alt.tech

Later this week, I’m going to Växjö, in the south in Sweden, to try out a recumbent bike. When I was in Berlin last fall, I tried a few different models. It was just half an hour, but I was hooked. Since then I’ve been longing to mount one once again, and now it’s happening.

When you say the word bicycle, most people would get a certain image of what one should look like. For most people, the recumbent bicycle is nowhere near that image. Still, it’s not all that big a diffence. If you’re not hell bent on the (near) standing upright position of most bicycles, it’s definitely worth a look. Especially considering that the wind resistance is your main loss of energy while riding a bike.

With all the environmental debate going on recently, theres been a lot of focus on the development on cars, trains and even airplanes. But the cheapest and most environmentally vehicle would surely be the bicycle. I’m getting a new one, and hopefully I’ll see you on the road, ok?

In the darkest and coldest months of the year, there’s a virus spreading. Slight headache? Feeling of anxiety? Well, you might not be suffering from a hangover since new years eve after all. You may just as well have caught the Affluenza virus, peaking in december.

At the moment I#m taking a rest from reading the book “Affluenza – The All-Consuming Epidemic”, second edition. (New and Improved, just like in the ads). I’m wondering about where our high-tech society is really carrying us. I can see a pattern of corporate owned technology (protected by patents, just to be safe) designed to push our consumtion closer to, or even past, our limits. A credit card mayhem is wrecking havoc, creating the slave labour of the 21st century.

“A powerful virus has infected American society, threatening our wallets, our friendships, our families, our communities, and our environment. We call the virus Affluenza. And because the United States has become the economic model for most of the world, the virus is now loose on every continent”

You are susceptible to the affluenza virus; do you want to step out of the hamster wheel? (Yes / No / Cancel)

Update: Valuable treasures can sometimes be found at Pirate Bay, if nowhere else.

“Catastrophes can wake up governments snarled in bureaucracy. A month after the Pearl Harbor attack, president Roosevelt gave the most extraordinary address to the nation. He announced huge targets for armament production. “Our task is hard. Our task is unprecedented. And the time is short. We must strain every armament-producing facility to the utmost. We must convert every available plant and tool to war production. That goes all the way from the greatest plats to the smallest – from the huge automobile industry to the village machine shop.” He stopped car production almost immediately. For nearly three years there were almost no cars produced in the USA” – James Martin, 2006

Humanity’s ability to ignore threats is breathtaking. Scientists can keep throwing warnings at us for years without actions being taken. Usually, things don’t start to change until the catastrophe’s already happened, and then, sometimes, it’s too late.

During the cold war, we built 75,000 nuclear warheads, enough to destroy every city on the planet a hundred times over. The threat of a nuclear all-out war is still very real, and it could happen by accident. We know that such a war would annihilate humanity, but still we fail to dismantle those atomic bombs.

In Newfoundland, the cod population collapsed due to an over sized fishing fleet. The same thing is happening in Europe, but still we do little to stop it.

Global warming will change life as we know it, within a generation. Still, the only result from UN’s global climate conference in Bali this year, was a declaration that we all gotta do something. All objectives for national initiatives we’re postponed. We know we have to make a radical change now, but the rich countries haven’t seen enough of the catastrophe to make a change.

Here’s what the Roosevelt of the 21st century should be saying (and doing):

“Our task is hard. Our task is unprecedented. And the time is short. We must strain every nuclear-dismantling facility to the utmost. We must convert every available plant and tool to environmentally sustainable production. That goes all the way from the greatest plats to the smallest – from the automobile industry to the fishing industry.”

Todays leaders are cowards! They won’t sacrifice a gram of comfortability to save humanities future. Catastrophes happens for a reason – usually because people choose not listen or not to act upon knowledge. With humankind being stronger that ever, carrying the tools to destroy ourselves, we risk everything if we don’t change the catastrophe-first pattern.

During my life as a web developer, I’ve been wasting many hours trying comply with web standards while designing websites. Right now, the process looks like this:

1. Designing in html/css2.1 using Bluefish and the Gimp.
2. Continuously testing the site using Firefox.
3. When pleased with the design, checking it using W3C’s html/css-validators.
4. Testing in using Internet Explorer (whenever I get access to it).
5. Being utterly pissed at IE’s lousy support for web standards.
6. Redesigning the site, avoiding IE’s flaws and removing some of the features that didn’t work out. (This is the part that seems to take the longest time)

I can’t help to wonder what the web would be like if web designers didn’t have to be cramped by a certain software companys complete disrespect for standards. It seems to me like a wonderful thing. Maybe IE7 will help out, but the problem is that I have yet to see IE7 in action. That’s quite surprising, considering that I use quite a lot of different computers when I move around in the world. Microsoft seems to have some adoption problems going on…

Anyway, I’m changing my process. I will be designing for web standards and the ones using IE will be served a different design, not that pretty, but working. (And they will get a link to download a decent browser.)

