more and more people to help you trim the edges then over time you may establish a new 'edge' so to speak? (read: status quo).
But by telling people that they aren't really welcome to help you trim unless they agree that they must attack the root of the weeds, even tho that's really hard!
I think that's the wrong way to think about the idea of environmentalism! We should encourage everyone to do whatever they find intersting and helpful. If the oil exec wants to do river clean-ups every weekend then why even balk at that? It's not black & white, it's great that in this theoretically scenario they want to even do that. Maybe over time they realize that the river keeps getting dirty because of their business actions, who knows?
keybored 2 days ago [-]
> Using your own final example: could you not argue that if you trim the edges every day to fight weeds (read: practice permacomputing as a daily lifestyle), then over time the weeds may never grow to their fullest extent?
There are two parts.
1. Counter-forces overwhelming your efforts meaning you just lose because they overwhelm you (e.g. climate change acceleration)
2. Permanently (nothing in life is permanent but ya know) getting rid of the problem
I think weed trimming is insufficient for both.
What is this a counter to? All of computing, on an industrial scale. You don’t counter that by hobbyist dilly-dallying.
> And that if you get more and more people to help you trim the edges then over time you may establish a new 'edge' so to speak? (read: status quo).
You can establish a new edge. It has happened before. And then counter-forces build back the old bad thing eventually.
Look, what is the point of trimming weeds if you can get rid of them at the root? What is it? So that you can unlock the achievement of maximum participation? The goal is to clean the garden. Not to get every passerby to clumsily help.
> But by telling people that they aren't really welcome to help you trim unless they agree that they must attack the root of the weeds, even tho that's really hard! I think that's the wrong way to think about the idea of environmentalism! We should encourage everyone to do whatever they find intersting and helpful.
Environmentalists (and humanity) are up against possibly civilization-ending climate change. The goal for them at this point is not to start an inclusive social club.
> If the oil exec wants to do river clean-ups every weekend then why even balk at that? It's not black & white, it's great that in this theoretically scenario they want to even do that.
If the food conglomerate executive that issues orders to throw away tons of perfectly good food in order to not devalue their own produce wants to volunteer at the soup kitchen, why even balk at that?
The point is not to balk at that..
> Maybe over time they realize that the river keeps getting dirty because of their business actions, who knows?
Then what happens next?
They order the company to forfeit profit maximization in order to be nice to the river?
Then the executive gets fired and they are truly one of the people again.
botanrice 2 days ago [-]
idk man I see your points for sure but feel like you're taking a pessimistic and dramatic take on it. Doing a little something is better than nothing when it comes to climate action. And doing a little something a couple times might lead to greater involvement.
environmentalists (myself included) have tried the doomsday "we need to act now!" approach and it turns off a lot of people, clearly, as evidenced by our societal regression (in the US at least).
any attempt to help weed whack is worthy of inclusion imo
keybored 2 days ago [-]
So far I’ve indulged the complaining from OP in this subthread. Here’s a contrast. I have always hated environmentalism that is solely about individual, piecemeal work.
A cause that correctly identifies the political problem is exactly something that I would get behind.
So it’s not this simplistic picture (presented by OP) of being some “inclusive” and “non-political” group that can get all the normies on board, or being a bunch of arseholes that only associate with people who intersect exactly with their interests and proclivities.
But it’s not like you can lead with that when someone says that having a political focus is “extra politics” and “polarization”. The good old “let’s leave politics out of climate change/wealth inequality/tech feudalism” chestnut.
botanrice 1 days ago [-]
well there's place for both, right? I think it's valid for us to agree at the end of the day that you need to have so-called radical groups that accept nothing less than what they stand for to push, what they call it, the "Overton window" of societally acceptable policies and whatnot? Sure so the radical group pushes these ideas into mainstream consciousness but you need sympathetic, but more moderate groups to make it palatteable to everyone. I think this is a good thing.
The tricky part is where to draw the line? Let's take on the behemoth of black lives matter movement for sake of discussion. Anyone with progressive ideals can get behind the base premise and of course empathize with the origin of it. Many people, whether they identify with left politics or not, maybe saw those origin moments in 2020 and agreed it was messed up and we should be better as a society. And ofc you wouldn't expect the leaders of the movement ot say, "no we dont want to scare the slightly racist people so we just want more bodyacms, its okay if there is still systemic racism" - no! they should push for the most equitable possible society. Cops should be held more accountable for bad acts, any potentially racial motivations need to be investigated, shit, while we're at it, there should be less cops since they are so militaristic in many places! (I agree).
But one thing leads to another and then that push for radical change becomes "defund the police" and all of a sudden you have a cultural backlash because now you're coming after 'good hardworking cops' and now it's a culture war! Now you've got those sympathetic, if apathetic, people who felt bad about george floyd, etc. suddenly hearing that we need to 'get rid of the police' and that could lead to safety issues or their cousin is a cop, whatever. Now they're against it.
--
So, interesting thought experiment. If permacomputing folks say, no, you must be anti-capitlist and feminist and post-marxist to practice sustainable computing, essentially, now some of prime demographic who could have joined the movement (hackernews) are a little skeptical because they maybe are a little capitalist or don't understand feminism. Then the average wealthy non-tech person who buys a new phone every year hears this and instead of hearing the core principle of, huh, maybe i could buy less phones if that would foster all these positive things instead hears that by doing so they are being anti-capitlist, marxist, whatever tf it is and they get turned off, then it's "woke"!
So where is the line drawn? Do you say, eh it's fine this is for a radical group and that's how it is. Or do you try to draw in others? Quite an interesting sociological discussion actually!
botanrice 2 days ago [-]
I don't think the idea is particularly polarized and you can choose to be inspired by the premise without buying into the political aspect of it, as you may do with many things.
That said, I do feel like it's cringe to say it's anti-capitalist, anarchist, etc.. I have very progressive values but just can't associate with liberal groups because of stuff like this. Like, why? Just promote the culture to everyone, capitalists, political ideologies, etc. By making that statement it is automatically turning off ppl that might otherwise join the cause, it's really not helping anything imo. Kinda annoyed me to see that as well.
realslimjd 2 days ago [-]
What values do you have that are very progressive but not anticapitalist?
You say that you can't associate with liberal groups because of stuff like this, but liberals are not anticapitalist or anarchist. Leftists are anticapitalist but liberalism is basically advocating for softer capitalism, which is to say capitalism and strong individual rights, while leftism is focused on collectivism.
botanrice 2 days ago [-]
honestly man I am not an expert at the terminology of liberal vs. leftist vs. progressive vs whatever. I'm just empathetic and care about uplifting our fellow citizens and want to support policies that do that, and ofc i see how capitalism harms people and the environment. but I also think that can be done without declaring the intersection of beliefs! if someone sympathizes with one of those things but hates two of the others then you've lost someone who might partake in your cause.
i also respect that there's a place for radical groups for sure, so hey, so be it if this group wants to run like this. just feels a shame to lead on a movement that can attract a wide swath of people with it's core concept but then exclude them if they don't share your exact beliefs, as OP was suggesting.
goodpoint 2 days ago [-]
"resilient and ecological use of computing" or of anything else is inherently political, like it or not.
theodric 23 hours ago [-]
But everything is political, don't'cha know
myrmidon 2 days ago [-]
I completely agree. I find it generally remarkable that the whole sustainability/environmentalism cause still struggles to find conservative support, because those things are basically perfectly aligned, and preserving the environment should be a trivial sell to a conservative base (it's literally in the name).
I see significant blame with environmentalist orgs/pushes like this that are deliberately anti-conservative for little reason, not just with conservatives being hypocrites.
aleph_minus_one 2 days ago [-]
> preserving the environment should be a trivial sell to a conservative base (it's literally in the name).
Be careful with such a statement: in the USA conservatism is defined as something different than what the Latin word origin suggests. See for example Russell Kirk's principles of conservatism:
Conservatives tend to gloss over what it is exactly that they want to conserve. The environment? No. Norms? Sometimes, but not always. Before the 19th century, abortion was relatively uncontroversial; anti-abortion rhetoric was a "conservative innovation."
What they always defend is social hierarchies. Anti-abortion rhetoric may break from the status quo, but it does so in defence of preserving women's role in society as obligate mothers. Starting wars in the Middle East isn't staid or responsible, but the performance of these wars situates America at the top of a symbolic hierarchy of global power.
If you dig into the fathers of modern conservative thought (people like Edmund Burke), one thing they were very concerned about was the preservation of aristocratic hierarchy beyond the end of monarchism. How can a liberal society maintain a class distinction between the rulers and the ruled? These are the intellectual roots of meritocracy: Let the free market pick winners without any interference by egalitarian meddlers, and the upper class will naturally select itself.
From this standpoint, the conservative disinterest in sustainability becomes obvious. The machines that are destroying the environment are owned by wealthy people whose fortunes may be destabilized by switching to a newer, more sustainable technologies. The conservative movement exists to protect the social status of the wealthy; therefore, concern for the environment is a liability.
HerbManic 2 days ago [-]
I heard it said once, "Nowadays the right lives in denial, the left lives in delusion".
It is very reductionist but it does sort of hit on althe flavour of how these things go.
philipallstar 2 days ago [-]
[flagged]
helpfulmandrill 2 days ago [-]
They elected a Jewish leader, so not that anti-Jew.
philipallstar 2 days ago [-]
This guy[0]? I imagine he thinks of himself as the good Jew.
No? I imagine, in this context, that he thinks of himself as an advocate against police violence, since he retweeted a video of cops kicking a man in the head and said he thought it was bad. Doesn't seem particularly Jewish to me, one way or another.
Kind of a weird comment, imo.
IshKebab 2 days ago [-]
And often anti-green too, in a cut-off-their-nose way. E.g. until recently they were against nuclear power, and vehemently against HS2, apparently preferring that everyone drives instead.
philipallstar 2 days ago [-]
Yep. Very pro anti.
dyauspitr 2 days ago [-]
Politics is essentially your model of the entire world. It’s essentially inextricably present in everything you do.
yawpitch 2 days ago [-]
If you see a substantial amount of bolted on extra politics on that page there’s a good chance you are experiencing the symptoms of polarization.
perching_aix 2 days ago [-]
How do you reckon they'd tell it apart without also experiencing (or having experienced) it?
If you do have an answer to this, why are you accusing him of it regardless?
yawpitch 2 days ago [-]
There’s no accusation, just like there’s nothing particularly political or polarized in that piece. One can imagine an accusation, precisely as one can imagine the particularly political where it doesn’t actually exist.
As for how to discern the difference, well that’s the purpose of critical thinking and metacognition.
perching_aix 2 days ago [-]
So are you supposing they either lack or had blanked on their critical thinking and metacognition somehow, or how did you arrive at the conclusion that they are merely "experiencing the symptoms of polarization" then instead? Why couldn't they have simply also just used the same critical thinking and metacognition you yourself seem to be so proud of, to reach their conclusion?
Maybe you're the one who's so aligned to the politics on that page that you're experiencing such symptoms after all? Exhibiting in retaliatory coded insults and DARVO maybe?
yawpitch 2 days ago [-]
You truly do have an impressive imagination. Again, there’s no insult, there’s simply an observation. Nothing on that page is particularly political from any position but a substantially polarized one. It’s not entirely apolitical, sure, but it’s pretty milquetoast for a manifesto. If you see polarization there it’s because you’re looking through a polarized filter, in the literal photographic sense as much as the political one: you’ve rotated your filter frame to minimize reflections of what you do like and maximize visibility of what you don’t like. If you’re offended by it, you’re looking at it from such an orthogonal direction that you really should check if you’re the one whose biases are on display.
Everyone should engage their critical thinking and develop their capacity for metacognition; no one starts with either of those skill sets, and thus I assume neither in anyone (and everyone, including myself) until I see evidence of either or both. I, very gently, pointed in the direction of engaging those skills and you see violence where violence isn’t, just like you imagine excessive pride where there cannot be any at all.
Perhaps you’ve also been primed to see violence where none exists? To feel as extreme what isn’t extreme because you’ve moved (or been moved) towards the extreme?
Again, not an ad hominem… just a question we should all be asking ourselves all the time.
zahlman 2 days ago [-]
> Nothing on that page is particularly political from any position but a substantially polarized one.
