Dear Kris,
I thought that you might be interested in the two photos that I attach and which were inspired by your 2015 article on Fruit walls.
Off-line Portal to Solar Powered Website
November 9, 2021 by Filed Under: Access to information, Internet, Random
Here’s our off-line portal to the solar powered website at the Dutch Design Week in Eindhoven. Designed and built in collaboration with Marie Verdeil. We formed part of Arne Hendriks’ Hara Hachi Bu village, which celebrates the Japanese principle that enough is enough. “Eat until you are 80% full”.
No Tech Reader #29
August 11, 2021 by Filed Under: No Tech Readers
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.
Misinformation Control
August 6, 2021 by Filed Under: Media
Even if you feel that the COVID crisis is reason enough to endorse government involvement in social media content takedowns, please consider for a moment the next steps. Today we’re talking about COVID misinformation. What sort of misinformation — there’s a lot out there! — will we be talking about tomorrow? Do we want the government urging content removal about various other kinds of misinformation? How do we even define misinformation in widely different subject areas?
And even if you agree with the current administration’s views on misinformation, how do you know that you will agree with the next administration’s views on these topics? If you want the current administration to have these powers, will you be agreeable to potentially a very different kind of administration having such powers in the future? The previous administration and the current one have vastly diverging views on a multitude of issues. We have every reason to expect at least some future administrations to follow this pattern.
Quoted from: Keep Governments Away from Social Media “Misinformation Control”, Lauren Weinstein, July 2021. Thanks to m.
No Tech Reader #28
August 2, 2021 by Filed Under: No Tech Readers
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.”
This clothesline goes around the corner
Low-tech Magazine featured Jonas Görgen’s mist shower in an earlier article. He did a second graduation project at the Design Academy Eindhoven that is worth mentioning: the clothesline that goes around the corner:
Revive the ol’ clothesline! This pulley system can move objects around the corner of a building. Following (or avoiding) the sun can help with making the most of the momentary weather conditions.
Modern buildings often trap the inhabitants into unsustainable practices such as using a tumble dryer or a large refrigerator. Making practical use of outside spaces of buildings is commonplace around the globe, from clotheslines spanning across streets in Italy to roofs crowded with jugs full of fermenting Kimchi in Korea.
It is not merely about resourcefulness, as these practices become part of the identity of a place.
In a reaction, he writes that “I wanted to think of a possibility to break out of the lifestyle that is dictated by the building in which you live”.
Source: Jonas Görgen.
