Endless Thread - Endless Thread presents Outside/In: How to build a solar-powered website

Episode Date: April 21, 2023

What if the internet was only available most of the time? This week, Endless Thread presents an episode of Outside/In — a podcast from New Hampshire Public Radio — about a man in Barcelona who is trying to make the material infrastructure behind the internet as visible and low tech as possible, by building a solar-powered website.

Support for endless thread comes from MathWorks, creator of MATLAB and Simulink Software, to design and develop engineered systems, accelerating the pace of discovery in engineering and science. Learn more at Mathworks.com. Support for WBUR comes from Is Business Broken, a podcast from the Mayrotra Institute at Boston University that explores questions like, why is innovation in healthcare so hard? Is ESG just greenwashing? And, of course, is business broken? Listen, wherever you get your podcasts.

WBUR Podcasts, Boston. Amory Siebertsin, are you into low-tech? Maybe. I don't know what that means. What would you think it means? Like, just not on the internet. Or, you know, like an internet powered by a bicycle. Ooh, see, you're not far off. You are not far off. I thought you were going to say, you know, because I know how you think about technology, I thought you were going to say, like, tech that was low to the ground. That's what my guess about your guess was going to be.

Yeah, some, like, toilet paper tube technology. The toilet paper tube technology. Yeah, you can do anything with a toilet paper tube. Well, we have got a story for you today. It is about the internets and a website. site that goes dark depending on the weather forecast. It comes from our friends at New Hampshire Public Radio. And Sympatico Partners in Podcasting Crime, Nate Hedgy and Justine Paradise. We're letting them take the wheel this week while we work on some upcoming endless thread

greatness. From NHPR's podcast Outside In, here's how to build a solar-powered website. This is Outside In. I'm Nate Hedgy. And I'm Justine Paradise. and today our story begins on the floor of the U.S. Senate. The year was 2006. It was a hearing for a bill on net neutrality.

Nate, can you define net neutrality for us real quick? Net neutrality. The idea is that, like, internet service providers must provide services like speed and communications equally to all users and not just to the highest bidder. Yeah, exactly. Like, companies can't be like, my website should be faster than your website because I paid more. Right, exactly. So senators were debating this. They were debating an amendment to the bill. And at this hearing, the late Alaskan senator, Ted Stevens, he stood up to oppose an amendment. And in stating his opposition, he also uttered a phrase that would go down in internet history.

They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the internet. And again, the internet is not something that you just dump something on. It's not a big truck. It's a series of tubes. And if you don't understand, those tubes can be filled. And if they're filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line. It's going to be delayed by anyone that puts in that. The internet is a series of tubes. Of tubes. I like, I guess Ted Stevens, Senator from Alaska, you know, he's used to pipelines and oil. And so maybe, yes, he sees the internet as a series of tubes of pipes,

bumping information or something like that. Yeah. I mean, this was again 2006. It was still very solidly in the era of the blog. And so that's where Senator Ted Stevens's words took on a life of their own. His statement was written up on a nonprofit advocacy blog first, and then Wired. A blog run by Wired noticed it.

And then it was just all over the place. All right, that might have sounded more like something you'd hear from, let's say, a crazy old man in an airport bar at 3 a.m. Then the chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, And I bring it up now partly because, you know, one, it's just, it can be pretty funny to go back to moments like this when people were reacting to the internet in the early days before it was so everywhere, before it was so integrated into so many of our lives. But I also bring it up because, Nate, if I asked you to describe what is the internet physically, like, what would you say? I would say that the internet's a series of tubes. The internet is not, the internet is not a big truck.

The internet is not something that you just dump something out. The internet is not, the internet is not a big truck. The internet is a series of truth. When I think about the internet these days, I think of clouds, right? Like everything, I feel like I've got my Dropbox that it goes to the cloud. You know, I've got my Google Drive. It goes to the cloud. This is like ethereal, nebulous data cloud floating in cyberspace.

or somewhere on Earth or something like that. When really the back end of the cloud is a whole bunch of data centers, like big warehouses filled with sometimes thousands and thousands of servers. Right, yeah. Like our photos are actually stored in a big warehouse in Nevada. Connected to us often by wires strung on our telephone poles or sometimes satellites. And because it's easy to kind of forget about all this physical infrastructure, I think it can be funny when elements of the natural world get in the way.

