30-01-2019:::boundaries                                         .moji
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I experienced some hardware woes recently that were documented on the
Zaibatsu BBS. The gist: my coming to terms, and initial frustration,
with the design flaws in hardware surrounding lithium batteries in
computers/laptops, and the implications here for durability and
low-consumption in computing (the full picture: a lithium battery
expanded and 'warped' the chassis and keyboard of a laptop I'd hoped
would last for many more years to come; the hope being towards
reducing my own personal computer/resource consumption footprint). The
incident brought me back to relying on older, lower-spec machines, and
also got me thinking about heavy-weight against light-weight
computing.

A few nights ago, I re-watched Ghost in the Shell (the original, ofc)
for the what must've been the first time in at least 5-years or so. I
loved this anime when I was in my late teens/early 20s, and I watched
it often. But fair to say I think some of the nuance I didn't quite
'get' back then, and having seen something so many times, it can be
difficult for the nuance or ideas to pierce through on re-watching,
because insodoing (rewatching) you often just get sucked into going on
a familiar journey again. Anyhow, this time I re-watched it I was
drawn to the observation made by Major Kusanagi during the scene where
she's out deep-diving: 

'I feel confined, only free to expand myself within boundaries.'

I don't think this observation ever made much sense to me until more
recently.  The Zaibatsu server is a pretty low-spec machine (128MB
RAM), and the result of this is that certain restrictions or
accommodations are put in place. On the server, I observe that so many
are writing incredibly light-weight alternative programmes and bespoke
software, and also just developing shared collective understanding
around not rinsing-out computer power where this wouldn't do the
community any favours. In the time I've been on the Zaibatsu, I've
really come to appreciate the discipline(s) that these boundaries and
limitations give rise to - and actually I've come to see that these
aren't actually boundaries at all: they're more an opportunity, or a
circumstance/situation, in which occurrences can unfold in different
directions. Elsewhere, in the soup of a high-juice machine, for
example, you don't have to think so much about how many applications
you leave open, how many processes are running in the background, how
much javascript is delivering unnecessarily heavy-goods into a Web
browser.  This presents excess in computing as a standard, or even an
ideal, as though more power = more capacity, more capacity = good. 

Contrasting this, the limitations - and in particular the limitations
around computing power and resource consumption (I mean to be hinting
at solarpunk/eco-thinking here) - can be seen instead as an
alternative capacity, an alternative power, and actually bring into
the foreground the very question of what we want from computing power
in the first place. You want to receive and read text? Great.. port70.
You want a pubnix community with some user-interaction facilities?
Great, let's* collectively build and determine what we need, model,
re-model, test, try out, explore - all the while keeping it
lightweight and tailored for purpose. I feel a freedom opening up from
this context, and it renders the context itself as not a boundary or a
limitation at all, but a possibility in its own right. This excites me
more than my words can convey right here, but it also hearkens into, I
think, the unix philosophy and ccmcabe's point on unix as a medium in
its own right, separate to television, radio, etc in equal standing. 

I think that this imperative to be light-weight and versatile is
opening up something new. It's opening up questions about computing
and computer-power, from a tiny little part of the Internet (and I
agree with Solderpunk that this is the 'coolest' part of the Internet
right now). As well as our tools and services, kit, network and
individuals being part of this community, this is also a
tinkering/hacking community that is coming up against these pertinent
questions of computing hardware, software, technology and energy
consumption and what it is to do - and to *want* - in computing; and
part of the journey is forming around exploring these ideas within
'fellowship' thinking.

*n.b. I must qualify that I myself haven't contributed in a technical
sense as I'm very much in the early stages of learning programming.
Though what I've learned here has certainly put me on a certain track
on this process of learning and the direction I hope to take it. I
soon hope to be able to have an attempt at the lightsabre-constructing
process of building a gopher browser of some kind, if only as an
experiment - but no promises on that front just yet, until I can sense
the steepness of the hill.