Summary

The Damaged Earth Catalog serves as a critical evaluation and access tool that reorients technological practices away from centralized, corporate, and exploitative systems toward intimate, community-driven power. Inspired by the legacy of the 1968 Whole Earth Catalog, it promotes practices and tools relevant to collective learning that are useful, low-cost, and foster decentralization. The catalog critiques the "cloud paradigm" and consumer capitalism, challenging the illusion that greenwashing and minor efficiency gains can offset the massive environmental and social costs of modern computing. It emphasizes that hyperscale data centers powered by renewable energy are not truly sustainable, as they drive overproduction, surveillance, and land exploitation.

Throughout its entries, the text weaves together interconnected frameworks such as Computing within Limits, Degrowth, Permacomputing, and Feminist Technology, all emphasizing the urgent need to scale down energy and resource consumption across the board. These concepts advocate for technology that is resilient, modular, and operates within planetary boundaries, rejecting tech solutionism in favor of "enoughness" and planned longevity. Movements like Appropriate Technology, Liberatory Technology, and Convivial Computing trace a historical trajectory that prioritizes human-scale, responsibly limited tools that empower individuals rather than relying on endless, exploitative economic growth. These philosophies insist that technology cannot be separated from social organization and must challenge the very systems that manufacture environmental collapse.

The catalog heavily emphasizes practical, situated, and localized approaches to mitigating environmental harm, utilizing strategies like Salvage Computing, Jenga Computing, and Patchwork Computing. These methodologies celebrate "making do" with redundant or discarded hardware, maintaining small community-run networks (Small Technology), and employing "unstable" or seasonal computing rather than demanding constant, resource-heavy uptime. Furthermore, initiatives like Disability Driven Development and ecofeminist space-making ensure that marginalized voices lead the reinvention of these digital spaces, fostering environments built on mutual care, accessibility, and resistance to systemic oppression.

(Snapshot) Dictionary of the Damaged Earth Catalog

About

The Damaged Earth Catalog functions as an evaluation and access device designed to help communities build intimate power in response to the massive losses obscured by the remote power of governments and big business. Adapted from the introduction of the 1968 Whole Earth Catalog, this project seeks out and promotes practices that empower communities to conduct their own education, shape their environment, and share knowledge. To be listed in the catalog, an item must be deemed useful as a practice, relevant to collective learning, high quality yet low cost, constitute forgotten common knowledge, and be easily available by mail. The catalog is an ongoing research project by Marloes de Valk that is continuously revised based on the experiences of its readers and writers.

Appropriate Technology

Coined in 1973 by Buddhist economist Ernst Schumacher in his book Small is Beautiful, Appropriate Technology (AT) originally described intermediate technology tailored to the environmental, ethical, cultural, and political needs of its intended community. Focusing on "enoughness," robustness, and sustainable living, AT operates on a small, decentralized scale with low capital investment and sparing use of natural resources. Although it fell into disuse in the late 1980s due to its association with Western aid fighting symptoms rather than the root causes of systemic inequality, it is experiencing a resurgence through Open Source Appropriate Technology (OSAT). OSAT projects, like the Global Village Construction Set, apply open design principles to AT, creating free, libre blueprints that can be peer-reviewed, iteratively improved, and adapted to local needs.

Benign Computing

Introduced by Barath Raghavan in 2015, benign computing is a general design framework inspired by Appropriate Technology that aims to create computing systems that prevent harm to the ecosystem and human society. It actively critiques tech solutionism and seeks to avoid Sevareid’s Law, which states that the chief source of problems is often previous solutions. Benign computing limits the structural power wielded by tech monopolies like GAFAM by fostering decentralized, open-source systems that can scale out through autonomous nodes under diverse administrative control. By mimicking nature’s approach to complexity and failure, the framework ensures systems are fractal and resilient, demanding that both the benefits and drawbacks of technology are continuously evaluated from diverse perspectives.

