Interesting magazine. Not to detract from its content - but are any of those technologies really low tech? Old computers, solar panels, and the various generators all rely on exceptionally advanced science and technology. It would take decades of research to recreate them from scratch.
It's more about reusing/repurposing 'old' discarded tech. Or keeping high tech going as people would do in a post apocalyptic society.
The magazine goes in to more than that, solar/old tech stuff is included (I would think) because at this stage, disengaging from tech effectively excludes people from society. So I read it as meaning "within the boundaries of remaining included in society, how low tech can we go?" and the conclusion is seemingly "we can host a high traffic site on a battery powered raspberry pi".
The other stuff in the magazine is very low tech indeed: their articles on hot water bottles, pedal power, very early solar power, and agriculture among others are exceptionally interesting and I'd recommend reading them.
Yeah I was going to say something similar, but you put it more succinctly.
It seems the message is really about efficiency and sustainability, not necessarily about low tech. Also, framing it as being about low tech sort of helps things but also hurts things.
For example, I was really interested to read the article about bicycles, and think they make a set of excellent points, points that don't seem to get enough attention in the cycling community. But my guess is the cycling community (to the extent there even is one cycling community), often (although not always) focused on the latest and greatest tech, would respond more to a bike being marketed as ultra-durable or upgradeable and efficient than being "low tech".
Lowresourcetechmagazine.com is too long domain name, no?
But yeah, "doing more with less" is the focus here. Skip unnecessary cruft. Not so much avoid using (high) tech stuff.
Also note that in the realm of computing (or even general electronics), high-tech IS frugal, if used appropiately. Thx to Moore's law, switch-mode power supplies, RPi style computers (or microcontrollers on the low end), e-paper / OLED displays & similar fancy stuff. Doing without those would be wasteful, imho.
#indieweb movement also has a lot of roots in similar ideologies with people going into lowtech -- so I would also check that out, but that is a pretty massive hole to dig into already :-)
If you have electricity you are not really in realm of low tech. I would consider mechanical human powered(not bike with generator) to be low tech. And those might make sense if you value that type of thing and don't want easiest way out...
I feel the same. It's just another arbitrary, an inconsistent point in the tech tree of real life. Solar panel powered server is low tech, but a firearm is not, for example.
So I think the point is to question the never-ending technological advance a bit, and especially its application to day-to-day life, which I think is good food for thought in general.
I agree with your second paragraph. I think the bait of "lowtech" name is thinking that the main goal is doing AI with stick and mud. It's one of the goal (ofc not literally ), but the most important one is showing alternative and inviting people to think about what is really "technology" and its implications. Mainly because browsing a website hide a ton of processes that one user don't have to think about it.
> It's just another arbitrary, an inconsistent point in the tech tree of real life. Solar panel powered server is low tech, but a firearm is not, for example.
Solar is not low-tech but I think you need to view it from the point of being able to have a computer and internet at all, in which case you'll need some form of electricity generation.
For hunting you don't need a firearm, bow and arrow does the job just fine for most game.
> So I think the point is to question the never-ending technological advance a bit, and especially its application to day-to-day life, which I think is good food for thought in general.
Yup. Lots of elementary stuff like do you really need to heat your whole house in the winter or could you just use a blanket (or some other form of localized heating) where you spend 95% of your time. Stuff like most people won't give much consideration to because the tech is there, it's easy to use and it's cheap.
It's more about reusing/repurposing 'old' discarded tech. Or keeping high tech going as people would do in a post apocalyptic society.