• Venezuela blackout devastates country’s second city as world focuses on Caracas
• As Costs Skyrocket, More U.S. Cities Stop Recycling
• Resource extraction responsible for half world’s carbon emissions
• Escaping the Iron Cage of Consumerism [via Aaron Vansintjan]
• How Tech Utopia Fostered Tyranny
• If Stalin Had a Smartphone
• Alone together: how mobile devices have changed family time
• The Urban Home as Fortress [Via Wrath of Gnon]
• Do Not Disturb: How I Ditched My Phone and Unbroke My Brain
• The racism of technology – and why driverless cars could be the most dangerous example yet

• 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.”

• 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 In Pontevedra, the usual soundtrack of a Spanish city has been replaced by the tweeting of birds and the chatter of humans.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.

• Taking back the wheel. In the future heralded by Silicon Valley, cars will fly and labor will be disposable. But none of this is inevitable. It’s a political choice—that we can still reject.
• Engineering the climate could cost us the Earth. A political technology, geoengineering belongs to the institutional apparatus that is preventing effective climate action and reducing the urgency for structural change.
• Scientists assessed the options for growing nuclear power. They are grim. For better or worse, renewable energy is the name of the game for the next few decades.
• Artificial Saviors. An increasingly powerful and influential social group is hard-coding its biases into the software running our societies.
• Pulling the magical lever. Techno-utopian visions can’t be used as inspiration for the creation of anything but an upper-class gated community sucking out resources and labour from peripheries and keeping the unfortunate poor out.
• What Happened in the Dark: Puerto Rico’s Year of Fighting for Power. “Could @elonmusk go in and rebuild Puerto Rico’s electricity system with independent solar & battery systems?”

All links via Uneven Earth’s August 2018 newsletter.

• Stacking concrete blocks is a surprisingly efficient way to store energy. [Via John Newman & Nicolas Maigret]
• The social ideology of the motor car (1973 essay).
• Gig economy pressures make drivers ‘more likely to crash‘.
• Rediscovering travel & The trouble with vacations.
• Look up from your screen.
• If solar panels are so clean, why do they produce so much toxic waste?
• The cashless society is a con – and big finance is behind it.
• Raising my child in a doomed world.
• Rise of the machines: has technology evolved beyond our control?

• My advice after a year without tech: rewild yourself.
• How to change the course of human history.
• The great nutrient collapse.
• Infrastructural Ecology: The City’s Buried Systems.
• A cyberattack in Saudi Arabia had a deadly goal. Experts fear another try.
• The social ideology of the motorcar (1973).
• Economic Science Fictions.
• Sociologists examine hackatons and see exploitation. [via internetactu.net]
• It wasn’t just Greece: Archaeologists find early democratic societies in the Americas. [Via Uneven Earth]