The modern semiconductor industry is dependent on minerals from the majority world, fabrication in billion dollar facilities, and labour exploitation. This workshop seeks to break down those harms into their political, technical and physical components, and ask whether hardware can be produced without them or are they inherent to computation as we know it.

Some harms are apparent and better understood: planned obsolescence is a business model, labour exploitation is a political and moral choice, and IP regimes are legal constructs. The path to refusing these is somewhat clear. Yet even open hardware still requires the same mines and fabs. These harms are more embedded. Chips require materials that must be extracted and fabrication complexity and cost seems only feasible at scales massive capital enable.

Computing as currently conceived may be inseparable from these systems. But what if we started from different premises? Sufficiency over growth, longevity over obsolescence, shared infrastructure over disposable devices? What would we build differently, and what should we give up?

This workshop welcomes anyone unwilling to accept technological determinism and solutionism. We particularly encourage those in climate justice, de-colonial work and degrowth who sense hardware is part of the problem and are looking for frameworks for thinking about it.

Format: framing presentation (10 min), small-group discussion (50 min), synthesis (30 min). No technical background required.