13. From Permacomputing to Agbogbloshie

Digital growth is often depicted by mainstream Western media as weightless and immaterial, beliefs reinforced by capitalistic tropes embedded in sociotechnical processes of chip miniaturisation, technological pervasiveness, and seamlessness. Among these tropes lies the metaphor of the “cloud”, used by tech corporations to obfuscate the material and labour implications of data transmission. In response to these blackboxed technologies, this chapter examines the role of makerspaces and collaborative design practices, whose acts of critical making and unmaking resist dominant corporate beliefs about technology. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, the chapter offers a comparative analysis of two communities across different geopolitical contexts. The first is the permacomputing community in Amsterdam, which fosters computational sustainability and resilience. The second encompasses makerspaces in Accra — the Agbogbloshie Makerspace Platform and Innovate Labs — which respond to the electronic waste crisis by providing tools and training to local communities. Placing these communities in dialogue, the chapter makes three arguments: that studying such practices renders tangible our computational material implications; that technology, though framed as universal, is deeply situated at the local scale; and that tracing these communities' resistance exposes the vertical power dynamics corporations enforce on individual actors. Together, these cases reveal how seamfulness and openness emerge through distributed innovation enacted outside institutionalised computing frameworks.