For example:
> The history of computing is deeply intertwined with capitalism and militarism.
To assert this as if it were significant, and continue on as the article does, is inherently making a political statement. It is trying to paint capitalism and militarism as inherently bad, and draw ingroup/outgroup lines in the sand. There is no reason why a capitalist or a military supporter might fail to see the value in more efficient computing, or in environmentalism generally.
There's also, you know, all the stuff it says on the main page of the site.
yawpitch 1 days ago [-]
They didn’t assert it as if it were significant, they asserted it as if it were fact. Which, let’s be clear, it is. And no sufficiently informed person could argue otherwise, given that the historical development of computing was driven, in its entirety, by the needs of, and investments made by, businesses and militaries. The early development of computing cannot be anything but intertwined with the nature of its early developers, which form the foundation upon which all further historical (and political) development of computing must stand. You’re supplying the idea that recognizing this basic, ground truth, and really ludicrously obvious fact is also casting those foundations as “inherently bad”.
Also capitalism is not comprised exclusively of capitalists, any more than militarism is composed exclusively of military supporters. Capitalism is a political framework centered on economic power, militarism is a political framework centered on martial power, both of them are ways of understanding the cultural and political and economic and rational systems we all live within, whether we support them or not.
Nothing on the linked page says anything particularly supportive or pejorative about those frameworks, it just acknowledges them as foundational to computing. It arguably makes a very (if not inherently) capitalist argument for environmental-conserving usage of computing resources, but that, really, is about it.
Anything else you’re supplying, from your perspective… my point is that such a perspective is, itself, already polarized.
zahlman 1 days ago [-]
> They didn’t assert it as if it were significant, they asserted it as if it were fact.
The same people who wish to tell me that "everything is political", will apparently not recognize the significance of choosing to do something when it clearly would have been easier not to do so.
The fact that the assertion is present demonstrates the imputed significance. Writing it is about making implications and value judgments, because it cannot serve another purpose in context, and it would be easier to say nothing.
yawpitch 21 hours ago [-]
Somewhat ironic that you think it would be easier to do nothing when that section is specifically asking people to consider doing nothing when doing something unnecessary with computing resources would necessarily be harmful.
Now, I might also be doing redundant work here, and maybe it’s not worth doing so, but I should think that anyone on any part of the political spectrum could find some pretty egregious examples of waste and inefficiency in the military / industrial complex.
perching_aix 2 days ago [-]
I think it's best if we segment things a bit more carefully here.
Their homepage makes explicit references and expresses alignment with a whole host of political movements and philosophies. I believe it stands to reason that people recognizing related motifs and tropes on the subpage shared above thus shouldn't be surprising, and that it certainly isn't just people's imagination going into overdrive based on personal biases. That it is further entirely reasonable to understand these features as intentional, or at least as something originating from the page author(s)' own personal motivations and biases. So as far as the signalling itself goes, it exists, and its origin is squarely the page's author(s), not the person above. You appear to agree so far:
> It’s not entirely apolitical, sure
But then that's not really what you "made an observation" about if I understand you right, but about the normative description around that signalling. That the person above described these political motifs and tropes as polarizing. I can definitely appreciate why this is problematic: normative language about subjective matters is generally grating and incorrect, as it falsely presents the label as objective. But then simply flipping things around I do not think highlights that at all. Rather than clarifying this epistemic lapse, I'd say you merely flippantly sent people on a loop instead. This is why I found what you wrote accusatory, a designation I do reserve the right to apply, as it is self-evidently subjective. Whether you [claim to] have not intended to insult is a separate matter. I hope that this also stands to reason and is appreciable. Though I shall also add that finding political motifs and tropes "polarizing" also very much teeters on the self-evidently subjective.
But then if you said that simply handwaving things away as subjective is not particularly helpful - I agree! So let's try and define what would be polarizing from a political standpoint. Words themselves only carry meaning to the extent we can agree on them after all, so without agreeing on what a polarizing messaging is, I'm afraid we'll keep going in circles about how we see each other, and how that is not actually the case.
I'd define a polarizing political message as one that brings someone closer to a specific political clique, a messaging that promotes clique formation and alignment. I'd maybe find it tempting to further lump in radicality or fringeness, but thinking about it, I really don't think there's a reason to. I also wondered about intentionality, but that, I feel, is also optional. The potency and success of such messaging is definitely affected by these other aspects though, and thus so is their discernability.
Now, since the authors explicitly call out several political movements and philosophies on their homepage, and given that on the subpage their messaging clearly does appeal to those, the question becomes: is featuring motifs and tropes like that in itself an exercise in polarization? I think that yes, it absolutely is. This is because it makes it appear as if solidarity with those ideals was a requirement to feel solidarity with the actual named topic at hand itself (permacomputing). Which is exactly what the person above took an issue with too, certainly in my interpretation anyways.
But then recognizing this in no way means the reader has to be polarized, or that there would be a "good chance" as you put it that they'd be polarized. I can certainly imagine, with my supposedly impressive imagination, that it'd hurt their ears more if they were diametrically opposed to the ideals otherwise cited. But I'm pretty sure that only modulates the likelihood of them speaking up, rather than the distribution of people noticing it. In that sense, again, it feels extremely flippant to try paint them as the one polarized. They might very well be, but that doesn't mean that the logical leap presented was actually reasonable as a result.
Finally, few more comments:
> Again, there’s no insult, there’s simply an observation.
You may [claim to] not intend to insult. What I'm saying is that that is absolutely what you achieved, and continue to achieve, and that I'm unable to believe you. If you fail to recognize or accommodate that, that is regrettable, though I can't say I feel particularly compelled to help with it either.
> Nothing on that page is particularly political from any position but a substantially polarized one
This bugged me for a while, but I think you're mixing up polarized and radical(ized).
> It’s not entirely apolitical, sure, but it’s pretty milquetoast for a manifesto.
Subjective. Could (should?) have lead with this though maybe, I'd say this is infinitely more obvious to be just "an observation".
> If you see polarization there it’s because you’re looking through a polarized filter, in the literal photographic sense as much as the political one: you’ve rotated your filter frame to minimize reflections of what you do like and maximize visibility of what you don’t like. If you’re offended by it, you’re looking at it from such an orthogonal direction that you really should check if you’re the one whose biases are on display.
I should probably explicitly address this as well. Normatively stating that the other person is offended, polarized (radicalized?), biased, etc, is an exercise in mind reading. Not saying it cannot be inferred, just that it is at best an inference, and that it in itself is subjective.
Meta-text aside, while the phenomenon you're describing is entirely possible (it's basically what overfitting is in ML), that check did happen. It is also entirely possible to be both sensitized to certain ideas, and also those ideas genuinely being shoehorned in or being unnecessary. And there's really no need for this to be a competition or a "one or the other". It also doesn't necessarily mean it should be an impetus for soul-searching. You have your own perspective for a reason, feeling strongly about certain topics is not inherently a flaw. Quite the opposite, it is nonsensical (in a very literal sense) to be "unbiased". Not to say one shouldn't mind their biases though.
> Everyone should engage their critical thinking and develop their capacity for metacognition; no one starts with either of those skill sets, and thus I assume neither in anyone (and everyone, including myself) until I see evidence of either or both
To my latest understanding of human cognition, metacognition (and critical thought) is an innate ability of humans, and many other animals. What you perhaps rather mean is a more willful and focused exercising of these capabilities, especially around subjects one may feel strongly about, where this capability is known to be more difficult to emerge and engage. Not only was there no evidence however that they did not do so, there was explicit evidence backing their recognition up, even if they indeed did not exercise these mental facilities. So as an advice, even a general one, it's a rather oddly timed and pointed one, hence why I understood it as a malicious insinuation, an insult, instead. Even ignoring how it misrepresents the state of the art understanding of human cognition.
> I, very gently, pointed in the direction of engaging those skills and you see violence where violence isn’t, just like you imagine excessive pride where there cannot be any at all.
I appreciate that you feel that way. I hope I was clear enough just how much I see it otherwise, and how and why exactly.
> Perhaps you’ve also been primed to see violence where none exists? To feel as extreme what isn’t extreme because you’ve moved (or been moved) towards the extreme?
I have been, yes. It is entirely possible I'm misjudging your attitude. Before you assume otherwise though, I'd like to explicitly let you know that all three messages (including this one) I posted in response to you were iterated on several times before (and after) posting, with me internally pondering about exactly this among other things (like how you might further get a kick out of picturing me pondering so), and adjusting my language accordingly. I find it extremely worrisome that you see other people so lowly that you'd expressly assume they do not do this, and I do not see this kind of hesitancy from you whatsoever. On the contrary, there basically isn't a sentence in what you wrote so far I haven't found blatantly inflammatory, which really isn't helping with this impression.
> Again, not an ad hominem…
I was suggesting you engaged in coded insults. Insults are not ad hominems. An ad hominem is a logical fallacy, not a moral one. Although I do consider insults to be a form of filibustering.
yawpitch 1 days ago [-]
Speaking of a form of filibustering, this forum rejects any reasonable response I write as too long. Email me at michael at yawpitchroll d’aught com and I’d be happy to give this another round.
perching_aix 22 hours ago [-]
I was actually pretty worried that I would run into a character limit myself, I don't usually write comments this long for a number of reasons, and I only noticed how excessively long it was by the time I submitted it. I guess there really is a limit then and I just fell short of it.
I appreciate this is kind of a dick move from me after I made you read all that (and write something evidently even longer!), but truth be told, my engagement on the matter was more instinctual than deliberate, so when presented with the option to willfully continue afresh elsewhere, I'd prefer to decline. Thank you for willing to engage me in depth and even offering to continue separately. This now does suggest to me I might have legitimately got off on the wrong foot earlier.
While I might change my mind depending, if you do receive any emails to that address claiming to be connected to this, please do assume it is not actually me, and ask for some "proof of identity" (e.g. changing the text on my bio to at least demonstrate control of this account). Won't perfectly guarantee it's me, but then nothing really can. You probably already figured as much, but I felt it's best I explicitly called this out regardless.
yawpitch 21 hours ago [-]
I appreciate the opsec advice. Honestly would have preferred to be able to reply here, for the public benefit of others, but I think you just came in under the artificial verbosity limit and there were a lot of interesting threads I didn’t want to butcher or not respond to thoughtfully.
Shame these sort of forums haven’t figured out a better means of handling the kind of longer form back and forth required to find common ground, especially where political philosophy gets involved.
knuppar 3 days ago [-]
This sounds like a fence sitter take. Everything is political and not acknowledging that is part of the problem.
its-summertime 2 days ago [-]
I think it would be a better approach to not pre-emptively burn oneself out with stress by viewing everything through a political lens at all times.
wolvesechoes 2 days ago [-]
But everything that touches how society functions, what it values, how it is organized etc. is political.
oersted 2 days ago [-]
There are several senses to "politics". You are right in that, in the general sense, politics is any collective negotiation of what matters to the group. There are objectively optimal ways to achieve a goal, but choosing what goals to pursue, and what benefits are worth what costs, and who they will affect, that is rather subjective and the realm of politics. In that sense politics is fundamental and valuable.
But in a more concrete sense, politics also refers to our tendency to join opposing teams or tribes and fight it out, more or less literally. In that sense, "everything is political" can mean viewing everything as a fight between groups, or worse, associating everything to the conflict between the two dominant groups. That is quite toxic.
2 days ago [-]
lithos 2 days ago [-]
Look a Redditor.
HerbManic 3 days ago [-]
I have argued for a long time that Permacomputing will be seen as the missing part of the Free Software movement. What use is free software long term if you do not have hardware you can control, maintain and repair easily? This will mean a sacrifice in performance and functionality but gaining control and longevity.
With things like Secureboot, TPM modules and ever increasing demands to lock down systems, there is the risk that even libre software will be snuffed out. While not those technologies explicitly, similar less friendly things may come up in future. And when that happens, being beholden to billion dollar hardware companies won't seem so friendly. A little alarmist, but I didn't think we would be were we are today as it is.
One interesting area is about how to make software that is not hardware locked but easy enough to implement with very little work involved.
