Log / 07 January 2026

Permacomputing is a pressure test

I test permacomputing on my website and find the contradiction quickly: smaller CSS can reduce technical dependency, but it cannot solve structural inequality, internet shutdowns, fragile communication tools, or my own attachment to typography, comfort, consumption, and the use of AI.

Contents

I met the term permacomputing again today: 8 May. My Obsidian notes say I first encountered it on 18 January.

I had written only this:

Is permacomputing possible? Is it needed? In my website? in my lifestyle? in health response?

That’s it.

This time I read the principles. Another website. On permacomputing for graphic design. The intention was good. The first thing I experienced was physical difficulty. The text was hard to read with my presbyopia.

A sustainable web punishes my rigid eyes, my limited brain capacity.

The term reminded me of circular economy, sustainable web, resilient web, low-tech aesthetics, and the performance around these ideas. The concept is useful, visionary, often utopic. I agree: people and planet need less extraction, less upgrade pressure, less digital bloat. But the human problem remains. People perform ethical choices. I perform too.

I once analyzed the Ellen MacArthur Foundation website, a prominent advocate in the field of circular economy. The website is bloated, at odds with what it promotes.

To avoid turning permacomputing into performance, I tested it on my own website.

At that point, my current CSS was 34 KB.

The urgency to make a website less bloated, sustainable, or lightweight now comes more often when I think of the July 2024 internet blackout in Bangladesh. I was looking for some protocol, something like Bridgefy, to communicate during critical times. But the protocol, and its apps, still felt underdeveloped: dependent on proximity, adoption, battery, prior internet dependency during setup, and yes: trust.

AI delivered: CSS reduced to 18 KB while keeping the present look. Then I pushed the test further: what would happen if I aimed for a 1996-minded CSS layer, close to the first era of CSS support? Possible?

The stylesheet became 9 KB.

No local WOFF2. No custom typeface. No variable font. No optical sizing. Only system stacks. Georgia, with large type, served for a while. HTML pages were semantic. The page remained readable.

Then my brain started bargaining. FOMO. Fear of missing out.

I missed Source Serif 4. I missed optical sizes, glyphs, ligatures, font features, and the pleasure of a chosen typeface.

The typography obsessive in me became vocal while the sustainability argument was reasonable.

AI suggested a middle ground. A certain model was trained to satisfy its “user” - unless further prompted on sycophancy.

Use Source Serif 4 Regular and Italic only. Keep mono as a system stack. Your code blocks are occasional, not the site’s main reading voice. System monospace is good enough for pre, code, and metadata. Keep Bangla font local and optional. Let the page fall back without drama.

I went to make my morning coffee.

I looked at the new coffee machine. Fragile, designed for planned obsolescence. I looked at the food processor in the kitchen. I looked at the other things I “own”. It’s clear: I am not yet a sustainable practitioner. I buy clothes every year. I smoke Marlboro cigarettes. Branded, expensive, corporate. And I am a subscriber to a few AI models. I live inside capitalism and still enjoy parts of it while struggling to accept other parts.

Then I looked back at my CSS. I was still looking at the technical layer. I was thinking of technical debt: stylesheet size, heavy font files, page weight, browser support, device tolerance. I was trying to make the site more accessible by reducing technical debt. But structural debt was harder to see. A lighter website, even with nostalgia-proof or future-proof intent, can reduce one kind of dependency. But it remains silent about who gets disconnected first, who has backup devices, who can pay for data, and who becomes unreachable when infrastructure fails.

I keep facing decision paralysis: this, that, another version of that. I keep exploring. I remain unsettled. Even that unsettledness, the idea and the word, is co-opted.

Never settle.

(the official tagline of the smartphone manufacturer)

Corporations appreciate it. Ads sharpen it. Interfaces keep offering newer, better, cleaner, more ethical versions of consumption. Another desire loop.

I wish my brain could be more settled. Because unsettling also means I am allowing corporations to feed me ads so that I buy things.

So the question is not whether I am “pure” enough to practice permacomputing.

Or the question is: where can I reduce dependency without performing poverty, nostalgia, or moral superiority?

For this website, the choices could be:

HTML as structure.
    CSS as accessible presentation.
    JavaScript as optional.

Fonts as preference.
	Source Serif when available.
	Georgia when not.
	Bangla readability as access.

When I consider typography as interface, relying on system fonts is one compromise. Reducing file size with less CSS is another. It reminded me how cinema viewing shifted from maker agency to viewer agency. Cinema now gets designed for multiple screen formats.

My practical wisdom is simpler: permanence is a fantasy. I am not an advocate for disposable or ephemeral content either. But when long-term durability gets treated as permanence, and a tech community shaped by planetary limits and permaculture thinking calls that desire permacomputing, the idea can become morally superior, distant from daily use, and difficult to practice. It may ignore the spectrum of human behaviour, hide systemic uneven access, and smooth over the social and political mess inside which computing happens.

I am living inside the contradiction. Inside the mess. My agency, or the ideal image of my agency, feels compromised.

Permacomputing is a pressure test.

Working glossary

Permacomputing as pressure test: A way to test whether sustainability remains practice or turns into performance. The test begins with code, then reaches lifestyle, infrastructure, access, and contradiction.
Performative sustainability: Ethical language used as display while the underlying system remains extractive, bloated, or exclusionary.
Technical debt: The visible maintenance burden: heavy CSS, font files, scripts, dependencies, and design decisions that make the page harder to sustain.
Structural debt: The hidden burden carried by people who are already closer to disconnection: low bandwidth, shutdowns, cost, device scarcity, battery anxiety, and fragile communication networks.
Typography as interface: The idea that type is not decoration. Font choice, size, spacing, contrast, and rhythm decide whether the page welcomes or punishes the reader.
Shadow reader: The reader excluded by normal design assumptions: tired, distracted, low-vision, multilingual, older, neurodivergent, suspicious, or using a weak device on an unstable connection.
Cognitive load reduction: The practice of removing avoidable burden from a page, form, document, or system so that attention can stay with meaning.
Protocol fragility: The gap between a communication idea and its survival in crisis. Proximity, adoption, battery, setup, trust, and usability decide whether the protocol becomes usable infrastructure.
Desire loop: The cycle where interfaces offer newer, cleaner, more ethical versions of consumption while keeping the user unsettled and wanting.

Agency compromise

The uneasy state of making choices inside systems already shaped by platforms, markets, ads, infrastructure, and personal dependency.

Unlearning repository

A website that holds fragments, contradictions, tools, drafts, and unfinished thinking without forcing everything to become a polished portfolio.

Interface autoethnography

Studying the interfaces I build and use as evidence. The page, the tool, the font, the form, and the friction become field notes.

Further reading

Working glossary