One more thing – please don’t complain about the lack of standards compliance on this blog’s html, I didn’t design it and won’t put the time it takes to redesign it. I have more important projects.

Today I opened up a new book – The Meaning Of the 21st Century by James Martin. Martin’s view is that the 21st century is the make-or-break of human civilization.

“A transition, unique in human history will occur.
If the transition goes well, humanity has a magnificent future. If it goes badly, we may be thrown into a new Dark Age or worse.”

Into my mind pops this article. A group, calling themselves The Wild Growing Collective, are advocating Anarcho-primitivism; a civilization critical ideology proposing a return to the “non-civilized” era of hunting and gathering.

It is easy, and very tempting, to dismiss the anarko-primitivists. For the humankind to live like hunters and gatherers we need to decrease the global population by about 99%. Just think about the path there for a while…

Still, I know the primitivists have no viable solution for the global problems, but I can’t help to think… How come people seeing a Mad Max apocalyptic scenario in the future get so little respect when people seeing the Star Trek colonizing-space scenario get so much? How come Christer Fuglesang gets away with saying that colonizing space could be a good alternative with all the environmental problems on earth, like global warming. Moving onto other planets isn’t a very realistic alternative for six billion people either. In fact, it’s a far worse solution than just returning to hunters and gatherers. Really! How are we supposed to manage life on other planets if we can’t handle it on earth – a planet so optimal that life emerged on it’s own?

So, still waiting for the solution? Maybe that’s just the problem, people waiting for the easy solution. The truth is that the solutions aren’t easy. They require us to use the best of civilizations knowledge, but not to once again increase our consumption of natural resources, but to decrease it. They require us to adapt our economy to the reality of ecology. They require us to base the most critical decisions of mankind on what world we want our children to live in – not quarterly reports.

And we all have to play a part, sooner or later. It starts with you or it ends with you, your choice!

On the twelfth of October the OLPC project starts a sale of the XO laptop. Buy one, pay for two. Yes, that’s right, you pay for two laptops and get only one. The other laptop goes to a child in a developing country, which is basically the purpose of the whole project, as I’ve written about previously.

Perfect Christmas gift for my kids!

Yeah, I know, they’re not actually “all gone”. But really, there aren’t really all that many out there these days. So, where did they go?

The reason for asking this is that I met a woman (while hitch-hiking) who was talking about the hitch-hiker culture of the 60′s and 70′s. According to her it was much more of a social movement than just about traveling. So, if it was sort of a social movement, it’s not enough to ask why the hitch-hikers disappeared, we also have to ask where this social movement went, or did that disappear aswell?

Let’s start with the easy question. Why did the hitch-hikers disappear. I would say that it’s probably mainly due to two or possibly three changes. First we have the spread of the freeways, where you’re not allowed to stop you can, nor to hitch-hike in the first place. That made longer distance hitch-hiking a real pain. Next we have the cars which became more easily accessible, possibly in combination with better public transport, which reduced the need for hitch-hiking. A third explanation could possibly be the mental barrier of fear against picking up strangers, providing that is a factor that’s changed over time. This is a rather common explanation, but I’m skeptical about it. I think most people have always been negative towards picking up strangers and this argument could just as easy be just another “things were better in the past” kind of argument. My opinion is that peoples fear of strangers isn’t really getting stronger over time; more like the other way around.

Ok, to the point already! Where did the social movement go? Well, when one technology fails a social movement, maybe they find other paths. Being pushed away by the freeways and laws they might well have found new ways on the Internet. Only this time it’s not about traveling, it’s about a place to sleep. (Well, sometimes the hitch-hiking turned out the same way I hear.) Breaking against the commersialistic approach of hotels, motels and hostels, they found something revolutionizing. Please join us at couchsurfing.com!

Du förändrar inte världen med en broschyr. Eller med en blogg. Jag kan tycka att det är frustrerande att se vilken liten förändring som sker oavsett hur mycket vi än diskuterar miljö, fattigdom eller orättvisor i det här landet. Visst kan det ses som ett steg i rätt riktning eller kanske, med en hoppfull förväntan, inledningen på ett nytt paradigm. Men ändå, stadsjeeparna säljer mer för varje år.

Men det betyder inte att världen inte går förändra. Ekonomen E. F. Schumacher bildade 1966 ITDG (Intermediate Technology Development Group) som senare bytte namn till Practical Action. Med mellanliggande teknologi (intermediate technology) menade Schumacher teknologi som inte är tillgänglig för utvecklingsländer, men som är väldigt billig för den rika världen. Mellanliggande teknologi kan lätt köpas av fattiga och öka deras produktivitet utan att öka de sociala klyftorna lokalt. Mycket av teknologin kan konstrueras och servas lokalt till skillnad från högteknologi. På så sätt kan fattigas situation förbättras radikalt utan att skapa beroenden.

