One of my projects this spring was to arrange to bring the
two person artist collective Hundred Rabbits[1] to the
university library where I work, to give a talk followed by
an informal reception. It happened this past Friday and I
have to say it was a memorable afternoon. The Rabbits were
great, and the crowd of around 50 people were enthusiastic
and appreciative.

I led off with a somewhat playful and rambling intro, the
themes of which should be somewhat familiar to readers of
this phlog ... 


Hundred Rabbits Intro
---------------------

As we begin, I would like to acknowledge with respect the
Lekwungen and Esquimalt Peoples on whose territory this
university stands, and the Lekwungen and WSANEC Peoples
whose historical relationships with the land continue to
this day.[2]

Today it is my privilege to introduce Hundred Rabbits, who,
as their website says, are an "artist collective that
documents low-tech solutions with the hope of building a
more resilient future." This afternoon they have graciously
agreed to tell us more about their work, and the experience,
philosophy, and ideas that inform it.

Since they can do that much better than I can, this will be
an introduction by way of a digression, I guess you could
say, and for that I ask your indulgence :-)

Back in the very early 1990s, there was a brief moment where
folks were unsure which of two upstart protocols would come
to rule the Internet. The first was called 'gopher',
invented at the University of Minnesota; and the other one
was a thing called 'the world wide web', invented at CERN
in Geneva. Well, that moment didn't last long, and by 1993
it was clear which would be the winner.

In 1996, Canadian media theorists Arthur and Marilouise
Kroker, who for many years led the Pacific Centre for
Technology and Culture here at UVic, wrote a book, "Hacking
the Future: stories for the flesh-eating 90s," a collection
of vignettes about then emergent cybercultures. One of
those vignettes, entitled "Slumming in GopherSpace",
described what it was like to visit gopher sites in the
mid-90s, after gopher's moment had passed. They describe a
place of abandonment, where "you float down empty pixel
hallways," "whirlpool swarms of dust balls swirl through the
digital air", and you have to look out for "falling data
beams".

About a quarter of a century later, all unwary, I happened
to venture into gopherspace.  And to my surprise, I saw
that here and there the fallen data beams had been propped
back up, and the formerly abandoned spaces occupied by a
motley collection of digital squatters, seeking refuge from
the toxic, surveillant carnival the web had by then become.

Wandering about, eventually I stumbled upon a collection of
writings by a person knownonly by the nom de net
"Solderpunk," who was (and remains) deeply concerned about
the environmental impacts of computing. It was I think in
one of his posts, "Discussions Toward Radically Sustainable
Computing" [3] that I first saw mention of Hundred Rabbits,
whose life and work aboard a sailboat Solderpunk averred had
given them "great real world experience and insight on the
realities of low power computing and intermittent network
connectivity". Solderpunk's writings also introduced me to
"permacomputing",[4] "a concept and community of practice
oriented around issues of resiliance and regenerativity in
computers and networks." Essentially, as I understand it,
permacomputing looks at ways of doing computing that
minimize industrial waste and environmental exploitation, a
necessary but somewhat quixotic task given that it is rapid
obsolescence, not permanence, that has long been one of
computing's defining characteristics.

Anyone who pays even passing attention to permacomputing
will encounter multiple references to Hundred Rabbits, who are
very well known in that space. References that, for
example, include an article last year in Wired, "Computing
at the End of the World."  At some point - I forget exactly
when, it did take me a while - I realized that the Rabbits
are local to Victoria, at least part of the time, and I
thought, what a terrific opportunity, to bring them here to
UVic Libraries, under the auspices of the Historic
Computing Lab and the newly launched Kula Library Futures
Academy.

It's the concept of Futures, plural, that is key here I
think. Libraries, as institutions of cultural memory, have
a foundational role in preserving digital objects, and the
knowledge and information they contain, for the long term,
well past the time when they, and the infrastructure that
makes them accessible, have obsolesced. Preparing for that
future involves making predictions about it, a practice
that is notoriously difficult.  To do it effectively, we
need to contemplate multiple possible futures for computing,
including futures far removed from the fantasies of endless
expansion of compute capacity that by and large constitute
the mainstream assumptions of our time.

I think the work of Hundred Rabbits can really help us do that,
and it gives me great pleasure to turn the podium over to
Rekka and Devine.


References
----------

[1] Hundred Rabbits website
https://100r.co

[2] The limitations of ASCII do not permit an accurate
transcription of our territorial acknowledgement, see
https://www.uvic.ca/ovpi/ways-of-knowing/culture-and-protocol/index.php

[3] Solderpunk, Discussions toward radically sustainable computing
gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space:70/0/~solderpunk/phlog/
discussions-toward-radically-sustainable-computing.txt

4] Solderpunk, Permacomputing
gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space:70/0/~solderpunk/phlog/permacomputing.txt


Sun 08 Mar 2026 03:08:32 PM PDT