Brew the Base

Find your main ingredients, intentions, and inspiring places.

Every collective starts with a feeling — curiosity, frustration, anger, hope or refusal. Before thinking about tools or topics, think about the emotional and spatial ground that will hold your work.

Permacomputing isn’t a movement of optimization — it’s a practice of attention, care, solidarity and critique. You do not need to be a computer expert to start reflecting and countering the environmental and human harm done by the most dominant and extractive forms computational culture.

Suggestions

• Start from what moves you — not from what’s missing in tech.
• Let your personal background shape your entry point — art, activism, economics, biology, engineering, etc.
• If you can, anchor your practice in a real, inspiring place: a studio, forest, kitchen, community house or community server. Choose a location that encourages conversation and reflection over production.
• Find others who share your interest in finding ways computer technology could be used for other things than surveillance, war, production and control.

Quotes

I fell into coding as a teenager, but I came into permacomputing through Marx and political radicalism, more than through gardening. [...] Finding a space that feels inspiring is the most important thing. It just felt right. We wanted a place that isn’t about production or efficiency, but about thinking, reflection, and care. — Ana, London

I just had an itch — and felt that if I didn’t start it, it wouldn’t happen. — Brendan, Berlin

I sat down to brainstorm a digital space that would include those identities and that would also do it in the most frugal and simple way possible. I've been exploring pubnix and the smol web while reading about frugal computing and low-tech, including permacomputing. Thanks to a friend’s enthusiasm and technical assistance, by January of the following year I had the basics up and running. From there, it has slowly taken shape. — Archipiélago I

The actual kick-off was not due to me but to [Björn - a colleague] who said “Ok. I would be on board. If we team up, we can do it.” If I’m not alone in it and somebody else actually brings some initiative then I can see this happening, even if I’m a bit skeptical about dedicating to yet another cause. — Simon, Vienna

I always wanted to do something in this area but initially I lacked the language for it until I found existent papers and discussions around permacomputing, online on Mastodon – this gave me a framework to start. — Colm, County Mayo

A lot of the people who come into the bookstore and become part of this group or other groups, are working in the tech industry or some kind of job that they may have an issue with. They have these frustrations and they feel, especially at work, that they are in the minority and these topics are not welcome. So it's a bit of a breath of fresh air for some folks to just be able to talk a little more freely about their actual political beliefs. — Steve, Philadelphia

We know amazing work has been done – all this practical stuff in the permacomputing community. It has been a place for people to gather and work on some sort of guiding North Star or framework for thinking about digital technology that doesn't absolutely suck. — d1 and crunk, Rotterdam