Go BACK TO THE FUTURE OF TECHNOLOGY with GUILLAUME LION and KRIS DE DECKER

Interviews Editor, Andrew Irvin, is joined by Guillaume Lion and Kris De Decker for a unique conversation over Back to the Future of Technology - a comic exploring the world of Low Tech Magazine, a longstanding bastion of sensible sustainability investigations on a wide range of topics and challenges facing our current society.

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COMIC BOOK YETI: Kris and Guillaume, thank you for joining me today. How's everything going over in Europe?

KRIS DE DECKER: Great, it's early, but we managed to get awake.

GUILLAUME LION: Yeah, I'm okay, tired, but okay.

CBY: So I'm really happy to have you both here. I'm at the end of my day, but very energized because I get to be talking with both of you. I'm especially grateful, Guillaume, that you created this comic and provided a good excuse to bring all of us into the same conversation. Kris, I've avidly enjoyed Low Tech Magazine for most of the past decade, and I thoroughly value it more than most websites on the internet. I became familiar with your research and writing during my early days at IUCN (the International Union for Conservation of Nature) in 2014.

Guillaume, the site mentioned you reached out to Kris in 2022. How did you come to learn what Kris was doing? And Kris, can you share how Low Tech Magazine started back in 2007? How has it turned into the operation with a large support team it is today, and what impact has it had as it has grown? 

GL: Okay so, it was a friend of mine who sent me a couple of articles from Low Tech Magazine a couple of years ago. And those were great, but I don't really like to read online so I just read them and forgot about them. And then later the same friend offered me one of the books; the printed website, Vol. 2. Then I really read it from cover to cover and. I really loved it and thought it was kind of revolutionary, so I had this idea of making the comic about Kris, and I asked the magazine I was working with if that would interest them as an account, because it was originally published in a Belgian magazine before the Low Tech Magazine site. And so that was it, yeah.

CBY: Fantastic. And Kris, how did this all kick off?

KD: Before I started Low Tech Magazine, I was a freelance science and tech journalist, normally reporting about the newest innovations for newspapers and magazines. In 2007, by then, after 10 years, I started to realize the technical solutions are not really working, and that we're going nowhere. That's why I kind of turned everything around and focused on the older technologies that we’ve forgotten about instead of the newest stuff. I try to look at topics in a much wider historical context, and that automatically brings very different answers and insights, because it's very simple in the end what I do. I'm just taking a wider historical context. I don't start in the early 20th century. Most whatever you read about technology - it usually starts in the 20th century, as if nothing happened before.

CBY: Right - the general cultural narrative is framed in a post-industrialization context, absolutely.

KDD: Yeah, that in this whole world before, people were stupid and were not able to do anything, and life was horrible, etc. Of course, not everything was maybe that attractive, but there were a lot of things that were actually better than they are today. So we can learn a lot from the past, absolutely, and over the years, I kept going.

CBY: You've got a lot of people who are now supporting the endeavor, and I know it must resonate. It resonated with me immediately. People looking at how you are unpacking technology and/or the approach to analyzing technology, and how it is meant to work for us. So I saw the structure of your site -  is it all just on a volunteer basis? Is it people who are just helping you get the word out? What's the Low Tech Magazine operation look like?

KDD: Yeah, that's complicated. Initially, I was by myself. So for many years, it was just me doing everything; building the old website and writing, looking for images, etc. More and more people got involved, especially over the last five to 10 years. First it started with Melle Smets, who is a Dutch artist. With him, I started “Human Power Plant,” which is a separate art project. Then I worked together with Elizabeth Schove, who is a sociologist at Lancaster University, and then came the solar website, and then the team really got bigger and bigger. Most people work voluntarily and all the articles are translated by volunteers.

Roel Roscam Abbing and Marie Otsuka – who built the website – initially, I paid them. But eventually, they kind of volunteered in the sense that they also get a lot from being part of the project. Then, Marie Verdeil, she started as an intern but now works for Low Tech Magazine, because the new website is great, but it also brings a lot of work, and some things need to happen - not all the work is so nice, and some things are urgent. I mean the problem with volunteering is that you cannot really make people finish things by a certain date. So sometimes you have to pay people to, to...

CBY: …Expedite things, I certainly understand that.

GL: Maybe otherwise it would never happen.

KDD: Yeah, and I, you know, do this on a voluntary basis. It’s a passion project and it's a learning exercise and I think a lot of people probably. I mean, the biggest volunteer is myself, I guess, for the whole Low Tech Magazine. Because if you look at all the hours that I worked on it over the last 15 years and what I’ve earned – yeah, then you could call me a volunteer. At least, I kind of can live from it. That, for me, is already fantastic. I don't want more than that.

