Monthnotes

Maybe I should find another name for these notes, I'll think about it. I like that they softly nudge me towards sitting down, reflecting and writing about what happened recently, but I don't want to feel like I'm avoiding an obligation when I can't hold the rhythm.

Some relatives came to visit recently, and I had the chance to present compost.party at the permacomputing meetup at offline.

Caspar David Friedrich Exhibition

My relatives took me to the Caspar David Friedrich exhibition at the occasion of his 250th birthday. The exhibition showed an extensive collection of his work between roughly 1790 and 1830.^[1]

The motives are mainly landscapes. I can relate to a sense of awe and admiration, of finding yourself in a wider ecology and I admire being able to appreciate this as a miracle over the extent of 40 years. But at the same time there was a rigidity to it that made me feel uneasy.

Some of the motives were painted multiple times with the slightest variations over this period. You could also note that some of the elements, mountains and trees reappear in different works. Humans are usually shown from the back, sitting down or standing idly facing into the distance. If they are ever shown as active, they are digging graves or part of a funeral procession.

Again, these were created around 1800, during the abolition of European feudalism, with social change omnipresent. Turning your back on this, looking at the sea and insisting that this is all there is, immutably and forever, no matter what humans do, looked to me almost cynical.

permacomputing at offline

The permacomputing meetup is held roughly monthly at offline, a community-organized space in Berlin Neukölln. I have attended a couple of times and always enjoyed it. It's a gathering of nice and bright people insisting that computing does not need to be organized in a way that it ends up piling mountains of waste on top of each other, and that problems can be solved in other ways than scaling up.

Brendan, one of the organizers, invited me to talk about compost, and I agreed. It's not something I do often,^[2] so I was unsure what to expect.

I prepared a couple of slides to help me tell my story about it, and did so for half an hour. The crowd consisted of quite a few people new to the meetup, and a lot of technically-minded but not super hardcore nerdy people from what I gathered after the round of introductions.

The reactions were very positive, which makes me incredibly happy. It's a great source of joy when someone tells me that they find compost inspiring, and hearing it in person gives even more weight to it. There was a lot of interest in the inspirations, and in the beyond-computational part of keeping it running. I am thinking a lot about the world around compost, both the part of it that went into it in the manufacturing process and how it is situated now, and it's good to see this resonate.

People from postmarketOS were also there, and it was very nice to be able to say thank you in person for all the work they did on enabling this kind of digging. I hope I did not give them too much unwanted attention by highlighting their contributions.

I'll try next time to take some smaller steps when diving into the whole Linux part of it. I have been using Linux for a long time, and the interactions around it are often with people that know more about it than I do. It's easy to loose track of what is common knowledge.^[3]

After the meetup I was invited to show compost at solpunk next week! A big question was also whether I could help others compost their own hardware, and I'm looking forward to see what other people do with these odd computers.