• If you can read this, you are not a machine. [Gittit Szwarc]
• Clay PCB. [Patrícia J. Reis] “Our Clay PCB is not made of plastic but instead clay collected from the forest in Austria that was carefully prepared and modeled in a shape of a tile with an imprinted circuit, and later fired with wood in the nature. Our conductive tracks use urban-mined silver and all components are re-used from old electronic devices.” Via Roel Roscam Abbing.
• The revenge of the home page. [New Yorker] “As social networks become less reliable distributors of the news, consumers of digital journalism are seeking out an older form of online real estate.” Via Roel Roscam Abbing.
• The ‘boring phone’: stressed-out gen Z ditch smartphones for dumbphones. [The Guardian] “The problem with offlining is that the world is increasingly difficult for people without a smartphone.”
• This Irresistible Revolution. [The Point Magazine] “One of the ways that I “get offline” in the morning is by running—after which I upload my run to Strava.” Via Arts&Letters Daily.
• Ben Grosser, artist and creator of Minus, the opposite of Facebook. [Techtonic podcast]
• 2024 Small File Media Festival: Call for Work. Deadline: 15 June.

Distinction and alternative tech: Exploring the technocritical disposition. [New Media & Society] “How should we understand alternative social media and open-source technologies that seek to challenge the dominance of Big Tech? Are these ethical substitutes for monopolistic platforms and technological infrastructures, or “alternative” in the sense we might talk of alternative forms of culture?”

Things Used to Work in This Country. [The New Atlantis] “Personal technology used to be a machine. Now it’s a bureaucracy.”

“Wherever you get your podcasts” is a radical statement. [Anil Dash] “Podcasting as a technology grew out of the early era of the social web, when the norms of technology creators were that they were expected to create open systems, which interoperated with tools by other creators and even other companies.”

The Loss of Things I Took for Granted. [Slate] “Ten years into my college teaching career, students stopped being able to read effectively.”

Center for Technological Pain. [website] “DIY solutions to health problems caused by digital technologies.”

B C, Before Computers. On Information Technology from Writing to the Age of Digital Data. [Open Book Publishers] “Computer developments rely on a long history of humans creating technologies for increasingly sophisticated methods of manipulating information.”

“Carbolytics is a project at the intersection of art and research that aims to raise awareness and call for action on the environmental impact of pervasive surveillance within the advertising technology ecosystem (AdTech), as well as to provide a new perspective to address the social and environmental costs of opaque data collection practices. Online tracking is the act of collecting data from online user activity, such as reading the news, purchasing items, interacting on social media or simply doing an online search. It is known that tracking and recording users’ behaviour has become a major business model in the last decade.”

“However, even though the societal and ethical consequences of abusive online surveillance practices have been a subject of public debate at least since Snowden’s revelations in 2013, the energy and environmental costs of such processes have been kept away from the public eye. The global data collection apparatus is a complex techno maze that needs vast amounts of resources to exist and operate, yet companies rarely disclose information on the environmental footprint of such operations. Moreover, part of the energy costs of data collection practices is inflicted upon the user, who also involuntarily assumes a portion of its environmental footprint. Although this is a critical aspect of surveillance, there’s an alarming lack of social, political, corporate and governmental will for accountability, thus a call for action is urgent.”

More: Carbolytics. A project by Joana Moll commissioned by Aksioma in collaboration with Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) and in partnership with The Weizenbaum Insitute + Sónar +D.

Abstract: “This paper describes how principles derived from degrowth can be a useful heuristic for designing an ICT system within energy limits. It does so by discussing the design choices behind https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com, an ongoing design research project that set out to build a ’low-tech website’. This research resulted in a design which is lightweight, tailored towards older and lower-powered devices, is powered by off-grid solar energy and thus designed with energy scarcity in mind. The project shows that values and frameworks theorized within the Computing within Limits community are technically applicable to practices of web development but also identifies hurdles to their more widespread applicability.”

