The Politics of Open Infrastructures - 13. From Permacomputing to Agbogbloshie

13. From Permacomputing to Agbogbloshie: Open-Knowledge Infrastructures for Computational Repair

Cyrus Khalatbari

©2026 Cyrus Khalatbari, CC BY-NC 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0528.13

Introduction

Our daily interactions are shaped by tech corporations using the socio-technical agenda of seamlessness (Ratto 2007; Black 2020). The pursuit of seamlessness obscures the human, material, and environmental infrastructure behind ‘the digital.’ It is embodied through minimalist User Interfaces (UI) or Experiences (UX) that prioritise connectivity and produce ‘jittery-schizoïd intervals’ (Greenfield, 2017: 40), shifting our perception of time. This desire for fluidity relies on a plethora of hardware that enables computational power: from local machines to routers, modems, and undersea cables, among others. In addition, the corporate agenda of seamlessness relies on the hidden labour of engineers, moderators, technicians, and users, optimising, maintaining, and recycling the network. In order to disentangle the material and human infrastructure hidden behind seamlessness and our digital interactions, the chapter focuses on alternative collaborative design practices and makerspaces.

Informed by fieldwork, the chapter takes the form of a comparative analysis between two arts and design communities mirroring across different cultural and geopolitical contexts. The first community, operating from Amsterdam (the Netherlands), is known as permacomputing: a portmanteau word formed by the association of permaculture and computing. The group aims towards the collective desire of fostering computational sustainability and resilience. The second federates around makerspaces in Accra ( Ghana). As responses to the toxic afterlife of electronics, they provide tools and training to local communities. In placing in dialogue these two design communities, this chapter argues for three main points. First, it posits that studying these practices are essential in making tangible our computational and internet material and human implications, too often obfuscated by corporate tropes and their focus on the digital. Second, it argues that, while technology is regularly framed as planetary and universal, zooming in at the level of these two communities and the local scales in which they operate brings forward the situated nature of our interactions. Third and finally, the chapter argues that challenging techno-utopian narratives of net neutrality and tracing the evolution of these two communities reveals not only power dynamics enforced on consumers by corporations but also forms of resistance undertaken by independent arts and design communities. Drawing from these three sections, this contribution argues that ‘ seamfulness’ and the openness of socio-technical systems emerge...

Ecomedia Studies

The chapter bridges two academic interests that are, through design and technology, inherently linked yet too often disconnected: science and technology studies ( STS) and human–computer interaction ( HCI). To challenge the narrative of technological immateriality, the theoretical framework draws on insights from the emerging field of ecomedia stud... Within HCI and critical design communities, this desire to reveal the materiality of media connects with two design propositions and postures: zombie media 2 (Hertz and Parikka 2012) and numériques situés 3 (Nova and Roussilhe 2021). Performing through design what Bowker coined as infrastructural inversion ( Bowker 1994), they creatively and critically reappropriate materials and components that constitute our internet’s hardware layer. While tropes around digitality overshadow th... and new media. With numériques situés,the focus shifts towards understanding digital technologies as embedded in specific terrestrial, environmental, and energetical contexts that power them and act as sites of executions (Howse 2014).

In arguing that studying these two contexts resists tropes of computational universality, the chapter builds on academic works approaching design as being bound to its local and material contexts. Extending from Mauss’ embodied techniques (1973) and Haraway’s ‘situated knowledges’ (1988), this framework foregrounds the ways in which bodily practices and epistemologies are deeply embedded within specific social, cultural, and material contexts. With the work of feminist scholars such as Suchman (1987) or Rosner (2020), the positionality of designers is brought into focus as a critical factor in the shaping of technologies and design practices. This shift challenges dominant narratives of objectivity in design and calls for the role of tacit knowledge and practices in understanding how technology is shaped, maintained, and activated by local and peripheral communities.

At the level of HCI, this aim is also advanced by critical making (Ratto 2011) and unmaking (Gaboury 2018), in which critical technical practitioners do not simply produce artifacts but develop critical awareness of technology within their local scales of action. Through these practices, the materiality of design, and our socio-technical culture are then disentangled in a situated and relational way. Outside of a techno-solutionist (Morozov 2014) approach in which devices aim towards exponential streamlining, making and unmaking serve to un-sanitise and re-politicise technology by unravelling its ecological seams and making it tangible, breakable, and reconfigurable. This practice reclaims agency over the corporate black-boxing ( Latour, 1999) of our technological systems, inviting through situatedness a critical engagement with technology and its socio-material implications.

