Chris Till

  • Labour will be a disaster on the Climate

    Starmer’s right wing so called Labour Party will be an unmitigated disaster for the climate and nature. They are ripping up planning regulations so that their mates in the private sector can build unsuitably large, car dependent, poor quality in many cases, not remotely sustainable, homes that will not address the chronic need for genuinely affordable housing, nor the desperate need for council housing. While at the same time forcing developments through on communities that have voted against them multiple times in recent years. For example the Goring Gap proposed development in Worthing that we thought we’d seen the back of.

    The type of housing we need is mid-rise apartment buildings of tiny home size flats, built on brownfield or derelict sites, in harmony with nature as much as possible; and with sustainability at the heart of every element of the design and build process. And yeah, maybe you can go out into the green belt a little bit when you build in harmony with nature as I say. But that is not what Labour is going for. Quite the opposite.

    Perhaps a bit more wild than this, but you get the idea

    We need developments to be walkable and with great cycle infrastructure. To have minimal car infrastructure. The narrowest roads we can get away with to carry buses, delivery vehicles, emergency services, taxis when necessary, and so on. No private cars. We need to have all the amenities required nearby. This is obviously very possible when you build with this type of consistent medium-ish density. We need to have rail connections within a reasonable distance. Obviously, when you build in this way, it becomes far easier to achieve this. If you build, as Labour plans to, ugly, expensive suburban sprawl; then rail connectivity becomes incredibly difficult to achieve. Especially when they don’t want to spend any money as a government. Maybe they’ll rip up regulations on that too, and get a US firm to come and build us private rail lines with diesel power in the late 2020s.

    This topic is probably the most frustrating of all to communicate in modern Britain. Even more so than the climate crisis itself. Despite what Julia Hartley-Brewer would have you believe, most people get that the climate has warmed and we need to burn less fossil fuels in order to have a future. But when it comes to housing, and building in general, people don’t really put two and two together. I think people have a sense of the population being high. Some are just racist, but not all, and the non-racists have a point. It’s interesting, because the thing we should be worried about is not the thing they’re worried about. They’re talking about public services being stretched, which is really caused by austerity. Some extra immigrants aren’t making a noticeable difference there. The real problem, which they’re not talking about, is in terms of building and general overpopulation causing our already severely nature depleted country to be put under yet more strain, to the point that almost all our wildlife is threatened. We can’t live without wildlife.

    The truth that these people will never bring up, is that we’ve obviously built on all of the suitable sites without major issue. For example, I wrote about before a site in this town where they built a development on an actual swamp. It even includes its own pumping station to make sure it doesn’t flood. If places like that already exist, how many suitable sites do you think are left? That aren’t on a floodplain? That aren’t on a swamp? That aren’t on precious remaining green belt land? This is why we have to build density, and very carefully build on the fringes of the green belt. But making sure to tread as lightly as we possibly can. The opposite of what Labour is going to do. They don’t care at all about our remaining precious wildlife habitats. They want endless growth, and they’ll trample anything they have to in order to see that line on the graph go up. They think that’s the key to getting re-elected in 2029, and it’s all that matters as far as they’re concerned.

  • Micro Four Thirds, and YouTube “experts”

    Photo: Greg Rosenke on Unsplash

    I’m conflicted between my distaste for excessive consumption and still rooting for OM System and the Micro Four Thirds image sensor system to do well; and sell as many cameras and lenses as possible. This is because I believe in it so much for all levels and genres of photography. And because all of the bullshit YouTube “experts” have polluted the entire photography community with nonsense about Full Frame sensors being the only ones worthy of use in 2024.

    These are people who don’t know what they’re talking about, and wouldn’t be published in a photography magazine or serious online journalistic outlet in the past or present. Obviously, YouTube and other social media services are incredibly useful and invaluable for people who had almost no platform in traditional media. Left wing political outlets in particular have benefitted no end, which is great. Because in that instance, they are the experts. But there is of course a downside to allowing anyone to end up with huge platform. You can end up with non-experts reaching and influencing a far wider audience than the real experts in the field. And that is the case in photography. No matter what good people like Chris Niccols, Jordan Drake, Robin Wong, and many others say, there is seemingly an army of idiots out there to spread misinformation that seriously threatens a format like Micro Four Thirds. All the people I see who support MFT are thoughtful, intelligent, reasonable people. That’s a problem, because we live in a very dumb, unreasonable, reactionary society. It doesn’t really fit. It’s like left wing politics right now. People who have taken the time to really educate themselves politically can see through the nonsense liberals and conservatives spew incessantly; and can understand and appreciate the counterintuitive benefits of left wing policy ideas. The same goes for MFT cameras. The problem is that very few people actually do take the time to properly educate themselves on anything these days.

    I’ve heard people in big companies say things like “the people are demanding this, so we’re just going to give it to them”. Even when they themselves know that it’s the wrong thing to do; they do it anyway because they know it’s harder to educate those people that what they really need is something counterintuitive. Take megapixels. We even saw with the Panasonic G9II (another MFT camera), where PetaPixel compared it to the OM System OM-1, and the G9 had worse image quality in their test despite having a 25mp sensor as opposed to 20mp. OM System worked hard to improve the sensor technology in other ways. To improve the overall image quality, rather than just resolution. But more people would just focus on the higher number and assume it’s better. And that’s within the Micro Four Thirds ecosystem.

