For those who want to build their own solar powered website, we have released the source code and a manual outlining all hardware and software details.
No Tech Reader #21
- The Problem with Reinforced Concrete. Putting steel inside concrete ruins its potentially great durability.
- The Quieter Life. Adopting traditional values, attitudes and practices in an increasingly nihilistic world.
- Cool People’s Movements. Let’s not confuse ‘the right to be cool’ with the right to a consumer good.
- Life in the Spanish City that Banned Cars. In Pontevedra, the usual soundtrack of a Spanish city has been replaced by the tweeting of birds and the chatter of humans.
- Solar Panels Replaced Tarmac on a Motorway. Here are the Results. Several factors work against this oddly popular idea.
- Opec Predicts Massive Rise in Oil Production over Next Five Years. Increasing demand from airlines will more than offset reductions from electric cars.
- Everything You’ve Been Told about Plastic is Wrong. Recycling is the grown-up version of squeezing our eyes shut, sticking our fingers in our ears and shouting “lalalalalala!”.
- Why Growth Can’t Be Green. New data proves you can support capitalism or the environment—but it’s hard to do both.
- I’ve Seen the Future of Consumer AI, and it Doesn’t Have One. If ever there was a solution looking for a problem, it’s ramming AI into gadgets to show off a company’s machine learning prowess.
- Leave no Dark Corner. China is building a digital dictatorship to exert control over its 1.4 billion citizens.
First two links via Wrath of Gnon. Last link via John Butler. Penultimate link via Slashdot.
Technological Sovereignty
We deserve to have other technologies, something better than what we nowadays call Information and Communication Technologies. This book delves into the guiding principles of technological sovereignty and proposes new theoretical and practical descriptions of some initiatives developing free technologies. It deals with its psychological, social, political, ecological and economic costs while it relates experiences to create Technological Sovereignty.
The authors bring us closer to other ways of desiring, designing, producing and maintaining technologies. Experiences and initiatives to develop freedom, autonomy and social justice while creating autonomous mobile telephony systems, simultaneous translation networks, leaks platforms, security tools, sovereign algorithms, ethical servers and appropriate technologies among others.
From the introduction to Technological Sovereignty Vol.2,, which is available in English, French, and Spanish. The first volume is available in French and Spanish only.
No Tech Reader #20
- Taking back the wheel. In the future heralded by Silicon Valley, cars will fly and labor will be disposable. But none of this is inevitable. It’s a political choice—that we can still reject.
- Engineering the climate could cost us the Earth. A political technology, geoengineering belongs to the institutional apparatus that is preventing effective climate action and reducing the urgency for structural change.
- Scientists assessed the options for growing nuclear power. They are grim. For better or worse, renewable energy is the name of the game for the next few decades.
- Artificial Saviors. An increasingly powerful and influential social group is hard-coding its biases into the software running our societies.
- Pulling the magical lever. Techno-utopian visions can’t be used as inspiration for the creation of anything but an upper-class gated community sucking out resources and labour from peripheries and keeping the unfortunate poor out.
- What Happened in the Dark: Puerto Rico’s Year of Fighting for Power. “Could @elonmusk go in and rebuild Puerto Rico’s electricity system with independent solar & battery systems?”
All links via Uneven Earth’s August 2018 newsletter.
No Tech Reader #19
- Stacking concrete blocks is a surprisingly efficient way to store energy. [Via John Newman & Nicolas Maigret]
- The social ideology of the motor car (1973 essay).
- Gig economy pressures make drivers ‘more likely to crash‘.
- Rediscovering travel & The trouble with vacations.
- Look up from your screen.
- If solar panels are so clean, why do they produce so much toxic waste?
- The cashless society is a con – and big finance is behind it.
- Raising my child in a doomed world.
- Rise of the machines: has technology evolved beyond our control?
Fermentation and Daily Life
There is a moment in the life of fruits and vegetables that has always puzzled and fascinated me. Put out a dish of strawberries, and in days some darker spots will appear. Maybe a thin tendril of mold sprouts out from the strawberry’s body. At this point, you can still eat it, simply by cutting off the moldy bit. But all of a sudden, the strawberry has clearly died. It’s inedible, sour. It has passed over in to the world of bacteria, mold, and minerals—it is no longer a self-regulating organism. It has stopped being an individual, but has become multitudes.
How does this happen? When is an organism living, and when is it dead? Where does death come from, and why does this change of state happen so quickly? Amazingly, we’ve developed some techniques to play with this boundary between life and death, stretch it, and blur it. I’m not talking about cryogenic freezing, blood transfusion, lab-grown meat, or any other modern technology. I’m talking about fermentation, the process of controlled decay of living organisms.
From coffee to ketchup, bread to sausage, wine to cheese, fermented foods are all around us. These types of fermentation tend to happen in far-off factories. Coffee berries are fermented before they’re roasted. To make ketchup, tomatoes are puréed en masse, left to rot, then heated to kill the bacteria. We usually don’t get the chance to see for ourselves the transformation of life—into other forms of life.
But you can. In this essay, I talk about fermentation: what makes it so magical, why people are so afraid of it. I talk about some strategies people use to make fermentation part of their daily life, and why modern life makes it so hard to do so. And finally, I speak to the ethics of fermentation—what we can learn from it and how it can help us think differently. [Read more…]