Inside these data centers, with all those servers, which are basically computers, it gets really, really hot. So data centers require sophisticated air conditioning and climate control systems to manage that. And there was this one time in one of these warehouses that the system essentially malfunctioned. And with the combination of hot and cool air and humidity, Nate, as an environment reporter, what do you get? You get weather. You get clouds. And that is actually what happened. There was a cloud and rain reportedly inside one specific data center.

Clouds inside clouds. Yeah, it was raining in the cloud. One of my favorite examples that I found of the natural world interacting with the infrastructure of the digital. It takes place in the ocean. So depending on how you connect to the internet, you might be relying on a vast network of undersea fiber optic cables. A series of tubes, you might say. And these cables run along, you know, the bottom of the ocean, many along the seafloor across the Atlantic. Actually, the NSA has reportedly wiretapped many of these cables in the service of surveillance of citizens of this country,

but it's not just agents of the U.S. government inappropriately interfering with these cables. It's also there's documentation of literal sharks that are apparently compelled to bite these cables. Why would they be compelled to bite cables? Those don't sound very tasty. I don't know. It's a thing. Like, there are videos of these sharks doing this, and no one seems to know maybe they're attracted to the electromagnetic field generated around the cables. But the International Cable Protection Committee, which is indeed a thing. That's a real thing. Says that, quote, sharks and other fish are responsible for less than 1% of all cable faults up to 2006.

And that none have been reported after. So according to them, this is not an issue. The point is there's weather in the data farm, rumors of sharks feasting on undersea cables, and the internet has a footprint, and it's often not owned by its users. It's often very far away. It's often outside of our control. And with so much of our lives collectively relying on the digital world, I think all this can feel quite precarious. But this brings me to the case of one particular website, and its founder, who is trying to make the information

infrastructure behind it as visible as possible. And that infrastructure is literally in his living room. Which is probably the biggest danger in the sense that nothing happened yet. But yeah, sometimes I see things lying there that should not be there. Glasses of water. Yeah, for example. Or a candle. So this is Chris Decker.

He is a journalist and the creator of Lotech magazine. Which basically questions the believe in high technology. solutions. So right now, for example, there's an article on how to build a bicycle-operated generator for your home. They've also done stories on making small wind turbines out of wood instead of plastic. Like most modern publications, Lotech magazine has a website. But when you visit this one, as you scroll, you'll notice an icon in the corner. It's a meter showing the server's battery life and the weather forecast for where he is in Barcelona. And that's because this website runs off a server powered by a solar panel on Chris's balcony, which means his website is

very much not immune to natural forces. So it's not cloud-based, but cloud-dependent? The accessibility of this website depends on the local weather here in Barcelona. Today on Outside In a conversation with the founder of Lotech magazine, Krista Decker. The website is in a way an experiment, peeling back the curtain of his website as a demonstration of one way to make the digital material. And it brings up questions about how convenient and constant our access to the internet could and should be, and if progress can sometimes mean choosing to live with less.

We have been told that so often, that we have come to believe it, that the internet is somehow a virtual thing that uses no energy, but of course it's just as physical as anything else. Producer Justine Paradise is going to tell the first part of the story, And I'll be back later to ask, could this work on a bigger scale? When I'm recording an interview remotely, sometimes my source is in a room thousands of miles away from me. So I have to rely on them to look around and check for anything that might make the recording sound bad,

like a panting dog or loud air conditioner, that kind of thing. So that's what I asked Krista Decker to do when we sat down to talk. My other question is there any buzzing appliances or open windows near you? I have to kind of be a remote engineer. That's the window that, well, it's closed, but also not really because there's wires from the solar panels going. So they cannot really close. So we made peace with the fact that the sounds of the street in Barcelona would be part of our conversation. Chris started his career as a journalist, covering technology as a freelancer for papers and magazines in Belgium.

