Collapse OS and Computer Crankery
Apr. 8th, 2021 12:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
grayestofghostsA few days ago user tozka posted about CollapseOS, and someone brought up the way these doomsday computing creations don't seem to account for something as basic as, if civilization were to collapse, where would we get electricity to run computers?
And like, this is a good point. If civilization collapses, for the individual, the ability to do computing is probably going to be the furthest thing from their mind. However, I think it's weird that these sorts of projects immediately jump to civilization collapse for the reason to justify themselves, whereas these quick-and-dirty solutions are already useful and may be more useful in the future for simpler, more realistic, more immediate reasons -- computer part shortages and businesses disbanding.
This is already happening with the shortage of video cards, making PS5s scarce and the cards themselves apparently valuable enough to smuggle. Parts need to be mined and/or recycled and those that build computers and phones love planned obsolescence. The average person may not be able to get a computer decent enough to keep up with new computing resource demands, companies that poured their resources into resource-intensive projects that people no longer demand as much might go under because of it, destroying projects, archives, and repositories created by users, their DRM may stop working leaving users who invested in it (knowingly or unknowingly, by choice or not) high and dry, etc.,... basically what I'm saying is that the ability to kludge computer parts, make lightweight operating systems, make non-centralized web infrastructure, etc., may still be a useful skill even if society doesn't completely collapse as preppers like to predict. And in these scenarios, which are happening now, ongoing, and may be worsening, people still generally have electricity.
Anyway, I guess you can take this as a reminder -- back up your damn stuff.
tozka posted about CollapseOS, and someone brought up the way these doomsday computing creations don't seem to account for something as basic as, if civilization were to collapse, where would we get electricity to run computers?And like, this is a good point. If civilization collapses, for the individual, the ability to do computing is probably going to be the furthest thing from their mind. However, I think it's weird that these sorts of projects immediately jump to civilization collapse for the reason to justify themselves, whereas these quick-and-dirty solutions are already useful and may be more useful in the future for simpler, more realistic, more immediate reasons -- computer part shortages and businesses disbanding.
This is already happening with the shortage of video cards, making PS5s scarce and the cards themselves apparently valuable enough to smuggle. Parts need to be mined and/or recycled and those that build computers and phones love planned obsolescence. The average person may not be able to get a computer decent enough to keep up with new computing resource demands, companies that poured their resources into resource-intensive projects that people no longer demand as much might go under because of it, destroying projects, archives, and repositories created by users, their DRM may stop working leaving users who invested in it (knowingly or unknowingly, by choice or not) high and dry, etc.,... basically what I'm saying is that the ability to kludge computer parts, make lightweight operating systems, make non-centralized web infrastructure, etc., may still be a useful skill even if society doesn't completely collapse as preppers like to predict. And in these scenarios, which are happening now, ongoing, and may be worsening, people still generally have electricity.
Anyway, I guess you can take this as a reminder -- back up your damn stuff.
no subject
Date: 2021-04-08 09:23 pm (UTC)---
I tend to run into this problem from the other direction: resilient-computing projects that justify themselves *solely* by being useful for the global poor right now and completely ignore the potential for use in rich-but-unstable places. There are a disturbing number of people who seem to believe that offline-first computing is a stopgap measure while the rest of the world catches up on Internet connectivity, something that we in the richer half would never need ourselves. The fact is, even rich countries' Internet fails at least one of "omnipresent, reliable, cheap" in any given situation, and often more than one.
And as for kludging and lightweight operating systems, the people doing *those* often don't even get as far as the global poor in their justifications: they're doing it for the challenge, or to reduce the carbon output of having to manufacture replacements, or to stick it to the Man. And, like, all of those *are* good reasons, but it worries me when people don't think about hedging.
no subject
Date: 2021-04-09 04:04 am (UTC)Hell, last summer our internet connectivity was having issues all the time and if I just wanted to cook something with an online recipe I might have trouble. Eventually we called the internet company and they replaced the modem but if they weren't able to diagnose that, or were unwilling to replace it for whatever reason? I mean, who knows how long that would have gone on for.
