Permacomputing: 10 Principles for Sustainable, Resilient Digital Practice

Permacomputing borrows from permaculture’s ethics of Earth Care, People Care, and Fair Share, translating them into ten design principles aimed at reducing the ecological and socio-economic damage of digital systems. The framework rejects the prescriptive, treating itself as a contextual guide for both technologists and casual users to question how, why, and whether computing should be deployed in a given situation.

Key principles include designing for resilience under collapse scenarios, extending hardware lifespans (with particular focus on chips, which are energy-intensive to produce and nearly impossible to recycle), and observing problems carefully before reaching for a technical fix. The framework explicitly endorses ‘not doing’ as a legitimate engineering choice, citing the Jevons Paradox to argue that efficiency gains in computing — most recently visible in hyperscale AI data centers — tend to drive greater resource consumption rather than less.

The ‘Expose the Seams’ principle pushes back against the industry’s conflation of seamlessness with transparency, arguing that hidden inner workings block critical engagement and skill-sharing. Throughout, permacomputing positions computing’s history as entangled with capitalism and militarism, framing refusal and degrowth as more honest responses than incremental efficiency improvements.