Computational systems today

If the information and communications technology (ICT) industry was purposefully following a harmful agenda, these would probably be their design principles:

  • disregard for life
  • disregard for the chips
  • more is better
  • assume limitless resources
  • keep it controlled
  • outsource the problem
  • amplify ignorance
  • obfuscate everything
  • destroy communities
  • achieve monopoly

While the industry is rarely discussed in this way, there are countless well-documented proofs that the dominant computational cultural paradigm greatly accelerates harm.

The properties of such systems are:

Permacomputing systems

The design principles of permacomputing systems are:

  • Hope for the Best, Prepare for the Worst
  • Care for All Hardware — Especially the Chips
  • Observe First
  • Not Doing
  • Expose the Seams
  • Consider Carefully the Interaction Between Simplicity, Complexity and Scale
  • Keep It Flexible
  • Build on Solid Ground
  • (Almost) Everything has a place
  • Integrate Biological and Renewable Resources

The properties of such systems are:

  • accessible: well documented and adaptable to an individual's needs.
  • compatible: works on a variety of architectures.
  • efficient: uses as little resources (power, memory, etc) as possible (minimization).
  • flexible: modular, portable, adapts to various use-cases.
  • resilient: repairable, offline-first, low-maintenance, designed for disassembly, planned for longevity, maximized lifespan, descent-friendly or designed for descent

Some additional concerns are of indirect interest because they impose costs on the entire end-to-end process of software creation:

  • it's bootstrapped from machine code without circular reasoning (bootstrappable builds)
  • it's obvious what source code went into it (reproducible builds)
  • it's easy to audit its source code, including all dependencies