Permacomputing
Look around at mainstream technology today. What do you see?
A digital monoculture – just like industrial farming that strips soils of life.
Big Tech corporates, which produces identical devices with built in expiration dates, while forcing us into linear interfaces that measure our lives in productivity metrics rather than natural rhythms.
These platforms harvest our attention like crops, processing it into empty “content calories” that offer as little nutrition to our minds as processed foods do to our bodies.
The waste their left behind is equally destructive – while industrial agriculture leaves dead soils that take generations to heal, discarded electronics create toxic landfills that poison the earth for centuries.
Both systems take diversity and turn it into standardized products, extract value without replenishing, and leave devastation for the seek of their constant growth.
Recognizing these challenges, permacomputing offers a radical paradigm shift in how we approach digital technology, primarily by applying ecological wisdom to them.
It extends the permaculture ethics of Earth Care, People Care, and Fair Share into technological contexts, creating a framework for more mindful and regenerative computing.
Key principles
Permacomputing isn’t just a technical approach, it’s more of a philosophy that stimulate our imagination to re-think our relationship with digital tools and data.
At its core, permacomputing cultivate harmonious relationships between hardware, software, and human needs while, prioritizing solutions that enhance our natural world rather than deplete it.
Unlike mainstream tech practices that prioritize planned obsolescence and constant upgrades, permacomputing values longevity, repairability, and appropriate resource use.
Permacomputing encourages us to ask ourselves: How much computing do we actually need? What is the simplest solution that solves our problems effectively?
When we honestly address these questions, we uncover the three pillars of permacomputing practice:
Regenerative computing: creating systems that repair rather than deplete our digital and physical environments.
This means designing software and hardware that minimize energy use, extend device lifespans, and consider their full lifecycle impact.
Appropriate technology: using the right tools for the job rather than defaulting to the newest or most powerful.
This might mean embracing older hardware, simpler software architectures, or lower-tech solutions when they adequately serve our needs.
Digital resilience: building systems that can adapt, evolve and thrive through changing conditions rather than requiring constant replacement.
My Digital Sanctuary: a living case study
This website represents my ongoing experiment in permacomputing - a living laboratory where ecological wisdom meet digital practice.
Like any healthy ecosystem, it evolves slowly, prioritizes resilience over novelty, and aims to give more than it takes.
So please keep in mind, that this Digital Sanctuary isn’t just a website, it’s a statement about what our digital future could be if we approached technology with the same care and intention that permaculture brings to our land and communities.
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