The hardware of the end times
I watched to much media in general and probably have actually read too much other things aswell. In a sense that I sometimes confuse fiction with reality about things I am not that knowledgeable about. In German we have the nice coined compound word/proverb âgefährliches Halbwissenâ --- âdangerous half-knowledgeâ. Knowing enough to be dangerous. That said, recently my thoughts circle around the end of the world. Or rather, one scenario were we donât get bombed into the stone age but rather a stagnant world.
Say Taiwan disappears tomorrow. Maybe because the Cheetoh in Charge does something stupid or because China does a thing. One way or another, we would lose a few years of technological advancement. The same is true for a lot of other stuff. There might be even more catastrophic events that limits or shuts off the global supply chain stuff so things might not be available anymore. Or ever, because a substantial amount of knowledge workers slash engineers die in the water wars.
One way or another, I come back to the thought that the laptop I got right now is the last one I can ever buy. Further models I must salvage from the ruins of an abandoned Lidl, run with left over solar panels from some burned out residential building. The scenario is highly hypothetical. Just the right amount of collapse but not too much so you actually can still run or need computers in some form. There was a one season series called Jericho, that had some government agent that got an EMP hardened laptop, which was the only tech thing still running. I sometimes think about that one.
Most of our tech, well, almost everything isn't really built to outlast the consumer cycle of two years. Most electronics is so tiny that I couldnât hope to repair it in the first place. The reality check goes further, I personally donât have the skills to repair anything right now, with still intact supply chains. A lot of electronics apparently die of old age just by some capacitors leaking out, I donât even know if this was a thing with 90ties capacitors or if its a general problem. No clue. I also donât know if that only happens when they are in use, so you could store new ones of the right kind in a cold and dry place or if they always have a set shelf life.
However, back to my current laptop. Its a Framework 13 inch one. It got an AMD 7640 processor in it and is probably the best laptop I have owned so far, some people have problems but mine is rock solid. But, and that is a big but. Framework does not sell apocalypse proof laptops. They sell repairable laptops that reduce e-waste. Something that does not play well with global supply chain collapse. The next cycle of AMD processors already exists and it has some AI bullshit in it and feels like a sidestep, not an evolution in terms of advancement.
By the way, I also donât know how hard it is to create new capacitors from scratch, micro chips are super hard, but maybe more basics electronics can be build easier?
So when the end of the world comes, I have an offline copy of Wikipedia and some other mildly useful books and knowledge on the device. But something will break eventually. Maybe the power supply, the battery (likely), probably not the SSD and also probably not the CPU itself. But there are so many parts. I suspect that some kind of 65 Watts USB-C Power will be available for quite some time, so I am not that worried about that part. Might still happen though.
I am by no means a prepper, I just donât have the resources to devote anything substantial for the scenario were I most likely die in the first few weeks due infected water or food shortage. Or some greedy wannabe warlord to be.
So I established by the power of my dangerous half-knowledge that anything electronic pretty much will only last so long it had before the apocalypse because there is nothing I can do. As everything I have is of dubious quality (it all comes from China, and those guys can produce quality, but I, again, lack the knowledge to identify it, so we can assume capitalist greed brings me the most corner-cut version of everything).
But there is also another scenario that is super likely, does not really directly kill anyone and seems to happen already. The Cyberpunk/Shadowrun (Cyberpunk with magic)/Dystopian/Late Stage Capitalism route:
Any one device you currently own might be the last open one that ever will be. The idea is absolutely not new and everything I think to know is from somewhere else.
My current phone is a Samsung, which is already pretty bad, its a Galaxy S20 FE, okay camera, reasonable fast in 2025 and almost out of the security update cycle. It also sports an ÂľSD card slot slash secondary SIM card. The successor, theS21 does not. The phone is by the way from 2021, FE stands for Fan Edition, a mystery in itself because I doubt any meaningful back and forth input from fans took place. The phone is fine but eventually it will not work anymore with the things a modern citizen needs. The battery already seems to start lagging, but that I might be able to fix with coin.
Currently there is a big upheaval in the open source community regarding changes with the next big Android release. Google kills the easy access for software installation that somehow got allowed to be called sideloading as if it was something shady I do on my device. Let me emphasise that again, MY device. That I paid for. That already runs a black box of a broadband chip that easily outs me to any one regime that might have the sliver of an excuse to spy on me.
So my next phone might be more of a block box than ever before, already had I to run a man in the middle attack on my fitness watch to not expose all my data to the producer of the hardware I own. I start to sound like a lunatic with all those emphasis on ownership but I feel like the overtone window about those things has significantly shifted already.
Big thanks and shout out to Gadgetbridge at this point. The âhackingâ I did was technically not necessary, on a rooted phone, read, a device I would actually own completely, I could have just opened up the sqlite database of the App and extracted the key to, wait for it, my other device. Another sub-thought here, that fitness watch will be totally useless once the world ends, its not use able without a server in the first place. At all. Ignoring the usefulness of a powered device that does not contribute to survival in any way. I assume those gps/glosnass/geo position satellites aren't for long either.
This is getting long and I have to actively stop myself to ramble which is what happens if you write based on feelings (or vibes if you are born after 2000) instead of well researched facts. The core of the thought that spawned this post was that this laptop I am writing this on, might be the last truly free device I will ever own. Which is technically not true anyway.
And I fear that, my thoughts are born out of fear for the world of tomorrow that only consists of devices that are always online, demand a weekly subscription, are never truly yours and are the opposite of apocalypse proof. Truly doomsday ready devices would be 80ties, maybe 90ties tech at most, but at least some kind of resilience might be nice. At this point Meshtastic might be mentioned, even if its probably not really the tech that will save us all.
Any device that needs me to install some kind of App to use it, and has no buttons in itself, is in my eyes basically 100% e-waste already. Regardless of the state of the current global supply chain. Any gadget needs a very good reason to not be self contained in some way. Make that my first demand for hardware. And it feels like world moves to a point where nothing is so anymore. (Another random thought, in the game Subnautica, it is stated that almost all space ships are not really self contained and need landing ports and is why the Aurora is so special. And the Subnautica universe is another capitalist end stage)
So even if the world ends in 20 years or more, maybe the hardware of the apocalypse is the stuff we have now, and not some fancy gadget that was produced right before the fall.
Two semi relevant, half-knowledge anecdotes in the end.
In the Fallout-Universe, the micro chip was only invented shortly before the world ended in 2083, so there are some tiny devices, but everything else is transistor. Logically, almost all surviving tech is chunky as heck.
An old, german computer games magazine (Gamestar) had a Star Trek persiflage called âRaumschiff Gamestarâ where one of the plot points was that the needed to get a Commodore 64 because it was the last untainted hardware. I think more frequently about that in recent times.
Was Windows 7 the last untainted software? Was it XP? Anything Microsoft really? What was the last, complete hardware&software stack you could get out of a warehouse box and get running without any external connection, just with data on discs?