Over the last twenty years, smartphones gradually replaced many earlier digital tools such as PDAs, cameras and music players. Today these objects are regarded as obsolete: they may hold some esthetic or nostalgic appeal but they do not fit in a modern, zerofriction, cloud-first workflow. Yet these devices still have desirable qualities that smartphones lack: a singular focus on a specific use case; hardware buttons and physical connectors; multi-day battery life.

Even their lack of connectivity can be seen as an asset from a resilience, privacy and security standpoint. Actually using decades-old tech today is challenging, in spite of its apparent simplicity. The friction of physical media-based workflows now feels unacceptable. But much like classic cars can be fitted with an EV motor, it is possible to retrofit older devices in order to make them usable again in a connected world.

Read more: “Practical Retrofitting for Obsolete Devices“, Martin Lafréchoux, LIMITS2025, June 2025. Via Roel Roscam Abbing.

“Just like the arts-and-crafts movement was a reaction against industrialization, we’re now experiencing a reaction against the smart home. People are looking for more manual, less complicated places to live.”

Read more: Why the Ultrarich Are Unplugging From “Smart Homes”, The Hollywood Reporter, April 2025. Thanks to Manuel.

“Suppose Schopenhauer is right that life boils down to a flight from either boredom or pain. Insofar as the vast material abundance of wealthy, industrialised society has had an analgesic effect (there is simply less physical pain than in the past, before fluoride and anaesthesia and sedentary lives), it would seem to have solved one problem only to amplify the other. In place of pain, we have ennui, the quintessential modern condition. It follows directly from overabundance: an endless stream of video “content” or chocolate cake or edibles or any other indulgence cannot deliver lasting satisfaction. Everything gets old eventually, leaving one to grope around for the next fix.”

Read more: The West is Bored to Death, Stuart Whatley, The New Statesman, April 2025.

A Collier problem occurs whenever a new technology requires the technology it nominally replaces to function due to efficiency limits. Steam ships replaced sailing ships, but without windjammers the steamships could not function. This led to worldwide exports, paradoxically with large sailing vessels often transporting the coal needed by steamships, as they were more economical to operate on long oceanic sea routes.

Read more: Woods, Steven. “The Collier Problem: Toward a Definition and Application.” Image: Unloading coal from a collier on East Beach in the town of Cromer. Norfolk, England. Image taken on 8 March 1912. Public Domain.

From Places Journal:

“Building” is a powerful metaphor that has long structured how we think about progress and accomplishment. What might be the new metaphors, the new rubrics, for an epoch of repair? How might professions premised on growth and consumption — new buildings, new landscapes, new cities — adapt to the new urgencies of reuse, preservation, and degrowth?

Image: Vacant lot, Second Avenue and Second Street, New York City, July 2024. [David Gissen], Places Journal.

Field Notes: Repair explores these questions and more through an ambitious eight-part narrative survey, featuring observations from nearly 100 scholars, designers, planners, activists, and artists. Contributing authors take us to locales around the world, from Belgrade to Chicago; Delhi to the Blue Pacific; Johannesburg to New York City, Malmö, and London, among many others.

In the installments, you’ll discover thoughtful, nuanced, and urgent calls for practices of repair, reuse, preservation, maintenance, and care. Some are hyper-practical, concerned with the lifespans of artifacts and structures. Others revise or propose philosophies of repair that might address the overlapping crises of climate change, economic inequality, and racial injustice. More than a few acknowledge that repair can only take us so far. “Field Notes: Repair” follows an earlier series in Places, Repair Manual.

Pedestrians face the greatest risk of automobile collisions when crossing a street: the longer a crossing, the higher their exposure is to oncoming cars. Despite the relevance of crossing distance, few studies have considered its variance within or across entire cities. Given that, we probed pedestrian crossing distance at the municipal scale, leveraging both OpenStreetMap and satellite imagery to quantify crossing distances at roughly 49,000 formal crossings (those parts of the roadway designated for pedestrians to cross), both marked and unmarked, at intersections and at midblock.

We measured formal pedestrian crossings throughout a dense European city (Paris [France]), a dense American city (San Francisco [CA]), and a less-dense, more car-centric American city (Irvine [CA]). This granular approach—covering roughly 49,000 total crossings—identified inter- and intraurban spatial patterns in the distribution of pedestrian crossing distance, including clusters of long crossings that likely deter walking and increase its risk. By overlaying recent pedestrian–vehicle collisions on these novel data sets we found that longer crossing distance correlated with increased likelihood of collisions, raising the salience of traffic-calming interventions.

