Smol Earth in five cold points

Still ridin' this thought train, sorry! Last post on this topic for several months, I'd wager.

The impetus comes, once again, from adiabatic's scrawlspace, where on 2024-04-24 they wrote "something of an exploration on how the smol.earth crowd is at least onto something, even though (it seems) I’m diving in deep into one aspect of a ten- or twenty-point desiderata list and ignoring all the rest". I'm responding mostly here to the subtle jibe that, yeah, Smol Earth *is* kind of a pile of loosely related points without much in the way of really explicit connections or underlying principles or priorities or anything. I mean, sometimes a project just has to be that way (I guess?), but it can't hurt to really knuckle down and try for a kind of minimum description length summary, right?

adiabatic's scrawlspace

I sat down to try this and was genuinely astonished to seemingly succeed in a successful in a five point list of goals:

1. To spread awareness that what society has taken to broadly referring to as "tech" has a non-trivial ecological footprint and that the footprint is growing, not shrinking, even though individual devices consume less energy with each generation. This is underappreciated. It is possible to make too big of a deal out of this relative to other things (and maybe I do), but people are by and large not as aware of this as they are of the footprint of electricity, cars, steaks, etc. People often propose large deployments of more tech as a solution to various other environmental problems without a shred of cognitive dissonance.

2. To shine a light on and amplify the voices of and otherwise do good things to/for those computer people who have already taken strong notice of tech's ecological footprint and have reacted mostly by championing greener computers and leaner software/protocols, longer device lifespans, more repairability and reusability, etc. They are a part of the solution.

3. To suggest that reforming devices and software alone is only one part of the solution and that computing less is an equally important part, and to try to get the people above thinking and talking about this, too. Changing from using a 10W computer for 4 hours per day to using that same 10W computer for 2 hours per day saves just as much energy as changing to using a 5W computer for the same 4 hours per day. Changing to using a 5W computer for 2 hours per day saves even more energy.

4. In acknowledgement that point 3. is a hard sell for computer folk who tend to think of computers as good and fun and powerful and efficient and always making life better and easier, to encourage a robust discussion of what personal computing is actually used for, how much good it does, how much harm it does, when non-computing alternatives are "good enough", etc. We want to give a voice to technically literate people with reasonable arguments for why computing less does not necessarily make life miserable.

5. In acknowledgement that changing from computing for 4 hours per day to computing for 2 hours per day requires you to find something else to do for 2 hours per day, to suggest that it's a good idea to go outside and touch grass. This is not logically necessary from the above: if you start using 2 hours per day to sit inside with the curtains drawn learning to play the piano or studying religious scripture or painting watercolours of your unused computers, that is an ecological win. But engaging with nature introduces the possibility of positive feedback loops, where the time you spend not computing reinforces your conviction and motivation to both reform and reduce the time you do spend computing.

That's it! Smol Earth is about figuring out ways to use computers and networks which achieve the above goals as well as possible, are as philosophically consistent with the beliefs under-pinning those goals (plus those which arising from trying to achieve them) as possible, and which maximise the formation of feedback loops between these points. That really is it. Everything else I've written about it is either me failing to cleanly separate the above from my much wider and wilder personal eco-philosophy from which the above was born but is not actually fundamentally dependent upon, me trying to justify or explain or motivate the points above without stating them clearly in isolation first, me having mentally already run a few kilometres down the path that *I* think these goals point toward and found shiny things and confused them as the beginning of the path when they are not and the actual beginning is clearer, or else just me spitballing a whole lot of ideas for things people might like to try to in service of the goals above as a substitute for a clear list of desiderata.

Immediately after writing these five points, I felt really accomplished. But reading them again later...while they are a pretty darn accurate account of the core goals that lead me to conceive the project, they somehow leave me feeling really cold. In separating those goals from the crazy Infinite Zeno-Steppin' March to the Stone Age philosophy which lead me to form them - and I really do think it's a good idea to separate them from that - I've also removed any and all hint whatsoever of deeper meaning, higher purpose, hearts-and-minds, geeky-green-identity-crisis-soul-searching. It's too utilitarian a framing. In short, I've over-corrected here, I think.

Nevertheless, these last three posts as a whole have felt tremendously fruitful for me. I've come away with a much clearer understanding of how many of the various ideas swirling around in my head relate to one another. I'm ready to launch into yet another round of refining the "About Us" document, confident that it'll be refining with clear goals, not just endless tweaking. I'm slowly homing in on something, and can't wait to eventually sink my teeth into it. But as promised in the opening paragraph, I'll leave this be for now. Tune in next week for, I dunno, more obscure 90s Japanese music content, or something.