But to be honest I think there's a pretty malicious reasoning for all this refusal for resilient offline-first is because if something is online-only and delicate, the provider has complete control over the resource and can and will at any time phase out older versions and/or become subscription-based, further locking it down. And I think subverting that alone is reason enough to do this stuff. So maybe I'm just in the last category after all.
But I mean like, being a part of an oppressed/persecuted minority, you become in-tune to the idea that resources that are important to you might blip out of existence at any time and everyone else will be none the wiser. A big reason I got a DW is because of popular social media sites going through cycles of purging LGBT content. These sorts of things aren't a 'possibility,' they happen over and over again... some of these ideas aren't responses to the concept of 'global collapse' but more extreme and thorough responses to existing problems.
no subject
Date: 2021-04-09 02:55 pm (UTC)That was actually the impetus that, back in 2014, got me to finally give up on my seven-year-old Sansa with the failing clickwheel and get my first smartphone: my family got lost in Middle of Nowhere, Massachusetts, and ended up wandering around for two hours, trying desperately to get oriented based on the turn-of-the-millennium paper maps of the entire Northeast we had lying around the glove compartment, tried to buy a more specific map at a gas station but they didn't sell them anymore because everyone else had GPS, eventually stumbled across a McDonalds by sheer luck and used their Wi-Fi to bring up Google Maps on a laptop.
The *next* time we went to Massachusetts, I had a smartphone with MapFactor on it†, and the moment Dad took a wrong turn I knew about it and knew what needed to be done to get back on track.
(This is probably a major part of why I find it so weird and offputting when people [act like the quintessential feature of smartphones is constant connectivity] and/or [have very cloud-dependent smartphone setups]: literally the *point* of me getting a smartphone was to not need the damn cloud!)
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>>I was extremely grateful to have downloaded a basic version of Kiwix onto my tablet because internet on cruise ships is notoriously prohibitively expensive and unreliable.
I was absolutely thinking of Kiwix with that first paragraph. I love them, but they're way more useful than they think they are, and that makes me worried that there might come a day when they falsely believe themselves to be no longer needed.
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(This isn't quite the same thing, but it's in a related part of concept-space: there was that time Signal made some snide remarks about people complaining that [their decision to push a data-reliant messaging system as an under-the-hood replacement for SMS] was locking out poor people, how clearly anyone who thought this was making false assumptions based on a misunderstanding of how Global South cellular systems work, and how ~actually~ data access is far *cheaper* and far *more* widespread than SMS access. And, uh, no, when I said you were locking out poor people I was thinking about *myself*, and my *own* inability to afford an always-on mobile-data connection. Guess I'll just have to stick with plain-text SMS until something changes on one end or another.)
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>>But to be honest I think there's a pretty malicious reasoning for all this refusal for resilient offline-first is because if something is online-only and delicate, the provider has complete control over the resource and can and will at any time phase out older versions and/or become subscription-based, further locking it down.
I signed up for the IPFS newsletter a while back, and every week I cheer them on.
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>>A big reason I got a DW is because of popular social media sites going through cycles of purging LGBT content.
Yeah, pretty much. I've put a great deal of effort into making both my present and my past independent of Tumblr, and that is because I 100% do not trust them not to ban me for talking about weird sex.
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>>These sorts of things aren't a 'possibility,' they happen over and over again...
I think maybe you've been talking with too many Crazy Prepper People™? The preppers *I* interact with (in large part because I generally stop interacting with those who aren't like this) tend to understand both that severe collapse-level disasters might not happen (but are worth hedging against), *and* that smaller disasters are practically guaranteed and in many cases already happening.
(And as for resilient computing in particular, I *have* encountered some projects that understand this. Briar is acutely aware that there are people going through political disasters right now (indeed, they orient *everything* they do around being useful for dissidents, often at the cost of being useful for anyone else); Serval is acutely aware that natural disasters often fuck with comms and that people in the Australian Outback deal with a near-perpetual lack of even basic mobile access.
...if only either of these apps were usable for me in their present state.
(Note: Serval is less dead than its main website makes it look, but neither is it very active.))
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†Oh hey, they've released an iOS version since the last time I checked, good for them. ↩
no subject
Date: 2021-04-09 06:17 pm (UTC)