NO TECH MAGAZINE

No Tech Reader #40

kris de decker — Thu, 01 Jun 2023 13:31:48 +0000

Out of the wild. [The New Atlantis] “The ideal of nature as it used to be before human intervention is one that Western urbanites created in the late nineteenth century, chiefly as a foil for their own modernity… This vision still permeates much of environmentalism and stands in the way of responsible action toward nature, particularly in the places where we actually live.”
Minds on Fire: Cognitive Aspects of Early Firemaking and the Possible Inventors of Firemaking Kits. [Cambridge Archaeological Journal] “We analyse aspects of the two main hunter-gatherer firemaking techniques—the strike-a-light and the manual fire-drill—in terms of causal, social and prospective reasoning.”
The Kayak’s Cultural Journey. [Craftsmanship Quarterly] “For millennia, Indigenous peoples across the world have built and used skin boats to fish and hunt, for sport and travel, even for warfare. Now non-Indigenous admirers of the craft are making them, too.”
Permacomputing Aesthetics: Potential and Limits of Design Constraints in Computational Culture. [LIMITS 2023] “Permacomputing is a nascent concept and a community of practice oriented around issues of resilience and regenerativity in digital technology. At the heart of permacomputing are design principles that embrace limits and constraints as a positive thing, as well as being creative with available computational resources.”
Building and Monitoring a SolarPowered Web Server. [ETH zürich] “In this thesis we focus on building a solar-powered web server. We present existing websites which are fully or partially solar powered, introduce some background about battery state of charge estimation and how to determine the right solar panel and battery size. Reusing components from older projects, we host a static website on an exemplary setup, which is solely solar powered.

No Tech Reader #39

kris de decker — Sun, 30 Apr 2023 19:34:00 +0000

I’ve rented DVDs from Netflix for half my life – streaming is a poor substitute. [The Guardian]
The Glorious Return of a Humble Car Feature. “Automakers are starting to admit that drivers hate touch screens. Buttons are back!” [Slate]
Agriculture in the Ancient Maya Lowlands (Part 2): Landesque Capital and Long-term Resource Management Strategies. [Journal of Archaeological Research] “We demonstrate long-lasting agricultural investments by Maya people, in social capital including multigenerational land tenure, in cultivated capital including long-lived trees, and in landesque capital including soil amendments and landscape engineering projects, such as terracing and wetland modification.”
Archaeologists are unlocking the secrets of Maya lime plasters and mortars. [ars technica]
When innovation goes south: The tech that never quite worked out. [ars technica] “We don’t need new gadgets; we need to use antibiotics more sparingly.”
“RAIN was planting the seeds”: An Interview with Tom Bender, co-editor of RAIN: Journal of Appropriate Technology. [Open Edition Journals]

No Tech Reader #38

kris de decker — Wed, 19 Apr 2023 10:00:36 +0000

I Made My Blog Solar-Powered, Then Things Escalated [Louwrentius] What happens when you try to run a solar powered website from your balcony in the Netherlands? “Only with a 740 Watt rated solar panel setup was I able to power my Raspberry Pi through the winter.”
The Rising Chorus of Renewable Energy Skeptics [The Tyee] “The current prescription for stopping climate change with a mining boom to support an industrial production of renewable technologies is a dangerous course.”
Half-farming, half-anything: Japan’s rural lifestyle revolution [Japan Times] “An increasing number of people from all age brackets are leaving behind their lives in Japan’s cramped megacities in favor of growing their own food sources, combined with a vocation that reflects their own unique interests and talents.” [Via Wrath of Gnon]
The age of average [Alex Murrell] “Whether you’re in film or fashion, media or marketing, architecture, automotive or advertising, it doesn’t matter. Our visual culture is flatlining and the only cure is creativity.” [Via Ran Prieur]
Nick Cave on Christ and the Devil [Unherd] “The idea that you can offend people, or that your songs can be dangerous enough for people to be scared of them, is exciting for me.”
In an isolated world, humans need to dance together more than ever – but we’re running out of places to do it [The Guardian]
A Humanism of the Abyss [The New Atlantis] “Illich and Sacks had in common a desire to reform the medical system — a desire that today still remains unfulfilled.”

