Climate change isn't going away, and it isn't going to get any better — at least if we keep legislating as we have been. In Democracy in a Hotter Time: Climate Change and Democratic Transformation, a multidisciplinary collection of subject matter experts discuss the increasingly intertwined fates of American ecology and democracy, arguing that only by strengthening our existing institutions will we be able to weather the oncoming "long emergency."

In the excerpt below, contributing author and Assistant Professor of Environment and Sustainability at the University at Buffalo, Holly Jean Buck, explores how accelerating climate change, the modern internet and authoritarianism's recent renaissance are influencing and amplifying one another's negative impacts, to the detriment of us all.  

MIT Press

Excerpted from Democracy in a Hotter Time: Climate Change and Democratic Transformation, edited by David W. Orr. Published by MIT Press. Copyright © 2023. All rights reserved.

Burning hills and glowing red skies, stone-dry riverbeds, expanses of brown water engulfing tiny human rooftops. This is the setting for the twenty-first century. What is the plot? For many of us working on climate and energy, the story of this century is about making the energy transition happen. This is when we completely transform both energy and land use in order to avoid the most devastating impacts of climate change — or fail to.

Confronting authoritarianism is even more urgent. About four billion people, or 54 percent of the world, in ninety-five countries, live under tyranny in fully authoritarian or competitive authoritarian regimes. The twenty-first century is also about the struggle against new and rising forms of authoritarianism. In this narration, the twenty-first century began with a wave of crushed democratic uprisings and continued with the election of authoritarian leaders around the world who began to dismantle democratic institutions. Any illusion of the success of globalization, or of the twenty-first century representing a break from the brutal twentieth century, was stripped away with Russia’s most recent invasion of Ukraine. The plot is less clear, given the failure of democracy-building efforts in the twentieth century. There is a faintly discernable storyline of general resistance and rebuilding imperfect democracies.

There’s also a third story about this century: the penetration of the Internet into every sphere of daily, social, and political life. Despite turn-of-the-century talk about the Information Age, we are only beginning to conceptualize what this means. Right now, the current plot is about the centralization of discourse on a few corporate platforms. The rise of the platforms brings potential to network democratic uprisings, as well as buoy authoritarian leaders through post-truth memes and algorithms optimized to dish out anger and hatred. This is a more challenging story to narrate, because the setting is everywhere. The story unfolds in our bedrooms while we should be sleeping or waking up, filling the most quotidian moments of waiting in line in the grocery store or while in transit. The characters are us, even more intimately than with climate change. It makes it hard to see the shape and meaning of this story. And while we are increasingly aware of the influence that shifting our media and social lives onto big tech platforms has on our democracy, less attention is devoted to the influence this has on our ability to respond to climate change.

Think about these three forces meeting — climate change, authoritarianism, the Internet. What comes to mind? If you recombine the familiar characters from these stories, perhaps it looks like climate activists using the capabilities of the Internet to further both networked protest and energy democracy. In particular, advocacy for a version of “energy democracy” that looks like wind, water, and solar; decentralized systems; and local community control of energy.

In this essay, I would like to suggest that this is not actually where the three forces of rising authoritarianism x climate change x tech platforms domination leads. Rather, the political economy of online media has boxed us into a social landscape wherein both the political consensus and the infrastructure we need for the energy transition is impossible to build. The current configuration of the Internet is a key obstacle to climate action.

The possibilities of climate action exist within a media ecosystem that has monetized our attention and that profits from our hate and division. Algorithms that reap advertising profits from maximizing time-on-site have figured out that what keeps us clicking is anger. Even worse, the system is addictive, with notifications delivering hits of dopamine in a part of what historian and addiction expert David Courtwright calls “limbic capitalism.” Society has more or less sleepwalked into this outrage-industrial complex without having a real analytic framework for understanding it. The tech platforms and some research groups or think tanks offer up “misinformation” or “disinformation” as the framework, which present the problem as if the problem is bad content poisoning the well, rather than the structure itself being rotten. As Evgeny Morozov has quipped, “Post-truth is to digital capitalism what pollution is to fossil capitalism — a by-product of operations.”

