David Pennington

“I came in with very small ideas,” says Josh Vana, a sculptural artist and former student of Steinbach, “Like they were technically okay, but they were small ... We showed up to that first critique, and he was like, ‘go bigger’ and it gave me the freedom to create–to go absolutely nuts and crazy.”

Electronics evolved rapidly without any help before. Why can't we pull it again?

These technological breakthroughs happened in a context of cheap energy. Unless we have a "unicorn tech" (nuclear fusion for example) giving us cheaper energy than 1960's oil, we will never again see these days of extraordinarily cheap energy.

Without cheap energy, we... See more

Does the act of sitting in a park, patiently looking through a pair of binoculars and reading through field guides really deserve to be described with the same adjective usually reserved for angsty hardcore punk music, crusty anarchos and angry outcasts with ripped leather jackets?

If one considers punk as anything defiantly anti-capitalist,... See more

A user journey that changes who you are

My psychological tabs are maxed out, and there’s no alert to clear storage or update my internal OS.

I can’t tell it’s happening, but it creeps in and settles into a quiet, directionless overwhelm, a kind of existential buffering I’ve started to call “multiverse fatigue”.

No tab to close. No log-out option. Too many realities to keep up with.

Basic dynamic in life: there is nothing meaningful enough to make you happy that could not make you sad if you lost it. This is the paradox of feeling, and it’s inherent and existential. If things inspire real positive emotion in you then they are necessarily things in which you are sufficiently invested that you would feel negative emotions when... See more

There are huge environmental and societal issues in today's computing, and permacomputing specifically wants to challenge them in the same way as permaculture has challenged industrial agriculture. With that said, permacomputing is an anti-capitalist political project. It is driven by several strands of anarchism, decoloniality, intersectional... See more