Read more: Moran, Marcel E., and Debra F. Laefer. “Multiscale Analysis of Pedestrian Crossing Distance.” Journal of the American Planning Association (2024): 1-15.

“Researchers have argued that wealthy nations rely on a large net appropriation of labour and resources from the rest of the world through unequal exchange in international trade and global commodity chains. Here we assess this empirically by measuring flows of embodied labour in the world economy from 1995–2021, accounting for skill levels, sectors and wages.

We find that, in 2021, the economies of the global North net-appropriated 826 billion hours of embodied labour from the global South, across all skill levels and sectors. The wage value of this net-appropriated labour was equivalent to €16.9 trillion in Northern prices, accounting for skill level. This appropriation roughly doubles the labour that is available for Northern consumption but drains the South of productive capacity that could be used instead for local human needs and development.

Unequal exchange is understood to be driven in part by systematic wage inequalities. We find Southern wages are 87–95% lower than Northern wages for work of equal skill. While Southern workers contribute 90% of the labour that powers the world economy, they receive only 21% of global income.”

Read more (open access): Hickel, J., Hanbury Lemos, M. & Barbour, F. Unequal exchange of labour in the world economy. Nat Commun 15, 6298 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-49687-y

Earlier this year Rachel Donald interviewed me for her podcast “Planet: critical”. Here’s the video. Also check out the other episodes, there’s lot of interesting stuff there. https://www.planetcritical.com.

One of Low-tech Magazine’s readers, Arie James Dallas, has started making audio versions of articles. Three articles are available at the moment. Find their playlist here.

Giant wooden cargo ships that braved the oceans for thousands of years are still being made in the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu. Even as metal motorised ships became the norm, some shoreline communities in South India continue to craft this wooden cargo ship. In a blend of reason, creativity and hard work the communities engineered their past to forge a future. This book traces the transition of this tradition over time.

The authors have created a photo documentation using hundreds of images that capture the shipyard’s atmosphere to offer a narrative and the manufacture of these ships at each step of their construction. It analyzes the conditions of their economic viability and how it has evolved over time. Through visual anthropology this book offers a narrative of wooden cargo ship building and craftsmanship in south Asia.

The open access book can be downloaded from https://www.ifpindia.org/bookstore/wild-craft/.

There is also a video about the project: Of Wind and Wood. Sustainable cargo ships in France and in India.

Ivan L. Collins created historically accurate models of horse-drawn vehicles using painstaking research to ensure that every detail was authentic. Built at one-eighth scale, these models represent transportation technology before the automobile. Collins saw this work as more than a hobby; his models were a way to preserve history for future generations.

See and read more:

https://www.ohs.org/museum/exhibits/models-in-motion-ivan-collins-miniature-vehicles.cfm
http://www.scalemodelhorsedrawnvehicle.co.uk/(Ivan%20Collins).htm

Thanks to David Barnes.

Image: Oregon Historical Society.

Earlier this year we organised an event in Barcelona, “Back To The Future Of The Internet”, in which we explored concepts from the Internet’s history that can help create a more sustainable future network. The video is now online:

“The SmolPhone project is an action research on the topic of low-tech in the domain of IT systems. Its practical aspects consist in designing a sort of low-tech smartphone offering some services of a classical smartphone with a one-week battery lifetime. The goal is not to optimize a typical smartphone but rather to reconsider the smartphone design space, exploring unusual architectures and evaluating the set of features that should be part of long-lasting smartphones.”

Quoted from: Rautureau, Aloïs, et al. “Quantifying the tiny-Small design of the SmolPhone.” ICT For Sustainability (ICT4S). 2024. Related articles.

Image: Ducts in a row. Photo: Daniel A. Barber. Taken from: After Comfort: A User’s Guide.

Comfort is a construct. Many new commercial and institutional buildings built over the past few decades rely so heavily on fossil-fueled mechanical HVAC systems that they would be uninhabitable without them. Many of the stylistic and programmatic debates in architecture in these same decades similarly relied on HVAC for their explorations and innovations. In other cases, often at the residential scale, buildings have been produced with an expectation of cheap energy, which has meant that adequate insulation, cross ventilation, and other design-based passive thermal measures have not been considered. Our determinedly slow, casual move away from fossil fuels, with limited political or socio-economic support, is already resulting in “green inequity” and novel forms of thermal violence. Over the decades to come, enclaves where upper-class neighborhoods engage with expensive “green tech” such as electric vehicles and heat pumps will coexist alongside poorer areas that cannot afford to make any transition from the carbon-fueled lifestyles they need to get by.