A number of works outline the contours and dynamics of the current media ecology and what it does — Siva Vaidhyanathan’s Antisocial Media, Safiya U. Noble’s Algorithms of Oppression, Geert Lovink’s Sad by Design, Shoshana Zuboff’s Surveillance Capitalism, Richard Seymour’s The Twittering Machine, Tim Hwang’s Subprime Attention Crisis, Tressie McMillan Cottom’s writing on how to understand the social relations of Internet technologies through racial capitalism, and many more. At the same time, there’s reasonable counter-discussion about how many of our problems can really be laid at the feet of social media. The research on the impacts of social media on political dysfunction, mental health, and society writ large does not paint a neat portrait. Scholars have argued that putting too much emphasis on the platforms can be too simplistic and reeks of technological determinism; they have also pointed out that cultures like the United States’ and the legacy media have a long history with post-truth. That said, there are certainly dynamics going on that we did not anticipate, and we don’t seem quite sure what to do with them, even with multiple areas of scholarship in communication, disinformation, and social media and democracy working on these inquiries for years.

What seems clear is that the Internet is not the connectedness we imagined. The ecology and spirituality of the 1960s, which shaped and structured much of what we see as energy democracy and the good future today, told us we were all connected. Globally networked — it sounds familiar, like a fevered dream from the 1980s or 1990s, a dream that in turn had its roots in the 1960s and before. Media theorist Geert Lovink reflects on a 1996 interview with John Perry Barlow, Electronic Frontier Foundation cofounder and Grateful Dead lyricist, in which Barlow was describing how cyberspace was connecting each and every synapse of all citizens on the planet. As Lovink writes, “Apart from the so-called last billion we’re there now. This is what we can all agree on. The corona crisis is the first Event in World History where the internet doesn’t merely play ‘a role’ — the Event coincides with the Net. There’s a deep irony to this. The virus and the network ... sigh, that’s an old trope, right?” Indeed, read through one cultural history, it seems obvious that we would reach this point of being globally networked, and that the Internet would not just “play a role” in global events like COVID-19 or climate change, but shape them.

What if the Internet actually has connected us, more deeply than we normally give it credit for? What if the we’re-all-connected-ness imagined in the latter half of the twentieth century is in fact showing up, but manifesting late, and not at all like we thought? We really are connected — but our global body is neither a psychedelic collective consciousness nor a infrastructure for data transmission comprising information packets and code. It seems that we’ve made a collective brain that doesn’t act much like a computer at all. It runs on data, code, binary digits — but it acts emotionally, irrationally, in a fight-or-flight way, and without consciousness. It’s an entity that operates as an emotional toddler, rather than with the neat computational sensing capacity that stock graphics of “the Internet” convey. Thinking of it as data or information is the same as thinking that a network of cells is a person.

The thing we’re jacked into and collectively creating seems more like a global endocrine system than anything we might have visualized in the years while “cyber” was a prefix. This may seem a banal observation, given that Marshall McLuhan was talking about the global nervous system more than fifty years ago. We had enthusiasm about cybernetics and global connectivity over the decades and, more recently, a revitalization of theory about networks and kinship and rhizomes and all the rest. (The irony is that with fifty years of talk on “systems thinking,” we still have responses to things like COVID-19 or climate that are almost antithetical to considering interconnected systems — dominated by one set of expertise and failing to incorporate the social sciences and humanities). So — globally connected, yet divided into silos, camps, echo-chambers, and so on. Social media platforms are acting as agents, structuring our interactions and our spaces for dialogue and solution-building. Authoritarians know this, and this is why they have troll farms that can manipulate the range of solutions and the sentiments about them.

The Internet as we experience it represents a central obstacle to climate action, through several mechanisms. Promotion of false information about climate change is only one of them. There’s general political polarization, which inhibits the coalitions we need to build to realize clean energy, as well as creates paralyzing infighting within the climate movement about strategies, which the platforms benefit from. There’s networked opposition to the infrastructure we need for the energy transition. There’s the constant distraction from the climate crisis, in the form of the churning scandals of the day, in an attention economy where all topics compete for mental energy. And there’s the drain of time and attention spent on these platforms rather than in real-world actions.

Any of these areas are worth spending time on, but this essay focuses on how the contemporary media ecology interferes with climate strategy and infrastructure in particular. To understand the dynamic, we need to take a closer look at the concept of energy democracy, as generally understood by the climate movement, and its tenets: renewable, small-scale systems, and community control. The bitter irony of the current moment is that it’s not just rising authoritarianism that is blocking us from good futures. It’s also our narrow and warped conceptions of democracy that are trapping us.