GL: That's it, yeah.

CBY: And now Guillaume, I know you mentioned the magazine did not pay for your travel to visit Kris, but I wanted to make sure I focused on the comic that you put together – Back to the Future of Technologies – which was introduced in the preface to the comic with the analogous reference to the medium of comics as “low tech cinema,” which I loved as a term. Your work has this really strong personal narrative quality and presents as a more of a visual journal than a lot of other comics with creators who are more divorced from their material. Then, there are a lot of artistic liberties you take, adding all these amusing accents to the panels, but you tell a very clear story throughout. So, what does your creative process look like? Do you take notes from your interviews, such as the conversations you had with Kris, and then build the visuals to accompany that story? Or are you using many reference images in your penciling and inking process? (Since you're also a filmmaker, I'm wondering how this factors into your storyboarding and how you ended up putting all of this together.)

GL: Okay, thank you for noticing! This is a nice thing too, about the comics. So the creative process; first, visiting Kris and talking with him – it was like he and I conducted an interview for a week. There was no plan – no questions planned ahead. It was just conversation, and I remember Kris saying, “Hey, but you’ve got no plan really? You're just…we're just, talking?” And so we spent a week like this, and had a lot of fun. I gathered a lot of notes and recordings. Sometimes I was recording our conversation, sometimes not, and some sketches and also a lot of pictures – I had a small camera with me because I don't have a smartphone, so normally I never take pictures. When I do stuff like that, I take a lot. I was taking pictures constantly and it helped a lot during the drawing process because I used the pictures as the references to draw. And I also sometimes use the Internet when I like to find references – I wish I could just use my own, but sometimes I need something like landscape references – stuff like that.

Then I took a lot of notes about the actual scenes that happened during my stay with Kris. I tried first to just write about the most interesting scenes and try to depict them realistically, but actually the articulation of it was a really long process for me to make that into a story. So I took some liberties from reality, made the plans, and I think that's the work - to make a story. 

CBY: Yeah, I think it was a very nice distillation of a lot of the characteristics of the site that I had come to know from reading articles. You touched on a number of different technologies at points, and hopefully for those who come to this interview from the comic book side of things, this provides a really nice entry point into the rest of the content on the Low Tech Magazine site. That gets to the next question around the term Luddite, which you’ve mentioned, Kris. I use it a lot in self-description. You mentioned not having a smartphone, Guillaume. I didn't have one until starting my PhD when the university made me get one for third party verification. I mentioned dreading the intricacies of search engine optimization and all the digital marketing we were talking about in the context of how you built up your site over the last 16 years, Kris. I’m wondering about both of your respective personal challenges integrating your digital footprint into your way of life. You discussed the solar-powered setup for low tech magazine, Kris, which I hope others replicate. If you know of any who have said, “Oh, we can do it that way,”and followed your lead, I'd love to hear who picked up better practice. How do you both connect with others in discourse online and make your activity on the internet (such as this interview) part of your livelihoods?

KDD: Yeah, I don't have a smartphone either. I’ve never had one, and I'm never going to get one unless I'm really forced. It's getting hard to order things in restaurants, for example. For my online presence, obviously I'm online a lot for work, and that's mostly researching, searching for images, and also academic articles. That all happens online, of course. Because I'm already so connected for my work, when I go out the door, I don't want to be connected. I really want to keep that. I want to keep living in the real world, and I don't want it to become all just online living from morning to evening, which I see all around me. Of course, now people get very nervous when they lose connection. So in short, I still do a lot of research online, but my Internet consumption outside the research is practically zero now.

GL: I really switched back to books. So I'm reading a lot of books, and I make sure that around my computer there are a lot of books, so if I have the feeling, “Okay, I'm just wasting time now online,” I take a book and within a few seconds I’m gone and I’ve forgotten about the online world because it's so much more rewarding to read on paper, to read a book about one topic that I didn't know. Someone may have spent years making it, and it's just so much better. I somehow started to hate the Internet lately, which has to do with the fact that so many websites are so unattractive, and full of flashy advertisements and cookie notifications and stuff.

CBY: That you get fed the same content across everything?

KDD: Yeah, and then the social media, which has totally gone, yeah… I don't know. I used to follow Twitter, but Twitter is what anymore? I didn't find any replacement. Didn't really look for it either, actually.

CBY: Yeah, I get it.

