No Tech Reader #44: Tech & Politics

April 5, 2024 by kris de decker Filed Under: Cities, Luddites, No Tech Readers, Politics, Technology

A Seamless Dystopia. [The Nation] “When I was younger, growing up in the rural but rapidly developing small town of my youth, I believed that cities were the place where one could find freedom. The greatest disappointment of my young adulthood has been the discovery that this is not true.” Via Arts&Letters Daily.

Surveilling Alone. [The New Atlantis] “Interpersonal surveillance technologies have rendered us far more visible to each other and given people a sense of security and safety when it comes to protecting their homes and loved ones. But they have not helped rebuild the one thing that human beings need to live together in peace: trust.”

After the Holocene. [Gene Ray] “Rightwing and leftwing “prepping” may share some practices and technics, but no equation between them is possible.”

Torching the Google car: Why the growing revolt against big tech just escalated. [Blood in the machine] “The original Luddites opposed “machinery hurtful to commonality,” not any and all new tech. Today’s self-driving car adversaries seem to be operating on a similar principle.”

The Goba of Ladakh: Current Relevance of a Traditional Governance System. [Vikalp sangam] Indigenous and other local traditional communities in India have had their own systems of local governance, which have informed people’s interaction with fellow community members as well as the rest of nature.

No Tech Reader #35

January 5, 2023 by kris de decker Filed Under: Archery, Bicycles, Bikes, Books & Reference, Communication, Cooking stoves, Economy, Energy efficiency, Energy efficiency paradox, Fire, Gadgets, Health, No Tech Readers, Phones, Technology, Warfare

Electrification, digitalization, webification, datafication, personalization, actuation, and marketization

October 24, 2022 by kris de decker Filed Under: Technofix, Technology

“This theoretical essay argues that the development of so-called ‘smart innovations’ is based on the monotonous application of seven standardized principles: electrification, digitalization, webification, datafication, personalization, actuation, and marketization. When a new smart innovation appears, what has typically occurred was the implementation of these principles to an object or process that, until that moment, had managed to remain unscathed by the smart innovation monoculture. As reactions to this dominant logic, ten major critical arguments against smart innovations have emerged in the academic literature: smart innovations are considered to be superseding, unhealthy, subordinating, exploitative, manipulative, addictive, fragile, colonial, labyrinthine, and both ecologically and socially unsustainable.”

“To a certain extent adopting the traits of a manifesto, this essay aims to challenge the monoculture of smart innovations by means of proposing the development of a charter potentially capable of promoting change on two fronts. First, facilitating technologists to develop truly creative ideas that are not based on the application of the monotonous principles of smart innovation. Second, challenging technologists to develop new ideas and concepts that are effectively beyond the above-mentioned ten criticisms. This is a highly relevant area for citizen-driven, political, and academic activism, as smart innovations, despite their conceptual weaknesses and patent negative consequences, surprisingly continue to be preferred beneficiaries for funding in contemporary policy-making and academic research circles.”

Read more: Ferreira, António. “Seven Principles and Ten Criticisms: Towards a Charter for the Analysis, Transformation and Contestation of Smart Innovations.” Sustainability 14.19 (2022): 12713.

Via Roel Roscam Abbing.