Bayonetta director Hideki Kamiya is leaving PlatinumGames, after helping to found the company back in 2006 when it was called Seeds Inc. Kamiya was recently promoted to VP, so this move comes as a slight surprise. He recently said on social media that it was "by no means an easy decision to make."

Kamiya still has a couple of weeks on his post, as he officially exits the company on October 12. As for the why of it all, he wrote that the move “came after a lot of consideration based on my own beliefs," but didn't offer further explanation. He says he’s still going to make games in his “Hideki Kamiya way”, but hasn’t announced if he’s heading to another company, starting his own or even just planning to tinker away in a garage somewhere. He’s only 52, so a complete retirement is highly unlikely.

Kamiya’s mark on gaming is massive. Most recently, he was the supervising director of the critically-acclaimed Bayonetta 3. During his more than 15 years at PlatinumGames, Kamiya worked on classics like the original Bayonetta, the Wii U and Switch cult hit The Wonderful 101 and the action-heavy Astral Chain, among others. He was staffed at Capcom and its spin-off studio Clover before founding PlatinumGames, helming Resident Evil 2, Viewtiful Joe and Ōkami.

Kamiya has been hard at work these past few years on a superhero title internally referred to as Project GG. He was lead director on the “heroic” game and the company has marketed it as a conclusion to his superhero trilogy, joining Viewtiful Joe and the Wonderful 101. PlatinumGames hasn’t announced if the game’s still coming or if it will poof into vaporware with Kamiya’s departure.

This year’s Razercon event held a couple of surprises for those who love the computer accessory company and luxury lifestyle brands. Razer has partnered up with Lamborghini to create a beefed up Blade 16 laptop that draws plenty of aesthetic inspiration from the sports car maker. It boasts a customized chassis with orange highlights that’s “infused with the spirit of Lamborghini.” The price tag is also infused with the spirit of Lamborghini, as this thing costs $5,000.

It looks pretty cool, but the actual components also got some Lambo love. The CNC-milled chassis is made from a single block of aluminum, adding durability, with a finish inspired by Lamborghini’s signature orange and matte black. The design on the lid echoes the headlights of the recently-announced Lamborghini Revuelto hybrid vehicle. So now you can race down the information superhighway in your Lambo computer as you race down the actual highway in your Lambo car. It’s an ouroboros of unnecessary speed.

The specs here are on-point, as there are some significant improvements over the base-level Blade 16 laptop. This is a highly-souped up edition, with a 13th Gen Intel Core i9 HX processor that boasts 24 cores and 32 threads. It also features a GeForce 4090 GPU, a 4TB SSD, 32GB of DDR5 RAM and a dual-mode mini-LED 4K 16” display. This thing is a beast, but remember that $5K price tag. Despite the cost, the Razer Blade 16 x Automobili Lamborghini Edition could become a collector’s item some day, as the company is only making 150 units.

Razer

Razer has also teamed up with fashion icons Dolce & Gabbana to create a gold-emblazoned edition of its popular Barracuda wireless headphones. The fashion brand’s signature design has even been applied to a Razer Enki gaming chair and a bunch of clothing items to celebrate the partnership, like hoodies and t-shirts. Let’s hear it for corporate synergy!

Amazon has used today’s hardware event to go all-in on Alexa’s new LLM-infused capabilities, touting how easy it’ll soon be to have a natural sounding conversation with the bot. This also extends to kids, as the company just announced Explore With Alexa. This is a pared-down and kid-friendly version of the updated chatbot that specializes in topics like animals and nature. It’ll even play trivia games with your tykes and disperse daily fun facts.

Of course, this is for kids, so the tech has been developed with guard rails to protect them from the more sinister parts of the Internet. Amazon says Explore With Alexa will launch at some point before the holidays and will eventually extend beyond the pre-approved topics of animal and nature.

To accompany this new Alexa technology, there are some forthcoming kid-friendly devices. The Echo Pop Kids is a smart speaker designed for the younger members of your family. It ships in two SKUs that fall along typically accepted notions of gender. There’s an Avengers one and a Disney princess one. The Avengers one specializes in conversational tidbits about Earth’s mightiest heroes and the Disney princess model specializes in Mulan, Cinderella and the like. The Echo Pop Kids releases next month for $50 and includes six free months of Amazon’s Kids+ subscription service. Preorders start today.