After Comfort: A User’s Guide is a project by e-flux Architecture in collaboration with the University of Technology Sydney, the Technical University of Munich, the University of Liverpool, and Transsolar.

In Europe alone, there are more than 500 cities with continuous demographic shrinkage, which in many cases concern small‐ to medium‐sized, peripherally situated, former industrial cities. The surplus of space (land, buildings) in these cities and the diminished role of market parties might create favorable conditions for experimentation with alternative types and ways of urban development and land use. Moreover, in shrinking cities, there is also a need for urban development solutions that improve the quality of life in the absence of economic growth, and therefore there may also be more interest in the outcomes or lessons of urban degrowth experiments and a higher probability for larger‐scale uptake and implementation.

Read more: Hermans, Maurice, Joop de Kraker, and Christian Scholl. “The Shrinking City as a Testing Ground for Urban Degrowth Practices.” Urban Planning 9.2 (2024).

Hailing the Ferry, oil on canvas painting by Daniel Ridgway Knight, 1888, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

Medieval manuscripts resisted obsolescence. Made by highly specialised craftspeople (scribes, illuminators, book binders) with labour-intensive processes using exclusive and sometimes exotic materials (parchment made from dozens or hundreds of skins, inks and paints made from prized minerals, animals and plants), books were expensive and built to last. They usually outlived their owners. Rather than discard them when they were superseded, book owners found ways to update, amend and upcycle books or book parts.

These activities accelerated in the fifteenth century. Most manuscripts made before 1390 were bespoke and made for a particular client, but those made after 1390 (especially books of hours) were increasingly made for an open market, in which the producer was not in direct contact with the buyer. Increased efficiency led to more generic products, which owners were motivated to personalise. It also led to more blank parchment in the book, for example, the backs of inserted miniatures and the blanks ends of textual components. Book buyers of the late fourteenth and throughout the fifteenth century still held onto the old connotations of manuscripts—that they were custom-made luxury items—even when the production had become impersonal.

Owners consequently purchased books made for an open market and then personalised them, filling in the blank spaces, and even adding more components later. This would give them an affordable product, but one that still smacked of luxury and met their individual needs. They kept older books in circulation by amending them, attached items to generic books to make them more relevant and valuable, and added new prayers with escalating indulgences as the culture of salvation shifted.

From: M Rudy, Kathryn. Piety in pieces: how medieval readers customized their manuscripts. Open Book Publishers, 2016.

Image: Parchment diptych with the measurements of Christ’s length and side wound, inserted into a French book of hours. Paisley, Renfrew District Museum and Art Gallery, Ms. 1, fol. 13–14 forming a diptych. Photo © Author, CC BY 4.0.

• If you can read this, you are not a machine. [Gittit Szwarc]
• Clay PCB. [Patrícia J. Reis] “Our Clay PCB is not made of plastic but instead clay collected from the forest in Austria that was carefully prepared and modeled in a shape of a tile with an imprinted circuit, and later fired with wood in the nature. Our conductive tracks use urban-mined silver and all components are re-used from old electronic devices.” Via Roel Roscam Abbing.
• The revenge of the home page. [New Yorker] “As social networks become less reliable distributors of the news, consumers of digital journalism are seeking out an older form of online real estate.” Via Roel Roscam Abbing.
• The ‘boring phone’: stressed-out gen Z ditch smartphones for dumbphones. [The Guardian] “The problem with offlining is that the world is increasingly difficult for people without a smartphone.”
• This Irresistible Revolution. [The Point Magazine] “One of the ways that I “get offline” in the morning is by running—after which I upload my run to Strava.” Via Arts&Letters Daily.
• Ben Grosser, artist and creator of Minus, the opposite of Facebook. [Techtonic podcast]
• 2024 Small File Media Festival: Call for Work. Deadline: 15 June.

The Ironwood bicycle is a wooden framed bike that people could make themselves with commonly available materials. It has a laminated wooden frame and fork to which standard bicycle components are bolted. The frame can be made with basic carpentry and metalwork skills, without the need for welding or soldering. The design is intended for small scale bicycle production that would support local employment as an alternative to importing bicycles from around the world. More: http://www.ironwoodbicycle.com.

Next week 21 May LTM does a talk in Brussels, reflecting on the work of architect Louise Morin in gallery “et al.” It is the last day you can see her exhibition.