No Tech Reader #37

kris de decker — Mon, 03 Apr 2023 18:52:34 +0000

These scientists lugged logs on their heads to resolve Chaco Canyon mystery. [Ars Tecnica] “Tumplines allow one to carry heavier weights over larger distances without getting fatigued.” Thanks to Matthew McNatt.
Barbed Wire Telephone Lines Brought Isolated Homesteaders Together. [Atlas Obscura] “In some cases, as many as 20 telephones were wired together—all of which would ring simultaneously with each call, regardless of who was making it and who they were trying to reach. Agreed-upon codes—three short rings for you, two long rings for me—helped people know if the call was for them.”
The vertical farming bubble is finally popping. [Fast Company] “In a typical cold climate, you would need about five acres of solar panels to grow one acre of lettuce”.
Seaweed as a resilient food solution after a nuclear war. [ResearchGate] “We find seaweed can be grown in tropical oceans, even after nuclear war. The simulated growth is high enough to allow a scale up to an equivalent of 70 % of the global human caloric demand (spread among food, animal feed, and biofuels) in around 7 to 16 months, while only using a small fraction of the global ocean area. The results also show that the growth of seaweed increases with the severity of the nuclear war, as more nutrients become available due to increased vertical mixing. This means that seaweed has the potential to be a viable resilient food source for abrupt sunlight reduction scenarios.”
Traditional Fishing Gears and Methods of the Bodo Tribes of Kokrajhar, Assam. [Fishery Technology] “The popularity and usage of some of the gears like Sahera, Baga, Borom Je and Dura Je were found declining, which may be attributed to increasing popularity of destructive fishing techniques like electric fishing, blast fishing and poisoning.”
Low-tech approaches for sustainability: key principles from the literature and practice. [Sustainability: Science, Practice and Policy] ” This article develops a seven-principle framework to categorize low-tech concepts based on an abductive approach which included a literature review and interviews with low-tech actors.”
Ministry of Truth: The secretive government units spying on your speech. [Big Brother Watch] “The internet contains masses of incorrect information – but this is a defining feature of an open forum, not a flaw.”
We’ve lost the plot. [The Atlantic] “Our constant need for entertainment has blurred the line between fiction and reality—on television, in American politics, and in our everyday lives.”

Some low-tech computing links:

No Tech Reader #36

kris de decker — Mon, 30 Jan 2023 23:13:39 +0000

Your stuff is actually worse now. [Vox] How the cult of consumerism ushered in an era of badly made products.
The Automation Charade. [Logic] The rise of the robots has been greatly exaggerated. Whose interests does that serve?
How Stanford Failed the Academic Freedom Test. [Tablet] For America’s new clerisy, scientific debate is a danger to be suppressed.
Minimal Computing. [Digital Humanities Climate Coalition] Minimal computing is a set of principles and practices that aim to reduce both environmental impact and barriers to access and engagement.
Open hardware: From DIY trend to global transformation in access to laboratory equipment. [PLOS Biology] This Essay examines the global spread of open hardware and discusses which kinds of open-source technologies are the most beneficial in scientific environments with economic and infrastructural constraints.
Riddle solved: Why was Roman concrete so durable? [MIT News]
Speeding up. Prehistoric animal traction and the revolute joint. [Eva Rosenstock] The revolute joint, an innovation of the late fourth and the early third millennia BCE, brought about wheelsets and wheels for carts and wagons along with other applications such as pivoted doors, the potter’s wheel, and levers. In terms of acceleration, these innovations were as significant as the acceleration period we currently encounter that started with industrialization.
The candle clock. [Wikipedia] While no longer used today, candle clocks provided an effective way to tell time indoors, at night, or on a cloudy day. Previously: Human alarm clocks.
Brandalism. A revolt against the corporate control of our culture and space.
Pickup Trucks: From Workhorse to Joyride. [Axios] In the 1980s, about half of pickup trucks were categorized as small or midsize, but by the 2010s small pickups had nearly vanished and fullsize trucks dominated.

No Tech Reader #35

kris de decker — Thu, 05 Jan 2023 15:54:17 +0000

A hundred and nineteen things a punkist should know. [http://www.punk.ist]
Firewood will save the West. [Unherd] “Our dysfunctional society must return to the hearth.”
‘Luddite’ Teens Don’t Want Your Likes. [NYT] “When the only thing better than a flip phone is no phone at all.”
Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time. [Nature] “We find that papers and patents are increasingly less likely to break with the past in ways that push science and technology in new directions. Overall, our results suggest that slowing rates of disruption may reflect a fundamental shift in the nature of science and technology.”
Assessing the effectiveness of energy efficiency measures in the residential sector gas consumption through dynamic treatment effects: Evidence from England and Wales. [Energy Economics] “This paper disentangles the long-lasting effects of energy efficiency technical improvements in UK residential buildings. The installation of energy efficiency measures is associated with short-term reductions in residential gas consumption. Energy savings disappear between two and four years after retrofitting by loft insulation and cavity wall insulation, respectively. The disappearance of energy savings in the longer run could be explained by the energy performance gap, the rebound effect and/or by concurrent residential construction projects and renovations associated with increases in energy consumption. Notably, for households in deprived areas, the installation of these efficiency measures does not deliver energy savings.”
Mapping Four Decades of Appropriate Technology Research: A Bibliometric Analysis from 1973 to 2021. [Sains Humanika] “The purpose of the study is to examine the publication trends, collaborative structures, and central themes in appropriate technology studies.”
Life in the Slow Lane. [Longreads] “Cooking all day while the cook is away. How the slow cooker changed the world.”
Can a Robot Shoot an Olympic Recurve Bow? A preliminary study. [National Taiwan Normal University]
Amnesty, Yes—And Here is the Price. [Charles Eisenstein] “The invisible workings of the Covid machine must be laid bare if we are to prevent something similar from happening again.”
Reduce, re-use, re-ride: Bike waste and moving towards a circular economy for sporting goods. [International Review for the Sociology of Sport] “This study focuses on the bike and its role in global waste accumulation through various forms of planned obsolescence.”
Civilian-Based Defense: A Post-Military Weapons System. [International Center on Nonviolent Conflict]
Millionaire spending incompatible with 1.5 °C ambitions. [Cleaner Production Letters]
Radical online collections and archives. [New Historical Express]

