Read more: A Manifesto for Preserving Content on the Web, Jeff Huang.

See also: A clean start for the web, Tom MacWright.

To see just how much human potential is being squandered by having knowledge dispensed by the “free market,” let us briefly picture what “totally democratic and accessible knowledge” would look like. Let’s imagine that instead of having to use privatized research services, there was a single public search database containing every newspaper article, every magazine article, every academic journal article, every court record, every government document, every website, every piece of software, every film, song, photograph, television show, and video clip, and every book in existence.

The content of the Wayback Machine, all of the newspaper archives, Google Books, Getty Images, Project Gutenberg, Spotify, the Library of Congress, everything in WestLaw and Lexis, all of it, every piece of it accessible instantly in full, and with a search function designed to be as simple as possible and allow you to quickly narrow down what you are looking for. (e.g. “Give me: all Massachusetts newspaper articles, books published in Boston, and government documents that mention William Lloyd Garrison and were published from 1860 to 1865.”) The true universal search,  uncorrupted by paid advertising. Within a second, you could bring up an entire PDF of any book. Within two seconds, you could search the full contents of that book.

Let us imagine just how much time would be saved in this informational utopia. Do I want minute 15 of the 1962 Czechoslovak film Man in Outer Space? Four seconds from my thought until it begins. Do I want page 17 of the Daily Mirror from 1985? Even less time. Every public Defense Department document concerning Vietnam from the Eisenhower administration? Page 150 of Frank Capra’s autobiography? Page 400 of an economics textbook from 1995? All in front of me, in full, in less than the length of time it takes to type this sentence. How much faster would research be in such a situation? How much more could be accomplished if knowledge were not fragmented and in the possession of a thousand private gatekeepers?

Read more:  The Truth Is Paywalled But The Lies Are Free, Nathan J. Robinson, Current Affairs, August 2020. Via Ran Prieur.

A family in Florida also had their Ring camera hacked by someone who broadcast the whole thing live on a podcast. He monitored the couple before starting to harass them, shouting racist epithets and activating their alarm. A woman in Georgia who installed a Ring to monitor her dog discovered that it had been hacked four separate times after a man spoke to her through the camera, saying “I can see you in bed.” Someone threatened a couple in Texas through their Ring, demanding a ransom in bitcoin.

Read more: Google Nest or Amazon Ring? Just reject these corporations’ surveillance and a dystopic future, Evan Greer, NBC News.

“Facebook is not introducing people to open internet where you can learn, create and build things,” said Ellery Biddle, advocacy director of Global Voices. “It’s building this little web that turns the user into a mostly passive consumer of mostly western corporate content. That’s digital colonialism.”

Read more: How Facebook’s free internet service has failed its users.
Previously: How to build a low-tech internet.

Current interface culture is dominated by a few large corporatate players: google/Alphabet, Apple, Microsoft. For many of us who spend countless hours working, socializing and amusing ourselves while using technical media, these powerful players have a huge influence on our experience of everyday life. Our perception of the world around us and how we see ourselves in, it is mediated by the decisions of a few privileged managers, programmers and designers, mostly male and white on the west coast of the United States. To suggest any other way of living in a networked society is to risk being percieved as blasphemous, uncool, out-of-touch, escapist or simply absurd. These interfaces have become so embedded in our conception of reality that we now have a crisis of the imagination, where it is difficult to even think of anything different.

Removing the screen is a radical gesture denying conformity to the dominating forces of contemporary interface culture. By getting rid of the display, we force digital text and images back into the old conventions of print culture. While this might have a superficial, nostalgic appeal, more importantly, it puts us into the role of acting like amateur media archeologists, investigating the history of modern visual, literary and bureaucratic systems both technical and social. At the same time, by taking newer forms of digital media and packing it into the old container of print, we open up a new experimental field of analog-digital hybrid forms. Our goal is to discover and invent novel ways of living in the digital world which might be more informal, expressive and embodied.