A system spec that is only 32 instructions deep, something that a single person could implement in less than a week. Essentially the hardest part is building the hardware Abstraction Layer. It wouldn't be efficient but it is very portable and thus makes it resilient to any future possible shocks.
anthk 2 days ago [-]
Nils Holm does permacomputing without writting fancy manifestos: https://t3x.org
T3X/0 will assemble binaries for Unix/DOS (maybe Windows) and CP/M.
S9 can do great stuff with very little.
Klong it's a mini APL-like CAS more bound to Statistics than Calculus. No fancy Unicode needed.
Read the instructions, that mini VM it's surprisingly able.
Finally, Subleq+EForth from https://github.com/howerj/muxleq (muxleq it's just subleq with parallel mux running the exact same intstructions).
From the book you can boostrap EForth from itself with a minimal Subleq DEC file. Enough to run a Sokoban, a calculator (set complex numbers as binomials), and you can implement q+ q- q* q/ to calculate and reduce (lcm/mcm) fractions:
2 3 1 3 q+ .s
3 3 <ok>
/ .
1 <ok>
Luxferre's Scoundrel C port can trivially ported to UXN and even maybe mu808. Eforth for sure, with cells and a minimal 'vector/array/' like implementation.
This project appears here from time to time and each and every time I am amazed. Thanks for sharing it.
louismerlin 3 days ago [-]
I have been involved in Berlin’s permacomputing scene for a few years now, and have met a lot of very cool people through that. Can highly recommend you get involved in your local meetups or start your own !
I think it's rad that folks are thinking more deeply about what mainstream computing is implicitly for and what a counter-culture would look like.
The language on this site seems to position permacomputing in opposition to an unethical status quo.
Personally I'd rather more of a solarpunk computing initiative.
Instead of identity defined by what you are fleeing, define it by what you are running towards.
kakwa_ 2 days ago [-]
Are these principles really about sustainability?
It seems to be far more geared toward promoting some sort of misplaced post-collapse resiliency.
In other words: solving some hypothetical issues on the other side of a catastrophe for a world we don't know anything about, and almost ignoring present and actual problems.
xantronix 2 days ago [-]
I don't think the two are particularly incompatible. This seems more like a foundational statement than a demonstration of what permacomputing in current practice might look like. Sure, things like https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/ have a performance element to them, but it's meant to be illustrative of what can be achieved more than just prescriptive.
A very solid (but mundane) example of permacomputing today is just holding onto an old ThinkPad and using it for meaningful work rather than feeling the need to buy a new machine every couple years.
ktallett 2 days ago [-]
This is where EU policy is helping. Permacomputing only works when we have a significant number of devices that are easily usable beyond a usual lifespan. Whether the whole device is repair able or at least the key aspects such as battery to keep a working phone working, is essential. Although it's really only the first step of many. The next obvious one is to remove lockdown of bootloaders and firmware on devices and allow any software to be installed. Google are going the wrong way.
We are so far beyond needing regular purchasing of new devices. Functionality wise, in any significant form, devices haven't improved in many years. This yearly release cycle has become ludicrous and goes against everything we should be doing.
Fairphone, Framework, MNT, Shift, are all on the right track even if not perfect.
GistNoesis 2 days ago [-]
The root of this problem is linked to the difficulty of manufacturing chips at home. Some people are already doing this in their home lab (don't get me wrong the chemicals involved are really nasty).
The main problem is economical. Big factories benefits from economies of scale, which mean the ecosystem for one off prototypes chips couldn't really develop.
For advanced devices the transistor must be small so the process used ever-shrinking wavelength to engrave the silicon wafers. The whole industry took the Extreme-UV lithography route, which required big machines and investments.
But the alternative was there all-along (reminiscent of 3d-printer vs mass fabrication). Instead of using light to engrave the wafer use particles : For example mask-less electron beam lithography where you scan a beam of electron like in old TVs. It still have problems scaling up because you are writing a single point instead of projecting an image, but achievable resolution can be higher, and multi-beam systems are on the horizon to solve this speed issue.
With software and IP cost going down and humans no longer needed in the loop due to advanced robotics, most safety issues can be contained more easily.
abricq 2 days ago [-]
While I appreciate all the stuffs mentioned here, I believe they are missing something: people should *go vote at all the elections*, and advocate for a system-level change. Systemic resilience instead of personal habits.
Pretty much all their suggestions are to be applied on personal-level. And I agree with those. But they could be made 100x easier if there was some help provided by localities, municipalities & states. I'd love to know better my neighbors & exchange skills & objects, but i'd be much easier if there was a *free* repair-coffee in the neighborhood.
One example from the article: one of the suggestion for "hope for the best prepare for the worst" is "start a local repair cafe". But come on ! With what money ? With what time ? Where ? Opening a repair café is the kind of stuff is by nature non-profitable, therefore the business of the states.
All i'm trying to say is: let's just not forget that this is a political concern, and we can vote for these stuffs.
320x200 2 days ago [-]
Fair point, however the link between systemic and individual changes is not as binary as it may seem, it's long debated thing, but in a nutshell it's essentially a circular problem. Lot of permacomputing participants are involved into activist work and encourage coop forms of organization, collective action, creation/joining of unions, and make use of their technical skills to help less privileged groups (some of these encouragements are also listed in the principles). All of these things have impact on the perception of mainstream politics, capacity for change and how electoral politics could be activated. Maybe this could be made more explicit.
bccdee 2 days ago [-]
> and we can vote for these stuffs.
Can we? We can vote for a party, but I don't know that any party here has permacomputing in their platform. If you want to add something to a party's platform, the usual way to do that is lobbying, but who can afford lobbyists? The alternative—grassroots activism—tends to involve a lot of stuff like local repair cafes that attract volunteers and get people talking.
TrevorFSmith 2 days ago [-]
Every effort doesn't need to address every problem, I think. You're right that individual effort isn't sufficient and many of the permacomputing folks are also activists of varying sorts but I think it's ok to separate concerns as most people understand that there's no single and complete solution.
I'm not a greenie by any stretch of the imagination but I'm a strong believer in Repair, Re-use, Recycle.
I'm writing this comment on a Lenovo Yoga I bought for $10 and fixed up. It's a quad core with 4GB of soldered RAM and a 128GB SSD but I slapped CachyOS on it and it works for nearly anything I want to do when I'm out and about. The battery lasts me about 3 1/2 hours. I've picked up CRT monitors for virtually nothing and they work just fine.
We throw things away too easily.
1313ed01 2 days ago [-]
Browsing that wiki in the past and two pages that resonated with me were on the topic of stable APIs (that is a topic in need of much more discussion overall). There are some good thoughts there.
- T3X0 and a lot more languages from there will compile to Unix, DOS and even CP/M. There's a Tetris clone, some shooter, a Ladder clone, some editor...
- S9 Scheme has Ncurses and sockets support, it can do a lot, basically all the exercises from Computer Abstractions. If you are good enough at Scheme you might do SICP by reusing the graphics.scm code for (frame)
- Klong it's an APL/K like language but without odd symbols. It comes with a greats book on statistics.
- MLite it's a great ML/Haskell-like intro
- NHM Basic it's more like a toy Basic but it can do a lot with a bit of effort
This didn't pass my sniff test. Each of the three key ethics; "Earth Care", "People Care", and "Fair Share", only appear once in the document. I feel like that is a clear rhetorical failure. "Fair Share" triggers my economic mind and made me look directly for their alternative to capitalism, they have none.
unfirehose 2 days ago [-]
my community is also growing a permacomputer we have permacomputer dot com and unturf dot com to explain the system.
our system has a bounding box of Truth, Freedom, Harmony, & Love.
lynx97 3 days ago [-]
from permacomputing.net:
... an anti-capitalist political project. ... anarchism ... intersectional feminism ...
No, thanks. I thought it was a tech project. Apparently not.
jochem9 3 days ago [-]
One does not rule out the other. In the end it's nerds messing with hardware.
Lots of computer culture is rooted in anarchism, anti-capitalism and a fight for fairness. E.g. early internet culture, the open source community.
Imo it's very nice to see explicit anti-capitalist movements within tech, because the other side of tech is so completely over the top capitalist.
lynx97 3 days ago [-]
anti-capitalism, while a bit strange a lable, is something I can sympathize with. But once we are talking anarchism and (intersectional) feminism in a computing context, I am definitely out. I miss the time when computing was a lot less political. It was nice hacking on projects without having to identify with something totally unrelated, or being forced to support idiologies just to be a part of it.
tolerance 3 days ago [-]
> I miss the time when computing was a lot less political.
Whether such a time ever existed is debatable.
Here's a test. Define the period that you're imagining. Then investigate this period as a point in the history of computing with its broader sociopolitical contexts.
Somewhere in the midst of that milieu I reckon or the politics you're likely to be fond to mix with your tech projects.
colechristensen 2 days ago [-]
Most "conservative" opinions are basically "I miss when I was young and wasn't aware of all of the stuff happening around me and want modern reality to be like my incorrect perception of how things were in my youth"
tolerance 2 days ago [-]
That was the direction I was going to head in first before I was less confident in my assumption of the parent commenter's age based on their username.
It's a good direction to take and adds in the possibility, for example, that one may investigate the past and find themselves unintentionally and retroactively complicit in everything between the atomic bomb to US intervention in Libya.
And now I'm curious about the likelihood of a youth who will know no age better than our present, in the future.
You might like this thread from earlier this year:
Yes, that is a more honest assessment than longing for the time "when computing was much less political". It simply wasn't, and not recognizing that leads directly to the mess we have today and onwards towards bleak future.
lynx97 2 days ago [-]
That is quite a condescending take. I get that you are extrapolating from my post that I might be conservative. That needs more nuance, but I get it. But to assume I always was, and used to be ignorant, is too far reaching. In fact, I used to be a lot more progressive in the past.
colechristensen 2 days ago [-]
>But to assume I always was, and used to be ignorant, is too far reaching.
Eh, it was only meant to be a little mean. You were I dumb kid, I was a dumb kid, everyone was a dumb kid. I'm assuming to be human involves being a stupid child who didn't have a very good picture of reality. It is extremely common for a person to have this innate belief that their perceptions of the world as a dumb kid to be true and have that be the basis of their desires for how things should be now.
I bet you also think the music you listened to roughly in your teenage years was the best music ever made and everything made before or after isn't as good. Again, nearly everyone feels this way.
>In fact, I used to be a lot more progressive in the past.
If middle-age had a slogan, this would be it. If middle-age was a movie, this would be the subtitle. Welcome.
I'm not talking about conservative the binary, 1-dimensional political stance. I'm talking the "I want things to stay the way they were in the past" conservativism which is broad, can be about anything, and is really common particularly as one gets a little order and hasn't really reevaluated the reality they may remember incorrectly.
botanrice 2 days ago [-]
honestly bruh this is weirdly combative and not a good look on behalf of whatever movements you stand for
colechristensen 2 days ago [-]
Which movements are those again?
When you're young you're naïve, when you're old you're cursed with a false nostalgia. It's the human condition and we're all kinda stupid like that. You'll have trouble pinning down which group I'm attacking and which I'm supporting.
boudin 3 days ago [-]
The web originally was way closer to anarchism and I really miss that. It was a cluster of self-organising communities, little to no intervention from the state, a lot was not profit driven.
Same with IRC.
colechristensen 2 days ago [-]
The web was invented at CERN and spread through universities and got taken up by nerds. It could not possibly have been more state sponsored.
boudin 2 days ago [-]
And the Internet was state sponsored too, at the time though it was not even legal to create communication networks in a lot of countries. But that's the premises
But what it gave birth to was a form of anarchy. One doesn't go against the other, the same way a political regime can change within a country.
tenuousemphasis 3 days ago [-]
If you at all understood any of those three things you would know that they are all closely related.
atoav 3 days ago [-]
IMO it depends very much on how those positions are being forced on those attending. Since this is about permacomputing I suspect not all that much.
In my experience these self-given-labels just express the views of some founding members and are often used to clarify who they do not want (capitalist, misogynist authoritarians) and who is welcome (left leaning people, women, people who know how to treat women, people who can respect flat hierarchies).
I find it a bit edgy to self label an encouraging like that, instead of explaining the meat of it (we are anticapitalist, because..., we are feminist, so women are welcome, we are anarchist, so our organization is structured with a flat hierarchy). Since it is an anarchist space, that is anti-authoritarian you probably won't find much indoctrination.
tolerance 2 days ago [-]
> In my experience these self-given-labels just express the views of some founding members and are often used to clarify who they do not want [...] and who is welcome [...]
