gemini://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space/~solderpunk/gemlog/a-smol-earth-update-on-earth-day.gmi

The first concrete sub-project under this ambitious umbrella label was/is the Smol Earth Compendium, which I announced last September. Uptake was very close to zero (but not quite and I'm grateful to those two people who responded in any way whatsoever). That's a shame, but I'm not super-duper cut up about it because I always intended to do bigger and better things under the same label anyway, and if any of those took off it would probably naturally draw some attention back to ye olde Compendium. I am kind of hoping to set up a few thematically-related but only loosely-coupled projects which will mutually reinforce one another in organic and unpredictable ways over the years.

I went through a phase of a month or maybe even two months late last year where I really hyperfixated on the big picture of what I called Smol Earth Publications. I wrote countless thousands of words toward a kind of "About us". At one point I was working on multiple different versions of that document in parallel. Some of them hit on and tied together just about every single relevant idea I had, but they were just so long and dense and weighty in tone that realistically nobody would actually *read* them. I am supremely grateful to the small handful of friends I shared them with who even tried to do so! And writing those monsters was useful for me, nevertheless. Other versions were short and sharp and sweet and punchy and didn't take themselves too seriously but I feared that the economy came at the cost of throwing out important things. I ended up being roughly happy, at the time, with a kind of middle ground. I published it, and it's still up in exactly that form today (having just re-read it, I'm not as happy as I was then, but oh well).

I never announced the publication of that page, but I shared it with a couple of folk whom I expected to be interested, and the feedback was uniformly positive and excited and people wanted to be a part of it, so I was and I am convinced that this project has merit and will go somewhere. I wrote back then that I was aiming to have the first release of the Smol Earth Journal published today, Earth Day 2024. Alas, it has not come to be. That's a shame, but not the end of the world, at least not for now, because I am currently LARPing as a patient and disciplined long-term planner who works meticulously toward goals. So I understand that part of the reason nothing smol.earth related happened in the past six months or so is because I have too much other stuff going on, so now actively working on finishing and reducing other stuff. Smol.earth is more or less on hold for the duration of 2024's "operation blazing star", and maybe April 22nd 2025 will be the day.

Half way through last week I got the frankly insane idea to launch "operation supernova inside of blazing star" and knock out an "Issue 0" by calling in desperate favours from all interested parties to send in whatever they possibly could in just under a week and also asking for permission to republish a bunch of existing stuff, just so I could say something like "we exist and this is a very roughy first-draft of what we want to be, if this resonates with you at all chime in and we can do an Issue 1 for real next year"! Obviously I didn't, and that was probably the right move, but the temptation was mighty.

Instead, I'm just making this post, putting a little more attention on the wider smol.earth project, and I'm gonna ramble a bit (not rant, rambling is different!) more to try to give some better sense of just what the hell I want to achieve with all this. I'm probably going to fail, because my own understanding is still developing. But sufficiently many imperfect and partial characterisations can hopefully be averaged out to something approximately correct, so here goes.

In some ways, smol.earth is an intensely personal project. It's grown out of "something I'm going through", and I want to work on it as part of really confronting that "something" and not just going through it but coming out the other side. It's not a vanity project, though, it's not about *my* personal journey, rather it's a project born out a realisation that a lot of people are going through the same thing and that it's important that we find one another and help one another and share the journey, or at least part of it. It's as much a philosophical or emotional or spiritual or *something* like that undertaking as it is technical, and I'm hoping it will be roughly as creative as it is technical, too. It has low key but real aspects of addiction therapy and grief counselling and expressing some kind of guilt/remorse for complicity in something, but it's supposed to be about moving forward and moving on in an active and participatory way, it's not cybernetic wallowing, a low-energy online pity party. It's also not supposed to be, pardon my Australian, a pissing contest for ascetic Luddites to brag about how compu-frugal they are. The risk of it turning into that might be high, and if a little bit leaks in (no pun intended) it won't be the end of the world, but it's absolutely not the intent. What is supposed to be, or aspires to eventually be, is positive and empowering, without being in any way solutionist. It's absolutely not "let's band together and figure out how to use computers and the internet to save the world from everything that's wrong with it" because I absolutely don't think that's possible, it's not a sensible thing to aspire to. It's a perfectly naturally and understandable thing for life-long "computer people" to *want* to be able to do, I completely get it, I just don't think there are any realistic prospects for it, it doesn't stand up to scrutiny at all.