The Screenless Office is a system for working with media and networks without using a pixel-based display. It is an artistic operating system. The office presents a radically alternative form of everyday human interaction with media. It is constructed using free/libre/open hard- and software components, especially for print, databases, web-scraping and tangible interaction. Currently, it exists as a working prototype with software “bureaus” which allow a user to read and navigate news, web sites and social media entirely with the use of various printers for output and a barcode scanner for input. While our existing software allows for interesting new ways of consuming media, we are currently working to expand the system to make it capable of publishing content and thereby, enabling a provocative possibility for active participation in contemporary social life.

Quoted from: The Screenless Office. Via Jeu de paume espace virtuel, May 2017.

Pretty Fly For A Wi-Fi revisits the histories, origins and uses of self-made Wi-Fi antennas. Many of these designs were once shared through home pages that no longer exist and are now only partially accessible through the Internet Archive. It is a combination of pots and pans, dishes and cans through which people from around the world give shape to their collective dream of making an alternative internet.

This project tries to revive these designs by rebuilding, testing and documenting them. The antennas serve as an interesting point of departure to think about the internet’s infrastructure and how day-to-day users could potentially influence its shape and use.

Most of the antennas result out of the idea of wireless community networks, an idea which emerged shortly after the commercial introduction of Wi-Fi equipment in the early 2000s. These grassroots initiatives aim to build alternative network infrastructures, often on a peer-to-peer basis and without the need for costly wires. Such network infrastructures can be found on rooftops, balconies and windowsills and can cover large distances by broadcasting from building to building.

They are built for a variety of reasons, sometimes to provide broadband connections in areas where there are none, to make censorship free alternatives to the internet or to share the costs of a single internet connection.

More: Roel Roscam Abbing’s website (pictures) & Lídia Pereira’s booklet (drawings, PDF).

Previously: How to Build a Low-tech Internet.

The Pirate Book offers a broad view on media piracy as well as a variety of comparative perspectives on recent issues and historical facts regarding piracy. It contains a compilation of texts on grass­roots situations whose stories describe strategies developed to share, distribute and experience cultural content outside of the confines of local economies, politics or laws.

These stories recount the experiences of individuals from India, Cuba, Brazil, Mexico, Mali and China. The book is structured in four parts and begins with a collection of stories on piracy dating back to the invention of the printing press and expanding to broader issues (historical and modern anti­piracy technologies, geographically­ specific issues, as well as the rules of the Warez scene, its charters, structure and visual culture…).

The Pirate Book. Nicolas Maigret and Maria Roszkowska, 2015. Picture: a code wheel, a type of copy protection used on older computer games.

Thanks to Melle Smets.

A Kwakwaka’wakw canoe in 1910. Picture by Edward S. Curtis.

Engineering4Change highlights a video series about indigenous knowledge. From their article:

Thirteen video interviews in a YouTube playlist and a research paper expound the value of indigenous knowledge, the knowledge gleaned from the world throughout millennia that is not formally enshrined in academia. Ignoring indigenous knowledge can cripple engineering projects, and learning from it can enhance them, says Khanjan Mehta, Director of Penn State’s Humanitarian Engineering and Social Entrepreneurship Program.

Carolyn Sachs tells a story of women tending maize fields in Swaziland who ignored the advice from visiting agricultural scientists. The consultants said the farmers should weed their fields, but what looked like weeds to the visitors were actually dietary staples and a source of Vitamin A that the visitors did not recognize.

Bruce Martin explains how Ojibwe fishermen in northern Minnesota read the water to predict the location of the catch and the day’s weather forecast, sometimes better than fish-finding sonar and the local weather channel.

In another video, Audrey Maretzki tells the story of a woman in a nutri-business cooperative in Kenya who described the nutritional values of two grains. Boys raised on maize are fat and boys raised on finger millet are wiry and will beat the maize-fed boys in a fight, the woman said.

“That hit me like an ‘aha’ moment, because I knew that wimby [finger millet] was a more nutritious grain than corn. And to have her tell that in her own way was a recognition on my part that in fact there was a lot of knowledge there that we needed to figure out ways to capture,” Maretzki says in her interview.

