[Go Make Things] The Japanese Edo period and modern web development

By rahmat hidayat

Monday, July 8, 2024

​ Over the weekend, I read an article about the Japanese Edo period, and its culture of ecological sustainability… Partly due to the government's policy of not trading with outside nations, there was a scarcity of key resources like cotton and timber. The result was that Edo was a city without waste. Almost everything was reused, repaired, repurposed or in the last instance recycled – what we would today call a circular economy. The Edo economy "ran as a very efficient closed-loop system", argues sustainability historian Eisuke Ishikawa. A traditional yukata – a simple cotton summer kimono – would be used until the cloth began to wear out, at which point it had become soft enough to be turned into pyjamas. Its next stage of life was to be cut up for nappies, which could be washed again and again, after which it might become a floor cloth before finally being burned as fuel. For some reason, I started thinking about capitalism as a whole, and modern web development specifically, and how much it is the antithesis of this. Modern web development is phenomenally wasteful. We ship literal megabytes of JavaScript to serve up kilobytes of mostly static HTML. We use AI to generate shitty code boilerplate that we could just has easily have copy/pasted from StackOverflow a decade ago, but now we use 5x the electricity to to do it, and waste years of drinking water to keep it all cool. We chew through our users' data allowances in mere minutes. We create experiences that are basically unusable if you're not on the latest devices, perpetuating the cycle of disposing of perfectly working electronics before their expiration date and contributing to the mountain of e-waste the ends up on foreign shores, contaminating their farm soil and drinking water. The modern web—and capitalism as a whole—need an ecological renaissance. Tech won't get us there. Tech won't save us. Culture and human behavior will. Our sites should be small and fast and easy to maintain. Our electronics should easy to fix, and last far longer than they do. Our culture of buy, consume, and discard needs to be replaced with buy, maintain, and reuse. Cheers, Chris ​ Want to share this with others or read it later? View it in a browser.​ ​

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