Thinking Without Machines has gone low tech.
In basic terms, that means I no longer use Substack. Instead, I host all the articles on the static personal website you are viewing right now.
The goal is to reduce energy consumption and hardware requirements, both on the user and server side. At the same time, a low-tech personal website like this resists the increasing “platformisation” of the Internet.
If you want a detailed account of what the “low tech” Internet might look like, why it might be a good thing, and how to go about implementing it, I highly recommend reading How To Build a Low-Tech Internet (2023) by Kris De Decker, the founder of low-tech magazine.
As Decker argues:
We were told that the Internet would dematerialize society and decrease energy use. Contrary to this projection, it has become a massive infrastructure and a rapidly growing energy consumer.
It’s worth bearing in mind that Decker set up low-tech magazine in 2007, well before the rise of generative artificial intelligence and the even greater energy and infrastructure demands of the Internet today.
Beyond the Internet, Decker and his team makes a brilliant case for thinking about “the potential of past and often forgotten technologies and how they can inform sustainable energy practices” more generally. That doesn’t mean going back to the stone age. Rather, it means being selective about what technologies we adopt and how we use them. In fact, rather than “low tech”, it might better to think of something between high and low—what the British-German economist E. F. Schumacher called “intermediate technology” is his classic Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics As If People Mattered (1973).
Indeed, Decker fits within a long tradition, stretching from the arts and crafts movement of the late nineteenth century through to the environmentalism of the 1970s. For much of the past 150 years, people have been finding ways to quietly resist the “high technology” of industrial capitalism.
A Low-Tech Website
So how to respond? On an individual basis, Decker shows us what a low-tech Internet might actually look like. And it’s pretty cool.
The basics are all straightforward, but powerful.
First off, reduce energy use on the server side by making the website static. No calls to external APIs. No server-side processing of PHP or SQL or Ruby or alike. Just the original vision of the World Wide Web: users requesting static documents from a server. In practice, that means all the pages are static HTML, CSS and a little Javascript.
That doesn’t mean the website itself never changes. Quite the opposite. It’s just that the site only changes when there is new content, not every time a user visits it. To achieve this, low-tech magazine uses one of the many great open source static site generators—in this case Hugo—to turn local plain text files into a website. Then Decker and his team simply upload the new files when they write something new.
Second, reduce the actual file size of individual webpages. That’s already a lot easier when you’re just working with plain text: HTML and CSS take up very little space. Images are a bigger problem, quite literally. But rather than abandoning visuals entirely, low-tech magazine solves this by using “dithering” to massively reduce the file size of a typical JPEG or PNG. In addition, where possible, they use vector images (which are defined mathematically and thus very small in file size) rather than raster images (which are made up of millions of dots and thus large in file size).
Finally, to keep things as tight as possible, low-tech magazine makes minimal use of Javascript, and imports no external Javascript libraries. Javascript itself isn’t really a problem, but when it is used excessively, it adds to the processing overhead for the user. Plus the typical libraries that most websites rely on easily add up to a couple of Megabytes of extra data to download.
The Results
Having set this all up, I decided to do a little test. I used the “Inspector” function on Firefox to see exactly how much data I was downloading and how many calls to external APIs I was making, comparing Substack with my new low-tech website.
To give a rough idea: loading my article ‘Learning to Play: Computer Games and the Origins of AI’ on Substack would make 217 user requests to the server (or other external servers) and download 4.61 MB of data, which was then decompressed by the user to 10.43MB.
Loading the same article on this website makes just 10 server requests and downloads 335kB of data. There is no additional decompression step.
And that’s just the user-side stuff. Substack of course does all kind of complex server-side processing for the content, accounts, advertising, analytics and alike, which I have no visibility on. My website does no extra processing. It just sends the static pages.
In any case, I’m pretty pleased with the result. Now, low-tech magazine actually goes a step further than this. For now, I still rely on my domain-name provider to host the web server. In contrast, low-tech magazine uses their own locally-hosted server, running on a very low-powered computer. Not only that—and this is seriously cool—low-tech magazine runs their server using solar power. Being based in Barcelona, rather than the Midlands, does help somewhat with that. But hey, the weather has been pretty good extreme recently, so you never know.