No Tech Reader #34

kris de decker — Thu, 13 Oct 2022 15:31:10 +0000

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.””

No Tech Reader #33

kris de decker — Tue, 14 Jun 2022 07:28:56 +0000

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.

No Tech Reader #32

kris de decker — Wed, 18 May 2022 12:18:45 +0000

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.

No Tech Reader #31

kris de decker — Thu, 05 May 2022 10:39:20 +0000

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.”

No Tech Reader #30

kris de decker — Tue, 23 Nov 2021 12:53:13 +0000

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.”

No Tech Reader #29

kris de decker — Wed, 11 Aug 2021 17:31:03 +0000

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.

No Tech Reader #28

kris de decker — Mon, 02 Aug 2021 08:03:13 +0000

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.”

No Tech Reader #27

kris de decker — Tue, 29 Jun 2021 09:32:14 +0000

Delusions of sanity — Deconstructing madness in an insane world. “It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”
Subscriber City. What happens when you need an app to access anything. “How long before different customers are charged different prices for the same goods in physical grocery stores?”
The death of the festival. “The overarching crisis of our time – more serious than ecological collapse, more serious than economic collapse, more serious than the pandemic – is the polarization and fragmentation of civil society. With coherency, anything is possible. Without it, nothing is.”

No Tech Reader #26

kris de decker — Thu, 26 Nov 2020 16:45:45 +0000

No Tech Reader #25

kris de decker — Mon, 10 Jun 2019 22:44:36 +0000

The art of threading; a conversation with Wrath of Gnon. “Mankind has simply lost the ability to build a decent plaza.”
How to do nothing. “In a public space, ideally, you are a citizen with agency; in a faux public space, you are either a consumer or a threat to the design of the place.”
Talkin’ ’bout my (5th) Generation. “The imperative to ensure everyone has the right to communicate and access information, which is laudable, is being supplanted by this new drive to connect the already connected even further through a whole host of new and upgraded technologies.”
It’s not enough to break up Big Tech. We need to imagine a better alternative“. 99% of technological disruption is there to merely ensure that nothing of substance gets disrupted at all.”

Links via Ran Pieur, Aaron Vansintjan, Roel Roscam Abbing, and Hackernews.

No Tech Reader #24

kris de decker — Wed, 08 May 2019 11:11:08 +0000

- How the news took over reality. [The Guardian]
- How Big Tech Threatens Economic Liberty. [The American Conservative]
- Apple Cracks Down on Apps That Fight iPhone Addiction. [The New York Times]
- Technology may be making us unhealthy and miserable – governments must act now. [The Conversation]
- The Ruin of the Digital Town Square. [The New Atlantis]
- Smart cities aim to make urban life more efficient – but for citizens’ sake they need to slow down. [The Conversation]
- City OF Things or City FOR People? [REAL CORP 2019]
- Drones to deliver incessant buzzing noise, and packages. [The Conversation]
- Is 5G worth the risks? [Open Futures]
- Online abuse: teenagers might not report it because they often don’t see it as a problem. [The Conversation]
- Technology cuts children off from adults, warns expert. [The Guardian]
- What Will You Say to Your Grandchildren? [Patterns of Meaning]
- Degrowth vs. the Green New Deal. [briarpatch magazine]
- Degrowth is utopian, and that’s a good thing. [Uneven Earth]
- Protect our right to light. [nature] Via Wrath of Gnon.
- The urban farming ‘revolution’ has a fatal flaw. [Quartz] Via Cynthia Hathaway.

No Tech Reader #23

kris de decker — Sun, 17 Mar 2019 18:18:02 +0000

No Tech Reader #22

kris de decker — Wed, 09 Jan 2019 21:50:17 +0000

Why exercise alone won’t save us. “As long as physical activity is divorced from the real work of our lives, we will find reasons for not doing it.”
The future’s so bright, I gotta wear blinders. “By perpetually refreshing the illusion that progress is just getting under way, gadget worshippers are able to wave away the problems that progress is causing.”
Machine Politics: The rise of the internet and a new age of authoritarianism.”One of the deepest ironies of our current situation is that the modes of communication that enable today’s authoritarians were first dreamed up to defeat them.”

No Tech Reader #21

kris de decker — Sat, 29 Sep 2018 11:58:53 +0000

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.