Permacomputing
Metadata
Highlights
- in the aspect of cultural and ecological permanence. That is, how to give computers a meaningful and sustainable place in a human civilization that has a meaningful and sustainable place in the planetary biosphere. (View Highlight)
- At the same time, computers have been failing their utopian expectations. Instead of amplifying the users’ intelligence, they rather amplify their stupidity. Instead of making it possible to scale down the resource requirements of the material world, they have instead become a major part of the problem. Instead of making the world more comprehensible, they rather add to its incomprehensibility. And they often even manage to become slower despite becoming faster.
In both computing and agriculture, a major issue is that problems are too often “solved” by increasing controllability and resource use. Permaculture takes another way, advocating methods that “let nature do the work” and thus minimize the dependence on artificial energy input. Localness and decentralization are also major themes in the thought. (View Highlight)
- The presence of intelligent life in an ecosystem can be justified by its strengthening effect. Ideally, humans could make ecosystems more flexible and more resilient because of their ability to take leaps that are difficult or impossible for “unintelligent” natural processes. The existence of computers in a human civilization can be justified by their ability to augment this potential. (View Highlight)
- Note: computers as augmenting to the potential make ecosystems more resilient not people more intelligent
- At times of low energy, both hardware and software would prefer to scale down: background processes would freeze, user interfaces would become more rudimentary, clock frequencies would decrease, unneeded processors and memory banks would power off. At these times, people would prefer to do something else than interact with computers. (View Highlight)
- Use what is available. Even chips that do “evil” things are worth considering if there’s a landfill full of them. Crack their DRM locks, reverse-engineer their black boxes, deconstruct their philosophies. It might even be possible to reappropriate something like Bitcoin-mining ASICs for something artistically interesting or even useful. (View Highlight)
- Current consumer-oriented computing systems often go to ridiculous lengths to actually prevent the user from knowing what is going on. Even error messages have become unfashionable; many websites and apps just pretend everything is fine even if it isn’t. This kind of extreme unobservability is a major source of technological alienation among computer users. (View Highlight)
- The visualizations intended for casual and passive observation would be pleasant and tranquil while making it easy to see the big picture and notice the small changes. Tapping into the inborn human tendency to observe the natural environment may be a good idea when designing visualizers (View Highlight)
- The difference between yin and yang hacking is similar to the difference between permaculture and industrial agriculture. In the latter, a piece of nature (the field) is forced (via a huge energy investment) into an oversimplified state that is as predictable and controllable as possible. Permaculture, on the other hand, emphasizes a co-operative (observing and interacting) relationship with the natural system. (View Highlight)
title: “Permacomputing”
author: “viznut.fi”
url: ”http://viznut.fi/texts-en/permacomputing.html”
date: 2023-12-19
source: reader
tags: media/articles
Permacomputing
Metadata
Highlights
- in the aspect of cultural and ecological permanence. That is, how to give computers a meaningful and sustainable place in a human civilization that has a meaningful and sustainable place in the planetary biosphere. (View Highlight)
- At the same time, computers have been failing their utopian expectations. Instead of amplifying the users’ intelligence, they rather amplify their stupidity. Instead of making it possible to scale down the resource requirements of the material world, they have instead become a major part of the problem. Instead of making the world more comprehensible, they rather add to its incomprehensibility. And they often even manage to become slower despite becoming faster.
In both computing and agriculture, a major issue is that problems are too often “solved” by increasing controllability and resource use. Permaculture takes another way, advocating methods that “let nature do the work” and thus minimize the dependence on artificial energy input. Localness and decentralization are also major themes in the thought. (View Highlight)
- The presence of intelligent life in an ecosystem can be justified by its strengthening effect. Ideally, humans could make ecosystems more flexible and more resilient because of their ability to take leaps that are difficult or impossible for “unintelligent” natural processes. The existence of computers in a human civilization can be justified by their ability to augment this potential. (View Highlight)
- Note: computers as augmenting to the potential make ecosystems more resilient not people more intelligent
- At times of low energy, both hardware and software would prefer to scale down: background processes would freeze, user interfaces would become more rudimentary, clock frequencies would decrease, unneeded processors and memory banks would power off. At these times, people would prefer to do something else than interact with computers. (View Highlight)
- Use what is available. Even chips that do “evil” things are worth considering if there’s a landfill full of them. Crack their DRM locks, reverse-engineer their black boxes, deconstruct their philosophies. It might even be possible to reappropriate something like Bitcoin-mining ASICs for something artistically interesting or even useful. (View Highlight)
- Current consumer-oriented computing systems often go to ridiculous lengths to actually prevent the user from knowing what is going on. Even error messages have become unfashionable; many websites and apps just pretend everything is fine even if it isn’t. This kind of extreme unobservability is a major source of technological alienation among computer users. (View Highlight)
- The visualizations intended for casual and passive observation would be pleasant and tranquil while making it easy to see the big picture and notice the small changes. Tapping into the inborn human tendency to observe the natural environment may be a good idea when designing visualizers (View Highlight)
- The difference between yin and yang hacking is similar to the difference between permaculture and industrial agriculture. In the latter, a piece of nature (the field) is forced (via a huge energy investment) into an oversimplified state that is as predictable and controllable as possible. Permaculture, on the other hand, emphasizes a co-operative (observing and interacting) relationship with the natural system. (View Highlight)