Archives for November 2020

No Tech Reader #26

November 26, 2020 by kris de decker Filed Under: No Tech Readers

This Website is Designed to Last

“My proposal is seven unconventional guidelines in how we handle websites designed to be informative, to make them easy to maintain and preserve. The guiding intention is that the maintainer will try to keep the website up for at least 10 years, maybe even 20 or 30 years. These are not controversial views necessarily, but are aspirations that are not mainstream—a manifesto for a long-lasting website.”

Read more: A Manifesto for Preserving Content on the Web, Jeff Huang.

See also: A clean start for the web, Tom MacWright.

November 26, 2020 by kris de decker Filed Under: Access to information, Internet

The Smart Wife: Why Siri, Alexa, and Other Smart Home Devices Need a Feminist Reboot

In The Smart Wife: Why Siri, Alexa, and Other Smart Home Devices Need a Feminist Reboot, Yolande Strengers and Jenny Kennedy examine the emergence of digital devices that carry out “wifework”–domestic responsibilities that have traditionally fallen to (human) wives. They show that the principal prototype for these virtual helpers–designed in male-dominated industries–is the 1950s housewife: white, middle class, heteronormative, and nurturing, with a spick-and-span home. It’s time, they say, to give the Smart Wife a reboot.

November 26, 2020 by kris de decker Filed Under: Books

Post Growth Toolkit

Post Growth Toolkit [The Game] is an invitation to reprogram ourselves out of the economic growth orthodoxy. It proposes to literally reshuffle our world-views through a compilation of stories, concepts and tactics in order to stimulate new modes of understanding in the context of current environmental crises. It takes the form of a tactical card game inviting players to explore a number of key notions to facilitate collective debate.

November 26, 2020 by kris de decker Filed Under: Random, Technology