This is where I think the problem is.
Once you start appending political identifiers then the purpose of an organization becomes more than just about X, but X according to certain values to the exclusion of others. There's nothing wrong with that but I could see how it can be viewed as disingenuous when it's insinuated that the organization is more open/general than it is apparent.
atoav 2 days ago [-]
Yes of course. But as I said the exclusion of misogynistic, capitalist authoritarians is seen as a feature not as a bug by most groups that self-label like that. If it is your private group you can decide freely which audience you want to target. Most groups do this in some way or another, be it with self-labeling or other less explicit ways.
And quite frankly, as someone teaching at the university level, I think people with these traits (misogynistic, capitalistic, authoritarian) are not the best to have in a group anyways if your goal is to cultivate a curious learning environment. Not because of ideological reasons, but if there are women in a group, having a misogynist in there is toxic and doesn't add any value. Capitalists would have the opposite goal of a permacomputing group (extracting wealth from their environment), so having them there is questionable. Authoritarians generally have problems with going new paths and like to hate on the minority their specific flavor of authoritarianism chose as the excuse for their bad behavior, that also doesn't add to a great learning environment.
That doesn't mean I would label my courses as anarchist or anticapitalist and it doesn't mean I select the participants of my courses based on their ideology (I am not even sure how I could do that). But if it was my afterwork book club maybe I'd like to keep people away that take more in society than they give.
hyperjeff 2 days ago [-]
clearly not a reader of Mondo 2000 back in the day. i do miss real hacker culture.
tolerance 3 days ago [-]
> In the end it's nerds messing with hardware.
Am I being lazy or does this imply that all (or true) nerds are anarchist anti-capitalist feminists.
t-3 3 days ago [-]
No. Some $x do $y does not imply that all/most/many/true $x do $y. It implies that some $x do $y.
tolerance 3 days ago [-]
Right. But "in the end" people who participate in "permacomputing" per the websites stated values represent a subset of nerds. I think the rebuttal we're commenting on oversimplifies this.
lynx97 3 days ago [-]
Well, yes, but no. Hacker Community projects increasingly force political agendas on participants. It gets harder and harder to just do tech stuff without having to align with some cabal.
stackghost 3 days ago [-]
Being apolitical just means your politics align with the status quo. Technology is inherently political in nature, because it affects society in material ways.
Joker_vD 2 days ago [-]
> because it affects society in material ways.
I'm fairly certain the word for that is "economical". Of course, the politics grows out of the economical relationships, but they are still different things: changes in technology may or may not change the political climate (I am fairly certain that an invention of e.g. a tin can opener did not have any noticeably political effects).
t-3 2 days ago [-]
> (I am fairly certain that an invention of e.g. a tin can opener did not have any noticeably political effects).
The tin can certainly did though! "Can openers" are particularly distinct refinement of the cutting tool for a specific application, but not any kind of new technology.
lynx97 2 days ago [-]
"If you are not supporting us, you are the enemy" isn't a valid take. But it shows nicely the sentiment which turns me off regarding politics in tech. You can't even stay neutral, because someone will force you to align with their values. "My way or the highway" pretty much.
stackghost 2 days ago [-]
Again, "staying neutral" by definition means you're aligned with the way things are. It is a political stance whether you recognize it or not.
If you weren't okay with the way things are, then you wouldn't be neutral.
boomlinde 3 days ago [-]
Yes, you're being lazy
HerbManic 3 days ago [-]
I get why you wouldn't see this as inviting.
But we need to merge the humanities with technology because if both sides ignore the other than both sides will blindly walk into the worst out comes of the other side.
eigencoder 2 days ago [-]
I don't disagree with you, I think we need both the humanities and technology. But this group hasn't listed "the humanities", but a rather reactionary and recent limiting subset of the humanities.
modo_mario 2 days ago [-]
I find it sad to see that pile of ideologies is so easily taken to represent the humanities.
"With that said, permacomputing is an anti-capitalist political project. It is driven by several strands of anarchism, decoloniality, intersectional feminism, post-marxism, degrowth, ecologism."
Even for myself, an anarchist, that jumble of ideologies isn't appealing.
unfirehose 2 days ago [-]
check out my version at permacomputer dot com
shota_x402 2 days ago [-]
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EvidenceRun 2 days ago [-]
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sebakubisz 2 days ago [-]
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aaron695 3 days ago [-]
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dzhiurgis 2 days ago [-]
This got to be satire.
rolandhvar 2 days ago [-]
I agree. What is the purpose of this article?
ulbu 2 days ago [-]
to introduce a perspective and a community to someone who might want to be informed about it or participate.
rolandhvar 2 days ago [-]
Probably not a popular opinion around here, but here goes anyway: the fundamental problem is that unless your net worth is $100m+, there is no point being a do-gooder as any attempts to fix big moral hazards are only going to harm you more than it's worth.
So why bother?
ulbu 1 days ago [-]
it's not about mending the world. it's about finding pleasure in living out what's right. it's embodying of a value, a moral principle.
the way you express it says that the breadth of the effect of your choices is an essential parameter in considering your processes. I dislike this position due to its administrative, almost corporate undertone; I do understand it and ascribe to it myself in administrative matters, but not the personal.
but look at it this way: you won't change much by feeding homeless animals or birds, or by planting a couple of trees, but it may still bring great pleasure to do it. one way that i see it differ from permacomputing is that the feedback / perception of its effect is more immediate; or that permacomputing is following a more abstract, mediated value. but both are about finding some joy and meaning in doing something purely out of care. if not pleasure, it at least gives a little framework, a heuristic when making decisions.
ulbu 20 hours ago [-]
orr, maybe it is about mending the world. but the little part that’s yours.
I think an important step is to acknowledge when and where to implement technology in the first place.
Arguably the environmental benefit of an American farm replacing a 10 year old tractor with an electric model isn't nearly as good for the environment as a farm in India replacing a 70 year old tractor that leaks gallons of oil per month with a 50 year old tractor that doesn't.
Capitalists don't understand how to apply cost-to-benefit ratios to anything outside themselves. There is no global entity making sure resources are spent responsibly or equitably at scale.
altmanaltman 2 days ago [-]
70 year old tractors? India is the largest manufacturer of tractors but you think they all use 70 year old tractors like as the standard? I feel like you don't really know what you are talking about or just using examples on the fly to make your point which doesnt make much sense. China and the US are the two biggest polluters in the world.
My original analogy was flawed. And yes, I pulled the reference out of my ass. The actual objects referenced are arbitrary. Let me try again.
Replacing a low efficiency device with a medium efficiency device is better for the environment (and more cost effective) than replacing a high efficiency device with an ultra high efficiency device.
This principles page doesn't seem to have any irrelevant politics to me.
Permacomputing seems like a body of values and practices that is extremely grounded in a particular political perspective.
It's odd to regard permaculture, degrowth, anarchism, decoloniality, intersectional feminism, etc. as completely orthogonal. They're all part of a shared tradition of thought—not an "omnicause," but an ecosystem. You won't find a lot of people who love intersectional feminism but hate decoloniality. Appropriately enough, plucking a single plant from the earth and then dismissing the rest of the garden is exactly the type of blinkered thinking which permaculture discourages.
I guess at this point, I think it's fair to say:
1. They're not the central authority on permacomputing. You can implement the principles however you like. 2. If you find the principles objectionable simply because you saw an explicit statement of political alignment on their main page, maybe that's worth examining within yourself.
You can advocate for sustainability, right-to-repair, privacy etc. while being strongly capitalist just fine.
The point is that the page puts "correct" political alignment very prominently, excluding a large intersection of people otherwise interested in the non-political parts of the movement.
Colonialism, to me, implies exerting direct political control over a territory (without allowing it democratic participation) and ressource/value extraction against the will of the local population.
Assembling phones in China/buying silicone in Brasil does neither.
If that's not colonialism, I don't know what is.
you really can't. I mean I get the point that maybe anarchism or feminism are more contingent when it comes to their idea of perma-computing, but you cannot advocate for radical ecology and long-lived computing under the logic of capital.
The entire point of capitalism is to constantly shove new things into your face, that's how you get fast fashion, new phones, more energy consumption, capital reproducing itself. You won't get a computer that runs a thousand years on a solar panel so to speak under the logic of the market economy.
I think intersectionality goes a bit too far sometimes but the degrowth aspect is central to what they're advocating, and there's no degrowth capitalism. See also Kohei Saito's book on the topic (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_in_the_Anthropocene)
Induced demand is a second order effect of that at best, and both ecological concerns and negative growth are demonstrably compatible with capitalism: Just consider leaded gas/CFC and per-capita primary energy consumption as direct examples.
The big problem with sustainability/climate change in general is not that countermeasures/solutions are incompatible with a capitalist system, the problem is that too many people are too selfish to sacrifice any form of past/present/elsewhere observed luxury in order to achieve that goal.
It is true that right now you de-facto have places that experience degrowth and are capitalist at the same time, but that's transitory. Firms do not go where they shrink, debt will increase, labor will emigrate, privation will increase, and then you'll have a crisis. You can't stand still or shrink under the current regime. If a perma-culture is something you want to pursue you'll need a new form of social ownership and production.
the far-right is literally trying to make it illegal for companies to say they're taking environmental concerns seriously (i.e. ESG bans in tx, fl, etc). in 2026, sustainability is not apolitical.
(it's _never_ been apolitical but i will spare you that lecture.)
Just because far-righters are against sustainability does not mean you have to be a post-marxist anarchist (or w/e) just to be for it.
if you oppose a far-right project, what are they going to call you? lol. here is your membership card for the cultural marxist party, welcome aboard comrade!
i just think it's folly for people to complain that "not destroying the environment" is a partisan issue in 2026. being a nice person is a partisan issue in 2026.
The US right likes to call their opponents pedophiles, but it would be ridiculous for anyone to adopt that label for themselves because of it.
In Germany literally "linksgrünversifft", which loosely translates to filthy green/left advocate.
Which is, critically, completely unrelated to both communism and anarchism; while a lot of the political spectrum opposes the far right, only a tiny fraction are actual communists or anarchists (at least in Europe).
I do feel your pain that a significant part of modern politics involves completely indefensible, irrational and irresponsible positions, but that still does not mean you have to be marxist/anarchist or even anti-capitalist just to oppose that idiocy.
A lot of our current state of affairs is as much a symptom of regulation as of deregulation (most laws are really regulation) -- and it's unclear whether the world would be better off with more or less overall (the answer is probably "it depends" -- though I myself lean towards less)
> Politics is the activity of settling affairs in an organized society.
Not sure how any strongly held belief doesn't resolve down to politics.
Politics is life whether you want to accept it or not. Ignoring it is ignoring your place in society and the direction it takes at large.
No decision is truly apolitical.
Unfortunately this is a two way road.
The more topics political factions gobble up, the worse this becomes. You may or may not have experienced completely benign words becoming very politically charged for example, same effect.
If you strip a subject from every related concern, it will feel pointless. People just won't have any way of relating to it. So these are diametrically opposed interests at their terminal points.
What I found works best is there being a movement on each respective polarized side instead.
They aren't bad people, not even close. We all do this to some degree. Its just that we all think we are the good virtuous people and yet all of us have some form of negative impact on the world, especially in the Western world.
They are doing nothing of the sort. They are telling you that they have heard the argument countless times already, and disagree with it as strongly as ever.
I reject the implicit definition of "politics" required to make the argument (which does not agree with common use, even if dictionaries may fail to capture the subtlety); and I reject the notion that your side should be entitled to define the terms. Everyone knows what it means to "get political", and there is strong consensus that it does not include "let's go about the rest of our lives as we were already planning to do".
> Its just that we all think we are the good virtuous people and yet all of us have some form of negative impact on the world
There is no contradiction between "being the good virtuous people" and "having some form of negative impact on the world".
By my back of the envelope calculations, we produce something like 300kg of CO2 annually simply by breathing. I would prefer to continue to live, however.
The CO2 that you exhale came from elements that were fairly recently part of an animal or vegetable - ie part of an active and ongoing carbon cycle, rather than deposited into the ground 100M years ago and pulled out to be inserted into the system.