    This is why OM System is particularly at risk from this current online climate of idiocy (along with any other businesses that try to do things the right way in other fields). Panasonic are obviously a huge corporation, and they’ve also hedged their bets and have pushed full frame offerings a lot in recent years. OM is small, and only makes MFT cameras (apart from their tough series compact). And on top of that, they don’t subscribe to this idea of giving people what they want even if it means sacrifices to the end product. We’ve just seen this whole thing again recently with the updated OM-1. It came out a bit too soon for my liking (that’s another blog); but it did have a lot of significant improvements. Many of which couldn’t be done purely with a firmware update. Some of them could, and they are now working on an update to the original OM-1, the camera I have (and plan to keep using for the foreseeable future).

    Obviously, there’s some controversy about whether or not they had abandoned that camera until pressure mounted on them. That’s another potential future blog topic. But the point is that the updated model does feature significant improvements that many professional photographers especially will really notice and appreciate. And that will make arguably as big of an impact or bigger on their photography than if the company had announced the OM-1 Mark II had doubled the sensor megapixels to 40, or some insane change that would be visible on the spec sheet. Imagine if they had done something like that. It would have been the talk of the town (at least until the full frame supremacists had made another unwelcome intervention). As it was, the conversation became almost exclusively negative, accusing OM of cashing in on their loyal customers and failing to innovate. Only true experts like Thomas Eisel (professional fashion photographer and YouTuber) actually went deep into all of the small but very significant improvements that were almost universally ignored elsewhere.

    Thank god a big outlet like PetaPixel does give MFT fair coverage, and does their best to promote its advantages (lens size and weight, image stabilisation, computational modes, comparatively low cost, long telephoto range ideal for wildlife and particularly birds, and so on). Not to mention the fact that most people in the world can’t tell the fucking difference between full frame and MFT photos anyway. I just hope we don’t end up in a situation where MFT goes away.

    Photography is like politics. You have the uneducated people who believe everything a grifter on YouTube tells them. And you have those who take the initiative and make the small effort required to get informed of the facts, and what they mean. For the left to win, and for us to eventually reduce consumption and stop releasing so many damn new camera models, (and other even more throwaway tech products); people have to be informed. And they have to buy Micro Four Thirds cameras. Strange way to end a blog maybe, but I think it works. I haven’t written for ages so you’ll just have to put up with it.

  • The Future of Tech in the Climate Crisis

    Why battery life matters

    This is going to be the screen tech of the future in everything.

    I talked in my last post about the end of tech capitalism, and its search for ever more power and graphical capability. Now I want to talk about my vision for tech, and especially consumer (hate that word) devices in a degrowth communist society. Power and graphics are clearly going to be less important, if not entirely irrelevant. Energy efficiency, battery life and the ability to function in times of crisis when disruption of power grids is common will be crucial. The ability to live off-grid, even just for a few days with a few solar panels, small wind turbines and battery backups will be important around the world. Even in rich countries.

    Devices with adequate or poor battery life when they are first manufactured become useless as they age. Especially in an era where we will increasing covet longevity and reliability. E Ink devices (like e-readers) and DSLR cameras, are great examples of tech being entirely usable even after many years of battery degradation. An original Kindle probably still works like new, and I know personally that a 14 year old DSLR keeps going no problem. You also see this in the youth trend for buying and using old digital cameras. We need to focus on this type of tech. Stuff that’s really useful, built to last decades, repairable, and ultimately recyclable.

    Even EVs fall into this category. Things like electric buses could be refurbished and kept in service for many years. You could also imagine EV buses or coaches being used as emergency shelters during extreme weather emergencies. Their huge batteries being able to power the basics for a number of people for multiple days. They could also be used to power buildings, like we’ve seen with vehicle to grid technology in cars. Especially in Japan where they see it as vitally important during potential earthquakes and similar events.

    Going back to consumer devices, I think we will see an increase in the use of E Ink screens in phones and tablets over the typical LCD and OLED models we’re all used to. They’re already being deployed in some advertising situations where screen refresh rate is irrelevant, and it allows a huge reduction in energy use.

    E-paper screens, as they’re known, only refresh when something changes on the screen. So, if you’re reading a book, it only refreshes when you turn the page. This is in stark contrast to traditional screens which refresh 60 or more times a second. You just don’t notice it. This is massive for battery life as you can imagine. It’s why your Kindle or other E-reader lasts for months in standby mode, and weeks even if you use them often. It would make so much sense for battery life, longevity of the devices, reducing overall energy consumption, and for potential emergency situations for many of us to switch over. Not to mention reducing strain on our eyes. Perhaps not for video and fast moving games, but the technology is continually improving. We already have various impressive colour screen options, and I can imagine refresh rates fast enough to watch videos smoothly coming along in the next several years. Perhaps we’ll see TVs and large video screens using E-paper.