But eventually, he grew disillusioned with his beast. It's mainly from my experience as a science and tech journalist that I came to Lotech magazine, actually. Because I have been reporting on all these high-tech innovations, and it dawned on me that, well, they often kind of solve some problem, but then they introduce five new problems, and you're back to where you started. Lutek Magazine explores the idea that we've collectively forgotten about older technology. that could still be useful. For instance, as we think about sea level rise,

we could look to a 17th century Dutch technique of reinforcing their dikes and harbors with giant woven mats made out of twigs cut from trees. There's an idea that you might have heard. The medium is the message, that the form of a piece of content also communicates and shapes its meaning. Lotech magazine might be a great example

of the medium is the message. Because it's powered by a solar panel, in an ordinary apartment, everything about it looks different. The design, the equipment, even the experience of visiting the website, especially that it's not always available, including on the day we talked. Yeah, like this morning it was offline, now it's back on because it's sunny. At the time of our conversation, the solar powered website had been running for almost two years. And during that time... We had an uptime of 95%. and that's like, say, 17 days that we are offline per year.

And then the website just goes down and then, yeah, well, our readers have to do something else and come back later. And just like with a sailboat or with a windmill. And it's this concept that the website isn't always there whenever you want it, that it's kind of a limited resource. That's the concept people have responded to most. I mean, I never had to complain about the lack of attention, but this really made it explode in terms of visitor traffic and attention and interviews and everything. And it's funny because it's about a forum. It's not about the content. But at the same time, of course, the forum of our website also reflects the whole philosophy of Lotech magazine. So it's not a bad thing.

So what does it take to run a website out of your apartment? First of all, in this case, the website's solar panel necessarily had to be small because the website lives in Chris's apartment. And Chris wanted to live there too. It's a physical limit. You cannot put a whole wall of solar panels in front of your balcony because then you cannot enjoy the sun anymore. So you need to keep it small.

And even as it is, the website still has quite the physical presence in Chris's living room. There's a solar panel. 50 watts. Lots of cable. a battery and a charge control. And then there's the server, although that is actually pretty small. It fits in the palm of your hand. Chris chose a server that was reliable but didn't use a ton of energy.

Because if you're designing within such limits, even if the energy use goes up like, say, 20 kilowatts, that might result in the site going down every night. So it's really important to choose the right parts for your installation. But the design process didn't stop with equipment. Unless he wanted the entire apartment to be taken over by panels and batteries, he needed to design low-tech magazine to be very lightweight, requiring very little energy to operate.

Yeah, we were curious to see how far you can take it, how light a website can be. This is pretty different than what's happening widely elsewhere on the internet. Over half the global population are internet users. That's over 4 billion people. And a lot of that use relies on. on data centers, which, sure, they're getting more and more energy efficient, but there's also more and more of them, including giant facilities with over 5,000 servers apiece, which are called hyperscale.

So with the solar-powered website, Lotech magazine was removing their website from the data centers. But there was still another problem, contemporary website design. Chris explained that websites in general are getting heavier and heavier in terms of data use. Pop-up ads, gifs, streaming videos, high-resolution images. All of these things, of course, take energy to generate on your browser, each and every time you visit a site. More data, more energy. There's a project called HTP Archive, which tracks the history of web performance over millions of websites,

including metrics like the size and number of fonts, images, and videos requested by the page. Since 2011, the median total kilobytes requested per page increased by, 228% according to this project. So the solar-powered site was a perfect chance to apply the first principles of Lotech magazine, to look for solutions in the past, in this case the not-so-distant past. We went back to the first website ever made. That's like early 1990s. And we based the design completely on that website.

One fundamental feature of these older websites, they were static. Not dynamic. Dynamic websites are generated every time someone visits them. Think about a site like Netflix. The homepage looks different for each user, depending on your viewing habits. Or if you go to say the homepage of BuzzFeed, your server has to build all the elements in your browser piece by piece. And with a static website, it's basically you open a file on the computer and it's always there.

It's just similar to opening a text document or an image on your web, on your laptop. That's how our website works. You basically come onto our server computer and you open a file and you see the file and then you easily spend ten times less energy. But there are definitely things you can't do with a static page. They're not as interactive, for instance.