Carbon cycles aren't bad - they're fundamental to life on Earth, obviously. It's making the system unstable by continuous addition that causes the problem.
Imagine this permaculture computing thing in an alternative reality. Very environmentally friendly—but very narrowly about computers. It has nothing to say about the usual individualistic moralisms, like recycling—and reuse/repurpose/recycle!—, anti-consumerism, not littering. In fact some of the local members are “pigs” and litter the street next to their headquarters. The broad membership are not vegetarian or vegan, not to any larger degree than the general public. They are just very concerned about sustainable computing.
Would this make sense to outsiders? No, I think we are very used to environmentalists caring about all things related to the environment. Sure, some people who care about veganism/vegetarianism (for animal or env. concerns) might say that it’s better if people drop meat some days of the week rather than none of them. That’s a thing. But on the whole I think people don’t balk at environmentalists “aligning” with all environmental causes instead of being inclusive, like: oh sure, you care about sustainable computing but not about sustainable food production, that’s fine. Welcome.
I think this is specifically about having a focused political message. Because having one-hundred litmus tests for individualistic behavior is totally fine... within the political mainstream thought.
If we make batteries replaceable or whatever other thing, how much do we change this fundamental dynamic? I feel like it's not very much.
People are kidding themselves if they think somehow recycling ewaste or reusing your last-model iPhone is some kind of sea-change that will fix the environmental impacts of tech.
It also doesn't seem defensible to say we should just slow progress down- isn't that a world where we never get iPhones and AI? How could a computing field that moves slower than Moore's law even work?
I dislike a lot of these wasteful dynamics but I also don't know what the alternative is. Consumer tech and computing is still the poster child for the proponents of global free market economics for good reason. It's one of the least extractive, least wasteful, highest profit margin sectors of the economy.
It's just saying a lot about how wasteful the other sectors are that tech is so wasteful.
Moore's Law has been breaking down for years already (to the point that people shift the goalposts as to what the actual quantity is that improves exponentially), so it's strange to ask. There are known physical limits that will prevent it from continuing indefinitely; and we aren't even that far away, to my understanding.
Moore's law is just a stand-in for the planned obsolescence of all computing related things almost since computers were invented, and the fundamental tech question is always, when thing x gets 10x cheaper/faster, what new use case gets unlocked? Right now it's AI model capability. Maybe also battery tech.
The idea of the slow growth of computing smells to me like the Bill Gates quote about 640k of RAM being enough for anyone.
We’ll probably find out soon, because even ignoring the environmental concerns there is a limit to how small transistors can get.
It’s a negative externality.
We can argue about the magnitude and the details, but the basic fact remains.
There are ways of dealing with negative externalities. Some work better than others. The details do matter a lot. And we definitely need better ways of tackling problems like this, especially when the cost is less immediate. The more diffuse, temporally removed, downstream, hidden, or controversial it is, the harder it is to get people to take the problem seriously. Let alone actually do anything about it.
We can take on these challenges. Or we can largely ignore them / throw our hands in the air, and watch the consequences unfold.
As much as we are able to, I’d like to try the former. Computing can still move forward and innovate at a rapid rate.
I do and would want to buy tech that I'm not coerced into to throwing away after a year. It's insane to be how many objects today have batteries that are sealed inside and are meant to be thrown away after- that should be regulated.
But that seems to me to be an implementation detail rather than aspect that's worthy of an entire manifesto.
I do think the political aspects of things like Ring and Flock cameras and Palantir are super important (the reenforcing of existing power structures part).
But I don't get the folding in of this idea that not consuming computing devices is part of the solution- Like I said, it feels like the planned obsolescence of all computing devices and software is fundamental to the field.
Honestly, that sounds kind of OK. A lot of the things I use a smart phone for are things that have been imposed on me rather than chosen.
Also if we never had smart phones I doubt social media would have such a grip on peoples minds nowadays. It would still be there but toned down a lot.
But still: It's okay to enjoy the mindful and resilient and ecological aspects and not enjoy some other aspect.
Unfortunately the fashion is now for orgs and movements to declare their own intersections, which does nothing to further the core issues, while actively repelling those outside the intersection (which, by the time you’ve intersected a bunch of different things, is nearly everyone).
There is nothing inherently “post-Marxist” or “decolonial” about the core ideas here (scare quotes because these are extra-unhelpfully underdefined terms). Framing the project this way just signals that non-post-Marxists (etc.) will not be welcome, which makes it quite hard to enjoy the good bits for people who have been pre-declared to be the enemy.
Successful orgs are laser-focused on their core purpose.
I guess I would say, I'm not sure what the basis of your critique is. I guess if you want to sit back and watch a more centrist permacomputing organization push those values without you doing anything, that doesn't seem like a fair ask. If you do want to do something, you could probably make your own website/etc. "Please tailor your activism to my aesthetics/politics" is kinda self-centered.
This is silly - people are pro life all over the world. E.g. this guy in the UK[0].
[0] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c4g9kp7r00vo
When we showed up with the anti-abortion message at first we failed. The evangelicals who had attended our seminars by tens of thousands when we were launching the first series just were not interested in the abortion issue. At first we were looking at empty seats in places like the Grand Ole Opry we’d filled a few years before.
It took a lot of hard work to change that apathy on the “issue.” And oddly what in the end gave the series credibility were the Republican political leaders who saw the chance to cash in on the issue. The fact they began to pay attention to Dad and me got evangelical leader’s juices flowing: They coveted our new access to power!
https://www.patheos.com/blogs/frankschaeffer/2014/07/the-act...
The pro-life movement is older than the Reagan era courting on Christians to grow the Republican base. So it was not a Christian base that caused a shift, it was the other way around.
If putting up a some kind of flag or another is gonna keep people who would otherwise interfere with my core purpose from showing up, that might be the most expedient option for getting shit done. It's like: I'm not religious, but I'll wear a cross if it keeps the vampires at bay.
The drawback with a big tent is that small subgroups inside that tent may have their concerns ignored. For instance, black women in early feminist movements were treated poorly, but what were they going to do? Start a schism? That'd be a setback for everyone.
Intersectionality is a second-order tool that protects the interests of smaller sub-groups within a big tent. You're wrong to assume that everyone outside the intersection is "actively repelled." When an environmentalist group says they're anticolonial, feminist, BLM, etc., environmentalists are typically fine with it. Sure, it does turn some people off, but that's a feature, not bug. If your group gets co-opted by people who reject some of these values, it makes it difficult to work together with groups that do focus on issues affecting indigenous people, women, etc.
I think that is capitalist ideology (“make number go up”), not a fact for a non-capitalist definition of “success”. So, you just might not be part of the audience they care about.
Personally, I think there is a certain divide between capitalist and collectivist mindsets that cannot be bridged easily. In the end, it is either-or. In the end, one will win, and the other will lose. That does not mean either mindset is unable to acknowledge and incorporate methods and practices from the other, but it does mean that, in the end, you have to decide what to do when those values clash.
Never heard of permacomputing until right now. Super intrigued, very interested in the topic... Saw that whole line of "anti-capitalist, post-marxist, etc." and just got turned off, man. I don't even disagree with any of the principles of those intersections I just don't want to join a movement that labels itself that way.
I've definitely been a part of orgs, in my case working with homeless folks, where people vaguely want to help but become hindrances when the struggle tries to actually start to address core issues like police abusing homeless folks instead of just being a food distro where they can get their pic taken and feel like they did something.
> more sustainable society and thoughtful use of electronics
This is where I feel there is a difference and disagree with their overt statement of ideologies as the core of the movement. Any environmentalist worth their salt should celebrate any action or idea that just generally supports getting more people to care about, get involved with, or want to protect the environment -- regardless of their age, sex, background, whatever. See: national parks.
And then in the sense of sustainable use of electronics. Who is more sustainable in this sense than the old white dude who runs the computer repair shop or the indian dude running the phone repair place? If I'm on board with permacomputer, I want to look at these guys as the experts in long-lasting & recylable use of electronics... but what's the overlap between those guys and intersectional feminism, ya know?
> Maybe that's by design?
hey man, if they just want a group built around their values to make friends and take on the machine that's fine. who am I to say they shouldn't? anyone should gather with who they please. It's just a shame to turn people off from a movement by defining such a narrow intersection of beliefs, as the OP comment here says. I also would argue that it doesn't have to be strictly *anti-*capitalist as much as pro-socialist/communist/whateveridk.
What do you think?
This is such a genre of comment on here when you can Ctrl-F 'Marx' on the content, and it just really comes off uncurious and reflexive every time. Like, why is the burden on the authors and not you to sort through the things you care about and don't? Why is it not an opportunity to learn? Do you even care to know where they could possibly be coming from? If there is ever some kind of overlap between something you can get behind and something for whatever reason you feel is bad or "underdefined," doesn't that stir even a bit of curiosity, a chance to learn? Even if it's just sharpening what you already know?
You don't have to end up agreeing with it, but to frame all this as advice on how to "be a successful org" is just not great here imo.
And I gotta say, its just so telling that we jump here so naturally to a metaphor of an enterprising business and its customers. Like could there be anything that exists in the world where you are not a patron whose tastes must be catered to? Not everything you have a strong opinion on needs to be socketed into the genre of Google review.
> Whether you are a tech specialist, someone who uses a computer for daily tasks, or deals with technology only occasion, there are steps that you or the group you are involved in can take to reduce the environmental and socio-economic impact of your digital activities.
Sounds great to me, but then they have these:
> To mitigate this situation, this principle calls us to step outside the capitalist model of perpetual consumption and growth.
> The history of computing is deeply intertwined with capitalism and militarism. From playing a role in warfare and geopolitical power struggles to driving the automation of labor, computing has significantly contributed to the increased use of resources and fossil energy. The latest example of this trend is the construction of hyperscale data centers for running generative AI. Despite the promise of increased efficiency, the Jevons Paradox applies: higher efficiency tends to lead to greater resource use. Efficiency is often presented as a technical solution to a political decisions about how and why we use computing —without questioning the extractive business model.
The authors here (fairly or not) signal their in/out group preference. And the implication is that "those not willing or unable to step outside the capitalist model are not able to sufficiently apply the principle to affect change in the way we are wanting."
They're smuggling in an omission of technologists who recognize the benefits of a capitalist system compared to a collectivist one. It reads like they are trying to be careful, but still end up significantly limiting their potential audience.
People with strong capitalist beliefs may be willing to volunteer their time at a repair cafe or in taking other action to incrementally move their communities in the direction they're advocating for. But it seems to me like they would not even want those people to be a part of their movement. If I recognize the historical injustices that marginalized groups have faced but I still believe that a capitalist system is generally preferable to a collectivist one, would I be supported by this movement? I think that I doubt it.
EDIT: I missed on this on their homepage:
> With that said, permacomputing is an anti-capitalist political project. It is driven by several strands of anarchism, decoloniality, intersectional feminism, post-marxism, degrowth, ecologism.
> Permacomputing is also a utopian ideal...
Utopian? No thanks. I expected this to be a technological movement first with politics snuck in, but it sounds like it is the opposite.
The “Just Stop Oil” people are a great example of this. There’s a lot of headwind behind green energy and moving away from oil, but the activists suck all that air out of the room with destructive stunts and focus the story on themselves.
Like them or not, Just Stop Oil is very good at making headlines and stirring up controversy, which is their goal. If you go into a party with a megaphone and shout about beavers, everyone will eventually be talking and thinking about beavers. Conservatives use this strategy to manufacture controversies like "critical race theory" all the time. As a radical group, simply being in the headlines benefits them.
Note that I said blocking traffic at random. Targeted roadblocks are actually effective (such as in the ICE protests/interventions) and were also used to great effect by Canadian truckers. (Speaking of the Canadian truckers, maybe you noticed how the useless and constant honking was the thing that turned the public against them.)
This idea that attention alone, even negative attention, is enough is one of the worst mistakes of modern activists, particularly on the left, and it’s completely derailed their effectiveness in many cases.
If you just want "MacBook with socketed RAM" there's already other people doing that. You don't need this to be that.
In fact, leaded gas and CFC elimination in communist regimes happened exactly the same way (via regulation/treaties).
