Civboot is a project which aims to reduce the tools and knowledge necessary to bootstrap modern civilisation as much as possible, with a focus on computers. It is was originally inspired by Collapse OS and is also an educational project.
Essentially, a Civboot is defined as a factory (or set of factories) and the tools and knowledge required to build a computer, as well as everything needed to build the factories/tools themselves, recursively. It applies the idea of bootstrapping to physical systems in order to wet the curiosity and intellect of builders and designers towards a common goal that could encourage simplicity, understandability, adaptability and human scale in computational culture.
More specifically within the project, Civstack is the software implementation of Civboot - a self-bootstrapping software stack that is educational and can already be useful in the present day. The contributors of the Civboot project are starting with Civstack because software is easier than hardware and having a minimal yet useful software system for Civboot to target will clarify the hardware requirements.
Relevance to permacomputing
Today's technology stack and supply chain are too large and complex to be produced by small groups of people, much less understood from books or working examples. Simplifying parts of our technology stack has many benefits relevant to permacomputing. In Civboot words:
- Provides working examples that can be used as reference to learn from.
- Creates a base to modify and build new ideas and approaches.
- Allows adaptability if supply chains are disrupted or resources are scarce, especially in places with fewer resources.
The goal of Civboot is to follow the below process for each technology stack (i.e. software, precision engineering, semiconductor fabrication, etc):
- Reduce its complexity to something more replicable and understandable.
- Build a working system from as simple of tools as possible.
- Document that system and its construction.
- Repeat until it can rebuild itself with the knowledge of only a small group of people.
Limits and challenges
The Civboot manufacturing, hardware and software stacks will not be built in a night. It will require probably hundreds of interested people working in many different fields. This is the type of project that will take multiple lifetimes. According to the project contributors, 5 years in, it is believed that software complexity could already be massively distilled. Whether this is true for the other engineering branches remains to be seen.
Realistically, a full public domain Civboot which produces an economically viable computer entirely within a University campus (or similar) is very likely impossible to achieve without massive funding and support from society.
The goals of the project are acknowledged as largely pipe dreams, however such goals aid tremendously to map the economic, environmental and technical challenges and chains of dependencies, that needs to be addressed for the minimal viable bootstrapping of computers.