Collapse Informatics

The last term from the LIMITS archive which is important to mention is collapse informatics, software engineering taking advantage of today’s abundance in computing power to prepare for a future in which current infrastructures have collapsed 1,2. The aim is to develop a set of methods, metrics and tools to design for collapse. Collapse informatics is inspired by ICT4D and SE4S and is the most radical in its characteristics because of its post-collapse target. It is based on decentralisation, not only because current centralised services and networks will break down, but also because peer-to-peer infrastructures are more resilient and flexible. It aims for simplicity—software should function on existing hardware—and modularity in order to enable a diversity of combinations and implementations. Systems need to be resilient to intermittent energy supply and network connectivity. Next to that collapse informatics should prioritize community needs and make use of open source licenses to contribute to a knowledge commons in order to be able to succeed in case of economic collapse.

There are some software and hardware projects that could be considered collapse informatics, even though they do not use the term themselves and might not apply all characteristics described by Penzenstadler et al. 3 Collapse OS is a Forth operating system and collection of tools to preserve the ability to program microcontrollers through civilizational collapse 4. Collapse OS, as the name suggests, is only an OS and requires very creative post-collapse coding in order to become useful. On the other side of the spectrum is disaster.radio, that promises a disaster-resilient off-grid, solar-powered, long-range mesh network built on free, open source software and affordable, open hardware 5. It offers a fully functional communication system, but relies on a substantial amount of custom hardware and even 3D printed casing and contains patented and proprietary components, which might not only prove counterproductive in case of an actual disaster, but also begs the question for who this project is affordable. Whatever the shape of the system, what is most interesting is to consider the current state of our planet as one of collapse already, so we can make use of the more radical methods and tools described by Penzenstadler et al. today.

  1. Birgit Penzenstadler, Ankita Raturi, Debra J. Richardson, M Six Silberman, and Bill Tomlinson. 2015. Collapse (& Other Futures) Software Engineering. In Proceedings of the First Workshop on Computing within Limits. ACM, Irvine California, 1-3.↩
  2. Barath Raghavan and Justin Ma. 2011. Networking in the Long Emergency. In Proceedings of the 2nd ACM SIGCOMM Workshop on Green Netowrking (GreenNets '11). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 37-42. https://doi.org/10.1145/2018536.2018545↩
  3. Birgit Penzenstadler, Ankita Raturi, Debra J. Richardson, M Six Silberman, and Bill Tomlinson. 2015. Collapse (& Other Futures) Software Engineering. In Proceedings of the First Workshop on Computing within Limits. ACM, Irvine California, 1-3.↩
  4. Collapse OS. 2021. https://collapseos.org↩
  5. Disaster.radio. 2020. https://disaster.radio↩