Links: Beyond sustainable

Links about technology and regenerative design.

• The land before modern APIs (Darius Kazemi, 2020)

  HTTP status codes are largely an accident of history. The people who came up with them didn’t plan on defining a numerical namespace that would last half a century or work its way into popular culture. You see this pattern over and over in the history of technology. […]

  Because technology isn’t immune to historical contingency, it’s important for us as engineers to remember that long-lasting technical inflection points can occur at any time.

• The resource leak bug of our civilization (Ville-Matias Heikkilä, 2014)

  It is increasingly difficult for computer users to avoid technological alienation. Systems become increasingly complex and genuine interest towards their inner workings may be discouraging. If you learn something from it, the information probably won’t stay current for very long. If you modify it, subsequent software updates will break it. […]

  The mainstream regards platforms as neutral devices that can be used to reach a predefined result, while the demoscene regards them as a kind of raw material that has a specific essence of its own.

• Sustainability is not Enough: We Need Regenerative Cultures (Daniel Christian Wahl, 2018)

  The aim of creating regenerative cultures transcends and includes sustainability. […]

  The art of transformative cultural innovation is to a large extent about making our peace with ‘not knowing’ and living into the questions more deeply, making sure we are asking the right questions, paying attention to our relationships and how we all bring forth a world not just through what we are doing, but through the quality of our being. A regenerative culture will emerge out of finding and living new ways of relating to self, community and to life as a whole.

• Video: Human and Planetary Health: Ecosystem Regeneration (talk by Daniel Christian Wahl, 2018)

  Once we do the reconciliatory step, shifting to the organising idea that we are actually nature – that we can design as nature because we’re nothing but it, we are biological beings first and foremost – then we move into working regeneratively.