KDD: So yeah. It's, I mean, the internet faces another problem in that everything of quality is behind a paywall. So there are a lot of complaints about fake news, and the real news (or what is supposed to be real news) is locked, so you have to pay for it and if you like to read different sources, different newspapers, then you have to take a subscription for all of them, which is extremely expensive. So I think the internet could have been a wonderful thing, and we are destroying it. We're breaking it actually.

CBY: With the paywall component, we've seen the same thing with streaming services, but that would be getting way off-topic. You mentioned, Guillaume, you came to appreciate Low Tech Magazine once you got it in your hands. Not just clicking through, but once you've got a hard copy, you could digest it. What is your relationship like with the Internet, Guillaume? 

GL: Yeah, my relationship is love and hate, I think, similar to Kris. Because I think I'm kind of addicted to it, somehow, and I'm a geek also. I'm willing to tool with computers and I have my own website. So I quit all social media a couple of years ago, as I didn't really like it much, but I was also kind of addicted to it. Same for the internet - I love many things on the internet, like reading Wikipedia, stuff like that (and I even read Low Tech Magazine, too!) Now, when there's an article, I always read it, and all the No Tech Magazine. So it takes a lot of time to read, yeah.

CBY: There's certainly a lot there. 

GL: So what I try to do is very similar to Kris. Put in some boundaries, like physical boundaries, and what I've been doing recently is that I don't bring my computer at home. I have a work space, so I have my computer there and so when I'm not there, since I don't have a smartphone, I'm just not online at all.

CBY: I am envious of the level of partitioning that both of you men are able to accomplish in this day and age.

GL: Yeah, and that was great for me. I feel like I am really more present at the moments I am spending time with people at home. Something else that relates to that question is my presence online, and so I'm not on social media. Usually when I say that I'm an artist or a filmmaker and comic book artist, people ask me for my Instagram, and I have none, and actually it's very unusual. I can observe that it's very unusual in the artistic scene. 

It has worked for me so far because I was lucky enough to be published in a magazine for my comics. I don't care to advertise them - promote them on social media - and so I think I was able to make some choices that really helped, but that it's not that not easy. Choices that are not easy. Like, I understand that a lot of artists who have to make a name do it (social media) like this and also I'm first a filmmaker. When I was out of film school I was hired many times to do web video content. I quit that very pretty fast because I hated it. It was also a conscious choice that I didn't want to. It's not because I'm into video filmmaking that I want to spend my time creating content for social media that I hate. This again is a choice I think I was lucky to make because I benefit from Social Security here in Belgium. So I had some revenues from welfare, so it helps in choosing. Now that I have my artistic career starting to launch, I mean I have opportunities that emerge outside of stuff that I find unethical. And so I have the luxury not to do things that many have to do.

CBY: I think that's a really important point, especially given many of the folks I've been interviewing have been American or US-based, and the amount of self-promotion and hustle that is required because there is no social safety net forces people into making decisions in a market that doesn't take care of them otherwise. You have the benefit of having a system that allows you to approach your career with your integrity intact.

GL: It doesn't mean that people don't use Instagram in Europe, right?

CBY: Oh, sure, yeah. But being forced into social media by virtue of the market dictating it, well, we could go on about that for ages, so please, continue.

GL: Usually when I tell that to another artist or somebody who is in filmmaking, the answer is that I don't have the choice; I don't get jobs, I don't use Instagram. And it’s the same when talking about smartphones to any person - that I don't have any choice, that I'm forced to use it. So, I made choices to fit my ethics and not just ethics. It's just life comfort. I feel it's really comfortable not to be connected all the time. But I observe that, for many people, it seems to be impossible to do. I don't think it is, but I understand that we don't all have the same freedom.

KDD: Yeah, for me it's different because I'm Belgian, but I left the social welfare paradise that it is and I ended up in Spain, which is just like the States in that sense. So although I kind of stopped using social media - and it's thanks to social media that Low Tech Magazine became what It is -  the thing is that it started with social media that after a while disappeared. So the first years were StumbleUpon. Nobody knows that anymore. OK, so that's what brought the first wave of traffic.

CBY: Yeah, I remember StumbleUpon.

KDD: And then you build up all these followers, and then these social media basically die out, and then you lose all your followers. So in that sense, the experience teaches me, “Okay, don't spend too much effort in building up a large following on a social media platform because 10 years later…

CBY: Right - no more Friendster or Myspace.

KDD: Yeah, so more and more, I focused on the newsletter, on the email subscribers, and otherwise. What Guillaume says is really very important. The fact that we don't have smartphones and are kind of living partly offline is because of our jobs. If you're more, say, integrated into the normal capitalist system, where you are basically forced to have a smartphone and go online, I mean, if you have children, it already becomes a bit harder, I think, and then all this technology sneaks in through the back door.