No Tech Reader #34

October 13, 2022 by kris de decker Filed Under: Consumption, Craftsmanship, DIY, Economy, Education, Farming, Health, Luddites, No Tech Readers, Politics, Social media, Technology, Travel, Unabomber
  • Low-tech at the University. [Kairos] The challenge of low-tech is not to juxtapose harmless « soft » alternatives to industrial technologies, as this would only create a new niche market for « responsible consumers ». It is a question of replacing, as much as possible, the industrial productions by artisanal productions, adapted to the direct environment of their user, selected, understandable, repairable, adaptable and durable.
  • Why the past 10 years of American life have been uniquely stupid. [The Atlantic] “The main problem with social media is not that some people post fake or toxic stuff; it’s that fake and outrage-inducing content can now attain a level of reach and influence that was not possible before 2009.”
  • Stuck Between Climate Doom and Denial. [The New Atlantis] The incredibly fascinating, important, and nuanced issue of climate change has become an online team sport between the good guys (your side) and the bad guys (the other side).
  • The Unabomber and the origins of anti-tech radicalism. [Journal of Political Ideologies]. “As today’s most infamous anti-tech radical, and as the one with the most detailed blueprint for a revolution, Kaczynski may well become the ‘Marx’ of anti-tech.”
  • The Degrowth conundrum. [Resilience] “Only when the right ideas and values become predominant can structural change towards simpler lifestyles and systems take place. These conditions show the fundamental mistake built into the standard socialist assumption that the good society must have highly centralised state control. And it shows that the standard socialist strategy of taking control of the state is also fundamentally mistaken.”
  • Ecological Civilisation: Beyond Consumerism and the Growth Economy – Free Course. “This video series will be grappling with the problems of consumerism and the growth economy; envisioning alternative, post-carbon ways of life; and considering what action can be taken, both personally and politically, to help build an ecological civilisation.”
  • Why we need the apocalypse. [Unherd] In modern terms, “apocalypse” has come to mean “the cataclysmic end of everything”. But this is a long way from the ancient Greek understanding: to uncover, to disclose or lay bare. From this perspective, apocalypse isn’t the end of the world. Or at least, not just the end of the world. Rather, it’s the end of a worldview: discoveries that mean a previous way of looking at things is no longer tenable.
  • Monbiotic Man. [The Land] “Simon Fairlie assesses the farm-free future for humanity spelled out in George Monbiot’s latest book ‘Regenesis’.”
  • Beyond rescue ecomodernism: the case for agrarian localism restated. [Small farm future] “Given the present world historical moment of profound crisis that the modernist myth of progress has generated and cannot tackle, it surprises me how powerfully it still animates almost all mainstream responses to the crisis.”
  • Should we be trying to create a circular urine economy? [Ars technica] “Urine diversion could solve a lot of the environmental problems that plague overwhelmed wastewater treatment systems, but it’s a whole different way of thinking.”
  • How To Deflate An SUV Tyre. [Tyre Extinguishers]. “Because governments and politicians have failed to protect us from this danger, we must protect ourselves.”
  • Useless Car.
  • Silicon Valley’s Push Into Transportation Has Been a Miserable Failure. [Gizmodo] The titans of tech brought plenty of disruption to our broken transportation system but delivered little in the way of innovation.
  • The global warming reduction potential of night trains. [Back on Track] “Back-on-Track, a European network of night train initiatives, has examined air passenger numbers in the EU in 2019 to see which air connections could be replaced by night train connections.”
  • The attack on rail. [Compact Magazine]. “Disorder, war, and general chaos have conspired to prevent what ought to have been the global triumph of the railway.”
  • Chronotrains. This map shows you how far you can travel from each station in Europe in less than 5 hours.
  • Orbis. ORBIS allows us to express Roman communication costs in terms of both time and expense. By simulating movement along the principal routes of the Roman road network, the main navigable rivers, and hundreds of sea routes in the Mediterranean, Black Sea and coastal Atlantic, this interactive model reconstructs the duration and financial cost of travel in antiquity.
  • Fuck Off Google.
  • After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have thrown in the towel. The oligopoly has won. [Carlos Fenollosa]
  • FreedomBox. FreedomBox is a private server for non-experts: it lets you install and configure server applications with only a few clicks. It runs on cheap hardware of your choice, uses your internet connection and power, and is under your control.
  • Old age isn’t a modern phenomenon – many people lived long enough to grow old in the olden days, too. [The Conversation] It’s incorrect to view long lives as a remarkable and unique characteristic of the “modern” era.
  • The Healing Power of “Bello”. [Craftsmanship Quarterly] How an intentional community in Italy uses craftsmanship—and a sense of family—to holistically rehabilitate people who are suffering from drug addiction.
  • The making and knowing project. “The Making and Knowing Project is a research and pedagogical initiative in the Center for Science and Society at Columbia University that explores the intersections between artistic making and scientific knowing. Today these realms are regarded as separate, yet in the earliest phases of the Scientific Revolution, nature was investigated primarily by skilled artisans by means of continuous and methodical experimentation in the making of objects – the time when “making” was “knowing.””

Technologically utopian solutions rest on narrowly defined system boundaries

July 26, 2021 by kris de decker Filed Under: Random, Science, Technology

Quoted from: Cederlof, Gustav, and Alf Hornborg. “System boundaries as epistemological and ethnographic problems: Assessing energy technology and socio-environmental impact.” Journal of Political Ecology 28.1 (2021): 111-123.

What are the social and environmental impacts of carbon and low-carbon energy technologies in different places and at different times? To answer this question, we are faced with an epistemological dilemma. Before measurement takes place, we need to define where and when the phenomenon we are measuring begins and ends—to define its “system boundaries.” For instance, one liter of semi-skimmed milk, bought in a British supermarket, has an energy content of 380 kcal. However, to think of the milk in terms of energy also evokes the far-reaching social and environmental contexts that bring milk to the market.

Beyond the energy content declared on the milk carton, we can undertake a life cycle assessment (LCA)—expanding the system boundaries—to account for the energy (or the carbon, water, labor, or land) “embodied” in the milk via its production and distribution. We might include the energy content of processed cattle feed, electricity used to run milking machines, cooling tanks, water boilers, and lighting, energy inputs in alkaline and acid detergents, diesel for tractors, and a wide range of other energy technologies used in production.

We might expand the system boundaries further to account for the fuels needed to generate the electricity, run the chemical plant, fuel the milk tanker, power the dairy plant, and so on. Arguably, we should also account for the energy expended in the production of the electricity generator, the milking machine, the milk tanker and the tractor, fencing and the batteries storing energy to electrify it. But if an electricity generator and a battery are somehow embodied in a liter of milk, we have culturally come far away from what we normally understand milk to be. Where, then, should we draw the system boundaries around an object in order to gauge its social and environmental impact?

[Read more…]

What to limit, and how and why

July 5, 2021 by Francis Rogers Filed Under: Economy, Ivan Illich, Technology

A common argument made by proponents of degrowth, supported by historical evidence, is that economic growth is ecologically unsustainable and entails an increasing inequitable distribution of resources. In Tools for degrowth? Ivan Illich’s critique of technology revisited, Silja Samerski discusses Ivan Illich’s (1926-2002) argument that limits to growth are needed not only for ecological or distributive justice, but for social freedom. Any limits must be politically decided, and applied not primarily to the economy, but to technology. [Read more…]