I completely agree. I find it generally remarkable that the whole sustainability/environmentalism cause still struggles to find conservative support, because those things are basically perfectly aligned, and preserving the environment should be a trivial sell to a conservative base (it's literally in the name).

I see significant blame with environmentalist orgs/pushes like this that are deliberately anti-conservative for little reason, not just with conservatives being hypocrites.

Consider that the venn diagram of "people likely to be negatively impacted by climate change" and "people who belong to historically marginized or discriminated groups" has a lot of overlap. It's little wonder to me why permacomputing, having its roots in environmentalism, attracts people who spend a lot of time and energy on social justice causes.

But still: It's okay to enjoy the mindful and resilient and ecological aspects and not enjoy some other aspect.

This sounds like a fence sitter take. Everything is political and not acknowledging that is part of the problem.

Indeed. The Green Party in the UK is also very anti-Jew. Or if we're really charitable, just very anti-the existence of Israel.

I get why you wouldn't see this as inviting.

But we need to merge the humanities with technology because if both sides ignore the other than both sides will blindly walk into the worst out comes of the other side.

One does not rule out the other. In the end it's nerds messing with hardware.

Lots of computer culture is rooted in anarchism, anti-capitalism and a fight for fairness. E.g. early internet culture, the open source community.

Imo it's very nice to see explicit anti-capitalist movements within tech, because the other side of tech is so completely over the top capitalist.

check out my version at permacomputer dot com

I think the issue being highlighted here is how polarizing causes are advanced and detract from a reasonable one that is supposed to be the pith of an organization.

> It's okay to enjoy the mindful and resilient and ecological aspects and not enjoy some other aspect.

I don't object to this in the most general sense. But I also think that a little tact can go a long way from the organization's side to anticipate where the public can't exercise it on their own.

I agree. What is the purpose of this article?

On what page did you find that?

There's strong first-principles reasons to think that left-wing radical politics does a significant disservice to historically marginalized or discriminated groups. Historically the proper and most effective response to maginalization and discrimination was developing strong, enduring social ties (arguably, these social ties are what defines a "group" to begin with, especially on very long-run, even generational timescales), which in practice is now coded as a "right wing" value.

Taking some parts and leaving others is exactly how intersectionalism should work: at an individual level. You throw your lot in with the orgs and movements you like, and leave or oppose the ones you don’t. The intersection is within you.

Unfortunately the fashion is now for orgs and movements to declare their own intersections, which does nothing to further the core issues, while actively repelling those outside the intersection (which, by the time you’ve intersected a bunch of different things, is nearly everyone).

There is nothing inherently “post-Marxist” or “decolonial” about the core ideas here (scare quotes because these are extra-unhelpfully underdefined terms). Framing the project this way just signals that non-post-Marxists (etc.) will not be welcome, which makes it quite hard to enjoy the good bits for people who have been pre-declared to be the enemy.

Successful orgs are laser-focused on their core purpose.

I think it would be a better approach to not pre-emptively burn oneself out with stress by viewing everything through a political lens at all times.

70 year old tractors? India is the largest manufacturer of tractors but you think they all use 70 year old tractors like as the standard? I feel like you don't really know what you are talking about or just using examples on the fly to make your point which doesnt make much sense. China and the US are the two biggest polluters in the world.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...

Fair point, however the link between systemic and individual changes is not as binary as it may seem, it's long debated thing, but in a nutshell it's essentially a circular problem. Lot of permacomputing participants are involved into activist work and encourage coop forms of organization, collective action, creation/joining of unions, and make use of their technical skills to help less privileged groups (some of these encouragements are also listed in the principles). All of these things have impact on the perception of mainstream politics, capacity for change and how electoral politics could be activated. Maybe this could be made more explicit.

This project appears here from time to time and each and every time I am amazed. Thanks for sharing it.

Look a Redditor.

to introduce a perspective and a community to someone who might want to be informed about it or participate.

anti-capitalism, while a bit strange a lable, is something I can sympathize with. But once we are talking anarchism and (intersectional) feminism in a computing context, I am definitely out. I miss the time when computing was a lot less political. It was nice hacking on projects without having to identify with something totally unrelated, or being forced to support idiologies just to be a part of it.

> In the end it's nerds messing with hardware.

Am I being lazy or does this imply that all (or true) nerds are anarchist anti-capitalist feminists.

