More on withered technology, part II
------------------------------------

Here at long last is my response to Anna's response[1] to my initial
"Lateral Thinking with Withered Technology".  Not only is it late, it
won't be half as good as she deserves.  I'm writing this in the early
days of what seems set to be a fairly miserable heatwave.  Eight of
the ten days in the current long term forecast are above 30C, and
the highest is an unbelievable 38C.  I'm pretty sure it hasn't
gotten this hot in June once in the five years I've lived here.
I worry what this might mean for July and August.  Anyway, I very
nearly opted not to make a post at all today, but realistically, I'm
unlikely to feel any more like it next Sunday after a week of this,
and I worry if I leave this any longer it won't get written at all.
A small electric fan on my desk is doing a surprisingly good job
of taking the edge off, so let's see how this goes...

Anna mentions using the ESP32 - via an expansion card, RS-232 or a
USB dongle - as a way to extend the connectivity of older computers
which cannot, for example, run SSH natively.  You telnet or screen
into the ESP32, and from there you SSH anywhere else.  This is more
or less the same idea I mentioned in my previous response to freet,
using ESP32s or RPis as gateways for older devices which cannot
use WPA2, HTTPS, etc.  This is clearly going to be a recurring
theme in salvage-oriented permacomputing: the small, DIY bit of
glue connecting old systems to new networks, or indeed connecting
two old systems to one another in the absence of a designed-in way
to do that.

But that's just a practical detail.  I got more philosophical
than practical insight out of Anna's post (which is emphatically
not to say there was a lack of practical musing in it, there
was, and in fact Anna's posts about repurposing old laptops as
single-purpose DOS platforms for young children is absolutely
required reading for anybody interested in this broader discussion).
I am forever indebted to Anna for introducing me to the idea of
"demand destruction", which is not just a nice bit of rhetoric but
an actual recognised economics term.  I have been convinced for a
long time now that something like this must be the ultimate goal of
any kind of coherent permacomputing movement, but I didn't have a
succinct name for it, and I'm delighted not only to learn of one but
to see the same idea promoted independently by a kindred spirit.
During the long and painful process of writing the Smol Earth
manifesto, I wrote a lot of things I was really happy with but then
reluctantly removed to try to make the whole thing fit better within
the stringent word limits I had set myself.  One casualty of this
process was the alliterative declaration that even lower-power,
designed-for-repair, open-hardware computers must be made to act as
"the engines of their own eventual extinction".

Demand for new computers comes from multiple sources.  Some subset of
demand must actually continue to be met for the foreseeable future,
that involved in actually providing basic essentials of good living
to an over-grown world population.  Others are almost entirely
artificial and should be attacked as effectively as possible.
One strategy, not necessarily the most important or effective
and by no means to be championed to the exclusion of any others,
but well worth consideration, is to do things which undermine the
popular misconception that computers "slow down" with age, that
old computers are useless, and to break down the arbitrary dividing
lines which exist in many people's heads between things like laptop
and desktop PCs, smartphones, and video game consoles, all of
which are the same fundamental kind of thing underneath the hood.
In place of these harmful and false ideas we should try to cultivate
as broadly as possible the perception of a genuine embarrassment of
riches with regard to hardware, because that is the actual reality.
Doing totally original and genuinely fun or interesting things
with old video game consoles has tremendous "propaganda value"
for this purpose.  They are familiar and non-threatening even to
"non-technical" people, and the idea that they can be made to do
things other than execute pre-packaged commercial content will
have never occurred to many.  A big part of the appeal for me
of this "culture jamming" approach to permacomputing is that
it doesn't require buying into and perpetuating the idea that
there indispensable practical applications of the general purpose
personal computer.  It might seem frivolous to focus on doing things
which are "merely" fun and interesting, but as Anna pointed out,
personal computers have effectively just become the 21st century's
from of television.  A very big and very real chunk of the demand
for new gadgets is driven precisely by the desire for new fun and
interesting things, so meeting that demand with what we already
have is perfectly legitimate.

[1] gopher://sdf.org:70/0/users/agk/2026-04-14-lat.txt