From Soil to Servers
I recently joined the Composting Futures workshop organised by Future Everything in collaboration with University of Arts London's Critical Climate Computing team, MUD, the University of Manchester, and Sow the City.
The day started with literal compost heaps and ended with looking at a web server powered by compost. We moved from looking at soil profiles, microbes, and roots into questions about computation, energy, and how we might design technology differently.
Getting our hands in the soil
At the Platt Community Garden we explored natural soil profiles and how layers build up over time. I learned how soil health can be determined by reading the ground like a cross-section: the pit showed a thin organic layer on top, a darker A horizon where most biological activity happens, then a paler subsoil, and finally some dense Manchester clay.
There was an interesting band of clinker sitting in the profile. These were leftovers from Manchester’s industrial past. Clinker can change the physical and chemical behaviour of the soil which shapes which plants thrive. More critically, it can carry metal traces and other residues. None of this means food grown there is unsafe by default, but it does mean safety is an empirical question rather than an assumption. It was fascinating though because it collapses time in a sense.
Growing food in urban areas comes with its challenges. These processes of soil analysis are crucial to gather evidence that the ground is safe for produce. Contaminants do not always transfer directly into plants, and we looked at ways to find out for sure.
XRF (X-ray Fluorescence) analysis can reveal the elemental composition of soil without destroying the sample. It provides urban growers with an accessible method to assess soil safety.
We also looked at bioassays: simple tests you can try at home by growing plants in different soils and tracking their root systems. Grow the same seeds in different soils, log germination and root growth, and compare. It is a low-cost method that surfaces functional effects long before you have a full chemical work-up.
The microscopy area did turn the community garden into a living lab!
The soil food web depicts how soil is alive and how microbial networks work. The role of fungi-algae association (lichens) in nutrient exchange and carbon fixing is marvellous! There is a practical lesson right there for low-power, high-uptime systems. Lichens operate slowly, tolerate scarcity, and make more life possible around them.
Compost for computation
Carrying that lesson forward, we then shifted into critical computing and the idea of a compost computer. We discussed reframing decomposition as both an ecological process and computational metaphor. We looked at some phenomenal work done by the Critical Climate Computing team at UAL using Microbial Fuel Cells that produces energy as compost breaks down. I loved the demo of a low-tech web server running on compost power.
This opened up wider conversations about finding new ways to think about humans, computation, and the climate. Planned obsolescence in tech, e-waste, and data centre burn are not abstract issues but are very much material consequences of our current computational infrastructures.
The web doesn’t have to be bound to endless extraction though. What would it mean to design systems that embrace slowness, and acknowledge that the web itself is not infinite but compostable? Here are some computing practices that resist extractive defaults:
- Permacomputing: a stance that borrows from permaculture to prioritise longevity, repair, modesty, and a regenerative relationship with material and ecology.
- Low-tech Web: Designing an energy-aware web: static-first, image-light, careful typography, and making intermittency visible when power is scarce. Solar Protocol is an exemplar project where requests are routed to whichever solar-powered server currently has the most sun. My micro-project Ūrjā studies energy-adaptive web design and directly draws from this.
- Pluriversal computation: recognises multiple ways of knowing and designing. Decolonises computing and situates systems in place and culture.
- Esoteric computing: using unconventional languages and substrates to question what counts as computation and reveal its politics.
These are a few attempts at reframing computing as situated, slower, repairable, and accountable to the communities it draws from. This expands the existing computing space, focuses on constraint, materiality, and infrastructural literacy. It is crucial for us to think about web decay and to acknowledge that old and slow does not equal useless.
Systems, whether biological or digital, are layered and full of hidden exchanges. This invites us to rethink growth, waste, and cycles. Technology doesn’t always need to scale up. Sometimes it can scale down, slow down, or even decompose.
Technology can be treated less like an infinite resource and more like soil. Fertile, alive, finite, and in need of care?