NO TECH MAGAZINE

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.

No Tech Reader #20

kris de decker — Thu, 06 Sep 2018 15:38:32 +0000

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?”