Permacomputing Wiki

Voters don't write code. There is a process that goes from votes to personnel decisions to design decisions to writing patches. This process involves people who have their own ideas about how to interpret what the voters might theoretically want. There is lots of scope for them to make decisions you wouldn't like.

https://youtu.be/HB5TrK7A4pI

Granted, the assumption he made is that computing power would grow increasingly cheap (which is basically the opposite of the point here), but I also wonder if techniques like those shown in that talk could be used effectively with a network of smaller, lower-power computers.

(I mean, the talk does mention the use of small low-power computers specifically, but more in the context of e.g. sensor networks.)

The ethical principle of "Fair Share" isn't just about the yields the land owner has, but also the yields other inhabitants of an ecology have. For people who are motivated by stewardship, for example, humans obtaining benefits is not elevated into its own thing. As an example, some of the Native tribes would say something along the lines that when you plant, one is for the plants, one is for the animals, one is for the birds, one is for us. It is certainly not about maximizing production efficiencies for the benefit of humans alone.

That motivation and attitude shapes the way someone views and experiences their life, and their place, and in turn shapes how we go about caring for land, caring for people, and fair share.

I know I'm cheating here a bit. I'm using the work of Carol Sanford to identify world view and paradigm, and that way of thinking through these things are not spelled out in the original works of Mollison and Holmgren. Sanford's work on regenerative paradigms and living systems world view goes a long way towards sorting out the different ways people approach things in the permaculture community, and is generalizable more broadly than food systems.

Regeneration is a characteristic exclusive to living systems. It's not something that can be approached from a world view that everything is a machine, or the paradigm that one can control behavior through incentives and disincentives. Only living systems can regenerate. It's the broader paradigm from which "your food (and other resources) produce themselves" comes from. Living systems are capable of growing and adapting on their own; they are nested -- so that is you and I, within larger living systems of family, community, organization, ecology. It is because of regeneration that "food and other resources produce themselves".

My point in all of this is that there is a diversity of motivations and views, and the view that "without that core benefit nobody could do it even if they wanted to and have a viable farm" is not as universal as it sounds like. "The core reason to do permaculture is that your food (and other resources) produce themselves" might be your core reason, but it is not true it is the reason that everyone in the permaculture community applies permaculture.

When I look at this as something that can last generations, the valve is simpler and probably more reliable. If we were to evaluate its resilience and anti-fragility, because it is produced with a much shorter technological dependency graph, it is more likely to be maintainable.

I marveled at the "curb cutting" that Brad Landcaster pioneered out in Tuscon. He dug basins for native trees and shrubs in public right-of-ways, and then cut notches in curbs. When the monsoon rains flush down the street, it fills up a basin, helps recharge the local aquifer, held by living plants. When the basin is full, there's a natural backpressure that then lets the rainwater flow to the next basin. There are no moving parts. The curb cut uses power tools, but if needed, you can chisel it out by hand using something that is lower-tech. Those are all technologies too, ones that may seem simple, perhaps primitive, but were deployed and used in alignment with permaculture ethical principles.

There was another book I have and the author talked about how they are intended to design their farm to grow multiple generations ... but they are willing to use a chainsaw for the initial build, a way of investing the last dredges of fossil fuels and power tools to set in motion something that can regenerate and keep on growing.

I think about some of Richard Stallman's essays. I remember the ones that laid down design principles for software that makes it accessible to people who may be blind, or have difficulty using a mouse, or even keyboard. It's laid out in terms of the principles of free software, but it could easily have come from permaculture ethical principles. I remember Christopher Alexander, and people's attempt to bring the ideas of living architecture, where inhabitants can make local changes that are still architecturally coherent. That would be end-user-modifiable software, such as Smalltalk or Hypercard. They don't web-scale and drive the aggregation flywheel, so it's been abandoned in consumer software.

I remember watching a documentary on a Native American elder speaking to her people about permaculture. How her initial reaction was that this was, yet again, another example of being told by arrogant people on what to do. Then she recounted how she saw people working the earth with reverence, and that went a long way towards credibility. In terms of permaculture, these people were living the permaculture ethical principles.

I don't think my life and career making a living with technology is a waste. There's a place for technology in all of this (rather than the inverse, a place for traditional values in technology). I've already been applying some of the permaculture design principles to how I work with Kubernetes, but I think there is a deeper change in my way of life that involves computer technology.