• Western Architecture is Making India’s Heatwaves Worse. [Time]
• Could Google’s Carbon Emissions Have Effectively Doubled Overnight? [The New Yorker]
• When Cities Made Monuments to Traffic Deaths. [Bloomberg] Via Aaron Vansintjan.
• Can Dryland Farming Help Growers Endure Increasing Heatwaves and Drought? + A Guide to Drought-Resilient Farm Animals + 10 Drought-Tolerant Crops to Plant Amid Water Scarcity. [Modern Farmer]
• How the Amish Use Technology. [Wired] Via Bradley Stroot.

Sustainable computing special.

• Digital sufficiency: conceptual considerations for ICTs on a finite planet, Tilman Santarius et al., Annals of Telecommunication, 2022.
• Permacomputing. Viznut, 2021.
• What might degrowth computing look like? Neil Selwyn, 2022.
• Solar Witch. A tiny solar-powered server only awake during the day. More at hackernews.
• What if the internet was only available 95% of the time? Interview with Kris De Decker about the solar powered website. Inside/Out Radio, April 2022.
• The Website Carbon Calculator thinks the solar powered website is run by fossil fuels….
• What It’s Like To Stop Using Google Search, Clive Thompson, 2022.
• The Staggering Ecological Impacts of Computation and the Cloud. The MIT Press Reader, February 2022
• Meet the Self-Hosters, Taking Back the Internet One Server at a Time. Vice, September 2021
• The Modos Paper Laptop. More at Hackernews.

• The Technocrat’s Dilemma — Expert rule is destroying itself. Alexander Stern, The New Atlantis, April 2022. “Technocrats, when they speak in public, use the rhetoric of objective, neutral, scientific knowledge to justify policy decisions that are not — cannot be — fully “based on science”.”
• In the dark: How authoritarian regimes found an off switch for dissent. Rest of World, Peter Guest, April 2022. “The free, open, global internet is under severe threat. Blackouts and mass censorship risk fragmenting the internet and even undermining its physical integrity.”
• Their bionic eyes are now obsolete and unsupported. IEEE Spectrum, Eliza Strickland & Mark Harris, February 2022. “More than 350 blind people around the world with Second Sight’s implants in their eyes, find themselves in a world in which the technology that transformed their lives is just another obsolete gadget.”
• In the Battle Over the Right to Repair, Open-Source Tractors Offer an Alternative. Greta Moran, Civil Eats, April 2022. “The idea is to create more regional, country-level manufacturing for farm equipment, rather than having farmers rely on the major global manufacturers whose sales don’t benefit the local economy.”

• Lab-grown meat is supposed to be inevitable. The science tells a different story. [The Counter] “It’s a fable driven by hope, not science, and when the investors finally realize this the market will collapse.”
• A world without Sci-Hub. [Palladium] “The cost of individually purchasing all the articles required to complete a typical literature review could easily amount to thousands of dollars.”
• Manufacturing Consensus. [The New Atlantis] “We hear constantly today, and rightly enough, that trust in scientific expertise is under assault. Too often during Covid, the assailants have been the experts themselves.”

Mob morality and the unvaxxed.
The fear operating in the ostracism of the unvaxxed is mostly not fear of disease, though disease may be its proxy. The main fear, old as humanity, is of a social contagion. It is fear of association with the outcasts, coded as moral indignation.

I’m a Luddite. You should be one too.
I’m also a social scientist who studies how new technologies affect politics, economics and society. For me, Luddism is not a naive feeling, but a considered position.

I have one of the most advanced prosthetic arms in the world — and I hate it.
When my new, 21st-century arm arrived, I hosted an “arm party,” an absurdist celebration of the new device as well as a farewell for a pile of old, passive arms with broken silicone fingers held on with Band-Aids.

How Google quietly funds Europe’s leading tech policy institutes. [New Statesman] “A recent scientific paper proposed that, like Big Tobacco in the Seventies, Big Tech thrives on creating uncertainty around the impacts of its products and business model. One of the ways it does this is by cultivating pockets of friendly academics who can be relied on to echo Big Tech talking points, giving them added gravitas in the eyes of lawmakers.”

Long term infrastructure. [Wrath of Gnon] “Like the stone lined canals in Kyoto, the terraced rice fields of Java allowing for millennia of continuous rice growing, the sandstone aqueducts of Italy still able to transport water after two millennia, the ancient Greek amphitheater still in use for plays and concerts, the cobblestone streets of Copenhagen that haven’t been resurfaced in five hundred years, we need to go back to thinking about our infrastructure not in terms of five year plans and technical efficiency, but in long term sustainability. If a bridge cannot be built that will last a thousand years, why build it? Why not build one that will last, even if it will be a less efficient or more expensive in the short run?”

COVID-19: false dichotomies. [BMC Infectious Diseases] “The COVID-19 pandemic has been riddled with false dichotomies, which have been used to shut down or polarize debates while oversimplifying complex issues and obfuscating the accompanying nuances. In this review, we aimed to deconstruct six common COVID-19-related false dichotomies by reviewing the evidence thoughtfully and thoroughly: 1) Health and lives vs. economy and livelihoods, 2) Indefinite lockdown vs. unlimited reopening, 3) Symptomatic vs. asymptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infection, 4) Droplet vs. aerosol transmission of SARS-CoV-2, 5) Masks for all vs. no masking, and 6) SARS-CoV-2 reinfection vs. no reinfection.”