The WiderNet Project is a non-profit organization affiliated with the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill that promotes low-cost information and communication for underserved populations.

The eGranary Digital Library, also known as “The Internet in a Box”, is an off-line information storehouse that delivers educational resources to people living in underserved areas of the world.

• In developing countries, many of the universities, schools, clinics and hospitals have no Internet connection.
• Institutions that are connected to the Internet have such limited bandwidth that they cannot offer free Web browsing to the majority of their staff and students.
• Bandwidth in Africa can cost up to 100 times what it costs in the U.S., so for some organizations a slim Internet connection can consume the equivalent of one-half their operating budget.
• Even for those individuals who have the wherewithal to pay for Web browsing, the experience can be frustratingly slow — it can take hours to download a single audio file.

The eGranary Digital Library addresses these issues by moving a large assortment of educational Web documents onto the subscriber’s local area network (LAN) so that the documents can be made available to everyone within the institution freely and instantly.

Related article: How to Build a Low-tech Internet.

Illustration by Luis Quiles

“It turns out that digital devices and software are finely tuned to train us to pay attention to them, no matter what else we should be doing. The mechanism, borne out by recent neuroscience studies, is something like this:

• New information creates a rush of dopamine to the brain, a neurotransmitter that makes you feel good.
• The promise of new information compels your brain to seek out that dopamine rush.

With fMRIs, you can see the brain’s pleasure centres light up with activity when new emails arrive.

So, every new email you get gives you a little flood of dopamine. Every little flood of dopamine reinforces your brain’s memory that checking email gives a flood of dopamine. And our brains are programmed to seek out things that will give us little floods of dopamine. Further, these patterns of behaviour start creating neural pathways, so that they become unconscious habits: Work on something important, brain itch, check email, dopamine, refresh, dopamine, check Twitter, dopamine, back to work. Over and over, and each time the habit becomes more ingrained in the actual structures of our brains.”

Quoted from: Why Can’t We Read Anymore? The illustration was made by Luis Quiles — check out his work. Previously: Why the brain prefers to read on paper.

If you are a FB-subscriber and you want be informed of new articles, there are two options:

• Go to Low-tech Magazine’s fan page, hover your mouse over where it says “LIKED” and click on “Add to Interests Lists”. (Thanks to E4C for this advice).
• Dump Facebook and subscribe to new updates via Twitter, Email, or RSS/feed (Low-tech Magazine, No Tech Magazine). If you’re looking for a good feed-reader after the demise of Google Reader: Feedly is even better.

Update: Since some people have asked for it, here is some more information about what happened precisely. Facebook still shows updates to about 10% of our subscribers. Until some weeks ago, each update was viewed by an average of 5,000 people, since then this has become an average of 500 people. This is in line with the observations by other page owners. The change has nothing to do with declining popularity: the new posts are not less popular than the ones before (which we can easily check by dividing views by likes and shares).

Facebook does what it wants, of course, but as a news consumer I don’t see the value of a news medium that selects news articles based on what publishers are willling to pay.

Demand, a publication of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), was launched in December 2013. It mixes case studies, stories and original reports from leaders in the sector’s fields. In the first edition, the US engineering professors Nathan Johnson at Arizona State University and Kenneth Bryden at Iowa State University place pieces in the unused cookstove puzzle with their own research in rural Mali. Other notable topics include low-cost and rugged wheelchair design, remote sensors for project evaluation, smokehoods reimagined to fight indoor air pollution and funding for social innovators. Read more about the launch of the new magazine.

The Journal of Humanitarian Engineering (JHE) was launched in May 2012. Two volumes have been published so far, and a third is on the way. The magazine, which is published by the Engineers Without Borders Institute in Melbourne, Australia, presents outcomes of research and field experiences at the intersection of technology and community development. “One of the wishes we’ve heard from experts in humanitarian design and engineering is for academia to keep pace with the rising interest in the field. Appropriate technology design and the invention of new devices, tools and infrastructure for use in regions with few resources has apparently had trouble gaining recognition in major universities. With a few notable exceptions, formal academic programs in appropriate technologies are rare, and academics have few outlets to publish their research. The JHE aims to fill this gap.” Read more about the initiative.

