What is a clunk?#

In programming, a hack is an ugly but expedient solution to a problem. A clunk is a suite of hacks that solve the biggest and messiest of problems: lack of resources. Be it time, money, tools, or knowledge, there never seems to be enough to get it done. Hacking is about making something do what its creator never intended, clunking is about making it work with what you have. It doesn’t matter that the car makes a clunking noise, you gotta drive to work.

Home labs with political aspiration#

Clunking isn’t about best practice. It’s about realistic practice. Best practice is just corporate speak for “approved practice”. In corporate tech, best practice can sometimes become gate keeping, and gate keeping can sometimes become bourgeois bullshit. It’s easy to “do the right thing” when you have a team and a budget. When you are alone in front of your homemade server rack, or all you have is an old laptop, practicality takes priority. Sometimes you just have to clean up the mess later when you have more resources.

Corporate tech is often less about good work, and more about who gets taken seriously. When you are on the wrong side of the gate, the rules made up by people with time, money, mentorship, and managerial approval don’t really matter. The problem with information technology isn’t that it’s hard, it’s because it’s dripping with “real engineers” that are gatekeeping assholes judging you for not being like them.

The Real Engineers(TM) clunk too, they just give it corporate names like “Technological Debt”, which just means “the chain of questionable decisions that led us to here.” VMWare cutting free licensing on ESXi is the corporate IT equivalent of the apocalypse. The scramble by companies to find a suitable replacement is clunk city. Clunkware` doesn’t collapse like that because it’s not propped up by corporate best practice to begin with.

This idea isn’t new, and it’s failed before#

People don’t use GMail because they’re stupid, or they don’t know what surveillance capitalism is. They use it because it just works, every time you log in, and you don’t have to know what an MX record is. Normal people don’t care how that sausage gets made. And there are other projects and products with similar aims. The idea isn’t to reinvent them, just to provide better access to them.

So instead of inventing a product, I propose inventing a pattern. Instead of technological wizardry, I want to focus on accessibility. The code is already written (Debian, Proxmox, Wireguard, etc.), there’s no need to rewrite it. It needs lower barriers to entry. After the slow collapse of late-stage capitalism, we will still need to get online, to connect to each other. Clunkware is that post-collapse, Mad Max looking infrastructure.