Permacomputing adapts permaculture ethics into 10 principles for reducing the environmental and socio-economic impact of digital technology.
Key Takeaways
The 10 principles include: resilience-first design, hardware longevity, observation before action, refusal/not-doing, exposing system seams, balancing simplicity and complexity, flexibility, and building on mature foundations.
Microchip production is singled out as especially harmful: energy-intensive, polluting, and nearly impossible to recycle, making hardware lifespan extension critical.
“Not Doing” invokes the Jevons Paradox directly: efficiency gains in computing historically increase total resource consumption rather than reduce it; demand refusal is framed as more effective.
“Expose The Seams” pushes back on seamless UX as obfuscation, arguing hidden infrastructure makes it harder to question resource use, ownership, and systemic harm.
The framework is explicitly non-prescriptive, favoring contextual judgment over universal rules, and treats partial or non-automated solutions as valid outcomes.