Like if you want to leave a comment on an article on Lotech magazine's solar-powered website, you actually have to email it to them so they can manually add it to the page. Another hurdle for lightweight web design, images. So Lotech magazine is a very visual block. It's long articles, but it's also a lot of images. And if you look at the first website ever made,

you see that it was just text. It had no images. The internet started as a text medium. So we could have very easily made a very light website simply by getting rid of the images, but that would have been like commercial suicide, basically. So what we did, instead was to radically

compress the images. And we did that with a dithering plugin. It's like a kind of old compression technique that, well, it's not really a compression technique. It was used in, for old video games. Well, they look kind of like newspaper

images, like grainy. Yes. Yeah. I mean, when you go to your website, it almost just looks like a style choice to me, rather than like an infrastructure choice. Well, to start with, I don't know how it looks for you, looks different for everybody. It's one of the things we also did like the first websites. We don't load any custom fonts or logos. We use the design capabilities of the browser.

And so how the website looks depends on which browser you use and which font you have installed, for example. And it kind of adapts to these things. When you visit Lotech magazine's solar-powered website and see all this together, the battery meter, the dithered images, the static design, it sends a message. The appearance of the solar-powered website is markedly different than most of the websites most of us might visit on a typical day. The website is meant to be provocative, to call attention to the fact that it is solar-powered, to stand out by opting out. So, Nate. Yes. What does low-tech magazine's solar-powered website bring up for you?

All right. I mean, sure. You don't need to have constant access to an article on, I don't know, 17th century Dutch dyke design. I mean, speak for yourself. I don't need that every day. But let's say you run your business off of like WhatsApp or you're a website providing emergency services or you're running a security system at a facility. You know, there are plenty of examples where Chris's design just wouldn't work. Like the website going down would be kind of catastrophic for either your business or, you know, for people's lives. Right. Like I think about, you know, here in Montana, Montana Department of Transportation has its highway site, you know, where you can like look and you can find out, okay, is that highway is the interstate open right now during a snowstorm? Or, you know, if there's avalanche dangers or like Noah, the weather website, you know, like that, those are websites that you need to have access to 24-7.

But I feel like this does speak to this point of like, again, do we need to be, I don't think that his point with a solar powered website is not nuanced like that. Like he's not saying everyone to adopt my design. It's fine if the internet goes down, or at least that's not what I take away from it. It's more like if we want to use less fossil fuels and live on a planet that stays within certain temperature ranges and certain weather patterns, behavior change in ways that maybe feel. like sacrifice is going to be necessary, right? And so how can you apply this? Do we need to go 100% all the time to different parts of our lives, right? Right. And I think like all of us who have cell phones and get really tired of like looking at like, oh, I'm on BuzzFeed, you know, for the upteenth time. Yeah, for no reason. I'm just like doom scrolling Twitter, which I do all the time.

It's like I don't need to be doing that. And like what if Twitter was down at night or I couldn't access, I don't know, wordle. I couldn't do my wordle. 24-7, you know, do we need that? And it's the same thing as like, there's an article he has up there right now about hot water bottles as a technology where it's a low tech, right? It's just an object. But maybe you don't need to heat the entire room while you're sleeping. Maybe you just need to heat the space in between your blankets where you are, right?

And so, like, how can, that's like another way of applying it that has nothing to do with the internet, right? But it's like, take the idea and think about, think about how you could do it in your life. Okay, but everything I just said about how this website is an object lesson about learning to live with less, there's a giant caveat to all this. Yeah, I'm fine with that. You can call it hypocritical and in a way it is. Yep, a detail that raised some questions for me. We'll be right back. At Radio Lab, we love nothing more than nerding out about science, neuroscience, chemistry. But we do also like to get into other kinds of science.

stories. Stories about policing or politics, country music, hockey, sex, of bugs. Regardless of whether we're looking at science or not science, we bring a rigorous curiosity to get you the answers. And hopefully make you see the world anew. Radio Lab, adventures on the edge of what we think we know. Wherever you get your podcast. There is something powerful about the sound of the human voice. Beautifully produced audio has the unique power to connect and inspire. Tell your organization's story with a custom podcast from CitySpace Productions, the Creative Studio from WBUR's Business Partnerships Team. Become a thought leader.