CBY: Yeah, that's part of being forced to participate in institutional behavior and institutions integrate this stuff to the point where it's mandatory. It's good to see you unpacking a lot of these things and taking apart a lot of these assumptions about what is required. On another topic, I was really pleased to see how you feature archery in the comic, in which you mention it as an elegant and simple means of delivering propulsive force upon a single point. I mentioned in the notes that my father spent years as a competitive archer, and it's all rubbed off on me over the years. In the context of bicycles and bows together, I wanted to unpack the need for scaling down across sectors. The military industrial complex literally manufactures conflict, and it's one of the largest polluters on the planet (specifically the US military). So while the bicycle has practical utility outside of conflict, and I'm exploring some of the potential uses of archery as a practical tool in a comic I’ve written, armed conflict has been a core feature of human interaction since before civilization began, and shows no sign of abating. So how do we extricate warfare from our narratives as a species? What sort of stories would you both like to tell, or can you provide examples from your work that help add diversity of thought and perspective to the landscape? 

KDD: First of all, it was a very difficult article to write. So I got involved in archery, then I wanted to write the definitive article on archery, which was quite difficult because there's a lot of material. There's a lot of history - obviously it never stops. I had to stop somewhere because otherwise I would still be working.

CBY: Right, you’ve got thousands and thousands of years to work with. 

KDD: But there were many things - it's also kind of an unusual article, maybe; is it about bows or is it about sustainability? It's really connecting how the bow and the bicycle are very similar and one is being promoted, but the other one…when you start promoting bows then you get very, very weird reactions like, “No, we should not fight each other.” Obviously, I agree, but we do fight each other the whole time. You mention conflict started before civilization, but actually, especially since industrialized civilization and the states took over - that's when the big wars started.

CBY: And they're scaling up unsustainably.

KDD: Yeah, of course. As I explained in the article, it's also related. So you see when firearms came to replace bows, it's also when the states were getting bigger and taking over power from small communities. And that's pretty logical - I mean, if you have big states, then when they're going to fight their wars, it's going to be on a larger scale. While if you have small communities everywhere, you're never going to have a very large-scale war. So there is a connection between the type of weapon you use and the scale of conflict. In that sense, it rationally would make a lot of sense to say, “Okay, we, stop using cars, go to the bicycle. We stop using firearms, and we start with bows and arrows, and it confers a lot of advantages,” as I say in the article. But of course people don't like to go along with that.

CBY: It's certainly unpacking a train of thought which is difficult for people who are already locked into this idea that warfare is always an act of escalation. That's just the track that's been taken.

KDD: Yeah. And then they say, “but it's an unrealistic plan.” And then I think, “What? Because it requires global cooperation and everything?” But the same goes for the whole climate change discussion. If you don't have global cooperation, then it's never going to be realistic.

CBY: Unfortunately, there will always be bad actors interfering with the process of deploying effective solutions.

KDD: If there’s one continent where everybody stops using fossil fuels, but the Americans keep going…then yeah, we haven’t solved the issue. Obviously on one side of the conversation is my fascination for the bow because obviously I started using it, but in the other sense the website is also much more about investigating what sustainability actually is. What does it mean, and what is possible to become sustainable as a species? In this context, that's the question that keeps me busy looking for answers.

CBY: So what else do you both have coming up that you know draws attention towards other principles?

GL: Though I haven't been working on that subject, as a fan of Low Tech Magazine, I can say I think it's the most thought-provoking and controversial article Kris has written lately. The reactions on the website are so divided, it seems like only gun enthusiasts are interested in discussing the topic. Other people who consider themselves pacifists, they seem to be shocked. Even though it's not something I work on, I've been also thinking about it, and I wonder if the answer regarding the reason it's hard to discuss might be because we're so used to the fact that the state holds the monopoly on violence. We cannot really think of violence ourselves, and though I think it's a very valid subject to discuss, Kris’s view of the subject is really original.

CBY: Well, we've got plenty to cover. I think part of the reaction being a product of those who would be reading the site - like the self-selection of the audience - Kris, I imagine you would have a more progressive audience aware of the ethical ramifications of violence and why non-violence is important, so I understand why you’d get that reaction. 

KDD: Well, I wanted to add something - another intention of the article. So you have the readership of Low Tech Magazine? It's very diverse, from left to right-wing. So there are all kinds of people with very different political ideas reading the magazine. This was also mostly referring to the United States, where a big part of my readership exists and you have this kind of fascination with, and reality of, there being a lot of firearms there. I kind of somehow tried to fight this polarization happening between these political factions, too. There's one part of the population that really wants to hold onto weapons, and then the other doesn't want them. Then this is like a compromise; “Okay, you want a weapon? It's going to be a bow.”