Collapse Informatics

Representing the most radical subset of the Computing within Limits movement, collapse informatics utilizes today's abundance of computing power to engineer software and tools for a future where current infrastructures have entirely collapsed. Inspired by ICT4D (Information and Communication Technologies for Development), it is heavily based on decentralization, recognizing that peer-to-peer systems are vastly more resilient than centralized services destined to break down. The methodology demands simplicity and modularity, insisting that software must function on existing hardware while surviving intermittent energy supplies and spotty network connectivity. Operating under the assumption that the planet is already experiencing collapse, it prioritizes community needs and open-source licenses to build a critical knowledge commons, with projects like Collapse OS and disaster.radio demonstrating its post-collapse technical ambitions.

Computing within Limits

Derived from an annual academic workshop series running since 2015, Computing within Limits promotes the design of technology that prioritizes the well-being of humans and other species over endless economic growth. The framework integrates three core principles: questioning growth to target a steady-state economy, modeling scarcity to ensure resilience across diverse contexts, and actively reducing energy and material consumption while avoiding the Jevons paradox, where efficiency gains merely drive up demand. Over time, the concept has shifted from designing for a future of scarcity to recognizing and designing for the real-world limits of the present. This scholarship has profoundly shaped contemporary sustainable design, directly birthing related terms like Benign Computing and Collapse Informatics.

Convivial Computing

Rooted in Ivan Illich’s 1973 book Tools for Conviviality, convivial computing advocates for responsibly limited tools that empower individuals and dismantle the boundary between programmers and users. While Illich’s original text problematically ignored how capitalist power structures drive overproduction—and contained deeply flawed views on gender and population control—his vision of technology serving a community's needs deeply influenced early hacker culture and permacomputing. Modern convivial computing focuses on "soft software" that is highly modular, customizable, and capable of running on older hardware, shifting the user into the role of a designer. Andrea Vetter later expanded this into the Matrix of Convivial Technology, a degrowth assessment tool that evaluates technology based on relatedness, accessibility, adaptability, bio-interaction, and appropriateness.

Degrowth

Degrowth in the context of the catalog is an urgent philosophical and practical necessity to radically scale down energy and resource consumption rather than merely swapping fossil fuels for green energy. It fiercely critiques the "greenwashing" of massive tech corporations, pointing out that hyperscale data centers claiming to be carbon neutral are actually devouring heavily subsidized local wind energy, creating additional energy demands rather than offsetting existing ones. This entry warns against fixating solely on CO2 emissions as a tidy accounting trick that distracts from the tech industry's massive water consumption, e-waste production, and land exploitation. Ultimately, degrowth demands an attack on the foundational business models of these corporations, which rely on surveillance, targeted advertising, and the aggressive stimulation of global overconsumption.

Disability Driven Development

Coined by Amelia Laumann for the SpoonStack project, Disability Driven Development (DDD) reimagines computing from a multiply-marginalized disabled perspective to challenge hegemonic, capitalist tech paradigms. Operating as a form of crip technoscience, DDD insists that marginalized people dictate their own technological needs, rejecting imperialist and ableist ideas of worth and productivity. The practice acknowledges that the open-source software space is often riddled with bigotry, aiming instead to create safe, joyful, and creative digital outlets published under the Unlicense to freely benefit the community. Environmentally, DDD aligns with degrowth by envisioning "unstable" or seasonal computing that operates on "crip time," drastically reducing electricity, manufacturing, and network permanence to foster a restorative, compostable relationship with the planet.

Ecofeminist and Always Unfinished Space Making

Originating from the practices of the Romanian collective hypha and their work with the rosa feminist server, this entry describes a methodology of digital space-making that prioritizes care, consent, and community over technical perfection. Acknowledging that network technologies are deeply enmeshed in patriarchal and capitalist histories, this practice accepts that true autonomy is impossible, forcing communities to "make do" with what is already available. It frames infrastructure as an ongoing, unfinished process maintained by unpaid volunteers, relying on a delicate, financially precarious balance of giving and taking. Heavily informed by decolonial and ecofeminist thought, it rejects the universal scaling of Western tech, proposing instead localized, situated networking—such as relying on a Local Area Network (LAN)—to foster collective emancipation and survival.