Recruit new talent. Reach new audiences. Whatever your goal, we can help. Discover how the magic is made at WBUR.org slash creative studio. The problem with that is that people think in two extremes. You go along with everything that comes along, or you're a Luddite and you're living back in the Middle Ages. there's a thousand possibilities in between. And we don't need to go back to the Middle Ages

or whatever far away time in the past. We could keep a modern society and modern comfort and convenience, just not the 100% that we have. And you see that in many things that it's this drive to go to the maximum. That's really the damaging thing. Personally, I'm not even back to the land.

I would die of loneliness there. I'm a city person. I need to be in a city. No, I don't dream of that kind of life. That's not my intention. It's more I want to show that we can do things much more sustainably if we would just sacrifice a little bit. And often the sacrifice is not even a sacrifice.

I mean, not being online 16 hours a day. It doesn't make you more. unhappy on the contrary. The solar-powered website is meant to embody this principle that we don't always need to go to the maximum. Again, Chris says it's up and running about 95% of the time, but sometimes people say to him, hey, you could get it to 100%. Why don't you put a server in different parts of the world and then you change the DNS depending on where the sun shines? And that's also a possibility to keep it online. That's funny. Many people have have given us advice on how to keep the website always online, which we don't even want.

It feels like part of the point is to change your behavior a little bit. Exactly. The thing is, if you want 100% reliability for your solar system, I made the calculation. So now we have 95%. But if you want 100%, I need to have seven times the battery size that I have now, because you need to be prepared for the most unusual weather event. So if you go to 95, you can do with much less and you're still online most of the year. Like during summer, basically we are six months online. It's just in the winter that it goes down.

So with just some little kind of sacrifices, you have a much more sustainable system. Making sacrifices for a more sustainable system. But here's that giant caveat. I talked to Chris in the winter of 2021, and it was one of those things that I didn't return to for a while, about a year. But the thing I didn't realize when I talked to him is that the solar-powered website is not Lotech magazine's only website. That one lives at solar.lotechmagine.com. But if you go to just Lotechmagine.com, the whole magazine is also available there, 24-7. It's a modern dynamic website, a simple one, but it basically just looks like a blog,

at a data center somewhere. Yeah. Wait. Doesn't that strike you as like a little hypocritical? Like he's been talking and like saying all these things about his solar powered website. But like if I was to type it in right now and and I can just go to the regular version of his website as well. I don't know. I know.

To me that like it strikes me as a little hypocritical that you're like this is the way it needs to be for things that aren't that important. But my website, I still want to have my regular version. So we decided to call him up again. Chris was actually in Brussels this time, staying in a friend's apartment. Chris, I want to give you what my first reaction was when I, when Justine was first telling me this story. So when I first heard that you had the solar powered website, but you also had a traditional website that was, you know, running on a power intensive data center as most websites do, right? My first reaction was like, oh, that's totally hypocritical. Yeah, I'm fine with that.

You can call it hypocritical and in a way it is. And it's also, say, a problem in the sense that first it kind of defeats the purpose. I mean, I now have two websites. So all I did is increase the ecological footprint. Chris explained that part of the reason why they haven't just gotten rid of the original website is they haven't moved the entire back catalog over yet. It takes time to move the content over because on the solar-powered website, each article needed to be coded and laid out differently. So essentially, it's a lot of work.

Definitely, I would love to move everything to the solar-powered website. But at the same time, it needs to be financially sustainable also. Something that Chris and his team did not anticipate was that by creating the solar-powered website, they accidentally created two distinct audiences. Lotech magazine already had a readership. a following, which had existed for years. But when the solar-powered website launched, a lot of the attention came from a community of people

psyched about it from the perspective of web design. But on the other hand, there's, of course, a big part of the readership of Lotech magazine that is not really into websites. They just come to the website to read about all technologies. And those people sometimes let us know that they're not very happy with the design. and that mostly refers to the battery meter,

which is very much in your face. And then there's people who kind of say that they still visit the old website because it has color images. So either we make the solar powered website less radical by kind of making the battery meter smaller, maybe adding color images where it's useful. But then as a statement in web design, it becomes less powerful. So that's in a way a shame.