Demand and JHE join a growing library of publications that specialize in “global development technologies”. Appropriate Technology has been around since 2003, while Makeshift saw the light in 2011. These magazines have to be paid for. More publications and academic programs can be found here. Previously: How to make everything yourself: online low-tech resources.

Especially interesting for Low-tech and No Tech Magazine readers are the journals in the categories History, Archaeology, Technology & Engineering, and Earth and Environmental Sciences.

Dedicated to Aaron Swartz. Also: #PDF Tribute to Aaron Swarz (via TechCrunch), a mass protest uploading of copyright-protected research articles. Previously: Censors of Knowledge.

“In India and South Africa, for instance, (to take just two countries in the rest of the world), the number of books produced per year is nowhere close to, say, the number of books produced in the UK. What this means for indigenous language Wikipedias from India and South Africa is that there is very little citable, printed material to rely on in those languages; in turn, it means that it is very difficult for any of those languages to grow on Wikipedia. (There is a related problem: writing this local knowledge on English Wikipedia is a task similarly hampered by a lack of good printed sources).”

“As a result of this disparity, everyday, common knowledge – things that are known, observed and performed by millions of people – cannot enter Wikipedia as units of fact because they haven’t been written down in a reliably published source.This means that not only do small-language Wikipedias in countries like India and South Africa lose out on opportunities for growth, so also does the Wikimedia movement as a whole lose out on the potential expansion of scope in every language.”

Description of the project, audio files, movie and links to news articles can all be found on this page. Via Appropedia.

What happens when two industrial design students from Sweden end up in Kenya creating a pedal powered machine for small-scale farmers who are often illiterate and speak more than 60 languages? You get a do-it-yourself design that seems to have come out of the IKEA factories – pictoral manuals included.

“Made in Kenya”, the bachelor project of Niklas Kull and Gabriella Rubin, is a textbook example of low-tech made accessible to everybody, regardless of their native tongue and language skills.

Last spring we documented the forgotten future of the pedal-powered machine, looking at both early twentieth century applications as well as the ambitious endeavours of the 1970s. These days, pedal-powered machines are often ignored when we are discussing renewable energy options – not only in the Western world but also in developing countries where other renewable energy options are often too expensive. There do exist successful local initiatives like Mayapedal in Guatemala, but these remain exceptions rather than the rule.

Knowledge transfer

One of the obstacles seems to be a lack of knowledge, and how to communicate the information needed to combat it. This does not only concern the absence of internet connections and computers; these issues can be solved relatively easily by a few isolated computers and printers combined with a sneakernet.

At least as important is the prevalence of illiteracy and semi-literacy in the developing world, and the existence of many different languages. Between 2000 and 3000 languages are spoken in Africa alone, while manuals offered by organisations such as Practical Action (and others) are understandably limited to publication in only a handful of languages.

The issue is not without relevance for the first world. Most information on Do-It-Yourself projects is written in English, while many people (for instance in Europe) have insufficient knowledge of this language, especially when it comes to understanding technical instructions.

Pictoral manuals

In their project “Made in Kenya”, Lund University students Niklas Kull and Gabriella Rubin tackled these issues by avoiding words altogether.

The instructions in both the design manual and user manual of their pedal-powered juice extractor are solely visual, with the exception of a few words. They write:

“Many big companies, as for example IKEA, use simple pictograms to instruct the customer. Apart from the economic point of view, it is also strategic from a communication aspect. It is no longer necessary to have different versions for different countries and languages. The fact that many Kenyan farmers are illiterate or semi-illiterate, in combination with the varying level of English/Swahili proficiency, requires that the product can be operated and maintained with mainly pictograms and illustrations as instructions.” 

Informal manufacturing industry

The students had two aims for their project: to improve the economic conditions of the local small-scale farmers, who make up three quarters of the workforce in the country, and to stimulate the local manufacturing industry. At present, Kenya lacks an industrial-scale manufacturing industry and is highly dependent on the import of goods.

