Low-Tech Magazine

This is super neat to me on a number of levels. Low-Tech Magazine is a website about operating "modern" social functions with minimal outside technological intervention, and practices what it preaches by running the whole server off a self-contained solar setup (as they put it, "This website runs on a solar powered server located in Barcelona, and will go off-line during longer periods of bad weather").

On a purely personal-interest front, this site is the unique combination of "making it work with what you've got" and "tech-hacking" that I find fascinating - like a mix between the Primitive Technology YouTube channel and Maker-space DIYs. But more than that, it (along with its sister-site, No Tech Magazine) is providing resources for building your own solar power set-up, building your own bicycle frames, and other similar actions which provide multi-purpose benefits. In addition to reducing individual environmental impact, the methods and guides produced by the site are specifically intended to limit dependence on corporate or other "Western" systems which (as we've seen in Texas repeatedly of late, as well as elsewhere in the aftermath of hurricanes when the FEMA budget has been intentionally constrained) are deceasing in reliability as profit-taking and other social ills are increasing their fragility. Beyond even that scope, they allow for communities outside the Western social model - such as global-south communities and social-change cooperatives - to function in a way where they can obtain some of the benefits of modern technology without being potentially chained to groups seeking to control, exploit, or even annihilate them.

As a part of that community ethos, one of the readers of the magazine is also actively producing a YouTube playlist of audio readings of the magazine for those who prefer to absorb their information that way.