Hello Patrick, Interesting. You may be interested in the work of Stuart Walker at Lancaster University. His core interest is "sustainable design". He's proposed a radical redesign of electronic objects such that they have a chasis, rather than a case - as a consequence each component can be upgraded or repaired individually as it weras out or is superseded by a genuinely more effective alternative.
(When I say "genuinely more effective" this may not simply mean "more processor cycles" - it could be "the same number of processor cycles but with a longer design lifespan and lower power usage".) His interpretation of the "50 Year Computer" might be one where the CPU, memory, data storage and power supply are replaced multiple times. Recently I've been thinking about sustainability quite a bit, and I'm starting to think that a key feature of it is about increasing the autonomy of the elements of a system. Stuart Walker's model for sustainable electronics reduces inter-dependency, separating out components into autonomous modules. I'd suggest that sustainable models should also foster the autonomy of their human components - the users - making them less exclusively dependent on centralised services, such as data storage, indexing and mediation. Last year one of Access Space's participants (Richard Drake) made a trip to the Himalayas, where he'd made contact with an English teacher in a very remote area. Richard brought some computer components with him to help him expand and rebuild a local cybercafe. He discovered that the local monks had a very resilient multimedia network, based entirely around UNCONNECTED mobile phone handsets. There's no cell coverage out there, but the monks would use phones to swap data (videos, photos, music, text) via SD cards or bluetooth. They'd recharge them with home-based generators, some commercial, some home-made. This sounds quite close to a "sustainable network" - it works even without a power grid, connectivity, DNS, etc. etc. I'm starting to think that there's a close conceptual link between "decentralisation" and "sustainability". One thing that has made me excited about the web is its potential for decentralisation. However, as this technology manifests itself, we see the physical infrastructure of the web become more and more centralised, and increasingly interdependent with other highly centralised infrastructures, such as the power grid and the credit card payments system. This is why the work of groups like "consume.net" are interesting. Even though there may be practical and technological barriers to effective home-built wide-area-network infrastructures, the impulse to make them - for the community to take ownership of a decentralised communications infrastructure, is right, and tends towards sustainability. Best Regards, James ===== Patrick Lichty wrote: > And I repeat - let's make it possible to make them last 50 years. > Fifty Year Computer Manifesto. > https://lists.thing.net/pipermail/idc/2008-September/003260.html > > _______________________________________________ > NetBehaviour mailing list > NetBehaviour@netbehaviour.org > http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour > > _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list NetBehaviour@netbehaviour.org http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
