I think this is a very important idea. Not only because of potential collapse and to conserve resources, but also because in your technological civilisation it is a near certainty that future generations will have to deal with legacy technology and software potentially hundreds of years old that are serving vital functions. Thus thinking now about how such systems could work in the long term and developing hardware and software with that in mind is IMHO quite vital.

There are things were wastefulness is warranted, like storage redundancy. If one wants data to survive, then it has to be distributed all around the planet.

But the hardware - primarily CPU and power requirement of modern computing is absolutely insane. How can a modern box with all the latest hardware feel not just slower, but so much slower than a PC from 1993, or an 8-bit from the 80’s while using many times more power and space?

Not to mention all the technology and resources required to design and build the thing.

While honestly almost everything can be achieved with power of a Pi or an old Android phone, if only the software is optimized.

And then all the ewaste from making everything disposable and irreparable. Wild.

I haven’t heard it called this before but I agree with others that the general concept is a good idea. We are far too quick to jump to the next processor, the next monitor etc. when those things can realistically last a very long time before hitting too much of a performance limitation (especially for people who don’t render anything like high games or video editing.)

https://permacomputing.net/ is another good site and community.

I think it’s what we need to further push the envelope further. We’re not using the full capability of our hardware that we have today by even a longshot. There’s too much fucking overhead everywhere. And I say that as an artist who fucking LOATHES the shitty rendered music paradigm over the modular approach that we used to have. We see it everywhere though, wastefulness in RAM usage, no damn compression in anything natively, no thought on what data structures would result in the lowest footprint on the harddrive, no actual concern for using higher level langugaes over lower ones.