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Today I was looking for a terminal font which could display various esoteric Unicode blocks, and stumbled upon the UNSCII fontset. Reading the webpage, I noticed that the domain, viznut.fi, was strangely familiar. I went to the homepage, and, yes, indeed! These fonts are by the same person who coined the term "Permacomputing". As if that weren't serendipitous enough, the *same* person is responsible for the "Robotic Liberation" VIC-20 demoscene production that I enjoyed watching ten years ago or so! A prolific fellow, to be sure.
UNSCII bitmapped Unicode fonts
I was surprised and excited to see that Viznut had taken notice of the fact that his Permacomputing post was received with such enthusiasm in various circles and has written quite a bit of follow up material since then. For some reason I had utterly failed to realise he was an active participant in these discussions. Anyway, here is some really excellent looking stuff that I can't wait to read and digest that I wanted to share with people who may like me have also missed it when it appeared in in 2021 and 2022:
Digital esthetics, environmental change and the subcultures of computer art
I'm really glad that these ideas and discussions are taking root. There seems to be a bit of a Cambrian explosion of terminology going on at the moment, which is not surprising, and it also seems like "permacomputing" is on track to become the most widely used umbrella term (see the end of section 1 of "Permacomputing update 2021"). I understand why, it's an undeniably catchy term. I've kind of personally gone off it just a little, though, and wanted to briefly explain why. I promise it's not because I want my own "radically sustainable computing" to supplant it! That's an awkward mouthful.
The term permacomputing is coined in analogy to permaculture. Permaculture is, in turn, a portmanteau from "permanent agriculture". It's been retconned to mean "permanent culture", but I think it still retains a strong connotation of being concerned with food production (which, sure, is not the exclusive domain of agriculture). I have no beef with permaculture at all (ha ha). It is basically the question of "how do we feed ourselves long term without destroying the planet". Human beings need to eat. Always have, always will. It's a question of existential importance. And we managed to successfully stop ourselves from starving out of existence for hundreds of thousands of years before the advent of intensive mechanised agriculture. So there's very good reason to believe the question can be solved.
But computing is not existentially important. Not even close. I still believe the quote below, which I wrote in late 2020 in my "radically sustainable computing" post. And not only is computing not existentially important, there is absolutely no reason whatsoever to believe that anything like what most people today would recognise as computing can be made sustainable on a timescale measured in millennia. Sure, some kind of hand-cranked Babbage engine might fit the bill, but that's not the kind of thing the permacomputing community is, for the most part, talking about.
"Permacomputing" as an idea is both orders of magnitude less important and less likely than permaculture, and we should keep them far apart in our heads, I would argue. But I grant this is a petty quibble. Like I said, I'm happy these discussions are happening, they are important, and I plan to keep engaging with them. I'm not trying to discourage anything. I just can't shake this feeling that there's a kind of "horse before the cart" thing going on here. It's 100% predictable that when a bunch of hardcore computer nerds who have grown up fetishising the idea of general purpose computing become seriously concerned with sustainability questions they desperately try to reform the thing they love rather than discard it. I'm as guilty of that as anybody else. But "reduce" comes before "reuse" and "recycle". The greenest possible computer is a lot less green than no computer at all. The first thing we need to figure out is what, if anything, do we need computing for at all. I'll write more about this in future. There's already been some great discussion along these lines in the Merveilles Town forum, framed under the provocative question "What are computers for, anyway?":
Merveilles forum thread: "What are computers for, anyway?"
Finally, that quote:
Within living memory, millions of people lead daily lives not touched by computing in any way, and while those lives may not have been perfect, it would be hard to argue that a lack of computation was the main contributing factor to that imperfection.
My 2020-07-26 post "Discussions toward radically sustainable computing"