Regulations are universally needed to account for negative externalities-- just look at soviet superfund site equivalents (like lake Karachay) and tell me with a straight face that communist administration solves those problems by itself "without dragging anyone kicking and screaming".
It seems like this site had a “neoliberal” wiki entry but it got removed, or I at least I can’t access it, I would be interested to see it
Then you are naive. Everything that is concerned with how people organize themselves, where and how they allocate resources, how they are supposed to make decisions, what values they should uphold etc. is politics.
The goal of my comments on this site is to learn more by engaging with others who may know more than me. Here I tried to point out ways in which the movement may be alienating itself it by excluding capitalists. If it makes me naive to not realize that was its core purpose, so be it
It isn't a one-way street. The authors have already, in fact, sorted through what they think a reader/participant does and does not care about.
> Why is it not an opportunity to learn? Do you even care to know where they could possibly be coming from? If there is ever some kind of overlap between something you can get behind and something for whatever reason you feel is bad or "underdefined," doesn't that stir even a bit of curiosity, a chance to learn? Even if it's just sharpening what you already know?
This doesn't read like a fair assessment of the negative responses that this page is receiving, at least it doesn't in this case. Or you're missing the entire point.
Not everyone disagrees with things out of ignorance. They may have done their due diligence to investigate what the concepts and frameworks at play are about. Assuming otherwise is a good way to ensure that what you agree with is impervious to debate save for what can be held among "fellow travelers".
The author's of this page are being very direct with their orientation and intentions here. I think even to the extent that their language is "underdefined" there is enough space for someone to reliably speculate about what the substance behind it entails and then come to an educated conclusion about whether they find those things objectionable—in spite of the existence of some principles that they agree with. The degree to which they find the objectionable to affect the unobjectionable can also lead a person to make a conclusion about the organization's viability.
You don't have to concede to these objections, but to frame all this as advice on how not to disagree obviates justifiable dissent.
Please, dissent away! I have only seen dismissal so far.
permacomputing.net doesn't achieve this. Again, communication isn't a one-way street.
The polarity that the upfront inclusion of their politics is obvious in the discussion here. People are either keying in on that or talking about permacomputing in general and indifferent to the group's stated politics. Are the people engaging in the former wrong for that? Tangentially, are the latter critically engaging with the subject in every aspect presented?
Is there anything provided by the website that explicitly piques their curiosity in the way that you encourage? Did the author(s) even care enough to externally link to pages that they are confident would explain what those frameworks mean in such a way that a skeptical visitor may be persuaded to figure out their relevance to permacomputing in general? If not to be entirely persuaded, but at least exit with a more cogent grasp of their own perspective on the practice?
I do like the point that you're making, I just think there's a shared responsibility in this dynamic that should be addressed. Not everyone went to a liberal arts school with a rigorous critical theory curriculum.
If your [their] politics are so important to permacomputing—something that any kind of "nerd" ought to be able to participate in—then you [they] should be able to explain why that is the case. Explain why as effortlessly as said politics are introduced and as fluently as they disappear from the foreground in deference to a rhetoric that positions them as a reliable source about the subject.
Feigning confusion in opposition to a thing that may be valid isn't any less vain than feigning shock that valid opposition exists. Insularity begets them both.
> It's okay to enjoy the mindful and resilient and ecological aspects and not enjoy some other aspect.
I don't object to this in the most general sense. But I also think that a little tact can go a long way from the organization's side to anticipate where the public can't exercise it on their own.
In practice? You mean, rhetorically, surely? The right wing is doing whatever it can to marginalize and disenfranchise anyone it doesn't like (and that's a lot of people). In the end, do you think marginalized people feel more included in the community in progressive cities or MAGA ones?
No it doesn't, do you mean the American right? There are so many right wing parties in this world, the American right is just a small fraction of them. Maybe we mean the Switzerland right? There aren't many poor people in Switzerland.
It's funny you mention Switzerland, surely you must have seen their far right's party compaign posters? The ones with the sheeps or rotting apples? How is that not marginalization and stigmatization?
The same holds for the left wing.
I don't know how "radical" you can call it since it was popular enough to get the White House and most of congress. Twice.
I really don't see what in right-wing ideology has ever served the cause of minorities and marginalized groups, even before MAGA.
If you're thinking of corporate activisty types, the sort of people who promote hamfisted "everyone with light skin has internalised racism" mandatory training, then I'd wager the "corporate" part has something to do with what you've observed. I would certainly call such people "aspiring-radical", and I might even call them tepidly left-wing (especially with respect to the US's Overton window), but I think "left-wing radical" might be a misnomer, since the radicality is unrelated to the left-wing nature. There are strong first-principles reasons to expect that this politics does a significant disservice to members of the groups it's nominally attempting to help (and that's before you factor in the backlash we're currently seeing).
But I've never found the "left-wing" / "right-wing" dichotomy to be helpful for anything other than identifying The Enemy™ (which I consider a generally counterproductive activity), so take what I say here with a pinch of salt.
The same statement holds for left-wing radicals: they insist that their community should be a certain way (with the radical left-wing value being that it must be a certain way, for various incompatible versions of "right way").
Maybe the difference is not left versus right, but "my community" (trying to recruit people into your imagined better society) versus "the community" (acknowledging that we all live in the same world, and meeting people where they are)? Or maybe it's just that the people doing the actual boots-on-the-ground work tend to care more about doing the actual work than about fracturing over ideological disagreements. ("Leftist infighting" long predates the internet, after all: https://existentialcomics.com/comic/165.)
Both for left-wing and right-wing people, it's about who is in-group vs out-group [1]. The only difference is by which values, psychometric and socioeconomic traits, ... left-wing vs right-wing people decide who belongs to their respective in-group vs out-group.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-group_and_out-group
Yet they are unable to build or keep one, due to the need to track all signs of thought heresy.
The thing about corporations is that they internally run on politics and a fixed hierarchy of command and control. No different than a resolutely "anti-capitalist" government office! You can think of this as an 'anarchist' observation if you want, but it's just a fact of life. So when we see corporate activism come up with such hamfisted ideas that we wouldn't see in less "activist" corporations, this has to tell us something about the merit of the underlying politics.
Anyway, the thing about traditional communities, in this context - the ones that "have to be a certain way" because they've been that way for generations - is that they have immense inertia; they create real social ties that can bind people together and make them resilient even in the face of very real, structural, systemic oppression. I don't see "polycules" as achieving that in the near term, even though that kind of fluid free association is undeniably the very earliest step towards what I'm thinking about.
A traditional community is not going to just dissolve when the going get tough, or when interpersonal conflicts arise (and such conflicts are inevitable in large-enough groups!): they uniquely encourage people who might otherwise dislike each other to cooperate for collective benefit. There is great value in that, which is not often acknowledged.
I really don't know where you're pulling that from. Jim Crow America wasn't a good time for black people. Women got lobotomy after showing the first signs of depression. Gay people were demonized at every occasion.
A return to this awful social hierarchy is MAGA and the right's ultimate goal, no matter how unrealistic. They're dismantling the Civil Rights act piece by piece, just last week they've been able to gerrymander the black vote away thanks to SCOTUS.
Like it or not, every social progress in this country has come from the left.
Many of these things were actively advocated for by the Progressive movement, back in the early 20th c. (Lobotomies came a few decades later, but were ultimately rooted in the exact same ideas about the primacy of 'science!' and trusted institutions over people's lived experience and the deep reality of enduring traditional values.) Studying that history in depth is an excellent way to disabuse oneself of the naïve notion that Progressives are inherently the good guys.
Yeah, the early 20th Century American Progressive movement has no connection to the late 20th-early 21st century American progressive movement, the latter of which adopted “progressive” not in reference to the earlier movement but in reference to "progress” in contrast to what its members perceived to be increasing static defense of a corporate capitalist status quo by other elements of the American liberal movement from which it emerged. It is a essentially a social democratic movement, which is about as far from the early 20th century movement's technocratic elitism as you can get.
This is like when laypeople say "economics is all hogwash because humans aren't rational actors": They are citing behavioural economics as if it disqualifies the field of economics rather than being part of the field.
But people like this genuinely think that these things are causally interconnected. And that treating them as separate things is counter-productive. They are not on a mission to make as small an intersection as possible. They want to solve the problem. But they think that the Whole that needs to be considered is much larger than you would think.
As a detached and hypothtical example: what does the non-political and anti-fossil fuel environmentalist cause look like in a city which is built on the fossil fuel industry? There isn’t one. Making it non-political is impossible. There are clear competing interests at play. You could make an environmentalist club where you volunteer to clean up litter. The grocery clerk as well as the oil executive are just as likely to join that club. But it wouldn’t have anything to do with the anti-fossil fuel cause.
Another hypothetical example. Being anti-war. Can such a group be anti-imperialism? To avoid Western blinders, just imagine Russian imperalism. What would a Russian anti-war but not anti-imperalism group look like? Clearly you cannot call the Russian invasion of Ukraine “imperialistic”. The war apologist would say that it is necessary to denazify Ukraine or something. So what are you fighting for? Allow wars that are imperialistic but advocate for more non-combatant aid in terms of supplies and health personel? I mean that would be “anti-war” in terms of reducing suffering. But it could never, ever hope to end any war.
There are people that are radical. They think that certain problems have root causes. So they get at the root of the problem, as they see it. This idea of having many loose causes doesn’t make sense in their world view. It’s like fighting weeds by trimming the edges every day. The weeds will always be there.
But by telling people that they aren't really welcome to help you trim unless they agree that they must attack the root of the weeds, even tho that's really hard! I think that's the wrong way to think about the idea of environmentalism! We should encourage everyone to do whatever they find intersting and helpful. If the oil exec wants to do river clean-ups every weekend then why even balk at that? It's not black & white, it's great that in this theoretically scenario they want to even do that. Maybe over time they realize that the river keeps getting dirty because of their business actions, who knows?
There are two parts.
1. Counter-forces overwhelming your efforts meaning you just lose because they overwhelm you (e.g. climate change acceleration)
2. Permanently (nothing in life is permanent but ya know) getting rid of the problem
I think weed trimming is insufficient for both.
What is this a counter to? All of computing, on an industrial scale. You don’t counter that by hobbyist dilly-dallying.
> And that if you get more and more people to help you trim the edges then over time you may establish a new 'edge' so to speak? (read: status quo).
You can establish a new edge. It has happened before. And then counter-forces build back the old bad thing eventually.
Look, what is the point of trimming weeds if you can get rid of them at the root? What is it? So that you can unlock the achievement of maximum participation? The goal is to clean the garden. Not to get every passerby to clumsily help.
> But by telling people that they aren't really welcome to help you trim unless they agree that they must attack the root of the weeds, even tho that's really hard! I think that's the wrong way to think about the idea of environmentalism! We should encourage everyone to do whatever they find intersting and helpful.
Environmentalists (and humanity) are up against possibly civilization-ending climate change. The goal for them at this point is not to start an inclusive social club.
> If the oil exec wants to do river clean-ups every weekend then why even balk at that? It's not black & white, it's great that in this theoretically scenario they want to even do that.
If the food conglomerate executive that issues orders to throw away tons of perfectly good food in order to not devalue their own produce wants to volunteer at the soup kitchen, why even balk at that?
The point is not to balk at that..
> Maybe over time they realize that the river keeps getting dirty because of their business actions, who knows?
Then what happens next?
They order the company to forfeit profit maximization in order to be nice to the river?
Then the executive gets fired and they are truly one of the people again.
environmentalists (myself included) have tried the doomsday "we need to act now!" approach and it turns off a lot of people, clearly, as evidenced by our societal regression (in the US at least).
any attempt to help weed whack is worthy of inclusion imo
A cause that correctly identifies the political problem is exactly something that I would get behind.
So it’s not this simplistic picture (presented by OP) of being some “inclusive” and “non-political” group that can get all the normies on board, or being a bunch of arseholes that only associate with people who intersect exactly with their interests and proclivities.
But it’s not like you can lead with that when someone says that having a political focus is “extra politics” and “polarization”. The good old “let’s leave politics out of climate change/wealth inequality/tech feudalism” chestnut.