Som Jared Diamond skriver i Vete, Vapen och Virus så är de teknologiska framstegen i Eurasien, baserade på geografiska fördelar, grunden för den globala snedfördelningen fram till idag. Teknologin har alltså varit en nyckel till en orättvis värld, men kan den också vara en nyckel till att minska orättvisa?

Practical Actions idé är att angripa problemen underifrån, genom att erbjuda fattiga människor teknologi som löser för dem viktiga vardagsproblem, men utan att skapa beroenden uppåt. En enkel biogasanläggning som ger energi till matlagning och belysning, driven av biprodukter från gödsel som används på åkrarna. Komposterande toaletter. Funktionella kärl som mångfalt ökar möjligheterna att lagra mat i varma länder. För oss i den rika världen är mycket självklarheter, men det täcker viktiga behov.

Jag önskar att jag verkligen kunde förändra världen med en broschyr och ett blogginlägg. Och visst, ett tankefrö kan en dag växa upp till ett träd av möjligheter. Det vore så skönt att verkligen kunna lita på att de senaste och hetaste tekniska framstegen kommer göra något för de fattiga i världen. Men i verkligheten är det inte iPods som kommer göra skillnad. Det är tillgång till rent vatten, mat och möjlighet till försörjning.

PS. Jag ska ut på äventyr. Det sägs att all förändring börjar med en själv. Skål för det!

One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) är ett projekt för att förse barn runtom världen med nya möjligheter att utforska, experimentera och uttrycka sig själva. Idén var från början att den lilla bärbara datorn skulle kunna säljas i stora upplagor till fattiga länder för under hundra dollar. Kostnaderna har skjutit iväg sedan dess, men datorn är fortfarande extremt billig att bygga. Dessutom bygger den på öppen programvara.

XO is built from free and open-source software. Our commitment to software freedom gives children the opportunity to use their laptops on their own terms. [...] We are using open-document formats for much the same reason: transparency is empowering. The children—and their teachers—will have the freedom to reshape, reinvent, and reapply their software, hardware, and content.

Projektet är en lysande kontrast till företagens vanliga strategier. Istället för en ökad centralisering av ägandet och minskade möjligheter för enskilda att påverka utvecklingen så bemyndigar OLPC sina användare. Istället för att begränsa konkurrens och skapa nya monopol så öppnas utvecklingen upp på ett sätt som också den fattiga världen kan ta del av. Beroenden bryts och nya möjligheter skapas.

Det har varit ganska mycket debatt om människors integritet de senaste åren. Åtminstone där jag har varit. Sverige har fått en självutnämnd integritetsombudsman som gång på gång lyfter fram nya hot mot vår integritet. Storebror ser dig. Nu vill jag inte dissa Per Ström, men kanske är det inte Storebror som är det största hotet mot ditt privatliv, utan dina vänner, eller rent av du själv.

Dagboksbloggandet, där en beskriver vad som händer i privatlivet, lämnar ut en massa detaljer som vem som helst kan läsa. Med communities som Facebook kopplas nätverken samman och man kan hitta bilder som alla möjliga har tagit, och som ger dig möjlighet att kartlägga människor ganska ingående. Och det handlar inte bara om sociala konsekvenser. Polisen varnar bloggare för att skriva om sin semester.

Normalisering

Från att internetdagböcker har varit något som ett fåtal har sysslat med så har vi kommit till ett läge där alla känner någon som gör det. För några år sedan ansågs det som ett kul experiment om än något extremt, men numera känner många till och med att det förväntas av dem. Den normaliseringen har gett en bild av att det är något som alla håller på med (trots att det fortfarande är så att dagboksbloggarna är i minoritet. Det har rent av blivit så normaliserat att folk nu bloggar även om vad deras vänner och familj hittar på, vilket inte bara integritetskränkande, utan rent av ett brott mot Pul i många fall.

Jag gissar att bloggarna tycker det är helt normalt att lägga ut privatlivet pÃ¥ nätet, men det är inte säkert att deras vänner upplever det likadant. Kanske tänker de att “jag har inget att dölja”, och varför skulle andra ha det? Men det handlar inte om ifall nÃ¥gon har nÃ¥got att dölja. Det handlar om rätten till sitt eget privatliv.

Krocken

Det intressanta är att utvecklingen i det moderna Sverige snarast varit att en skiljer på sina olika liv. Privatlivet för sig och arbetslivet för sig. Jag ska inte bedöma om det är positiv eller negativ utveckling, men jag tycker att den bilden är ganska tydlig.

Hur går då detta ihop med normaliseringen av att hänga ut privatlivet på nätet?

Inte alls, tillåter jag mig svara.

Nu kanske du förväntar dig en slutkläm, en fingervisning om vart detta ska leda? Icke då. Jag nöjer mig med att konstatera att samhället sällan har en entydig riktning. Det har flera, och det verkar inte finnas några hinder för att några av alla dessa utvecklingar totalt motsäger varandra.