The juice extractor is of a capacity and cost that would allow a small group of neighbouring farmers to invest collectively in a small production facility. To keep production costs low, ensure availability in rural areas and promote the domestic manufacturing capacity, the pedal-powered machine does not require complex components or maufacturing methods.

The design manual is aimed at the Jua Kali – the informal manufacturing sector which represents an estimated six million of the Kenyan workforce. With limited capital, modest workshop facilities and narrow access to raw materials, these self-employed blacksmiths and carpenters make handmade products – such as agricultural implements, hand tools and kitchen utensils – at a lower price than the imported goods.

“The instructions are meant to be used as a base that can be changed according to local needs, material accessibility and knowledge. If a certain material is a scarcity in an area, another one can be used. However, the cylinder, the beater and the filter, need to be made out of stainless steel. Apart from that, it is up to the jua kali. As for the wooden parts, we recommend a hard and oily wood, like for example the African iroko. Like the manual for the farmers, these instructions are also black and white to keep printing costs down.”

The student agreed to publish the manuals on Low-tech Magazine. Comments on the design of both the machine and the manuals are welcome (in the comment section below, or via email: rubin dot gabriella at gmail dot com & niklaskull at gmail dot com).

Kris De Decker (edited by Deva Lee).

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1. THE MACHINE

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2. THE DESIGN MANUAL

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3. THE USER MANUAL

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The text below was taken from the project description and is not included in the manual:

“Before the farmer proceeds with the actual juicing, it is important to remember to have clean hands and preferably short nails to avoid puncturing the fruit which can damage it. In addition, it is important to handle and store the fruit with care to avoid damage. The fruits are then washed carefully with clean water before the farmer prepares the machine by cleaning it. This to make sure that the juice extractor is free from dust and dirt.”

“Once this is done, the filter is placed in the bottom of cylinder. After the beaters are attached and the screws and nuts are tightened, the farmer should then control that the strap is stretched enough. If not, then it is just a matter of moving the axis to the next step and then tighten the nut. Before starting to pedal, place a clean hollowware of choice underneath the cylinder. Once the user has started pedalling and obtained an even rotation, the farmer can put the fruit into the cylinder. The juice will be filtered before it streams out into the hollowware.”

“Each time the farmer is finished with a batch of fruit, the peal and seeds need to be removed, otherwise the rotation will be disturbed. When the juicing process is finished, the stainless steel parts must be removed and cleaned thoroughly. The juice shall then be heated up to boiling point, this to prolong the life length of the juice and to ensure that all harmful bacteria is eradicated. When the fluid has reached the desired temperature, remove the foam that has emerged with a skimmer. Depending on when the juice will be consumed, lemon juice can be added to prolong shelf life. If desired sugar can be added as sweetener.”

“The juice can now be bottled in clean and tidy plastic or glass bottles. If the cleanliness of the bottles and caps can not be guaranteed, they should then be boiled in water for five minutes. Once the bottles are filled, seal the bottles and boil for ten minutes. The farmer should then let the bottles cool before labelling. It is desired that the bottles are labelled with the date of manufacture and for marketing purposes, with a brand name of choice.”

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Related articles:

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• Pedal powered farms and factories: the forgotten future of the stationary bicycle
• UNESCO sets up online traditional knowledge database
• How to make everything ourselves: open modular hardware
• How to tie the world together: online knotting reference books
• How to make your own low-tech vertical farm
• How to make everything yourself: online low-tech resources
• Wood gas cars and Gas bag vehicles: low-tech from World War Two
• Hand powered drilling tools and machines
• The bright future of solar powered factories
• The Museum of Old Techniques
• Truckloads of harddisks: the return of the sneakernet
• How to build a floating trash island
• The pinhole camera: low-tech photography
• Check out all our DIY-posts

Main page.

Whether or not you are interested in the publications, the accompanying manifest written by Greg Maxwell deserves to be read. Find a summary below. Original manifest + download here. Via Edwin Mijnsbergen.

