Compostable Software

Software design for disassembly and decomposition

• "Software is not soft" — it is not made of materials suitable for composting
  • A modular decomposition? Everyting is tidly-coupled, so it’s not easy to modularize it.
  • software is brittle, made of plastic and glass
• Systems which aren’t assumed to live forever, they can die, and this death can be nutritious for the ecology/substrate of computing if we want it to be.
• Commercial programming/software production would rather make dying software toxic (like how food corps poison it and throw it away so people cant benefit)
• ecological stewardship > constructing walled gardens
• Systems whose parts are useful for future systems, like how the death of a plant is nutritious for the ecology
• An alternative to the traditional death of software where either someone picks up maintenance or it dies and becomes useless. Instead, actively breaking down the system for insights, algorithms, ideas, etc. and returning them to the commons. An “Exit to Commons” of a sort…
• Incentivising systems which are made to be “nutritious” after death (toxic might be the other extreme) such that their parts are amenable to recomposition after some light transformation.
• Composting reduces collective labor
• reconceptualising digital waste -> reuse vs landfill
  • github is mostly a landfill, a dump of undigestible artifacts of hard cognitive labor

Narrative artifacts

• GitHub is not a repository of knowledge — it is a landfill. Made mostly of software which has died, constructed from materials which cannot be decomposed.
• The production of software under capitalism casts the afterlife of computational labor as a walled garden of decay. Locked away, discarded, or sold to those with the weaponry to direct gardeners and protect the gardens walls.
• The materials of software are brittle, resembling appliances and machines, easily breaking down into piles of rusting metal unless constantly maintained. - Software is not soft — for it is made of materials unsuitable for composting, for reuse, and re-organisation.
• A world of compostable software is one in which software has an afterlife — it's parts becoming nutrients for a shared substrate of computation. The value of the labour which produced it is passed into the dirt, fueling the growth of new organisation.
• Dead software is the norm. An ever-growing landfill of ghosts is perpetuated by commercial interests who claim the rights to own systems after death. To advocate for compostable software is to challenge both its production and its afterlife — that software be constructed from decomposable materials, and that decomposition after death is not governed by a regime of private property.