> Successful orgs are laser-focused on their core purpose.

I think that is capitalist ideology (“make number go up”), not a fact for a non-capitalist definition of “success”. So, you just might not be part of the audience they care about.

Personally, I think there is a certain divide between capitalist and collectivist mindsets that cannot be bridged easily. In the end, it is either-or. In the end, one will win, and the other will lose. That does not mean either mindset is unable to acknowledge and incorporate methods and practices from the other, but it does mean that, in the end, you have to decide what to do when those values clash.

It is? The left-wing radicals I'm aware of are all very big on community. My understanding of the corresponding "right-wing" value is that community should be a certain way (with the radical right-wing value being that it must be a certain way, for various incompatible versions of "right way"). The radical left-wing response would be an insistence on the validity of other forms of community (notably including relationship anarchy: polycules, queer-platonic relationships, etc), the promotion of community organising (such as unions, food distribution networks, mutual aid networks, communes), and so on – which I can understand might appear to be an opposition to "community", if your understanding of "community" is narrowly-defined (e.g. as referring to the traditional practices of your cultural group), but the radical left-wingers certainly don't think they're opposing community.

If you're thinking of corporate activisty types, the sort of people who promote hamfisted "everyone with light skin has internalised racism" mandatory training, then I'd wager the "corporate" part has something to do with what you've observed. I would certainly call such people "aspiring-radical", and I might even call them tepidly left-wing (especially with respect to the US's Overton window), but I think "left-wing radical" might be a misnomer, since the radicality is unrelated to the left-wing nature. There are strong first-principles reasons to expect that this politics does a significant disservice to members of the groups it's nominally attempting to help (and that's before you factor in the backlash we're currently seeing).

But I've never found the "left-wing" / "right-wing" dichotomy to be helpful for anything other than identifying The Enemy™ (which I consider a generally counterproductive activity), so take what I say here with a pinch of salt.

Second paragraph on the front page: https://permacomputing.net

> which in practice is now coded as a "right wing" value.

In practice? You mean, rhetorically, surely? The right wing is doing whatever it can to marginalize and disenfranchise anyone it doesn't like (and that's a lot of people). In the end, do you think marginalized people feel more included in the community in progressive cities or MAGA ones?

I think there are successful orgs that do both. The pro-life movement in the US was laser focused on that issue, but it was a manufactured campaign by the Republican party to capture evangelicals. You can't say the Republican party is laser focused, but they're also pretty successful.

I guess I would say, I'm not sure what the basis of your critique is. I guess if you want to sit back and watch a more centrist permacomputing organization push those values without you doing anything, that doesn't seem like a fair ask. If you do want to do something, you could probably make your own website/etc. "Please tailor your activism to my aesthetics/politics" is kinda self-centered.

People are generally not "post-Marxist" or "decolonial," concepts/frameworks are. These are just theoretical markers, not something necessarily one identifies with in the way you suggest. And I would be curious to know why you are so certain that none of the "core ideas" of permacomputing have bearing to either of these things, if you believe they are so underdefined. Little bit of kettle logic there, no?

This is such a genre of comment on here when you can Ctrl-F 'Marx' on the content, and it just really comes off uncurious and reflexive every time. Like, why is the burden on the authors and not you to sort through the things you care about and don't? Why is it not an opportunity to learn? Do you even care to know where they could possibly be coming from? If there is ever some kind of overlap between something you can get behind and something for whatever reason you feel is bad or "underdefined," doesn't that stir even a bit of curiosity, a chance to learn? Even if it's just sharpening what you already know?

You don't have to end up agreeing with it, but to frame all this as advice on how to "be a successful org" is just not great here imo.

But everything that touches how society functions, what it values, how it is organized etc. is political.

If you at all understood any of those three things you would know that they are all closely related.

clearly not a reader of Mondo 2000 back in the day. i do miss real hacker culture.

> I miss the time when computing was a lot less political.

Whether such a time ever existed is debatable.

Here's a test. Define the period that you're imagining. Then investigate this period as a point in the history of computing with its broader sociopolitical contexts.

Somewhere in the midst of that milieu I reckon or the politics you're likely to be fond to mix with your tech projects.

The web originally was way closer to anarchism and I really miss that. It was a cluster of self-organising communities, little to no intervention from the state, a lot was not profit driven. Same with IRC.