Feminist Technology

Rather than belonging to a single community, feminist technology is a broad research field and practice that redefines technology beyond militaristic, masculine, high-tech industrialism to include how societies cope with physical reality, such as food, clothing, and energy. It demands an embodied view of hardware and software, explicitly analyzing the social practices shaping them and unmasking the hidden, often exploited labor required to build them. A critical methodology within this field involves starting from the "zero point"—the perspective of those who do not fit standardized norms—to expose how seemingly stable networks exact violence on marginalized bodies. By insisting that the everyday is a site of political struggle, feminist technology asks who ultimately benefits from an innovation and firmly asserts that no current scientific or technological paradigm is inevitable.

Jenga Computing

Jenga Computing describes the precarious, balancing-act system administration practiced by the LURK collective, where essential community servers are kept alive using discarded hardware, digital scraps, and "tons of gaffer tape". Operating without a budget for most of its existence, LURK embodies the "junker" ethos, scavenging aging hardware to host mailing lists and Mastodon instances because most of a device's environmental impact occurs during its manufacturing phase. Because this older hardware is severely resource-constrained, everything running on it must be relentlessly optimized, treating software efficiency as a basic ethical obligation. While not explicitly defining itself as a feminist server, LURK actively performs feminist practices by treating their Terms of Service as living documents, carefully moderating microaggressions, and attempting to pioneer financially sustainable, surveillance-free social spaces via mutual aid.

Liberatory Technology

Defined by political philosopher Murray Bookchin in 1965, Liberatory Technology imagines an environmentally friendly, small-scale technological ecosystem strictly subordinated to an anarchist, communalist social structure. Bookchin believed that technology inherently lacks agency and must instead be deliberately rescaled and decentralized to eliminate manual toil and reintegrate humanity with the natural world. Rejecting both techno-pessimism and the individualistic lifestyle activism of "green capitalism," this framework argues that solar, wind, and hydro power should support local, multipurpose tools rather than centralized, mass-production industries. Liberatory Technology demands counter-systemic social activism, warning that true ecological balance is impossible without organized political movements capable of dismantling corporate and state domination.

Low-Tech

In contemporary usage, Low-Tech refers to practices and technologies explicitly designed to minimize environmental impact, reject planned obsolescence, and combat technological solutionism. Exemplified by projects like Low-tech Magazine, it focuses on radically reducing energy use by deploying solar-powered servers, utilizing static web pages, dithering images, and completely accepting network downtime when the sun isn't shining. The movement emphasizes accountability, demanding that computational costs remain on the server side rather than being outsourced to the user's device. While the aesthetic of low-tech is frequently co-opted for corporate greenwashing, true low-tech design—like the Solar Protocol network—integrates traditional ecological knowledge, accessibility, and extreme resource minimalism to demonstrate how society can live better with substantially less.

Patchwork Computing

Patchwork Computing, demonstrated by the Varia collective’s work on the rosa server, is the intentional, "seamful" practice of stitching together scripts and tools without automating them into invisibility. By deliberately refusing to automate server tasks, the community is forced to engage with the moving parts of their digital infrastructure, transforming routine maintenance into a welcoming, communal ritual. The practice flattens hierarchies by granting root privileges to all users, reclaiming the digital space by altering hostile administrative language into welcoming, localized instruction. Furthermore, it demands immense environmental flexibility, utilizing second-hand hardware and entirely rejecting the corporate standard of 99.999% uptime by accepting that servers will simply go offline when the community travels or steps away.

Permacomputing

Originating from the hyper-efficient demoscene, permacomputing was formalized by Ville-Matias Heikkilä to map the principles of permaculture directly onto digital hardware and software engineering. It approaches computation holistically, prioritizing planned longevity, extreme resource minimization, and the intelligent reuse of electronic waste over linear technological progress. Permacomputing explicitly rejects Moore's Law as an excuse for software bloat, demanding instead that programmers continuously refactor code to keep it small and accountable, ensuring heavy computation is only executed if it saves significant physical resources elsewhere. Operating as both a design framework and a political ideology, it actively contributes to the digital commons by placing tools in the public domain and fostering a deep, cultural connection to ecosystem strengthening.

