• 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.”

• 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.”

• On the efficiency of my scythe.
• Hearts of oak: towards a deep recipe for acorn bread.
• The lost art of traditional bow hunting.
• Female hunters of the early Americas.
• Virgin Hyperloop has invented the world’s crappiest High-Speed Rail.
• Driving the 2021 Cadillac Escalade was one of the most stressful experiences of my life.
• The case against American truck bloat.
• Can we call it a velomobile? 
• The Himalayan invention powered by pine needles.
• Trailbridges may have a far broader impact than once thought.
• Elena Kolesnkova: Voskhod Cooperative. [image above]
• Off-the-grid.

• 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.