• 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.””

• 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.