Taking advantage of today's abundance in computing power to prepare for a future in which current infrastructures have collapsed.
Designing for Descent ensures that a system is resilient to intermittent energy supply and network connectivity. Collapse informatics prioritizes community needs and aims to contribute to a knowledge commons in order to be able to succeed in case of infrastructure collapse. The practice of engaging with the discarded with an eye to transforming what is exhausted and wasted into renewed resources.
Nothing new needs producing and no e-waste needs processing. If your new software no longer runs on old hardware, it is worse than the old software. Software should function on existing hardware and rely on modularity in order to enable a diversity of combinations and implementations. It is about reinventing essential tools so that they are accessible, scalable, sturdy, modular, easy to repair and well documented.
A post-collapse society that has eventually lost all of its artificial computing capacity may still want to continue the practice of computer science in a purely theoretical level, as a form of mathematics.
And one voice, with sublime disregard for the situation, read poetry aloud in the firey study, until all the film spools burned, until all the wires withered and the circuits cracked.Ray Bradbury, There Will Come Soft Rains
incoming obsolescence