On the one hand, it's undeniable that personal computing and the internet and all the infrastructure and manufacturing surrounding them have a large environmental footprint which is growing ever larger ever faster. On the other hand, it's increasingly less clear that individual users or society as a whole extracts anything close to a net benefit from computers having taken over the world, and certainly not that any net benefit we do obtain is great enough to justify those costs. Computers aren't fundamentally evil by any means, we are not out to vilify them, but the view taken by our technohippy predecessors (whose "Whole Earth" moniker has obviously inspired us), that they are fundamentally empowering and liberatory devices, "personal freedom machines", is a hard pill to swallow in 202x.

These two realisations naturally give rise to an urge to give up on the whole enterprise, to stop "being a computer person", to feel guilty about computing, to want to wash your hands of it and repent and live a pure and untainted analog life. But this has problems too. On a personal level, of course, this is extremely hard to do for a life long computer person. The very fact that we think of ourselves as "computer people" emphasises that this is a major part of our identity. On a global society level, if we shut down all the semiconductor fabs next week, civilisation would crumble very quickly, it would literally be a recipe for mass death. The very best we can hope for is a slow and protracted but deliberate and determined retreat over decades or maybe even longer. Personal computing is not going away during the lifetime of anybody reading this today, unless something else triggers civilisational collapse, in which case everything you are reading here today will immediately become supremely unimportant and irrelevant.

So computers are going to be here, both old ones and new ones. There's no sense at all in refusing to use them out of some kind of green pride. The vast majority of their environmental damage is done in the process of building them. Once they exist, the damage is done, and is more or less irreversible. We might as well use the darn things, then. In fact, we might even be morally obliged to use them, because if we don't, all that damage was done for nothing, and doesn't that somehow make it worse?

This is our curse! We believe computing is unsustainable in the long term and that it needs to ultimately disappear from the world, but we are condemned to live *our* lifetimes surrounded by computers which we feel compelled to use. How the hell do you cut this knot??? How do you continue to enjoy computing under these circumstances without it feeling hollow? How do you avoid the sense of guilt and/or hypocrisy from engaging in fun stuff that you hope future generations will not be able to? For me, personally, it's not enough to compute merely via different means, using low-power technology and striving to maximise the lifespan of devices. It feels necessary to also, at least some of time, compute toward different ends. If we are going to hack while Rome (and everywhere else) burns, we ought to do it in a self aware way! We need to change the "why" of computing, as well as the "how".

Can we use computers and networks to spread ideas and beliefs and outlooks and attitudes and skills and practices which make a future with fewer computers and less networking seem less awful than it will instinctively feel to most people today? Can we use computers and networks in a way that makes us pay closer attention to and feel more connected to the natural world, rather than in ways that isolate and disconnect us from it? We absolutely cannot afford to maintain the traditional hacker attitude where "cyberspace" is beautiful and pristine and limitless and exciting and "meatspace" is this horrible, inconvenient, uncomfortable, mundane place, home of the dreaded Day Star, that we want to escape from. Cyberspace is literally built out of stolen body parts of Mother Earth! Endless growth of one strictly requires endless exploitation of and disregard for the other. Enthusiastically designing and building and deploying low-power, long-lived, easily repaired computers and hooking them up with low-power, delay tolerant, decentralised mesh networks risks becoming a confused, empty, self-defeating gesture if those cool toys are just used to prolong an escapist, solipsistic relationship to a cyberspace which is falsely seen as disembodied and ethereal. We need totally fresh perspectives and attitudes on the relationship between the digital and natural worlds, to see both as two sides of one coin.

