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.
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. Like, I'm not religious, but I'll wear a cross if it keeps the vampires at bay.
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.
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.
> 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.
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?
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:
2 3 1 3 q+ .s
3 3 <ok>
/ .
1 <ok>
The language on this site seems to position permacomputing in opposition to an unethical status quo.
Personally I'd rather more of a solarpunk computing initiative.
Instead of identity defined by what you are fleeing, define it by what you are running towards.
It seems to be far more geared toward promoting some sort of misplaced post-collapse resiliency.
In other words: solving some hypothetical issues on the other side of a catastrophe for a world we don't know anything about, and almost ignoring present and actual problems.
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.
I'm writing this comment on a Lenovo Yoga I bought for $10 and fixed up. It's a quad core with 4GB of soldered RAM and a 128GB SSD but I slapped CachyOS on it and it works for nearly anything I want to do when I'm out and about. The battery lasts me about 3 1/2 hours. I've picked up CRT monitors for virtually nothing and they work just fine.
We throw things away too easily.
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.
our system has a bounding box of Truth, Freedom, Harmony, & Love.
I run an old laptop, my last one was replaced solely because of the web browser dragging it down.
From that view, something like frog find (https://frogfind.superglobalmegacorp.com/) is what is needed.
- 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
- The repos from this guy have nice games such as Scoundrel (portable to subc with a bit... an anti-capitalist political project. ... anarchism ... intersectional feminism ...
No, thanks. I thought it was a tech project. Apparently not.
Lots of computer culture is rooted in anarchism, anti-capitalism and a fight for fairness. E.g. early internet culture, the open source community.
Imo it's very nice to see explicit anti-capitalist movements within tech, because the other side of tech is so completely over the top capitalist.
Whether such a time ever existed is debatable.
Here's a test. Define the period that you're imagining. Then investigate this period as a point in the history of computing with its broader sociopolitical contexts.
Somewhere in the midst of that milieu I reckon or the politics you're likely to be fond to mix with your tech projects.
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.
Am I being lazy or does this imply that all (or true) nerds are anarchist anti-capitalist feminists.
But we need to merge the humanities with technology because if both sides ignore the other than both sides will blindly walk into the worst out comes of the other side.
"With that said, permacomputing is an anti-capitalist political project. It is driven by several strands of anarchism, decoloniality, intersectional feminism, post-marxism, degrowth, ecologism."
Even for myself, an anarchist, that jumble of ideologies isn't appealing.
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...