In 2020, our solar powered website obtained an uptime of 95%, meaning that it was offline for 444 hours or 20 days. Unsurprisingly, most of the downtime is concentrated in the winter months.

The graph above (click to enlarge) shows battery storage capacity in relation to the weather in Barcelona from January to December 2020. Yellow is sunny, grey is cloudy, blue is rain. From May to November, we were online without interruption for almost 6 months.

The data were collected and visualised by Roel Roscam Abbing and David Benqué.

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

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

The Galaksija computer was a craze in 1980s Yugoslavia, inspiring thousands of people to build versions in their own homes. The idea behind them was simple – to make technology available to everyone. Free play was implicitly encouraged: the sharing, collaboration, manipulation, and proliferation of software was built into Galaksija’s very operation.

A computing enthusiast since 1979, Zoran Modli caught wind of Galaksija after the publication of Computers in Your Home. As host and DJ of Ventilator 202—a renowned New Wave radio show on Serbia’s Radio Beograd 202—Modli was something of a minor celebrity in Yugoslavia. Because all the day’s computers, including Galaksija, ran their programs on cassette, Regasek thought Modli might broadcast programs over the airwaves as audio during his show. The idea was that listeners could tape the programs off their receivers as they were broadcast, then load them into their personal machines.

An overnight sensation, this DJing practice quickly became a staple on Modli’s show. In the ensuing months, Ventilator 202 broadcast hundreds of computer programs. During the hour, Modli would announce when the segment was approaching, signaling to his listeners that it was time for them to fetch their equipment, cue up a tape, and get ready to hit record. In the case of games, users would “download” the programs off the radio and alter them—inserting their own levels, challenges, and characters—then send them back to Modli for retransmission. In effect, this was file transfer well before the advent of the World Wide Web, a pre-internet pirating protocol.

Read more: Socialism’s DIY Computer, Michael Eby, Tribune, July 2020. Thanks to m.

This book is a guide on how to build a community network, a shared local telecommunications infrastructure, managed as a commons, to access the internet and other digital communications services. It was written collectively by a group of community network pioneers in Europe, activists and researchers during a writing residency week held in Vic, Catalonia in October 2018.

Meant for a wide audience, the book includes practical knowledge illustrated by several hands-on experiences – a set of 32 real-life stories – as well as legal, technical, governance, economic and policy material extracted from netCommons, a three-year-long research project supported by the European Commission. Its goal is to guide the reader through a set of actions aimed at setting up and fostering the growth of a community network, but also, for policy makers, local administrations and the general public, to create the right conditions to let community networks bloom and flourish.

“Telecommunications Reclaimed: A Hands-On Guide to Networking Communities“, netCommons. Open access. Via John Thackara. Previously: How to build a low-tech internet?

Read more: Can the Internet Survive Climate Change? How a warming world is sparking calls for a greener web, Kevin Lozano, The New Republic.

Web Bloat Score Calculator. Quoted from: Our Lighter Website, feasta.

First, Roussilhe built his site with a user friendly content management system (Kirby), which is then converted into a static website. Compared to our approach, this makes it easier to build a light-weight website for those who are accustomed to working with WordPress.

Second, the designer also tackles his videos, which are hosted on Vimeo and Youtube, and manages to reduce their “weight” by 75%. This is a major contribution, because video takes up the largest share of internet traffic.

Here’s his own conclusion:

If we take stock: I reduced the weight of my site by 10, the average weight of a page by more than 3 and I reduced the weight of my videos on third-party services by 4. I have a site extremely simple to administrate, very light so very fast, which consumes very little electricity and therefore emits little GHG.

The site also follows all the canons of today’s digital design: mobile-first, accessibility, loading speed. In fact it is quite surprising to realize that structural limitations (weight / energy) lead to navigation experiences much more accessible to all audiences regardless of their equipment, their connection or their imperative motricity or vision.

Read more: Digital guide to low tech.