Yes, you're being lazy

IMO it depends very much on how those positions are being forced on those attending. Since this is about permacomputing I suspect not all that much.

In my experience these self-given-labels just express the views of some founding members and are often used to clarify who they do not want (capitalist, misogynist authoritarians) and who is welcome (left leaning people, women, people who know how to treat women, people who can respect flat hierarchies).

I find it a bit edgy to self label an encouraging like that, instead of explaining the meat of it (we are anticapitalist, because..., we are feminist, so women are welcome, we are anarchist, so our organization is structured with a flat hierarchy). Since it is an anarchist space, that is anti-authoritarian you probably won't find much indoctrination.

No. Some $x do $y does not imply that all/most/many/true $x do $y. It implies that some $x do $y.

> The left-wing radicals I'm aware of are all very big on community. My understanding of the corresponding "right-wing" value is that community should be a certain way (with the radical right-wing value being that it must be a certain way, for various incompatible versions of "right way").

The same statement holds for left-wing radicals: they insist that their community should be a certain way (with the radical left-wing value being that it must be a certain way, for various incompatible versions of "right way").

> The left-wing radicals I'm aware of are all very big on community

Yet they are unable to build or keep one, due to the need to track all signs of thought heresy.

> The right wing is doing whatever it can to marginalize and disenfranchise anyone it doesn't like (and that's a lot of people).

The same holds for the left wing.

It's also not just those three:

"With that said, permacomputing is an anti-capitalist political project. It is driven by several strands of anarchism, decoloniality, intersectional feminism, post-marxism, degrowth, ecologism."

Even for myself, an anarchist, that jumble of ideologies isn't appealing.

> Like, why is the burden on the authors and not you to sort through the things you care about and don't?

It isn't a one-way street. The authors have already, in fact, sorted through what they think a reader/participant does and does not care about.

> Why is it not an opportunity to learn? Do you even care to know where they could possibly be coming from? If there is ever some kind of overlap between something you can get behind and something for whatever reason you feel is bad or "underdefined," doesn't that stir even a bit of curiosity, a chance to learn? Even if it's just sharpening what you already know?

This doesn't read like a fair assessment of the negative responses that this page is receiving, at least it doesn't in this case. Or you're missing the entire point.

Not everyone disagrees with things out of ignorance. They may have done their due diligence to investigate what the concepts and frameworks at play are about. Assuming otherwise is a good way to ensure that what you agree with is impervious to debate save for what can be held among "fellow travelers".

The author's of this page are being very direct with their orientation and intentions here. I think even to the extent that their language is "underdefined" there is enough space for someone to reliably speculate about what the substance behind it entails and then come to an educated conclusion about whether they find those things objectionable—in spite of the existence of some principles that they agree with. The degree to which they find the objectionable to affect the unobjectionable can also lead a person to make a conclusion about the organization's viability.

You don't have to concede to these objections, but to frame all this as advice on how not to disagree obviates justifiable dissent.

There are several senses to "politics". You are right in that, in the general sense, politics is any collective negotiation of what matters to the group. There are objectively optimal ways to achieve a goal, but choosing what goals to pursue, and what benefits are worth what costs, and who they will affect, that is rather subjective and the realm of politics. In that sense politics is fundamental and valuable.

But in a more concrete sense, politics also refers to our tendency to join opposing teams or tribes and fight it out, more or less literally. In that sense, "everything is political" can mean viewing everything as a fight between groups, or worse, associating everything to the conflict between the two dominant groups. That is quite toxic.

Right. But "in the end" people who participate in "permacomputing" per the websites stated values represent a subset of nerds. I think the rebuttal we're commenting on oversimplifies this.

> In my experience these self-given-labels just express the views of some founding members and are often used to clarify who they do not want [...] and who is welcome [...]

This is where I think the problem is.

Once you start appending political identifiers then the purpose of an organization becomes more than just about X, but X according to certain values to the exclusion of others. There's nothing wrong with that but I could see how it can be viewed as disingenuous when it's insinuated that the organization is more open/general than it is apparent.

> If you're thinking of corporate activisty types, the sort of people who promote hamfisted "everyone with light skin has internalised racism" mandatory training, then I'd wager the "corporate" part has something to do with what you've observed.

