Permaculture

Permaculture is an approach to land management and settlement design that adopts arrangements observed in flourishing natural ecosystems. First formulated in 1978, it particularly stands in opposition against industrial agriculture. Permacomputing is based on the idea of applying permacultural ideas to computing (and "high" technology in general).

In particular, permaculture inspires permacomputing to:

• Recognizing the effects of computing to the biosphere, and trying to find ways to make these effects positive and regenerative.
• Turning waste into resources and constraints into possibilities.
• Explorative, imaginative and positive attitudes towards sustainable design, as opposed to "returning to the past" or "having to tolerate lesser resources".
• Opposition to the mainstream technological industry while offering a tangible alternative.

Permacomputing isn't the first attempt to bridge permaculture and computing. Earlier examples include:

• The Permaculture entry on WikiWikiWeb connects it with software design patterns but does not connect to the ecological reality.
• Kent Beck's talk "Programming as a garden: Permaprogramming" similarly drew inspiration from the philosophy to software design without the ecological aspect.
• Amanda Starling Gould's 2017 doctoral dissertation "Digital Environmental Metabolisms: An Ecocritical Project of the Digital Environmental Humanities" centers around the ecological aspect but concentrates on end-user activities.

Honouring History

Permaculture was not formulated in a vacuum. Working with land in a respectful and sustainable way is common practice for many indigenous communities and cultures and rooted in indigenous science. Permaculture, as formulated by David Holmgren and Bill Mollison, draws heavily from these practices, as acknowledged by them. A good primer on this topic is "The Indigenous Science of Permaculture" or "Decolonizing Permaculture".

This is not a critique on permaculture (or permacomputing for that matter), but a reminder that our perma practices are part of a larger and older network of knowledge and ways of being. The paper "A pluriverse of local worlds: A review of Computing within Limits related terminology and practices" contains a good list of pointers to alternative approaches to computing. Similarly, and a step beyond computing, exists a plethora of practices around our relationship with technology with which permacomputing vibes*. Examples are

• Jugaad on the Indian subcontinent, which is about a frugal approach to technology
• The Technological Disobedience Archive, which is drawing inspiration from the Cuban repair manual El Libro de la Familia
• The Shinto festival Hari-Kuyō in which people can bring their broken sewing needles to a Shinto temple to get them recycled. A modern equivalent was formulated around the recycling and burial of Aibo dog bots

These examples also show that many of these practices come about out of necessity, and are especially prevalent and common in the global south. It doesn't have to be this way. We shouldn't wait until catastrophes hit us, to start implementing permacomputing principles. In that light, the concept of imaginaries can be helpful.

"[I]maginaries provide ways of organizing that combine ideas and concrete practices, imagining organizational alternatives by enacting new forms of collective practice." - Alternative Visions: Permaculture as Imaginaries of the Anthropocene