This post continues from part one here. As in part one, these have been gleaned from various sources such as email lists but especially from posts on Mastodon. Listed here in no particular order.
What will you find here? Alternative everything. Natureculture. Autonomia, self-sufficiency, post-capitalist pathways. That is, podcasts, zines and magazines aimed at critique and imagining and building prefigurative futures, storytelling bridging environmental science, climate science and sustainability science with design, art and culture.
In addition to podcasts and magazines, in this series I will also be adding Tools, apps, programs, platforms, guides and instructions that help take back what used to be the digital and tech commons. (Mostly these have been recommended on Mastodon and not tested by myself.)
Podcasts
Algorithmic Futures
The Algorithmic Futures podcast is produced by researchers in Australia and aims to
explore the work needed to successfully design technology and policy for an uncertain future.
As technology capabilities continue to evolve, they will change our world and how we experience it. Technology is increasingly becoming embedded and interwoven into our everyday lives, shaping how we interact with one another and with our environment.
In each episode, we interview technology creators, regulators and dreamers to learn how complex technological capabilities imagined now might shape (and be shaped by) our environment and societies in the years to come.
Episodes cover various topics related to robotics, responsible AI, and technologies related to defence, energy and the military.
Drilled
Drilled started off as a journalistic podcast that has grown into a larger investigative project focused on climate accountability. (I recommend signing up for the newsletter.)
The main Drilled podcast is described as a “true crime podcast about climate change”, while other podcasts cover public relations and corporate communications, legal issues related to climate accountability, and more.
Automated Societies
This podcast is produced by the Australian Research Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society.
Learn more about how automated decision-making (ADM) is being incorporated, reinvented or resisted as part of everyday lives and how we can make it responsible, ethical and inclusive.
Utopian visions of automated decision-making (ADM) promise new levels of personalisation, control and choice in our lives. Yet, we still know very little about how ADM is being incorporated, reinvented or resisted as part of everyday lives.
This podcast series features insights from researchers and industry experts on the impacts of automated decision-making on our society.
Upstream
Upstream began in 2017 and focuses on economics, especially from postcapitalist and anti-capitalist perspectives. Like many podcasts I’ve listed here, it features expert interviews, but also stories and documentaries exploring worker cooperatives, degrowth, universal basic income, environmental and social justice, and more.
Plastisphere
Plastisphere is a podcast by researcher and journalist Anja Krieger about “plastics, people, and the planet”.
Plastics have become the basis for our modern lives, but they also pollute the planet. Will we be able to develop a healthy relationship with these materials we’ve created?
Follow me on a journey into the world of synthetic polymers, their impacts on nature and ourselves, and the global quest to tackle plastic pollution.
Critical Technology
The Critical Technology podcast is produced by the Knowledge Media Design Institute (KMDI), Faculty of Information, University of Toronto.
Critical Technology explores new and emerging research into the social, cultural, and political implications of new/recent technological developments, in the form of one-on-one interviews with the researchers and authors of the studies themselves.
Moral Repair
The Moral Repair: A Black Exploration of Tech podcast launched in autumn 2023:
There’s so much new technology to adapt to these days: automation, AI, holograms… It’s overwhelming! But technologists, philosophers, care practitioners, and theologians can help us navigate these changing waters. On Moral Repair: A Black Exploration of Tech, hosts Annanda Barclay and Keisha McKenzie talk with tech and spiritual leaders. They explore technological innovation and hazard while showcasing practical wisdom from the African continent and diaspora to nurture wellbeing for all. Moral Repair is for people creating, using, and being shaped by tech, wondering about its implications, and questioning what they can do about it. We expand mainstream tech narratives, celebrate profound insight from Black philosophy and culture, and promote technology when it serves the common good. Together, we’ll leave each episode with new ways to think about tech’s impacts and apply practical wisdom to our everyday lives. Starting October 4th, new episodes drop every 1st and 3rd Wednesday—wherever you listen to podcasts. Moral Repair is part of PRX’s Big Questions Project, which supports new podcasts exploring discourse with exemplary thinkers focused on humanity’s most profound questions. This season is supported by the John Templeton Foundation and produced by PRX Productions.
