Technology

1 October 2016News

Alternative technology festival held in Wales

Janice de Haaff is proud of ‘my tiny house’. PHOTO: Lotte Reimer

On 10 September, the Centre for Alternative Technology near Machynlleth hosted the EF Schumacher-inspired ‘Small is Beautiful’ festival with an exciting mix of debates, workshops, arts and talks (spanning hydroelectricity, pee power, zero-carbon Britain, aquaponics, campaign-building, thatching, tiny homes, improvising…) with debates captured in visual minutes by Creative Connection.

Practical Action’s Paul Smith…

1 October 2016News

Alternative tech students study designs for use in Gaza and Nepal

Shelter building. PHOTO: Sam Christie/CAT

This summer, postgraduate students at the Centre for Alternative Technology explored the construction of emergency shelters as part of their MSc degree in ‘Sustainability and Adaptation’.

Led by Jamie Richardson of Shelter and Construction, the students used the examples of Gaza and Nepal to learn about sustainable construction in the context of war and natural disaster.

Though they seem simple structures, considerable thought…

1 October 2016Review

New Internationalist, 2016; 336pp; £10.99

The Bleeding Edge deftly exposes the catastrophic impacts of inequality, exploding the myth that technology has brought us ‘the best of all possible worlds.’ Examining the lives of workers at the bleeding edge of our high-tech world, Bob Hughes explains how the ‘escalating human impact on the earth has gone hand in hand with successful encroachments on egalitarian culture.’

A central argument of the book is that capitalism has given us gadgets that we did not ask for and…

1 October 2016Review

OR Books, 2015; 268pp; £12

In 2014, the renowned physicist Stephen Hawking told the BBC: ‘The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.’ ‘Whereas the short-term impact of [artificial intelligence] depends on who controls it,’ he later wrote, ‘the long-term impact depends on whether it can be controlled at all’.

Andrew Smart shares these concerns and proposes that, should superintelligent machines ever be developed, they should be given ‘the digital equivalent of LSD…

1 October 2016Feature

40th anniversary conference to revisit visionary Lucas Plan

On 26 November, a wide range of groups are organising a Lucas Plan 40th anniversary conference at Birmingham Voluntary Service Council. It is 40 years since the workers at the Lucas Aerospace arms company proposed making alternative socially-useful products, while retaining jobs.

The conference will both celebrate the achievements of the Lucas workers and, we hope, reinvigorate a movement for arms conversion and democratic control of the economy. The Lucas Plan showed that…

1 October 2016Feature

Looking back at a book that sowed seedbombs

Illustration by Clifford Harper from Radical Technology

In my early teens I picked up a book from my sister´s shelves and quickly appropriated it as my own. Unknown to me then, it was to become a profound influence on diverse aspects of my life.

At that age I was already very interested in how things worked, and in dismantling and rebuilding anything that fell into my hands, from televisions to music boxes to steam engines. The book was all about alternative technology,…

1 December 2015Feature

How two activists learned to code from scratch in order to build an online tool to support activist groups

Sky Christensen and Keira PatersonPhoto: eConvenor (timer photo)

About three years ago, two Australian campaigners were surprised and frustrated to discover that the next generation of student activists were making the very same mistakes in organising that they had made at university. Nothing seemed to have changed. A lot of people have had a similar realisation.

Unlike a lot of people, however, Keira Paterson and Sky Christensen decided to do something about it. ‘Sky had this…

3 April 2014Feature

The world’s first ethically-minded smartphone

First of all, I need to say that moving to the Fairphone has been a major technical upgrade for me as before it I had a very basic smartphone (Samsung Galaxy Y), so my judgement will be influenced by this. Though I would like to add that I have never felt inclined to buy a high-priced smartphone before the Fairphone, as I never found the utility justified the price.

With the Fairphone, the clear breakdown of the costs of production, and the idea that I was investing in innovation and…

3 April 2014Comment

Breaking the Frame, May 2014

Nowadays, technology takes the lion’s share of military budgets and it is technological superiority, far more than numbers of soldiers, that determines who has military superiority. Not content with nuclear MADness, the military in different countries are busy developing cyber-warfare, directed energy weapons, enhancement of soldiers’ capabilities with brain-computer interfaces, drones that take their own targeting decisions, and robot soldiers. They’re also discussing biological weapons…

5 July 2013News

In June, a former CIA technical worker revealed US surveillance tactics, allowing the government access to phone records, individually stored data, and the servers of large social networking sites.

Whistle-blower Edward Snowden disclosed documents to WikiLeaks, calling the tactics of the US national security agency (NSA) ‘horrifying.’

Under the ‘Prism’ programme, which has been running since 2007, the NSA has access to the servers of Microsoft, YouTube, Skype, Facebook…

10 May 2013Feature

The uses of texting for activists

Cheap and powerful

Texting can put important or urgent information directly into your supporters’ hands. Combe Haven Defenders (CHD) are the latest campaign group to venture into mass texting of supporters – here’s how and why they do it (cheaply).

In addition to Facebook, Twitter and their Wordpress blog, CHD has relied heavily on texting to keep people updated.

Over 90% of…

17 October 2012Feature

This article is only available in the paper version of Peace News.

13 August 2011Feature

Anti-racism

http://www.united.non-profit.nl/pages/info18.htm
Accessed via the website of UNITED, a network of 550 European antiracist groups, this online guide contains a few detailed paragraphs on several aspects of working with the media, from drafting a press release to establishing your own magazine or radio station. Much of the information is relevant to other kinds of campaign groups. Also available in leaflet form,…

3 April 2004Comment

We receive important personal and social blessings from technology of all kinds, but for a quarter century we have been completely dominated by a seriously unexamined technology of which Sadie Plant (US author of Zeros and Ones, Digital Women and the New Technoculture) has written: “The impossibility of getting a grip, and grasping the changes under way is itself one of the most disturbing effects to emerge from the current mood of cultural change.”

This is compounded by
1)…

1 December 2003Feature

Rasmus Grobe from X-tausendmal quer media team reflects on their experiences of using mobile phone technologies for non-violent protests against nuclear transports in Germany.

In recent years the German anti-nuclear movement has been quite successful in organising nonviolent actions against Castor-transports en route to the intermediary storagehall for nuclear waste in Gorleben/Wendland. This November the German government has again needed 13,000 policewomen and men to guard this eighth transport, containing 12 carriages of nuclear waste. About 3000 anti-nuclear protesters have again succeeded in showing that the struggle over nuclear energy is by no means over.…