The thing about corporations is that they internally run on politics and a fixed hierarchy of command and control. No different than a resolutely "anti-capitalist" government office! You can think of this as an 'anarchist' observation if you want, but it's just a fact of life. So when we see corporate activism come up with such hamfisted ideas that we wouldn't see in less "activist" corporations, this has to tell us something about the merit of the underlying politics.

Anyway, the thing about traditional communities, in this context - the ones that "have to be a certain way" because they've been that way for generations - is that they have immense inertia; they create real social ties that can bind people together and make them resilient even in the face of very real, structural, systemic oppression. I don't see "polycules" as achieving that in the near term, even though that kind of fluid free association is undeniably the very earliest step towards what I'm thinking about.

A traditional community is not going to just dissolve when the going get tough, or when interpersonal conflicts arise (and such conflicts are inevitable in large-enough groups!): they uniquely encourage people who might otherwise dislike each other to cooperate for collective benefit. There is great value in that, which is not often acknowledged.

> The right wing is doing whatever it can to marginalize and disenfranchise anyone it doesn't like

No it doesn't, do you mean the American right? There are so many right wing parties in this world, the American right is just a small fraction of them. Maybe we mean the Switzerland right? There aren't many poor people in Switzerland.

MAGA is structurally a lot closer to a radical political movement than to right wing politics in the traditional sense (which, to be fair, is mostly dead in the U.S. and that's a huge problem that the left also has a lot to answer for). I don't know how you can possibly read my comment as advocating for MAGA, especially the varieties of it that are most overtly and blatantly hateful towards marginalized groups.

When I don’t put salt in my coffee, it’s not because I’m uncurious about what salt is, and nor does it mean I don’t appreciate salt in other contexts. But if a coffee shop only sells salted coffee, the burden is definitely on them to understand why they have so few customers. (And for my part I’ve seen enough shops that claim to be coffee shops but are actually salt shops).

The pro-life movement is huge among trad Catholics, and Catholicism is its roots. I think evangelicals came along pretty early. The Republicans aligned naturally, their base being heavily Christian.

Most "conservative" opinions are basically "I miss when I was young and wasn't aware of all of the stuff happening around me and want modern reality to be like my incorrect perception of how things were in my youth"

The web was invented at CERN and spread through universities and got taken up by nerds. It could not possibly have been more state sponsored.

Well, yes, but no. Hacker Community projects increasingly force political agendas on participants. It gets harder and harder to just do tech stuff without having to align with some cabal.

The right is defined by its opposition to progressive ideas. No matter if it's American or Swiss or whatever. It will always champion reactionary ideals, seeking to marginalize some groups to further its appeal.

It's funny you mention Switzerland, surely you must have seen their far right's party compaign posters? The ones with the sheeps or rotting apples? How is that not marginalization and stigmatization?

MAGA is just the logical end-point of any right-wing ideology. Just like every far right party in the world, it wasn't birthed in a vacuum. It's just amping up the same rhetoric that has been the bread and butter of right-wingers for half a century: perceived unsafety, anti-immigration sentiment, destruction of social nets in pursuit of these ever-elusive trickle-down economics, scapegoating of minorities...

I don't know how "radical" you can call it since it was popular enough to get the White House and most of congress. Twice.

I really don't see what in right-wing ideology has ever served the cause of minorities and marginalized groups, even before MAGA.

> Anyway, the thing about traditional communities, in this context - the ones that "have to be a certain way" because they've been that way for generations - is that they have immense inertia; they create real social ties that can bind people together and make them resilient even in the face of very real, structural, systemic oppression.

I really don't know where you're pulling that from. Jim Crow America wasn't a good time for black people. Women got lobotomy after showing the first signs of depression. Gay people were demonized at every occasion.

A return to this awful social hierarchy is MAGA and the right's ultimate goal, no matter how unrealistic. They're dismantling the Civil Rights act piece by piece, just last week they've been able to gerrymander the black vote away thanks to SCOTUS.

Like it or not, every social progress in this country has come from the left.

Exactly, their introduction seems broadly applicable:

> Whether you are a tech specialist, someone who uses a computer for daily tasks, or deals with technology only occasion, there are steps that you or the group you are involved in can take to reduce the environmental and socio-economic impact of your digital activities.

Sounds great to me, but then they have these:

> To mitigate this situation, this principle calls us to step outside the capitalist model of perpetual consumption and growth.