The tricky part is where to draw the line? Let's take on the behemoth of black lives matter movement for sake of discussion. Anyone with progressive ideals can get behind the base premise and of course empathize with the origin of it. Many people, whether they identify with left politics or not, maybe saw those origin moments in 2020 and agreed it was messed up and we should be better as a society. And ofc you wouldn't expect the leaders of the movement ot say, "no we dont want to scare the slightly racist people so we just want more bodyacms, its okay if there is still systemic racism" - no! they should push for the most equitable possible society. Cops should be held more accountable for bad acts, any potentially racial motivations need to be investigated, shit, while we're at it, there should be less cops since they are so militaristic in many places! (I agree).
But one thing leads to another and then that push for radical change becomes "defund the police" and all of a sudden you have a cultural backlash because now you're coming after 'good hardworking cops' and now it's a culture war! Now you've got those sympathetic, if apathetic, people who felt bad about george floyd, etc. suddenly hearing that we need to 'get rid of the police' and that could lead to safety issues or their cousin is a cop, whatever. Now they're against it.
--
So, interesting thought experiment. If permacomputing folks say, no, you must be anti-capitlist and feminist and post-marxist to practice sustainable computing, essentially, now some of prime demographic who could have joined the movement (hackernews) are a little skeptical because they maybe are a little capitalist or don't understand feminism. Then the average wealthy non-tech person who buys a new phone every year hears this and instead of hearing the core principle of, huh, maybe i could buy less phones if that would foster all these positive things instead hears that by doing so they are being anti-capitlist, marxist, whatever tf it is and they get turned off, then it's "woke"!
So where is the line drawn? Do you say, eh it's fine this is for a radical group and that's how it is. Or do you try to draw in others? Quite an interesting sociological discussion actually!
That said, I do feel like it's cringe to say it's anti-capitalist, anarchist, etc.. I have very progressive values but just can't associate with liberal groups because of stuff like this. Like, why? Just promote the culture to everyone, capitalists, political ideologies, etc. By making that statement it is automatically turning off ppl that might otherwise join the cause, it's really not helping anything imo. Kinda annoyed me to see that as well.
You say that you can't associate with liberal groups because of stuff like this, but liberals are not anticapitalist or anarchist. Leftists are anticapitalist but liberalism is basically advocating for softer capitalism, which is to say capitalism and strong individual rights, while leftism is focused on collectivism.
i also respect that there's a place for radical groups for sure, so hey, so be it if this group wants to run like this. just feels a shame to lead on a movement that can attract a wide swath of people with it's core concept but then exclude them if they don't share your exact beliefs, as OP was suggesting.
I see significant blame with environmentalist orgs/pushes like this that are deliberately anti-conservative for little reason, not just with conservatives being hypocrites.
Be careful with such a statement: in the USA conservatism is defined as something different than what the Latin word origin suggests. See for example Russell Kirk's principles of conservatism:
> https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Conservatism_in_t...
> A recognition that innovation must be tied to existing traditions and customs, which entails a respect for the political value of prudence.[173]
100% compatible with environmentalism, described as "preserving the environment".
Environmentalism is also compatible with Haidt's findings about US conservatives valuing "sanctity"/"purity" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_foundations_theory).
What they always defend is social hierarchies. Anti-abortion rhetoric may break from the status quo, but it does so in defence of preserving women's role in society as obligate mothers. Starting wars in the Middle East isn't staid or responsible, but the performance of these wars situates America at the top of a symbolic hierarchy of global power.
If you dig into the fathers of modern conservative thought (people like Edmund Burke), one thing they were very concerned about was the preservation of aristocratic hierarchy beyond the end of monarchism. How can a liberal society maintain a class distinction between the rulers and the ruled? These are the intellectual roots of meritocracy: Let the free market pick winners without any interference by egalitarian meddlers, and the upper class will naturally select itself.
From this standpoint, the conservative disinterest in sustainability becomes obvious. The machines that are destroying the environment are owned by wealthy people whose fortunes may be destabilized by switching to a newer, more sustainable technologies. The conservative movement exists to protect the social status of the wealthy; therefore, concern for the environment is a liability.
It is very reductionist but it does sort of hit on althe flavour of how these things go.
[0] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cp8p7k4k8xno
Kind of a weird comment, imo.
If you do have an answer to this, why are you accusing him of it regardless?
As for how to discern the difference, well that’s the purpose of critical thinking and metacognition.
Maybe you're the one who's so aligned to the politics on that page that you're experiencing such symptoms after all? Exhibiting in retaliatory coded insults and DARVO maybe?
Everyone should engage their critical thinking and develop their capacity for metacognition; no one starts with either of those skill sets, and thus I assume neither in anyone (and everyone, including myself) until I see evidence of either or both. I, very gently, pointed in the direction of engaging those skills and you see violence where violence isn’t, just like you imagine excessive pride where there cannot be any at all.
Perhaps you’ve also been primed to see violence where none exists? To feel as extreme what isn’t extreme because you’ve moved (or been moved) towards the extreme?
Again, not an ad hominem… just a question we should all be asking ourselves all the time.
For example:
> The history of computing is deeply intertwined with capitalism and militarism.
To assert this as if it were significant, and continue on as the article does, is inherently making a political statement. It is trying to paint capitalism and militarism as inherently bad, and draw ingroup/outgroup lines in the sand. There is no reason why a capitalist or a military supporter might fail to see the value in more efficient computing, or in environmentalism generally.
There's also, you know, all the stuff it says on the main page of the site.
Also capitalism is not comprised exclusively of capitalists, any more than militarism is composed exclusively of military supporters. Capitalism is a political framework centered on economic power, militarism is a political framework centered on martial power, both of them are ways of understanding the cultural and political and economic and rational systems we all live within, whether we support them or not.
Nothing on the linked page says anything particularly supportive or pejorative about those frameworks, it just acknowledges them as foundational to computing. It arguably makes a very (if not inherently) capitalist argument for environmental-conserving usage of computing resources, but that, really, is about it.
Anything else you’re supplying, from your perspective… my point is that such a perspective is, itself, already polarized.
The same people who wish to tell me that "everything is political", will apparently not recognize the significance of choosing to do something when it clearly would have been easier not to do so.
The fact that the assertion is present demonstrates the imputed significance. Writing it is about making implications and value judgments, because it cannot serve another purpose in context, and it would be easier to say nothing.
Now, I might also be doing redundant work here, and maybe it’s not worth doing so, but I should think that anyone on any part of the political spectrum could find some pretty egregious examples of waste and inefficiency in the military / industrial complex.
Their homepage makes explicit references and expresses alignment with a whole host of political movements and philosophies. I believe it stands to reason that people recognizing related motifs and tropes on the subpage shared above thus shouldn't be surprising, and that it certainly isn't just people's imagination going into overdrive based on personal biases. That it is further entirely reasonable to understand these features as intentional, or at least as something originating from the page author(s)' own personal motivations and biases. So as far as the signalling itself goes, it exists, and its origin is squarely the page's author(s), not the person above. You appear to agree so far:
> It’s not entirely apolitical, sure
But then that's not really what you "made an observation" about if I understand you right, but about the normative description around that signalling. That the person above described these political motifs and tropes as polarizing. I can definitely appreciate why this is problematic: normative language about subjective matters is generally grating and incorrect, as it falsely presents the label as objective. But then simply flipping things around I do not think highlights that at all. Rather than clarifying this epistemic lapse, I'd say you merely flippantly sent people on a loop instead. This is why I found what you wrote accusatory, a designation I do reserve the right to apply, as it is self-evidently subjective. Whether you [claim to] have not intended to insult is a separate matter. I hope that this also stands to reason and is appreciable. Though I shall also add that finding political motifs and tropes "polarizing" also very much teeters on the self-evidently subjective.
But then if you said that simply handwaving things away as subjective is not particularly helpful - I agree! So let's try and define what would be polarizing from a political standpoint. Words themselves only carry meaning to the extent we can agree on them after all, so without agreeing on what a polarizing messaging is, I'm afraid we'll keep going in circles about how we see each other, and how that is not actually the case.
I'd define a polarizing political message as one that brings someone closer to a specific political clique, a messaging that promotes clique formation and alignment. I'd maybe find it tempting to further lump in radicality or fringeness, but thinking about it, I really don't think there's a reason to. I also wondered about intentionality, but that, I feel, is also optional. The potency and success of such messaging is definitely affected by these other aspects though, and thus so is their discernability.
Now, since the authors explicitly call out several political movements and philosophies on their homepage, and given that on the subpage their messaging clearly does appeal to those, the question becomes: is featuring motifs and tropes like that in itself an exercise in polarization? I think that yes, it absolutely is. This is because it makes it appear as if solidarity with those ideals was a requirement to feel solidarity with the actual named topic at hand itself (permacomputing). Which is exactly what the person above took an issue with too, certainly in my interpretation anyways.
But then recognizing this in no way means the reader has to be polarized, or that there would be a "good chance" as you put it that they'd be polarized. I can certainly imagine, with my supposedly impressive imagination, that it'd hurt their ears more if they were diametrically opposed to the ideals otherwise cited. But I'm pretty sure that only modulates the likelihood of them speaking up, rather than the distribution of people noticing it. In that sense, again, it feels extremely flippant to try paint them as the one polarized. They might very well be, but that doesn't mean that the logical leap presented was actually reasonable as a result.
Finally, few more comments:
> Again, there’s no insult, there’s simply an observation.
You may [claim to] not intend to insult. What I'm saying is that that is absolutely what you achieved, and continue to achieve, and that I'm unable to believe you. If you fail to recognize or accommodate that, that is regrettable, though I can't say I feel particularly compelled to help with it either.
> Nothing on that page is particularly political from any position but a substantially polarized one
This bugged me for a while, but I think you're mixing up polarized and radical(ized).
> It’s not entirely apolitical, sure, but it’s pretty milquetoast for a manifesto.
Subjective. Could (should?) have lead with this though maybe, I'd say this is infinitely more obvious to be just "an observation".
> If you see polarization there it’s because you’re looking through a polarized filter, in the literal photographic sense as much as the political one: you’ve rotated your filter frame to minimize reflections of what you do like and maximize visibility of what you don’t like. If you’re offended by it, you’re looking at it from such an orthogonal direction that you really should check if you’re the one whose biases are on display.
I should probably explicitly address this as well. Normatively stating that the other person is offended, polarized (radicalized?), biased, etc, is an exercise in mind reading. Not saying it cannot be inferred, just that it is at best an inference, and that it in itself is subjective.
Meta-text aside, while the phenomenon you're describing is entirely possible (it's basically what overfitting is in ML), that check did happen. It is also entirely possible to be both sensitized to certain ideas, and also those ideas genuinely being shoehorned in or being unnecessary. And there's really no need for this to be a competition or a "one or the other". It also doesn't necessarily mean it should be an impetus for soul-searching. You have your own perspective for a reason, feeling strongly about certain topics is not inherently a flaw. Quite the opposite, it is nonsensical (in a very literal sense) to be "unbiased". Not to say one shouldn't mind their biases though.
> Everyone should engage their critical thinking and develop their capacity for metacognition; no one starts with either of those skill sets, and thus I assume neither in anyone (and everyone, including myself) until I see evidence of either or both
To my latest understanding of human cognition, metacognition (and critical thought) is an innate ability of humans, and many other animals. What you perhaps rather mean is a more willful and focused exercising of these capabilities, especially around subjects one may feel strongly about, where this capability is known to be more difficult to emerge and engage. Not only was there no evidence however that they did not do so, there was explicit evidence backing their recognition up, even if they indeed did not exercise these mental facilities. So as an advice, even a general one, it's a rather oddly timed and pointed one, hence why I understood it as a malicious insinuation, an insult, instead. Even ignoring how it misrepresents the state of the art understanding of human cognition.
> I, very gently, pointed in the direction of engaging those skills and you see violence where violence isn’t, just like you imagine excessive pride where there cannot be any at all.
I appreciate that you feel that way. I hope I was clear enough just how much I see it otherwise, and how and why exactly.
> Perhaps you’ve also been primed to see violence where none exists? To feel as extreme what isn’t extreme because you’ve moved (or been moved) towards the extreme?