Pokemon Go directly encouraged people to go outside, which is the opposite of what what we traditionally think of computers as doing. It drove a lot of people to explore parts of their immediately physical surroundings which they had never previously paid attention to. It didn't do this with any kind of high-minded purpose or principles, didn't necessarily lastingly change many people's understanding or perception of or relationship toward those physical surroundings, but couldn't it have?

Companies like Garmin make all kinds of rugged, high-tech gear you can take outdoors, which charge up from the sun and use GPS and tiny accelerometers and barometer sensors to be aware of where you are physically situated, but their whole shtick is that you upload this stuff the internet in real time, publically share it under your name in a place where it shows up and compares it to other people under their name, so you can prove that you ran or rode or climbed or whatever further or higher or faster than anybody else. It turns the natural world into a kind of combined gym and arena, where you compete against your fellow humans, or yourself. Can this flavour of tech be put to more humble, less vainglorious use? Can it encourage, facilitate, reward a slower, more reflective, kind of outdoor exploration and engagement?

Smol tech needs to hook up, passionately, with green-minded artistic self expression, autodidacticism, citizen science and citizen journalism. Green hackers can give people practising these things new tools, and people practising these things can give green hackers new insights and perspectives and feelings, and the two groups can learn to become more like each other, blurring the lines and collectively moving in the same direction. The tech toys are not the point, not the endgame, but the carrots to get people to willingly and happily and enthusiastically start taking steps toward new lifeways. "People like us" are always going to want to hack and tinker and play. We might as well aim to do it in such a way that the end result of each wave of ideas and innovations is a new set of perspectives and habits which set the stage for a subsequent wave of smaller, simpler, lighter tech toys which nevertheless give us even more satisfaction.

This a quixotic undertaking, no doubt. I'm doing it because that knot I mentioned is there inside of me, and I want it gone, or at least made smaller, and I can think of no other way to even attempt to cut it. It's absolutely beyond dispute that the internet can and has and does influence the way large groups of people behave even when they are not on it. Trying to use that power for good, and specifically trying to use it to encourage people to spend more time offline and to think about that time differently - to build a kind of green memetic engine which is actually sowing the seeds of its own slow dissolution - is about the only move I can think to make which is fully consistent with everything I currently know and think and feel. Exactly how it is going to go, what the outcome or outcomes are going to be, I genuinely have almost no idea. But I need to try it and I know other people who I think need it, or something similar, too, and I invite them to join me. The worst case scenario I can imagine is that we fail but for a few years we feel better about ourselves and learn a thing or two and make some new friends, and honestly, that alone sounds more than worth striving for.

In the almost completely forgotten words of Bruce Sterling wearing his Viridian Green Pope-Emperor hat, "if you're with me, send email". I am not going to fully launch myself into being editor-in-chief of Smol Earth Publications until next year at earliest, but I want to build up steam and make contacts well in advance. Please spread links to this post in a carefully targetted fashion to individuals and small groups of people whom you are already sure are highly likely to be sympathetic and interested and please think twice before doing it via technology which encourages uncontrolled and unlimited further distribution. I dream of one day reaching a (realistically) wide audience with this undertaking, but it needs to be incubated and nurtured in a safe environment for a little while first. If it hits the surface web before there's an early solid core of high quality work to prove its worth, when it's just a manifesto and good intentions, that industrial-grade-shitting-on-dreams machine will tear it to shreds, and I will push it forward anyway out of sheer spite and malice, but lots of other folk who might otherwise have been interested will be discouraged. Don't just spread the word to techy hyper-geeks who want to design low power, field repairable open hardware computers and link 'em together with mesh networks. Spread it to passionately green creative souls who use computers to make art of any and all kinds, if you think they'll enjoying using old and discarded equipment to create things inspired by time spent in nature. Spread it to aspiring journalists who want to rack mud regarding the water footprint of datacentres or the e-waste crisis who will be excited to get their articles distributed in forms that can be easily read using devices that they might otherwise think as *being* e-waste! Spread it to people who believe in things, people with guts and principles who want to compute through the Anthropocene with eyes wide open instead of just keeping parasocial media alive as long as possible.

A smol.earth update on Earth day