P E R M A   C O M P U T E R

  I've ranted quite a bit on my phlog on the state of modern 
  computing and the direction we're headed. And now with LLM
  being a fad, things have gotten so much worse yet again. A
  few  weeks ago the Washington Post released an article (1)
  with  therein a widget that lets you look up whether  your
  website has been scraped by AI or not.  I was dissapointed
  (but not surprised) to find out that they had scraped, not
  only my websites  (ignoring robots.txt),  but also  gopher
  proxies, and presumably gemini http proxies as well.  What
  this  means is they likely  slurped up all of  gopherspace 
  and gemspace as well. I do not consent to this. Anyhow,...

  This is not another rant about just  AI.  Our problems are
  much  bigger and wider  than just that,  or even computing 
  in general. The perpetual need of the western economies to 
  expand,   from  the macro  scale all  the way down to  the 
  smallest businesses is literally killing us. Stripping the
  planet of resources. Messing up the climate. Etc,...   Our
  entire western way of life  is built on the  suffering  of
  third world civilizations, and this too continues.  You've
  got children risking their lives in lithium mines so  some
  schmuck in the west can enjoy their Tesla. Etc...

  Unfortunately there isn't much I can do to change all that
  but the one and only thing I do have some control over  is
  how I interact with the world, how I do my computing,  how
  I write my code, etc,..  Thankfully I'm also not alone  in 
  these concerns. Degrowth movements are a thing now,  as is
  perma-computing. 

 (1) https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/interactive/2023/ai-chatbot-learning/
  
  A few of  us have  been working on  putting some of  these
  thoughts and ideas into an open letter, and hopefully soon
  a   community  where  we can  brainstorm ideas,  projects, 
  solutions, etc,...  Thinking about how twisted & backwards
  the world has become can get very depressing very quickly,
  especially when people who swallow  the narratives of  the
  wealthy who benefit  from this global  clusterfuck are all
  over,  calling you crazy,  because people tend to lash out
  when  they are confronted with the fact that their  entire 
  world is a bunch of manufactured lies.  Knowing you're not 
  alone can help a LOT!  And,  perhaps if  enough  of us get 
  together to do something about the status quo maybe we can
  affect the smallest bit of change!
  
    So please, sign the letter and join us over at:

        gopher://perma.computer
        gemini://perma.computer