An essay on AI, programming, and anarchist theory

Cultural practices of collective ownership over natural resources have been around for quite some time. Do these ways of working have a digital counterpart? It may seem simple at first. To translate cultural practices of collective ownership into the digital realm, just use a Creative Commons license to allow others to make use of your work, share further modifications, and contribute to the wealth of the digital commons. That’s it.

Some stories are just too good to be true.

While I’m in the beginnings of a new tech-oriented research project, I’m getting a lot from Ursula Franklin’s “Real World of Technology” lectures, which contain the following checklist for projects:

“… whether it:

(1) promotes justice;
(2) restores reciprocity;
(3) confers divisible or indivisible benefits;
(4) favours people over machines;
(5) whether its strategy maximizes gain or minimizes disaster;
(6) whether conservation is favoured over waste; and
(7), whether the reversible is favoured over the irreversible?”

This website lives on a Raspberry Pi placed in a garden shed and powered using a solar panel and batteries.

Well, that civilization thing was interesting, now wasn’t it? I mean, it certainly seemed worth a shot. We got a lot out of it: telescopes, wheelchairs, wikipedia. But we also just about took out the natural world. Science, agriculture, and specialization have done a lot for expanding cultural ideas and communication, but they’ve done even more for genocide and ecocide.

So it’s time we gave up the noble, failed experiment altogether and moved on to something new.

The digital world we live in is full of excesses. We have come to expect fast speeds, 100% up-time, high resolution and always accessible digital media. The primary version of this website reluctlantly aims to meet those expectations, while highlighting some these issues.

The main version of this site is accessible at all times of the day, but is housed on a self-hosted server, made from recycled, consumer-grade computer parts, on a domestic internet connection, and domestic electricity connection.

The remote website is most precarious, relying on solar power and cellular network, the main version of the website is slightly less precarious.

The EU hails a deal with Serbia on lithium mining as a “historic day for Serbia, as well as Europe”. […]
Mr Scholz was keen to ensure his country’s auto industry was at the front of the queue for supplies.
Carmakers will need ever more lithium for batteries, as the transition to zero-emission vehicles accelerates – and Rio Tinto’s Jadar project could provide as much as nine-tenths of Europe’s current lithium needs.

• A Permacomputing Berlin Workshop *

15.12.2024 from 12-17:00h

kindly hosted by:
/rosa
Heidelberger Str. 28
12059 Berlin

Many of us have old phones or tablets sitting in a drawer at home. They might have a dead battery or broken screen that keep us from using them, but in theory they are still quite functional computers. Imagine if we could install a new operating system and make them useful for new purposes: a tiny web site, small home server, media player, sensor station or even stranger, more poetic things. Thanks to efforts like PostmarketOS this is possible, but it can be intimidating and confusing.

In this workshop, we will attempt to install the Linux-based PostmarketOS on "obsolete" Android devices and find convivial new uses for them.

demo working finally! soft sculptures with phones hidden in them sending orientation sensor data to touchdesigner, which is driving the lights

PlantStudio Botanical Illustration Software is a tool for creating 3D plant models and 2D illustrations. PlantStudio simulates herbaceous (non-woody) plants like wildflowers and cut flowers, vegetables, weeds, grasses, and herbs using a parameter-driven simulation of plant growth and structure.

A blog post by https://kopiti.am/@nondescryptid detailing how they set up postmarketOS on their own phone:

I’ve got a Samsung Galaxy S II (i9100) lying around, and decided to try seeing if I can repurpose it and get it to host a blog. I was inspired by compost.party – a very cool server running off a Xiaomi Poco F1 using postmarketOS and a solar panel for charging.
The physical nature of computing is usually not a concern, as things are sufficiently abstracted for me to not have to care too much about it. But trying to revive this phone from 2011 was a reminder that when we talk about compute, we are ultimately dealing with physical resources – tiny towns with blocks of silicon, lithium, etc etc.

We are humans and might as well get used to it. So far, remotely done power and glory—as via government, big business, formal education, church—has succeeded to the point where gross profits obscure actual loss. In response to this dilemma and to these losses a realm of intimate, community power is developing—power of communities to conduct their own education, find their own inspiration, shape their own environment, and share their knowledge with others. Practices that aid this process are sought and promoted by the DAMAGED EARTH CATALOG.

It’s always safe to assume JavaScript will not be available, so here’s a quick list of very realistic reasons it won’t be.

Billions of phones will be hoarded in drawers and cupboards or thrown away rather than recycled, studies suggest.

A naturally intelligent network programmed by the sun.

Sun Thinking is a group exhibition that brings together artists, writers, and researchers to explore the qualities and logics of solar power and solar powered computing networks. It presents a collection of network-based artworks, games, texts, and interviews and is the first exhibition project to be hosted on the Solar Protocol network.

When designing computer systems, one is often faced with a choice between using a more or less powerful language for publishing information, for expressing constraints, or for solving some problem. This finding explores tradeoffs relating the choice of language to reusability of information. The "Rule of Least Power" suggests choosing the least powerful language suitable for a given purpose.

Permacomputing is both a concept and a community of practice oriented around issues of resilience and regenerativity in computer and network technology inspired by permaculture.

In a time where computing epitomizes industrial waste, permacomputing encourages the maximizing of hardware lifespans, minimizing energy use and focusing on the use of already available computational resources.