Hi everyone, dear friends,

I see that everyone is still on the list, and it's great to see that
Bricolabs is still alive. I would like to give you some elements of my
journey in the last few years, in order to give the context of my
reaction to Rob's message, at the end of the email. It's a bit long, sorry.

After being very technophile in the 80s/90s, then turned exclusively to
free software and free hardware around 1999, I am now a promoter of
low-tech and degrowth. I still don't have a cell phone, without any
worries, and I haven't taken a plane since 2015: my last wonderful trip
to Indonesia with Venhza, Irene, Argha and other Indonesian friends. I
had told them, before the trip, that it was the last time I would take a
plane.

In 2018, I founded and organized a 140-conference symposium on
Ecological and Citizen Transition, in Nice, France, with the material
support of the Côte d'Azur University. (no money). The content is not
particularly interesting for you, because it concerns activities around
Nice and its region. If you are curious, here are some links.
A few words on the local vs global concept, in English here:
https://at06.eu/a-propos-de-2/
I also published an open source 400-page book about the symposium (in
French). https://at06.eu/guide/
The 140-conference symposium and the book were done without subsidies,
without private companies, but only non-profit associations, without
mobile phones, without any social networks, and only with FLOSS .
I described the organization process here, (in French only, sorry):
https://blog.nicelab.eu/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/HSF2020.pdf
We received about 3000 spectators and sold 2000 books (in a 400 000
inhabitants town), which is a great success for Nice, in this city only
dedicated to mass tourism and luxury.

In 2018, I also became the editor-in-chief of the oldest political
ecology magazine in France, a magazine born in 1973, just after the
first Stockholm Earth Summit, and after the Meadows report: Le Sauvage.
https://www.lesauvage.org/
This magazine has not been in print since 1996, but on the web only (but
we would like to republish in print)

In 2019/20, during Covid, I slowly stopped the hackerspace of Nice
(which I had founded in 2011) because all the local hackers were too
busy with high-tech gadgets and other digital traps of the IOT.
Only two hackers were interested in low-tech…

During this period, I stopped my international ecological and social
activism, in favor of local ecological and social activism. After more
than 40 years of ecological commitment (I am 61 now), and knowledge of
the ongoing ecological, cultural and social collapse, my analysis is
that it is no longer possible to stop the capitalist economy, and
therefore, the destruction of the environment, from above, by global
measures, nor from within the system. Large NGOs no longer have any
possibility of global regulation.

Because the capitalist economy is based on the religion of infinite
growth. And this belief is deeply rooted in all of society, culture,
education, business, and other religions.
Which is totally stupid and suicidal on a small planet of only 12,740 km
in diameter. How can we persist for so long in such blindness?

Let's now talk about the IOT and AI, the two subjects mentioned by Rob,
two miraculous sectors to continue growth, while wasting ever more
unique material and environmental resources. The IOT and AI, robotics,
are wonderful tools for disability and medicine, for certain dangerous
industrial sectors, for research. But these three fields increasingly
assist humans in their daily lives, by making them lose cognitive
abilities, decision-making abilities, physical abilities.

By entering into transhumanism, by promoting the permanent assistance of
humans by machines, we are eliminating what a few million years of
evolution have built in humans: the capacity for perception, the
capacity for empathy, the capacity for decision, the capacity for
critical thinking, the capacity for physical movement, the capacity for
creativity, the capacity for dialogue and debate, and, Jaromil will not
contradict me, the poetic capacity of humans.

In addition, the Internet and mobile telephony have now become
instruments of alienation and mass manipulation, manipulation operated
by the large web corporations, themselves totally linked to a small
thousand large companies and banks that control 90% of the economy.
Those bank and companies do not care at all whether they destroy the
planet or not, as long as they make money.

If we consider that the threshold of the Singularity is the moment when
the capacity of machines to manipulate society is greater than the
capacity of humans to control machines, we have exceeded this threshold.

But we have not exceeded it because the machine is more intelligent than
humans, but because collective human intelligence is collapsing in the
face of global algorithmic colonialism resulting from capitalism. I am
lucky, having escaped the social networks supported by advertising
agencies (Meta, Alphabet, etc.), to be fairly protected from
manipulation algorithms, even if I spend a lot of time on YouTube. There
are also tips to avoid being influenced by YT, for example the plugin
"Youtube Recommendations Blocker" on my Firefox/Librewolf, with the
plugin "Ublock Origin" to avoid seeing ads.

