Hello ! Digital Limits has its own page on Mastodon, Linkedin and Instagram (Mostly in frenchâŠ)
We'll be sharing more details about our work, our inspirations and our ideas.
This month, we are shifting our focus in the manufacturing of organic and living materials of digital devices.
đż Organic & living
Manufacturing the devices that make up the digital world requires mineral and fossil materials in limited quantities on Earth, whose extraction and end-of-life raises serious environmental (and geopolitical) issues.
One branch of research is looking into what it would be like to have a computer without copper or silicon. One example is bio-manufacturing, which seeks to replace elements one by one with renewable, compostable or bio-sourced materials:
Compostable batteries based on edible products (with the recipe) or fungus mycelium (which still have metals).
A cellulose-based circuit substrate.
This printed circuit board patented by Jiva Materials has a base made from plant fibers that dissolves when immersed in hot water, allowing the soldered components to be recovered.
Great, but is it a solution to our problems? Well, not really. Or not yet. Firstly, because these works are still lab prototypes, and it will be difficult to replace the many materials and components of digital technology. Secondly, industrialization could prove problematic. Because even if materials are biosourced or accessible in large quantities, mass consumption produces the deleterious extractivist processes we know about: biofuel production is today destroying primary forests, bio-methane is developing in synergy with intensive livestock farming and so on. So continue to keep your devices as long as possible đ.
To continue, here is a more radical approach: replace digital technology itself with the living in certain functions such as capturing and indicating information. The canary in the mine is the best-known example, but there are thousands of others. The term "bio-indicator" or "bio-monitor" is used to describe an organism (or a part of one or more organisms) that contains information about the quality of the environment (e.g. a pollutant) that can be seen or measured.
In this article, computer scientists who had to equip various locations (garden, zoo...) with sensors, thought more about understanding the living world already in place. Rather than substituting the numerous bio-indicators, they looked at how technical interventions could support new ways of seeing living things.
Until 1996, the Montsouris drinking water reservoir in Paris used a "trout-o-meter" to assess water quality. More baroque (or Victorian, to be precise), in the 19th century, an Englishman designed a "leech barometer" which used the reaction of these animals to pressure to activate a bell indicating coming storms.
The Ozone tattoo project explores the use of tobacco leaves as an indicator of high ozone levels.
Lichens can be used as bio-monitors of pollution, offering an alternative to the low-cost sensors used in citizen monitoring projects. The first scientific article on this type of use dates back to 1866. More recently, the APIS project is using them to monitor air quality.
Project news
Continuing our work on ecological settings with a third approach: Rethinking the by default. This time we're starting from the observation that the default settings in our applications are always the most energy-consuming option. This is all the more problematic if we never change them, or if the settings are difficult to access. We therefore leave this choice to companies whose stakes are far more economic than ecological. In addition to recommending sober choices by default, here are a few other ideas:
Show the parameters that people change the most, to make them less afraid of changing the choice made by the application.
Choose your personal default, so that the state of a setting always returns to its sober state after a certain time. For example: I'm taking a high-definition photo? The smartphone will revert to low quality just after a screen lock.
No limits đ
On the cop28 website there is a nice "upgrade to low-carbon version" button. But since it's not activated by default, you've already downloaded all the content and images before clicking on the button... Not to mention the problematic vocabulary, since the most consuming mode is called "Return to full experience", implying that the sober mode causes us to miss out on things, when it could be presented as a gain (a faster experience, for example). This article talks about all that.
Since Orange's Maison Connectée application was discontinued, connected light bulbs (and other home automation products) are just good for the bin.
In other news
NASA has just updated the code of the Voyager 2 probe launched in 1977, to solve a problem of combustible residues that were accumulating.
A "repair" mode is coming to Android phones to prevent a repairman from rummaging through your data.
Nickel extraction in the Indonesian forest has deforested the equivalent of New York City.
We visited artist Raphaëlle Kerbrat's exhibition at the Centre Pompidou. Her work focuses on the sensitive representation of the materiality of the digital, as in the Si (1-BIT COMPUTER) project, a large-scale decomposition of a 1-bit operation, using raw pieces of silicon, the essential component of our devices.