Unpaid Workers

“On July 19th 2011, Aaron Swartz was criminally charged by the US Attorney General’s office for, effectively, downloading too many academic papers from JSTOR. Academic publishing is an odd system – the authors are not paid for their writing, nor are the peer reviewers (they’re just more unpaid academics), and in some fields even the journal editors are unpaid. Sometimes the authors must even pay the publishers. And yet scientific publications are some of the most outrageously expensive pieces of literature you can buy.”

Mechanical Reproduction

“In the past, the high access fees supported the costly mechanical reproduction of niche paper journals, but online distribution has mostly made this function obsolete. As far as I can tell, the money paid for access today serves little significant purpose except to perpetuate dead business models. Many don’t even realize the extent to which academic work is inaccessible to the general public, nor do they realize what sort of work is being done outside universities that would benefit by it. Large publishers are now able to purchase the political clout needed to abuse the narrow commercial scope of copyright protection, extending it to completely inapplicable areas: slavish reproductions of historic documents and art, for example, and exploiting the labors of unpaid scientists.”

Public Domain

“Several years ago I came into possession, through rather boring and lawful means, of a large collection of JSTOR documents. These particular documents are the historic back archives of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society – a prestigious scientific journal with a history extending back to the 1600s. The portion of the collection included in this archive, ones published prior to 1923 and therefore obviously in the public domain, total some 18,592 papers and 33 gigabytes of data. The documents are part of the shared heritage of all mankind, and are rightfully in the public domain, but they are not available freely. Instead the articles are available at $19 each – for one month’s viewing, by one person, on one computer. It’s a steal. From you.”

Watermarks

“When I received these documents I had grand plans of uploading them to Wikipedia’s sister site for reference works, Wikisource – where they could be tightly interlinked with Wikipedia, providing interesting historical context to the encyclopedia articles. For example, Uranus was discovered in 1781 by William Herschel; why not take a look at the paper where he originally disclosed his discovery? (Or one of the several follow on publications about its satellites, or the dozens of other papers he authored?)”

“But I soon found the reality of the situation to be less than appealing: publishing the documents freely was likely to bring frivolous litigation from the publishers. As in many other cases, I could expect them to claim that their slavish reproduction – scanning the documents – created a new copyright interest. Or that distributing the documents complete with the trivial watermarks they added constituted unlawful copying of that mark. They might even pursue strawman criminal charges claiming that whoever obtained the files must have violated some kind of anti-hacking laws.”

“Free” Access

“In my discreet inquiry, I was unable to find anyone willing to cover the potentially unbounded legal costs I risked, even though the only unlawful action here is the fraudulent misuse of copyright by JSTOR and the Royal Society to withhold access from the public to that which is legally and morally everyone’s property. In the meantime, and to great fanfare as part of their 350th anniversary, the RSOL opened up “free” access to their historic archives – but “free” only meant “with many odious terms”, and access was limited to about 100 articles.”

“All too often journals, galleries, and museums are becoming not disseminators of knowledge – as their lofty mission statements suggest – but censors of knowledge, because censoring is the one thing they do better than the Internet does.”

Poisonous Industry

“More than in any other area, the application of restrictive copyright is inappropriate for academic works: there is no sticky question of how to pay authors or reviewers, as the publishers are already not paying them. And unlike ‘mere’ works of entertainment, liberal access to scientific work impacts the well-being of all mankind. Our continued survival may even depend on it. If I can remove even one dollar of ill-gained income from a poisonous industry which acts to suppress scientific and historic understanding, then whatever personal cost I suffer will be justified – it will be one less dollar spent in the war against knowledge. One less dollar spent lobbying for laws that make downloading too many scientific papers a crime.”

“I had considered releasing this collection anonymously, but others pointed out that the obviously overzealous prosecutors of Aaron Swartz would probably accuse him of it and add it to their growing list of ridiculous charges. This didn’t sit well with my conscience, and I generally believe that anything worth doing is worth attaching your name to. I’m interested in hearing about any enjoyable discoveries or even useful applications which come of this archive.”

gmaxwell [at ]gmail [dot] com

Legal commentary here.