It's written with the intent to kind of make everyone agree about something, and I think polarization in society is one of our biggest problems. Like people on two sides, basically not talking to each other. 

CBY: Yeah, it's nearly intractable. 

KDD: They're next to each other, not talking. Obviously we're never going to solve anything in that way. So we have to kind of bring these two together and in that sense, it was intended also to do that.

CBY: Fantastic. As I'm unpacking the ethical framework of my own narrative approach, tales of Archers defending the downtrodden loom large. I think back to being a little kid watching Disney's Robin Hood from 1973 and then later, Studio Ghibli’s Princess Mononoke with Prince Ashitaka. Role as a defender of the exploited. I also think a lot about this concept of the species; our fate being the product of self-fulfilling prophecy based around the stories we create. So in sociological terms, this concept gets framed in my PhD work as potentialities for thin or thick futures, and Kris, I know you mentioned working with Lancaster University where a whole lot of social futures work is being done. The solarpunk genre contends with this, so I was wondering what sort of comics or other media both of you use as narrative touchstones to frame your values, priorities, and conversations when you're talking with other people? What stories help inspire optimism for you when talking to others? Guillaume, do you want to respond first?

GL: So I don't do that (referencing external work).

KDD: Well, obviously, I'm reading a lot, and I also like music a lot. So for me, that's a very big influence. When people ask, “who's your favorite inspiration in terms of writers?” I have no idea. But, I'm inspired by musicians and this kind of class of musicians that do whatever they feel like doing. I mean they do what they think they have to do instead of thinking commercially, and that inspires me a lot. Artists that make an album, and it's a big success, then with their next one they make it intentionally completely non-commercial so that nobody wants to buy it, but they do it because that's what they want to do. That's where I get a lot of inspiration from.

CBY:  I didn't see that coming. Those responses came out of left field on both fronts. That's great!

KDD: For the rest, I don't know. I have so many books, But to better understand me, I don't know. That's a hard thing to define. Maybe it's the same answer as with Guillaume. I'm not really spreading around references. 

GL: Well, I just like to share what I read with my friends. I mean, I don't present myself through a book or film. I'll read and watch a lot of stuff, and like to discuss with others.

CBY: The comic that you put together provides a window into a dialectic approach to understanding all of the issues Low Tech Magazine addresses and its various features. I hope this interview helps broaden awareness of the site, and the idea is to attract a wider audience of comic fans in general. Because with Comic Book Yeti we've, got a lot of indie publishers we're featuring with regularity and I wanted to make sure that I brought something new to the equation with this interview. If you had the opportunity to collaborate with someone or have a conversation with someone in a manner that would have its greatest impact on changing the trajectory of our society in a positive manner, what topic would you want to cover with whom?

GL: For me, I think the most important topics concern how to organize ourselves collectively to overcome a lot of the problems humanity is facing. I guess subjects I want to cover are getting more political.

KDD: Yeah, same here actually. More and more, what people ask me during talks or presentations is, “how do we get there?” Because when I then reply, it's kind of a utopian world that I'm revealing. Saying that this is how the world could look, then people are usually pretty much okay with that. Then the question is how do we get there? And for that, obviously you have to think politically. It's not that you design some technology and it happens. We have to get there because we have a whole system working against us. So how do we break that system or adapt it? I don't know. That's already a good question.

CBY: That ties back to another question you  reminded me of in a conversation I read from a Financial Times interview by Kenzo Brian with Kim Stanley Robinson. I don't know if either of you have read The Ministry for the Future, but Robinson mentions getting critiqued by Thomas Piketty, who sat him down and said he didn't talk about taxes enough. So getting the political will, a lot of the time means getting the economic backing behind that political will. 

KDD: No, not yet.

CBY: Yeah, I highly recommend it. I really appreciate you both taking the time to sit down with me and have this conversation. So in terms of social media links, we can axe those given our previous conversation. I've got your websites. If there's anything else you want to add, I will make sure that goes up in publication. It’s my pleasure to have you both by the Yeti Cave for this broad discussion on comics and beyond.

GL: Thank you very much.

KDD: Yeah. Thank you.

CBY: I'm really glad to get feedback from both of you and I've really enjoyed seeing years of Low Tech Magazine encapsulated in this one piece of illustrated work, Guillaume. It was really enriching and amusing. Gentlemen, thank you for your time and have a wonderful day!

KDD: Have a good night. Yes, thank you. Bye!

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