Permacomputing: Digital Culture within Limits

Prefiguring a regenerative digital culture through hardware longevity, local adaptation, and conscious constraints.

>> Permacomputing is reimagining digital culture through the lenses of ecological awareness and conscious constraints. Drawing on permaculture, this emerging concept and community of practice advocates for regenerative computing systems that prioritise hardware longevity and local adaptation. Its practitioners embrace constraints as a catalysts for creativity and resilience, sharing their knowledge of energy-aware programming, repair practices, and the creative reuse of obsolete technology. Permacomputing's diverse practices – from low-bandwidth cinema to modular, repairable hardware – challenge prevailing notions of technology, prefiguring alternative digital cultures. By rejecting the false dichotomy of progress versus primitivism, they invite a reconsideration of technological development, measuring such not by capability, but by efficiency, ecological harmony, and social impact. As these ideas percolate into mainstream discourse, they challenge attitudes to obsolescence and digital waste, potentially reshaping software design paradigms and cultural attitudes towards technology.