And at the same time, we don't want to keep two websites, or at least not on different platforms. So we have to find a solution. Chris says there is a possible solution that might satisfy both audiences. Because remember, the design of the solar-powered website is deliberately extreme. To draw attention to the fact that it's super lightweight and powered by the sun, but it doesn't have to look that way. You can perfectly build a low-energy website that looks like any other website with normal images.

Instead of the dithered images, they could use a less visually obvious compression technique. And they could offer another version of the website also hosted on the solar-powered server. Essentially, they could give readers a choice. Just give them the choice. When you go to Lotech magazine, you want to see the radical version or you want to see the, say, normal version. but both would be gone if there's no sun. So Nate, I get why you had the question of, you know, isn't this hypocritical to have both websites up and even why he agreed with you? But I think this brings up for me a tension that we struggle with almost perennially

where, you know, how do we shift to a lower emissions world? And are we placing the responsibility for environmental change? on individuals rather than systems. Because I feel like when we place that responsibility on individuals, we are holding each other to a really high standard, you know, of perfection. Yeah, that's fair. Like, if you're at all inconsistent with it, you're being a hypocrite. But it also feels like making choices to opt out of a more energy-intensive world.

It's like swimming against the tide, right? I think we have to acknowledge that it's really hard. Yeah, and this applies to areas way beyond web design. Like Chris told us that he also chooses not to travel by plane. Yeah, and that's why I think, so I practice what I preach, not necessarily because I feel morally superior, but more like I want to know what it feels like and how difficult it is and how, like for instance, traveling by train, well, it's really expensive. Here in Europe, it's so much more expensive than flying that, well, it's easy to set. I travel by train, but then you need to money to do that. If you have a, if you're working from nine to five and you have two weeks of holidays,

then it's not so easy to travel by train. So I'm not blaming people for flying because the whole system is geared towards flying. And from the moment you try to do it differently, you're punished in every possible way. Like not having a smartphone is a very similar position. Like, yeah, I don't have it, but every day my life gets, gets more difficult. So by practicing what you preach, you feel what makes it difficult. And then I can write about it, and then you can try to suggest to make these systemic changes.

But yeah, that's the hard part. Right now, Lotech magazine is just one website. One website, as you say, swimming against the tide. But Lotech magazine has published. instructions on how to make your own solar-powered website or even just how to make your own lightweight one, which tons of people have done. Some of them have even scaled things up. In fact, there's a project called Solar Protocol, which earlier we talked about this idea that it's always sunny somewhere. So the platform, you could host it on several different servers around

the world. Each server can be active or inactive at different times depending on the local weather. So a solar powered platform that doesn't go down when it gets cloudy. Yeah, Chris didn't want to do that for their website, but it makes sense that it would work for other people. And Chris says that he does hope that someone takes the idea even further and maybe even builds a solar-powered data center one day. So would you be like to take that metaphor further, not just one person swimming against the tide, but a whole ship? Yeah.

Love us some Nate Hedgy and Justine Paradise. If you want to check out images and more information on this story, go to wbUR.b.r.com. Orr.org slash endless thread or NHPR.org slash outside dash in. And you can subscribe to Outside In wherever you got endless thread. They're in my feed. Mine too. I never miss an episode, in fact. So follow them.

And here's who made this episode of that show. Outside In was produced this week by Justine Paradise and edited by Taylor Quimby with help from me, Nate Hedgy, Felix Poon, and Jessica Hunt. Our executive producer is Rebecca Lavoie. Oh, and special thanks to Melanie Rish. Music in this episode came from Panda Raps, Dama Beats, Dusty Decks, Harriet Vino, Sarah the Ilstramentalist, and Blue Dot Sessions. The Internet is a series of Tubes remix was created by Superfunky 59 on YouTube. Outside In is a production of New Hampshire Public Radio.