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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> [...] permacomputing is an anti-capitalist political project. It is driven by several strands of anarchism, decoloniality, intersectional feminism, post-marxism, degrowth, ecologism.
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
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.
>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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
> 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.
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
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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").
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.)
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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?
> 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
- 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
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.
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.
> 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.
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"
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Being apolitical just means your politics align with the status quo. Technology is inherently political in nature, 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).
"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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
This principles page doesn't seem to have any irrelevant politics to me.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
If you just want "MacBook with socketed RAM" there's already other people doing that. You don't need this to be that.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
https://permacomputing.net/Community/
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://permacomputing.net/software_rot/
https://permacomputing.net/bedrock_platform/
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.
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.
our system has a bounding box of Truth, Freedom, Harmony, & Love.
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.
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.... an anti-capitalist political project. ... anarchism ... intersectional feminism ...
No, thanks. I thought it was a tech project. Apparently not.
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.
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.
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.
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).
If you weren't okay with the way things are, then you wouldn't be neutral.
"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?
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...