This is hard to compress, and crosses over a couple of political boundaries about which people I like and respect have quasi-religious feelings, so Iām hesitant, butā¦
There are things about which weād be in vigorous agreement. I like simplicity, of course. Surveillance capitalism sucks. I hate waste in all forms. I have shirts that are 20 years old, my socks and trousers have patches from where weāve sewn them, &c. I share a generally green sentiment ā we grow a fair bit of food every summer in a plot at an urban garden, do vermicular composting at our house, collect rain water with which to water our plants, buy ~90% of the food we donāt grow from farmers who live within 100km of us, havenāt owned a car in 25+ years, &c, &c.
In my preferred radical semi-Solarpunk future, weād see an end to fast fashion and industrial farming as practiced today, alongside an incredible reduction in the number of cars in the world ā electric or otherwise. Weād see, generally speaking, greater respect paid to the ecosystems that make life possible on Earth, which is literally the only place in the universe that members of species are known to be able to live.
As for disagreements: I dislike e-waste as much as anyone, but where Permacomputing philosophy would say we should stop making so many computing devices, I would say that we need cultural and legal frameworks around recycling the materials in these things. I prefer all of us to have better I/O devices, faster CPUs, more/denser storage, &c, in a series of rolling upgrades for as long as we can continue. Having lived through 70s computing, I feel absolutely no desire to return to low-color 8-bit aesthetics, bitmap fonts, and programs that fit in 64k of memory. I want the opposite! I want:
⢠trivial massively parallel processing and huge memories
⢠to find better materials for a wide array of engineering uses
⢠to combine with cheap gene sequencing to facilitate precision medicine
⢠to create new green technologies to support our huge population
⢠as-yet-uninvented giant holographic displays with gestural control
I want many things that are extremely wasteful today to be converted from atom-oriented processes to electron/photon-oriented ones, with a move from petroleum to electricity over the gamut of human activity. To do this while lifting most of the world out of poverty will require tremendous energy inputs, so I support all clean forms of energy generation, including nuclear, and would like to see a near term end to coal, &c.
(Thereās also quite a bit of economic/political change Iād like to see, but that tickles even deeper religious feelings, so Iāll leave it out.)