    Even in the somewhat unlikely event that they don’t improve, I occasionally find the thought of replacing my phone with a black and white E Ink model with a slowly refreshing screen very tempting. Part of me would very much like to switch off from the nonsense you see every day on social media. Especially the climate denial and far-right bullshit. But also any other stupid and unnecessary arguments and hate from people; who are clearly mentally unwell and are taking their stress and anxiety out on others. Many of whom probably have similar afflictions themselves. The further we go into our future of climate chaos, the more tempting it will be to escape from social media. Or at the very least be incentivised to use it less because of the less than ideal screen for Instagram, TikTok etc.

    There are so many other areas of technology where we can simplify, focus on reducing energy use, use better materials (anything other than plastic) and so on. We need to investigate as many possibilities as we can as soon as possible. It’s quite an exciting prospect, because for so long the emphasis of technological and design improvement has been the opposite of the new philosophy we need. When we actually try to do things better; logically, you’d assume that there’s a lot of low hanging fruit in terms of avenues for innovation that haven’t been tapped into at all yet.

    I’m not saying it’s going to save this current disastrous economic system and global civilisation as we know it from collapse. But as we try to mitigate and adapt as best we can to the climate chaos that’s already here and on the way, these principles will definitely help. Even if we ultimately fail in creating a new system that works with nature. It’s better to do things right at some point than never. I’d rather we go extinct, if that’s what happens, having first tried everything we can to live in a far better way. And failing us doing it together as one humanity, I’ll just get that phone and ignore all the idiots fighting amongst themselves over pointless shit.

  • Computer Capitalism has nowhere to go

    We don’t need this

    In terms of technology for regular people, we’ve come to a point now where we don’t need more. We don’t need more video resolution. 4K is plenty, and I would say 1080P is still more than good enough. Most of what I watch on Virgin Media TV is still in 720P, even now. No one really complains. For photo editing you don’t need anything crazy. The reasons to upgrade a phone or computer are diminishing rapidly, and more and more people are realising it. I used to be so into new tech, more power and all of that stuff. Gradually it started waning maybe 5 or so years ago. I stopped watching all the Apple conferences; stopped caring about gimmicky new features, unless they clearly weren’t solutions looking for problems. But most of them are.

    Even if you look at professional applications, I struggle to think of anything that needs more power. Perhaps AI medical technology would. General AI uses a lot of power, and to me, that’s a big reason to not go down that route. I think AI for specific tasks that can really enhance our lives can be great. General AI is not really necessary, and is most likely going to end in tears, as we’ve all been told recently by the media, and obviously long before that in science fiction.

    In terms of regular people, maybe a new phone camera would be nice, especially if they can increase the optical zoom functionality. But do you really need that on a phone? People would probably benefit from having a separate camera that can provide better zoom for the odd occasions that you’d use that; while sharing out the battery drain between two devices.

    I didn’t watch the recent Apple event, but I heard about the computer models they announced on the PetaPixel podcast, which is mainly about photography. They were saying that very few people need these powerful machines now, and that got me thinking.

    We’re going to be simplifying our lives as climate change gets worse and worse. Even if capitalism continues for the next 5 to 10 years (which I really doubt at this point), what would these tech companies sell us? Phones and computers that are excessively capable for what the vast majority of people need to do? Perhaps they’ll focus even more heavily on services (like Apple TV+) once they realise that people don’t need more powerful / gimmicky devices. But, again, I don’t see them being able to push this indefinitely before people get sick of being so busy all the time. Being so committed to watching every new show. They’re going to rebel against that I think.

    It feels like capitalism has reached its end point. We don’t need more stuff. We don’t need more power. We don’t need more pixels or better gaming graphics. We just need to enjoy what we have and make the most from it. Does anyone really think that the PS5 is not powerful enough? That we need even bigger TVs and games that are 100% indistinguishable from real life? I don’t think I want that. The closer we get to photorealism, the more I realise I don’t actually want that. I want games to look still look like games.

    This obviously applies to every other aspect of our capitalist society as well. But it really interests me specifically in terms of tech; because for so long, we’ve been obsessed with the idea of ceaseless progress. And that we would always need more. The thing is, all of a sudden, we don’t.

    You might be thinking that I’ve forgotten about AR and VR, and that it will be the thing from now on that keeps tech capitalism charging forward and making us buy iterative headsets. I don’t think so. Firstly, people are increasingly being lured back to nature. We’re getting tired of looking at screens all the time. Especially when they’re right in front of our eyes. My eyes can just about adapt to my new camera with an electronic viewfinder. That’s about as close to VR as I want to get. Before you accuse me of being a hypocrite, my old camera is a 14 year old model, that still works, mind you. But I thought it was time to get something better than I can grow into over the next decade plus (assuming our existing societies last that long). I never said I don’t buy anything. I just keep it to a minimum.

    The basic fact is that we have enough, we don’t need more, and we don’t want to end up like the obese, permanently sedentary characters in Wall-E. That was the future we seemed to be hurtling towards, before we thankfully began gradually veering away.

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