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