The chapter also draws on the STS concept of knowledge infrastructures and the way knowledge production can be used to better understand friction, conflict, resistance (Karasti et al. 2016), or enclosure within our technological cultures. Inspired by... approaches in fostering innovation, resistance, and artistic reappropriation.

Overlapping with previous design frameworks of critical making, zombie media, and *numériques**situés*that aim for seamful design (Ratto 2007), this desire to bring forward alternative socio-technical configurations and imaginaries (Jasanoff 2015) strongly resonates with DiSalvo’s adversarial design (2015). Building from Mouffe’s concept of agonistic pluralism (1999), adversarial design foregrounds contestation and dissensus as essential to democratic engagement, positioning design as a space where conflicting worldviews can be articulated, negotiated, and made visible through material forms. In this context, the production of design and technology is displaced from the quest for efficiency and streamlining. While initially designed for enclosure and control, it is reappropriated to make visible and disrupt the dominant narratives it embodies, opening up spaces for critical reflection, debate, and more sustainable futures.

Materials and Methods

In addition to observation diaries, both case studies of permacomputing and Accra’s makerspaces are composed of semi-structured interviews with community actors met on site or online. The author of this contribution is external to both communities. Although the author is cultu... The author participated in two workshops and fieldwork in Amsterdam and Accra and conducted interviews online. The fieldwork on permacomputing first took place during two intensive workshops that ran for two days each and were organised by the cultural institution... participants explored sustainable approaches to computational culture by combining hands-on experimentation with critical discussion. The lab brought together artists, designers, technologists, and researchers to collectively question dominant paradigms of efficiency and growth in computing, and to investigate alternative, low-tech, repair-friendly practices. Across these two workshops, more than ten interviews were conducted with participants and facilitators ranging from designers, artists, and engineers. The fieldwork in Accra and its makerspace communities took place over a full week (1–8 January 2023), and then at irregular intervals between January 2023 and May 2025. Over this period, more than ten interviews were conducted. Profiles of interviewees range from community organisers, architects, and designers to nearby workers (maintainers, scrap-dealers, dismantlers, burners). Two makerspaces are the focus of the study. The first is the Agbogbloshie Makerspace Platform ( AMP), developed by architects and scholars Abbas and Osseo-A...

Grounded Contexts of Computation

Permacomputing

While tech corporations depict the internet as immaterial through minimalist design choices and streamlined platforms, investigating design communities’ local scales makes tangible the material and human infrastructural implications of our digital practices. Resisting these corporate tropes in which the internet is framed as a weightless, placeless, and ephemeral data transmission cloud, designers—through their critical practices of making and unmaking—contribute to further making visible and tangible the environmental materialities that underpin our digital life. This desire sits at the core of the permacomputing model: inspired by the permaculture movement and its land management approach aimed at working with, rather than against, nature (Mollison 1991).

As articulated in the movement’s principles (see Figure 13.1), the linkage to permaculture first appears through its emphasis on temporality: embracing long-durational processes and a frugal approach deemed essential to foster the development of more sustainable computational ecosystems. In order to resist the injunction for new media and brainstorm on alternative ways of embracing technology, old devices are repurposed. Amongst its propositions, this resonates with a*care for**life, a care for the chips, and the need**to build on solid ground*, as a:

critique of contemporary computer technology that privileges maximalist aesthetics where more pixels, more frame rate, more computation and more power equals more potential at any cost and without any consequences. (Mansoux et al. 2023: 1)

In similar ways to the ecomedia studies’ need to focus on ‘stuff you can kick’ (Parks 2015), the reinvestment of these old computers materialises what is too often overlooked by corporate tropes on the digital. As put forward by Mansoux and colleagues, this urgency to expose everything is driven by the need to shift from

a static understanding of infrastructure to a more dynamic one that adapts to changes in the local environment. (Mansoux et al. 2023: 9)

Echoing zombie media (Hertz and Parikka 2012) and numériques situés (Nova and Roussilhe 2021) in which digital processes become grounded in hardware and become visible in terrestrial ways, this relational approach of permacomput... project (2024).The project is a solar-powered, distributed web hosting network that prioritises server access based on sunlight availability, making computation responsive to planetary rhythms and its environmental factors. While tech corporations obscure the energetic dependencies and infrastructural demands powering their services, the project foregrounds these material realities—connecting computation to the contingencies of weather, geography, and energetics. In doing so, it challenges dominant narratives of seamlessness and efficiency, offering an alternative model in which the digital is made dependent on, and entangled with, the tangible, terrestrial nature of computation.