Redundant Technology

Spawned by the Redundant Technology Initiative (RTI) in 1997, Redundant Technology treats electronic waste as a vital artistic and educational resource, employing a guerrilla "NINJA Economics" strategy that turns financial weakness into activist strength. Recognizing that acquiring the newest hardware operates as an exclusive, expensive club, the movement reclaims discarded computers destined for landfills, utilizing them for free public media labs, skill-sharing, and grassroots expression. Documented in the 1999 Lowtech Manifesto, it heavily critiques the "artwashing" of consumer electronics, arguing that high technology does not equate to high creativity. By embracing the strict limitations of aging hardware, redundant technology promotes open formats, digital independence, and deep skepticism toward endless consumerist upgrading.

Salvage Computing

Salvage Computing directly confronts the devastating planetary impact of IT supply chains and e-waste by prioritizing the repair, reuse, and maintenance of the literal millions of devices already in existence. Acknowledging that the vast majority of carbon emissions and toxic pollution happens during hardware manufacturing—disproportionately harming the Global South—salvage computing critiques the trend of buying newly manufactured "low-power" gadgets. The practice demands structural political change, aggressively lobbying for Right to Repair legislation, mandated modular design, accessible spare parts, and an end to planned obsolescence. It merges grassroots mutual aid (like Repair Cafés) with abolitionist, degrowth economics, arguing that keeping old hardware functioning via customized open-source software is an act of deep solidarity with global laborers and a necessary countermeasure to runaway consumer capitalism.

Seismography of Artistic Practices

Coined by the Austrian collective esc medien kunst labor, this term describes the continuous observation, recording, and fostering of momentum within activist and feminist artistic networks. Spearheaded by figures like Reni Hofmüller, the practice uses the concept of "resources" (time, energy, hardware, and emotional labor) as a critical entry point to tie together intersectional feminism, decoloniality, and environmental sustainability. It emphasizes that building digital infrastructure is fundamentally about creating safe environments where participants can admit ignorance and engage in slow, patient communal learning without fear. By documenting lived feminist tech history and bridging generational gaps, this seismography ensures that vital socio-political knowledge regarding technology's impact is passed down, allowing new collectives to build upon established infrastructures of care rather than starting from scratch.

Small Technology

Small Technology, heavily associated with smallnet and smolnet communities, represents a deliberate delinking from the surveillance-heavy, bloated commercial internet in favor of alternative, ultra-lightweight network infrastructures. Utilizing hyper-efficient protocols like Gopher and Gemini, or connecting directly via Public Access Unix Systems (pubnix), these DIY communities self-host services that voluntarily restrict CPU, memory, and bandwidth usage. Stripped of inline images, heavy scripts, and external style sheets, Small Technology creates intimate, closely-knit digital spaces rather than broadcasting to anonymous masses. The movement explicitly frames everyday network practices as a site of political struggle, viewing extreme resource minimalism and decentralization as necessary tools to disentangle human communication from the destructive grip of corporate tech monopolies.

With / in Limits

Practiced by the Brussels-based collective Constant, operating "With / in Limits" is a holistic refusal of the endless "cloud paradigm" by deliberately constraining digital growth and embracing "possible ongoingness". Instead of purchasing more server space when databases fill up, the collective enforces protocols to downsize files, remove colors from archived documents, and convert unused collaborative pads into static text, treating data storage as a finite, precious resource. Guided by their framework of Speculative Libre Intersectional Technologies (SPLINT), they actively investigate how open-source software can counteract systemic discrimination while practicing techno-disobedience through hardware repurposing. Furthermore, Constant exercises a deep ethic of care by actively sharing their limited infrastructure (such as Big Blue Button servers) with outside activist groups, proving that community-managed, radically limited digital resources can successfully subvert the reliance on big tech.