> The history of computing is deeply intertwined with capitalism and militarism. From playing a role in warfare and geopolitical power struggles to driving the automation of labor, computing has significantly contributed to the increased use of resources and fossil energy. The latest example of this trend is the construction of hyperscale data centers for running generative AI. Despite the promise of increased efficiency, the Jevons Paradox applies: higher efficiency tends to lead to greater resource use. Efficiency is often presented as a technical solution to a political decisions about how and why we use computing —without questioning the extractive business model.

The authors here (fairly or not) signal their in/out group preference. And the implication is that "those not willing or unable to step outside the capitalist model are not able to sufficiently apply the principle to affect change in the way we are wanting."

They're smuggling in an omission of technologists who recognize the benefits of a capitalist system compared to a collectivist one. It reads like they are trying to be careful, but still end up significantly limiting their potential audience.

People with strong capitalist beliefs may be willing to volunteer their time at a repair cafe or in taking other action to incrementally move their communities in the direction they're advocating for. But it seems to me like they would not even want those people to be a part of their movement. If I recognize the historical injustices that marginalized groups have faced but I still believe that a capitalist system is generally preferable to a collectivist one, would I be supported by this movement? I think that I doubt it.

EDIT: I missed on this on their homepage:

> With that said, permacomputing is an anti-capitalist political project. It is driven by several strands of anarchism, decoloniality, intersectional feminism, post-marxism, degrowth, ecologism.

> Permacomputing is also a utopian ideal...

Utopian? No thanks. I expected this to be a technological movement first with politics snuck in, but it sounds like it is the opposite.

I think you have the timeline confused.

The pro-life movement is older than the Reagan era courting on Christians to grow the Republican base. So it was not a Christian base that caused a shift, it was the other way around.

That was the direction I was going to head in first before I was less confident in my assumption of the parent commenter's age based on their username.

It's a good direction to take and adds in the possibility, for example, that one may investigate the past and find themselves unintentionally and retroactively complicit in everything between the atomic bomb to US intervention in Libya.

And now I'm curious about the likelihood of a youth who will know no age better than our present, in the future.

You might like this thread from earlier this year:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46505934

Yes, that is a more honest assessment than longing for the time "when computing was much less political". It simply wasn't, and not recognizing that leads directly to the mess we have today and onwards towards bleak future.

And the Internet was state sponsored too, at the time though it was not even legal to create communication networks in a lot of countries. But that's the premises

But what it gave birth to was a form of anarchy. One doesn't go against the other, the same way a political regime can change within a country.

That is quite a condescending take. I get that you are extrapolating from my post that I might be conservative. That needs more nuance, but I get it. But to assume I always was, and used to be ignorant, is too far reaching. In fact, I used to be a lot more progressive in the past.

Being apolitical just means your politics align with the status quo. Technology is inherently political in nature, because it affects society in material ways.

> I expected this to be a technological movement first with politics snuck in

Then you are naive. Everything that is concerned with how people organize themselves, where and how they allocate resources, how they are supposed to make decisions, what values they should uphold etc. is politics.

What would an apolitical "permacomputing" look like? The premise is to reduce consumption and conserve resources. It's about recognizing the externalities associated with technology. You can't just do that in a vacuum.

If you just want "MacBook with socketed RAM" there's already other people doing that. You don't need this to be that.

> Jim Crow America wasn't a good time for black people. Women got lobotomy after showing the first signs of depression. Gay people were demonized at every occasion.

Many of these things were actively advocated for by the Progressive movement, back in the early 20th c. (Lobotomies came a few decades later, but were ultimately rooted in the exact same ideas about the primacy of 'science!' and trusted institutions over people's lived experience and the deep reality of enduring traditional values.) Studying that history in depth is an excellent way to disabuse oneself of the naïve notion that Progressives are inherently the good guys.

> because it affects society in material ways.

I'm fairly certain the word for that is "economical". Of course, the politics grows out of the economical relationships, but they are still different things: changes in technology may or may not change the political climate (I am fairly certain that an invention of e.g. a tin can opener did not have any noticeably political effects).

"If you are not supporting us, you are the enemy" isn't a valid take. But it shows nicely the sentiment which turns me off regarding politics in tech. You can't even stay neutral, because someone will force you to align with their values. "My way or the highway" pretty much.

You can recognize externalities and deal with it just fine without abolishing capitalism. See leaded gas or CFCs for example.

These progressives and modern ones share nothing but the name, and you now it perfectly well.