I've been reading a little conversation on Gopher about “withered technology”. It began with Solderpunk writing about Gunpei Yokoi's famous idea of lateral thinking with withered technology: instead of reaching automatically for the newest and most powerful technology, take something mature, cheap and well understood and think imaginatively about what it can do.
The Game Boy is the classic example. Nintendo could have pursued a more impressive colour display, but instead used older monochrome technology. The result was cheaper, tougher, simpler and had much better battery life. It wasn't the most technologically advanced machine. It was, arguably, a better machine for the job.
That idea has been nagging away at me because it connects several things I've previously thought of as separate interests.
One is the “small internet”: Gopher, Gemini and other deliberately simple ways of publishing and communicating online. Another is my own DeckZero experiment: trying to organise a useful part of my digital life around plain text, the command line and modest hardware. (I'll have to say more about this another time) A third is the much bigger question of environmental sustainability.
Perhaps they belong together.
One of the most interesting ideas in the discussion is that technological obsolescence is, at least partly, something we create socially. A ten- or fifteen-year-old computer hasn't necessarily stopped computing. Its processor still processes. Its memory still remembers. Its screen still displays things. What has changed is the world around it.
A modern website expects an extraordinary amount from a computer: a current browser, JavaScript, encryption, fonts, multimedia codecs, advertising systems, tracking protection, frequent security updates and much more besides. So eventually we say that the computer is “too old”.
But suppose all I want to do is read some text. Gopher makes remarkably small demands of both client and server. Suddenly the same “obsolete” machine may be wildly overpowered. The significant question changes from: “Can this old machine still cope with today's software?” to:“What useful things could we do if our software made smaller demands?”
That feels like quite a profound shift.
A lot of environmentally conscious computing concentrates on efficiency. We should have lower-power processors, recyclable cases, replaceable components, longer battery life and repairable devices. All of that is good. But Solderpunk raises an awkward question: If we already possess an enormous quantity of functioning computing hardware, how sustainable is manufacturing a fresh generation of beautifully designed sustainable computers?
There is embodied energy in the machine which already exists. Materials were mined. Components were manufactured. The thing was transported around the world. So the environmental win is not always to replace it with something consuming three watts instead of fifteen. Perhaps it is simply to keep using the thing.
In other words: Don't optimise the replacement. Avoid the replacement.
Solderpunk calls the bigger goal “demand destruction”: not merely making the next generation of computers greener, but reducing our need to manufacture another generation at all. That is a much more radical environmental ambition.
Other writers in the conversation develop the idea further.
Agk asks how old hardware could become genuinely useful again without requiring everyone to become a Linux enthusiast, bootloader hacker and systems administrator. That is an important challenge. It is easy for techie-types to say, “Just install something else on it.” But a sustainable computing culture cannot depend on everyone enjoying an afternoon debugging UEFI.
Agk imagines something more like a games console. Put in a cartridge and switch it on. Now the machine is a writing machine. Change the cartridge and it becomes an educational computer. Another might make it a controller for irrigation equipment, a communications terminal or something else entirely.
The exact technical proposal matters less to me than the principle: salvage should eventually become ordinary.
Someone may have to do the difficult work of understanding the old hardware once. Everyone else should then be able to use the result without understanding how it works.
Freet supplies some wonderfully concrete examples. An old PlayStation 2 becomes a media player. A discarded router becomes a small Linux computer. An old phone becomes a radio receiver. Instead of asking the old machine to conform to current expectations, you adapt the task to what the machine can comfortably do. That may mean converting the video to an older codec rather than declaring the media player obsolete because it cannot decode the latest one.
There is something almost subversive about that reversal.
This is where my little DeckZero project starts to look different to me.
I began it largely because I like plain text and terminal software. I enjoy being able to open todo.txt, calendar.txt or a notebook in almost anything. I like Mutt. I like SSH. I like having files I can understand without the application which created them.
There is an aesthetic pleasure in that simplicity, but perhaps there is also a politics of sufficiency.
Instead of asking, “How powerful a computer can I have?” the question becomes, “How much computer do I actually need?”
A text file requires almost nothing. Email does not require a modern graphical desktop. A personal calendar doesn't need a cloud platform. Publishing a few paragraphs can manage without a content-management system, a database and several megabytes of JavaScript.
When we reduce the requirements of the software, we enlarge the pool of hardware which remains usable.
The small internet doesn't make an old computer more powerful. It changes what counts as enough computer.
There is an obvious danger here. Environmental arguments can very quickly begin to sound like sermons about deprivation.
Don't buy anything. Put up with your old laptop. Stop wanting nice things.
I don't find that very attractive, and I doubt many other people do either.
The Gopher discussion points towards something much more playful. One writer talks about the value of making surprising things happen on old games consoles. Someone discovers that a Nintendo DSi can be turned into a surprisingly capable little programmable computer. People write new software for twenty-year-old machines simply because it is interesting.
That is not austerity. It is creativity. Rather than saying, “You ought to keep this old thing because buying another one is bad,” we might say, “Look what this thing can still do.”
There is potentially an abundance there — just not an abundance measured in newly manufactured objects.
I don't want to claim too much for Gopher.
Running a Gopher client is not going to save the planet. Nor is keeping an ancient laptop alive automatically an act of environmental virtue. But the assumptions underlying these technologies matter. Much of contemporary computing is built around continuous escalation: more capability > more complicated software > greater hardware requirements > replacement > repeat.
The small-internet/permacomputing alternative suggests another cycle:
enough capability > simple software > long-lived hardware > repair and repurpose > repeat very slowly.
It also has a social dimension.
Gopher and Gemini favour small spaces, personal publishing and direct connection. Plain-text tools keep information portable and comprehensible. Old machines can remain participants rather than becoming rubbish. Taken together, those things begin to look less like nostalgia and more like a modest alternative technological politics. Not anti-technology or even anti-new-technology.
Just suspicious of the assumption that technological progress must always mean replacing what we already have.
So perhaps the question I want to carry away from this conversation is not, "What exciting new computer should we build next?" It is, "What useful, enjoyable and connected digital life can we build from the computers we already have?"
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Thoughts? I'd welcome comments:
gemini://bbs.geminispace.org/u/lernanto/47544
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Sources:
Solderpunk, "Lateral thinking with withered technology"
agk, re: Lateral thinking with withered tech
gopher://sdf.org/0/users/agk//phlog/2026-04-14-lat.txt
freet, re:Lateral thinking with withered technology
gopher://aussies.space/0/~freet/phlog/2026-04-17RE_Lateral_Thinking_with_Withered_Technology.txt
solderpunk, More on withered technology, part I & II
gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space/0/~solderpunk/phlog/more-on-withered-technology-i.txt
gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space/0/~solderpunk/phlog/more-on-withered-technology-ii.txt
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richard <AT> deckzero <DOT> uk