Nils Bonfils

Nadia Mariyan Smith, Nils Bonfils, Han Qiao et al.

Permacomputing is a nascent concept and community of practice concerned with developing alternative computing systems grounded in principles of resilience, reuse, sufficiency, and ecological limits. However, research engaging with permacomputing remains in an early stage of development, raising concerns about whether permacomputing can move beyond reflective critique to become a meaningful alternative practice. Through a research-through-design case study, we documented our experience moving a personal website from a data centre in Texas to a self-hosted solar-powered server built from reclaimed electronics. Guided by permacomputing principles and relational aesthesis, we explore what it takes for permacomputing to reconfigure material and perceptual relations. Our findings reveal the frictions of moving away from a maximalist techno-aesthetic while attempting to re-use already existing technologies, potential ways to overcome these challenges through building a community of practice, and the transformative potential of visibilizing and visceralizing digital infrastructures to cultivate more responsible ways of relating to technology. This paper contributes to emerging research on permacomputing and its aesthetics by bringing it into dialogue with theories of non-place and relational aesthesis. Rather than functioning as a purely symbolic gesture, permacomputing practices can cultivate greater collective autonomy, agency, and responsibility in how communities engage and create meaning within digital infrastructures. In the context of socio-ecological crises and anti-colonial transformation, our research offers a situated approach to building and relating to computing technologies in the ashes of dominant technological paradigms.

Nils Bonfils, Christoph Becker

The business model of surveillance capitalism, premised on the extraction of behavioral data and its predictive potential for profit, relies on extensive material infrastructure. Such profit is typically driven by practices such as telemetry, user tracking, data analytics, secondary data uses, increased user engagement, and AI model training, as well as large-scale data storage systems that retain personal information for sale or reuse. This paper is motivated by the question: how much of the rising carbon impact of ICT can be attributed to this material infrastructure? Such an inquiry provides a foundation for quantifying the environmental costs of surveillance capitalism by proposing a conceptual framework and research direction that link processes of surveillance with their underlying material realities. To demonstrate the applicability of this framework, we examine the proportion of network traffic caused by surveillance capitalism processes through a comparative case study of a corporate social media platform, X/formerly Twitter, and a decentralized, non-commercial alternative, Mastodon. Our findings highlight the existence of corporate overhead: excess resource consumption driven by corporate social media practices, which is used as an initial proxy for the activities of surveillance capitalism. Our findings further demonstrate how the corporate overhead of X can be used to establish a lower bound in CO2e emissions attributable to for-profit activities that do not contribute to the user experience.