Episodes include this discussion with small-technology expert Aran Balkan and How Tech Impacts American Farmland.
Magazines
Strange Matters
Strange Matters is a magazine of new and unconventional thinking covering a wide range of subjects. We publish issues regularly in print and digital formats, and also publish new digital content on a rolling basis.
Strange Matters was founded in 2020 by a collection of co-editors with interest and training in a range of intellectual disciplines – literature, architecture, history, economics, the natural sciences, and computer science, among others. We are proudly living our socialist values as a 100% worker-owned and managed cooperative.
Reckoning
“creative writing on environmental justice“
See the beautiful issues here and related podcast episodes.
Symphonies of Imagination: Philosophy of the Anthropocene
In a desirable future the opinions of everyone will matter and we publish by this believe.
The Anthropocene has a deficit of philosophy that looks at the world from a different point of view, instead of the one prescribed, centralised, accepted narrative.
Symphonies of Imagination is looking for revolutionary, unconventional writing about our near future. How will we manage a world that changes drastically in unpredictable ways? What will happen when humanity is hit by the fast approaching limits of our reckless behaviour and accepted standards break down presenting new challenges?
Vertical Atlas
VERTICAL ATLAS IS A NEW PUBLICATION ON THE GEOPOLITICS OF DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY
How to navigate the rapidly changing digital geopolitics of the world today? How to make sense of digital transformations and their many social, political, cultural, and environmental implications at different locations around the world? Vertical Atlas brings together the insights of a diverse group of internationally renowned artists, scientists and technologists from different backgrounds and places. From an investigation into the lithium mines in the Democratic Republic of Congo to maps of the fiber-optic submarine cables in the Atlantic and the ride-hailing platforms of China.
Vertical Atlas is not a classic atlas that depicts the world in a uniform manner and it is not a collection of traditional maps. It is a set of tools that enable comparisons, connections, and the seeing of connections and contradictions between different and diverse visions, realities and techno-political worlds – through newly commissioned diagrams, interviews, essays and works of art by leading experts from around the world.
Tools
There are plenty of lists and advice on replacing Big Evil Tech such as alternatives to the google suite, and this urge to get off Big Tech has heavily amplified in recent months. One way to find alternatives is by searching through Open Source Alternative To or European alternatives for digital products.
Janet Vertesi’s Opt Out Project gives excellent guides for removing oneself from extractivist, data sucking death star platforms. (See also this article on Lifehacker.)
This article on TechCrunch also gives a few security, privacy and data oriented product recommendations.
Check out these lists too:
Switching Software: “Ethical, easy-to-use and privacy-conscious alternatives to well-known software”
Ethical Alternatives & Resources from ethical network
Delightful gems of freedom
A growing set of tools, guides and advice is also related to avoiding extractivist AI models from scraping your own content and what you write and do on your own devices. This is fast moving, as companies are increasing updating their terms and sneaking scraping into their programs as default instead of opt-in.
A few write-ups on this:
Block the Bots that Feed “AI” Models by Scraping Your Website
How to remove Copilot from your Microsoft 365 plan
How to opt out of Meta’s AI training and How to Keep Meta AI From Using Your Instagram Data for Training
How to keep your art out of AI generators
Keeping updated on the constant enshittification (Cory Doctorow’s term) of tech and how to workaround is challenging, especially for those of us who are not developers and/or don’t consider ourselves particularly tech literate. However, there is also a blooming of open source, community based tech being developed and increasingly becoming user friendly to non-coders. The community tech and indie web scene has never gone away; it is coming into its own now more than ever, and it represents a – perhaps less visible – aspect of a solarpunk ethos where tech becomes the instantiation of a prefigurative politics.