I have been, yes. It is entirely possible I'm misjudging your attitude. Before you assume otherwise though, I'd like to explicitly let you know that all three messages (including this one) I posted in response to you were iterated on several times before (and after) posting, with me internally pondering about exactly this among other things (like how you might further get a kick out of picturing me pondering so), and adjusting my language accordingly. I find it extremely worrisome that you see other people so lowly that you'd expressly assume they do not do this, and I do not see this kind of hesitancy from you whatsoever. On the contrary, there basically isn't a sentence in what you wrote so far I haven't found blatantly inflammatory, which really isn't helping with this impression.
> Again, not an ad hominem…
I was suggesting you engaged in coded insults. Insults are not ad hominems. An ad hominem is a logical fallacy, not a moral one. Although I do consider insults to be a form of filibustering.
I appreciate this is kind of a dick move from me after I made you read all that (and write something evidently even longer!), but truth be told, my engagement on the matter was more instinctual than deliberate, so when presented with the option to willfully continue afresh elsewhere, I'd prefer to decline. Thank you for willing to engage me in depth and even offering to continue separately. This now does suggest to me I might have legitimately got off on the wrong foot earlier.
While I might change my mind depending, if you do receive any emails to that address claiming to be connected to this, please do assume it is not actually me, and ask for some "proof of identity" (e.g. changing the text on my bio to at least demonstrate control of this account). Won't perfectly guarantee it's me, but then nothing really can. You probably already figured as much, but I felt it's best I explicitly called this out regardless.
Shame these sort of forums haven’t figured out a better means of handling the kind of longer form back and forth required to find common ground, especially where political philosophy gets involved.
But in a more concrete sense, politics also refers to our tendency to join opposing teams or tribes and fight it out, more or less literally. In that sense, "everything is political" can mean viewing everything as a fight between groups, or worse, associating everything to the conflict between the two dominant groups. That is quite toxic.
With things like Secureboot, TPM modules and ever increasing demands to lock down systems, there is the risk that even libre software will be snuffed out. While not those technologies explicitly, similar less friendly things may come up in future. And when that happens, being beholden to billion dollar hardware companies won't seem so friendly. A little alarmist, but I didn't think we would be were we are today as it is.
One interesting area is about how to make software that is not hardware locked but easy enough to implement with very little work involved.
This is where projects such as UXN come in. https://100r.co/site/uxn.html
A system spec that is only 32 instructions deep, something that a single person could implement in less than a week. Essentially the hardest part is building the hardware Abstraction Layer. It wouldn't be efficient but it is very portable and thus makes it resilient to any future possible shocks.
T3X/0 will assemble binaries for Unix/DOS (maybe Windows) and CP/M.
S9 can do great stuff with very little.
Klong it's a mini APL-like CAS more bound to Statistics than Calculus. No fancy Unicode needed.
Also, Luxferre doing an ultra-minimal numeric VM:
https://codeberg.org/luxferre/mu808
Read the instructions, that mini VM it's surprisingly able.
Finally, Subleq+EForth from https://github.com/howerj/muxleq (muxleq it's just subleq with parallel mux running the exact same intstructions).
From the book you can boostrap EForth from itself with a minimal Subleq DEC file. Enough to run a Sokoban, a calculator (set complex numbers as binomials), and you can implement q+ q- q* q/ to calculate and reduce (lcm/mcm) fractions:
Luxferre's Scoundrel C port can trivially ported to UXN and even maybe mu808. Eforth for sure, with cells and a minimal 'vector/array/' like implementation.https://git.sr.ht/~rabbits/subleq-forth
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/howerj/muxleq/refs/heads/m...
The speed should be much faster.
https://permacomputing.net/Community/
The language on this site seems to position permacomputing in opposition to an unethical status quo.
Personally I'd rather more of a solarpunk computing initiative.
Instead of identity defined by what you are fleeing, define it by what you are running towards.
It seems to be far more geared toward promoting some sort of misplaced post-collapse resiliency.
In other words: solving some hypothetical issues on the other side of a catastrophe for a world we don't know anything about, and almost ignoring present and actual problems.
A very solid (but mundane) example of permacomputing today is just holding onto an old ThinkPad and using it for meaningful work rather than feeling the need to buy a new machine every couple years.
We are so far beyond needing regular purchasing of new devices. Functionality wise, in any significant form, devices haven't improved in many years. This yearly release cycle has become ludicrous and goes against everything we should be doing.
Fairphone, Framework, MNT, Shift, are all on the right track even if not perfect.
The main problem is economical. Big factories benefits from economies of scale, which mean the ecosystem for one off prototypes chips couldn't really develop.
For advanced devices the transistor must be small so the process used ever-shrinking wavelength to engrave the silicon wafers. The whole industry took the Extreme-UV lithography route, which required big machines and investments.
But the alternative was there all-along (reminiscent of 3d-printer vs mass fabrication). Instead of using light to engrave the wafer use particles : For example mask-less electron beam lithography where you scan a beam of electron like in old TVs. It still have problems scaling up because you are writing a single point instead of projecting an image, but achievable resolution can be higher, and multi-beam systems are on the horizon to solve this speed issue.
With software and IP cost going down and humans no longer needed in the loop due to advanced robotics, most safety issues can be contained more easily.
Pretty much all their suggestions are to be applied on personal-level. And I agree with those. But they could be made 100x easier if there was some help provided by localities, municipalities & states. I'd love to know better my neighbors & exchange skills & objects, but i'd be much easier if there was a *free* repair-coffee in the neighborhood.
One example from the article: one of the suggestion for "hope for the best prepare for the worst" is "start a local repair cafe". But come on ! With what money ? With what time ? Where ? Opening a repair café is the kind of stuff is by nature non-profitable, therefore the business of the states.
All i'm trying to say is: let's just not forget that this is a political concern, and we can vote for these stuffs.
Can we? We can vote for a party, but I don't know that any party here has permacomputing in their platform. If you want to add something to a party's platform, the usual way to do that is lobbying, but who can afford lobbyists? The alternative—grassroots activism—tends to involve a lot of stuff like local repair cafes that attract volunteers and get people talking.
I'm writing this comment on a Lenovo Yoga I bought for $10 and fixed up. It's a quad core with 4GB of soldered RAM and a 128GB SSD but I slapped CachyOS on it and it works for nearly anything I want to do when I'm out and about. The battery lasts me about 3 1/2 hours. I've picked up CRT monitors for virtually nothing and they work just fine.
We throw things away too easily.
https://permacomputing.net/software_rot/
https://permacomputing.net/bedrock_platform/
I run an old laptop, my last one was replaced solely because of the web browser dragging it down.
From that view, something like frog find (https://frogfind.superglobalmegacorp.com/) is what is needed.
https://t3x.org
https://luxferre.top of effort) and vm's like mu808, and Scoundrel can be adapted to S9, T3X0, MLite, NMH Basic on hours.https://alexwennerberg.com/permacomputing.html
our system has a bounding box of Truth, Freedom, Harmony, & Love.
... an anti-capitalist political project. ... anarchism ... intersectional feminism ...
No, thanks. I thought it was a tech project. Apparently not.
Lots of computer culture is rooted in anarchism, anti-capitalism and a fight for fairness. E.g. early internet culture, the open source community.
Imo it's very nice to see explicit anti-capitalist movements within tech, because the other side of tech is so completely over the top capitalist.
Whether such a time ever existed is debatable.
Here's a test. Define the period that you're imagining. Then investigate this period as a point in the history of computing with its broader sociopolitical contexts.
Somewhere in the midst of that milieu I reckon or the politics you're likely to be fond to mix with your tech projects.
It's a good direction to take and adds in the possibility, for example, that one may investigate the past and find themselves unintentionally and retroactively complicit in everything between the atomic bomb to US intervention in Libya.
And now I'm curious about the likelihood of a youth who will know no age better than our present, in the future.
You might like this thread from earlier this year:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46505934
Eh, it was only meant to be a little mean. You were I dumb kid, I was a dumb kid, everyone was a dumb kid. I'm assuming to be human involves being a stupid child who didn't have a very good picture of reality. It is extremely common for a person to have this innate belief that their perceptions of the world as a dumb kid to be true and have that be the basis of their desires for how things should be now.
I bet you also think the music you listened to roughly in your teenage years was the best music ever made and everything made before or after isn't as good. Again, nearly everyone feels this way.
>In fact, I used to be a lot more progressive in the past.
If middle-age had a slogan, this would be it. If middle-age was a movie, this would be the subtitle. Welcome.
I'm not talking about conservative the binary, 1-dimensional political stance. I'm talking the "I want things to stay the way they were in the past" conservativism which is broad, can be about anything, and is really common particularly as one gets a little order and hasn't really reevaluated the reality they may remember incorrectly.
When you're young you're naïve, when you're old you're cursed with a false nostalgia. It's the human condition and we're all kinda stupid like that. You'll have trouble pinning down which group I'm attacking and which I'm supporting.
But what it gave birth to was a form of anarchy. One doesn't go against the other, the same way a political regime can change within a country.
In my experience these self-given-labels just express the views of some founding members and are often used to clarify who they do not want (capitalist, misogynist authoritarians) and who is welcome (left leaning people, women, people who know how to treat women, people who can respect flat hierarchies).
I find it a bit edgy to self label an encouraging like that, instead of explaining the meat of it (we are anticapitalist, because..., we are feminist, so women are welcome, we are anarchist, so our organization is structured with a flat hierarchy). Since it is an anarchist space, that is anti-authoritarian you probably won't find much indoctrination.
This is where I think the problem is.
Once you start appending political identifiers then the purpose of an organization becomes more than just about X, but X according to certain values to the exclusion of others. There's nothing wrong with that but I could see how it can be viewed as disingenuous when it's insinuated that the organization is more open/general than it is apparent.
And quite frankly, as someone teaching at the university level, I think people with these traits (misogynistic, capitalistic, authoritarian) are not the best to have in a group anyways if your goal is to cultivate a curious learning environment. Not because of ideological reasons, but if there are women in a group, having a misogynist in there is toxic and doesn't add any value. Capitalists would have the opposite goal of a permacomputing group (extracting wealth from their environment), so having them there is questionable. Authoritarians generally have problems with going new paths and like to hate on the minority their specific flavor of authoritarianism chose as the excuse for their bad behavior, that also doesn't add to a great learning environment.
That doesn't mean I would label my courses as anarchist or anticapitalist and it doesn't mean I select the participants of my courses based on their ideology (I am not even sure how I could do that). But if it was my afterwork book club maybe I'd like to keep people away that take more in society than they give.
Am I being lazy or does this imply that all (or true) nerds are anarchist anti-capitalist feminists.
I'm fairly certain the word for that is "economical". Of course, the politics grows out of the economical relationships, but they are still different things: changes in technology may or may not change the political climate (I am fairly certain that an invention of e.g. a tin can opener did not have any noticeably political effects).
The tin can certainly did though! "Can openers" are particularly distinct refinement of the cutting tool for a specific application, but not any kind of new technology.
If you weren't okay with the way things are, then you wouldn't be neutral.
But we need to merge the humanities with technology because if both sides ignore the other than both sides will blindly walk into the worst out comes of the other side.
"With that said, permacomputing is an anti-capitalist political project. It is driven by several strands of anarchism, decoloniality, intersectional feminism, post-marxism, degrowth, ecologism."
Even for myself, an anarchist, that jumble of ideologies isn't appealing.
So why bother?
the way you express it says that the breadth of the effect of your choices is an essential parameter in considering your processes. I dislike this position due to its administrative, almost corporate undertone; I do understand it and ascribe to it myself in administrative matters, but not the personal.
but look at it this way: you won't change much by feeding homeless animals or birds, or by planting a couple of trees, but it may still bring great pleasure to do it. one way that i see it differ from permacomputing is that the feedback / perception of its effect is more immediate; or that permacomputing is following a more abstract, mediated value. but both are about finding some joy and meaning in doing something purely out of care. if not pleasure, it at least gives a little framework, a heuristic when making decisions.
Arguably the environmental benefit of an American farm replacing a 10 year old tractor with an electric model isn't nearly as good for the environment as a farm in India replacing a 70 year old tractor that leaks gallons of oil per month with a 50 year old tractor that doesn't.
Capitalists don't understand how to apply cost-to-benefit ratios to anything outside themselves. There is no global entity making sure resources are spent responsibly or equitably at scale.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...
Replacing a low efficiency device with a medium efficiency device is better for the environment (and more cost effective) than replacing a high efficiency device with an ultra high efficiency device.