If there is any upside to a computational culture dominated by enshittification, crapularity and maximalist techno-aesthetics, is that sometimes a computational object or situation may generate unintenional permacomputing advantages.

Rejoice and dance around the tech dumpster fire!

Good old good enough software is good enough

Some software have been developed with little drastic change in their design since their conception. This can be due to a conservative position of their author(s), or just because it works good enough so why bother. UNIX has been historically blamed for this and how this capacity to be just good enough has accelerated a process of operating system monoculture accompanied with the loss of incentive to innovate in this space. But what is interesting here is at the level software applications that somehow have a small but stable enough community who could not care less if your desktop environment is GPU accelerated or if your CPU supports AVX. It worked great on a Pentium-III so why bother. Oh and you truly hit the lottery if the sotware has dependencies sharing the same philosophy.

Novelty software and hardware exploits

There is no such thing as perfect security. If you combine this with the fact that the ICT industry is economically rewarded by launching new products rather than maintaining what they launched a year ago, then the playground is quasi infinite. This is usually seen as a cybersecurity nightmare, but within the permacomputing community CVEs and weird exploits are potential small gifts to help reclaim vendor locked hardware or DRM'ed software. It could be an old video game console from the 90s that can now be completely softmodded, or a mass rebandred multi core router/wifi hotspot that just needed a bit of telnet massage to break into a shell, or a locked phone that somehow still listen to modem commands, or one of gazillions Linux based disposable appliance out there that can suddenly be rooted.

Cloud outtage

Cloud outtage is the new cancelled meeting. And because all your meetings were anyway scheduled on Teams or Google Calendar, then it's a double win. A significant aspect of permacomputing is focussed on reclaiming ewaste, prolonging the lifecycle of existing computers, or figuring out how/if computational culture can do other things than harm. However an important permacomputing design principle is not doing. While the principle is framed through the lense of an individual or collective action, we have to give credits and thank the ICT industry for also contributing every now and then to computational degrowth by being absolutely useless. And if the outtage concerned storage, well, we both know you had too many files and you were never gonna do anything with all these photos. Internet is down, go touch some grass.