“There’s a common misconception that state-of-the-art technology has to be expensive, energy consumptive and hard to engineer. That’s because we have been persuaded to believe that #InnovativeTechnology is whatever bombastic billionaires claim it is, whether that’s commercial #spacecraft or the endless iterations of generative #AItools.
As the #Canadian #technologist and #engineer #UrsulaFranklin once said, fantasies of technology would have it that innovation is always “investment-driven, shiny, lab-born, experimental, exciting”. But more often than not, in the real world, it is “#NeedsDriven, #scrappy, on #location, #iterative, #practical, #mundane”.
The real pioneering #technologies of today are genuinely useful #systems I like to call “frugal tech”, and they are brought to life not by eccentric billionaires but by people doing more with less. They don’t impose #TopDown “#solutions” that seem to complicate our lives while making a few people very rich. It turns out that genuinely #innovative #technology really can set people free.” — Eleanor Drage
#OpEd / #EleanorDrage / #tech / #FrugalTech / #Cambridge #LeverhulmeCentre / #FutureOfIntelligence <https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/aug/02/billionaire-big-tech-frugal-elon-musk-innovation>
Titans like Musk would love us to believe innovation means top-down solutions that only enrich the wealthy. In fact, we all have the power, says Eleanor Drage, research fellow at Cambridge University
I define peace not as the absence of war, but as the presence of justice, and the absence of fear.
-- Ursula Franklin
⬆ #Wisdom #Quotes #UrsulaFranklin #Fear #Justice #Peace #War
Ursula's list
"Ursula Franklin is one of my all-time favorite thinkers about both the obvious and obscured parts of our technological world."
#decisions #UrsulaFranklin #philosophy #Tech #TechPolicy #ToRead
Technology is much more than a tool. Physicist Ursula Franklin argued that it’s a system — one so powerful that it can shape our mindset, our society and our politics. Her observations were prescient when she delivered her Massey Lecture in 1989 and they are all the more relevant today. Ursula Franklin’s friend and collaborator Jane Freeman reflects on the power of Franklin’s message.
Fight for your right to own media https://mikepaul.com/fight-for-your-right-to-own-media/
#4kUhd, #ArrowVideo, #BluRay, #Copyright, #CreativeLeadership, #CriterionCollection, #Film, #Movies, #Opinion, #PhysicalMedia, #RealWorldOfTechnology, #Streaming, #Tv, #UrsulaFranklin
“Now may be the time take machine demography seriously and enter into real discussion about *machine* population control”
The Real World of Technology pp25
5/n
“Any tasks that require caring, whether for people or nature, any tasks that require immedieate feedback and adjustment, are best done holistically”
The Real World of Technology pp17
4/n
“prescriptive technologies are often exceedingly effective and efficient, they come with an enormous social mortgage. The mortgage means that we live in a culture of compliance, that we are ever more conditioned to accept orthodoxy as normal”
The Real World of Technology pp17
3/n
The Real World of Technology by Ursula Franklin is a brilliant lecture series and book, way ahead of its time (1989 & 1999)
This thread is for the quotes I find useful for my #Community #ForestGarden #CommunityAssembly work.
Boost this post & when I add new quotes, you’ll get a notification.
https://archive.org/details/the-real-world-of-technology
https://archive.org/details/realworldoftechn0000fran_u9w8/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ursula_Franklin
#anthropology #design #science #technology #commons #capitalism #corporations #UrsulaFranklin
1/5
These are recordings of Ursula Franklin's public lectures that she made as part of the 1989 Massey Lectures series. The recordings were broadcast by the...
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