The Internet and telephony manipulate the masses to sell objects through
advertising, in what can be called global algorithmic colonialism.
Algorithmic neuromarketing techniques appeal to the lowest, most
reptilian instincts, the most destructive for humanity. "We provoke
division and we incite hatred" denounced the director of Meta algorithms
Tim Kendall in 2010. But there is not only division and hatred, there is
also the state of generalized psychological depression manufactured by
the addiction systems included in the algorithms. This calculated
depression is wreaking havoc among the youngest, among the most sensitive.

We are living a slow apocalypse, much more powerful than a global
nuclear winter. I am not the only one to analyze and observe that
culture and democracy are disappearing in front of our eyes, in a few
decades. In every small community in the world, down to the deepest
forest, mountain or desert where you can receive 4G or 5G, age-old
cultures are dying out, annihilated by the stupidity of the content
selected by algorithms serving capitalism.
Some people will tell me that some "poor people" have learned to read on
their smartphone, I will answer that it is better to continue learning
how to make a goat waterskin while being illiterate, than to die of
thirst watching some bullshit on TikTok.

Let's get back to the IOT and AI. No, Rob, it is not possible to reform
from the inside a system that is totally locked by a multitude of
interests driven by hundreds of billions of dollars. For a single good
decision that we have managed to implement, there are 99 that go in the
wrong direction. Efficiency 1%.
The efforts of Rob, Jaromil, and other activists who frequent the
institutional field, to politically influence European decisions, have
their limits very quickly reached. On the other hand, good tools (= good
software, good frameworks like those of Dyne/Jaromil), good
documentation, good training, good workshops, are extremely effective,
this is what we have always done, and what we know how to do best. All
the more so at the regional, municipal, local level. The concept of
Bioregions integrates autonomy and technological creativity, at a scale
that allows the application of the political ethics of open source and
direct democracy.

Having founded the first training courses in France on Arduino in 2005
(I also wrote the first Arduino documentation in French), I followed all
the evolution of the IOT from a technical point of view, and I am very
interested, as a technophile, in the work of Hamish Cunningham on the
Unphone, in all soft like Meshtastic, and other mesh network developments.

But many of these technologies are linked to the chip industry, and to
telephone networks. The more we use processors finely cut in Taiwan, the
further we move away from the resilience that we will need very very
quickly with the climate collapse, the socio-economic collapse and the
end of certain resources.

TMSC, Nvidia, Intel or Foxconn are extremely fragile in the face of
geopolitical problems, climate collapse and the finiteness of resources.
Not to mention the ecological/social weight of AI and IOT industries.
Not to mention surveillance capitalism and the Chinese-style Orwelian
society that is invading the world.

I do not think that we should use the latest microprocessors and
microcontrollers, but on the contrary use the oldest, most affordable
technologies in the event of a global component crisis. Also, I greatly
appreciate what Dyne and others are doing, for example, by designing
GNU/Linux distributions that run on computers that are more than 20
years old.


In summary, for me, both sectors of AI and IOT are moribund. They will
continue to abuse the capitalist gallery, and a few non-politicized
hackers, for a few more years, continuing to destroy our environment and
our resources, and accelerating the collapse. But I will not spend
another joule of energy, not a single neuron to promote their
development. As I said in 2010, by organizing the hacker festival Estive
Numérique, we have reached a "digital peak", a technological level
sufficient to divert or stop the collective march towards disaster,
without amplifying the climate crisis which will in any case impact
societies very badly.
http://web.archive.org/web/20100711143828/http://www.estivenumerique.org/editorial-engl.

The climate catastrophe has begun and we are still only experiencing
small fragments of this catastrophe, because it is growing every day,
faster and faster, each time we cross a tipping point. I am not going to
give you an inventory of what is burning, what is being swept away, what
is being deserted, or what is being flooded, it is everywhere in the media.

The worst is certain, even if our brains are configured not to take it
into account. In our lifetime, in the lifetime of our children, we will
all be, at one time or another, climate refugees, technological
refugees, and for many, hungry, thirsty and sick. Our only hope is the
viral construction of open human entities on a human scale, in osmosis
with the environmental and social fabric, in the form of horizontal
democracy or any other enlightened decision-making system.
I insist on the openess and mesh-networking of such bioregion/communities.

We still have all the cultural tools to do it, but the young generations
coming up today, those who have been fed on digital technology since the
cradle, will have a hard time getting out of digital dependency,
algorithmic dependency. If we believe in the future, educating young
people to understand the cognitive, ethical and political issues of
digital technology is a priority.

Looking forward to seeing you soon on video on my 2006 computer, I will
go through my VPN so that Zoom does not retrieve my metadata…

Cheers,

JN

(oh, last words: this text was first writen in french, than digitally
translated...no one is perfect)