Amazon

There’s also a pair of forthcoming tablets. The new Fire Kids tablet is aimed at younger children and the Fire Kids Pro is being marketed to older kids. These are 10-inch tablets that are 25-percent faster than the previous generation, with 1080p FHD screens, 3GB of RAM and access to specialized kid-centric apps. Each tablet costs $190 and ships with a year of Amazon’s Kids+ subscription service. You also get a two-year warranty out of the box that covers the kind of accidental mishaps that parents deal with every single day. Preorders start today and shipments begin next month.

Both tablets boast access to the company’s new Play Together feature that gives kids access to online multiplayer titles, like checkers, and an app called Music Maker. This experience lets children become “composers, blending instruments and other sound effects together, to create a unique composition with the help of AI, all through touch.”

Follow all of the news live from Amazon’s 2023 Devices event right here.

DIY repair gurus iFixit just issued a hearty rebuke at Apple, dinging the company’s self-proclaimed commitment to the right-to-repair movement. Additionally, the organization has retroactively lowered the repairability score for the iPhone 14, after originally being quite impressed by the phone’s easily-accessible hardware components.

The iPhone 14’s score shot down from a respectable 7 out of 10 to a “do-not-recommend” 4 out of 10. In other words, iFixit says the phone’s no longer a viable option for DIYers, even with Apple selling replacement parts via the company’s Self Service Repair program. This is because self-repair is more than just parts. There’s software involved and iFixit says Apple’s code purposefully limits repair options for most tasks.

The company derides Apple for creating a “labyrinthine maze of obstacles” for both consumers and third-party repair technicians. It all boils down to software that requires and checks for parts bought directly from Apple. Otherwise, you’ll lose functionality and receive endless warnings during use, as the system won’t successfully pair aftermarket parts.

The repair also must be validated by a proprietary chat system that requires personal information from the customer. Third-party technicians haven’t relished the prospect of handing out their customers’ private information just to replace a battery. Additionally, consumers and technicians alike typically rely on used or third-party parts, and Apple’s system dissuades both options in favor of purchasing pricey branded components.

A blog post on the matter by iFixit stated that it’s heard from several repair pros who have excited the business entirely rather than deal with Apple’s constant hurdles. The company also noted that community pushback began almost immediately after the iPhone 14 received its original repairability score.

iFixit still lauds Apple for making an “improvement over the status quo” by selling replacement parts, but says that the hoops a consumer or technician must jump through to replace a part makes the iPhone 14 “literally not repairable.” The site hasn’t issued a repairability score for any of the just-announced iPhone 15 models, but they should start coming in the next couple of weeks.

Cadillac just unveiled the 2025 CT5 luxury sedan and it ships with a tech-forward feature that’s certain to annoy the “back in my day, cars were for driving” crowd, a 33-inch 9K touchscreen display. The dashboard-based LED screen curves toward the driver in a “single, continuous screen” that spans the entire viewing area.

Like most in-car displays, this is a customizable user interface that you can access in a number of different ways. Cadillac has partnered up with Google, so many of the company’s apps are built-in to the display, like Google Assistant and Google Maps. This allows for live traffic updates, podcasts, music streaming, hands-free communication and more. The inclusion of Google Play lets you shop around for all kinds of apps to help pass the time during that annoying commute.

Cadillac has been teasing this display for a while, after it first showed up at CES in 2021 as part of the Lyriq EV concept car. However, the 2025 CT5 is far from a concept vehicle, as it likely releases next year. It seems as though automobile manufacturers are in a race to push out the widest and more versatile screen, with BMW recently introducing full-width displays on windscreens that are also set to launch with 2025 models.

Of course, the Cadillac CT5 is also a car, and not just a big metal house for a touchscreen display. The CT5 refresh boasts a 2.0L turbo engine, upgradeable to 3.0L, with 237 horsepower and 258 lb-ft of torque, along with dual exhaust tips. The company promises a “quiet, smooth and effortless” ride, thanks to all-wheel drive, Super Cruise drive assistance technology, and something called the Drive Mode Selector that uses a full range of sensors to automatically adjust responses depending on the surface and weather conditions.

Cadillac says the 2025 CT5 will be manufactured at GM’s assembly facility in Michigan, with production beginning in the spring. We’ll have to wait for pricing and availability details, however, as the company says more news will be announced in the future. In the meantime, we can all live in terror at the prospect of a child accidentally breaking that touchscreen during a particularly grueling and anxiety-inducing road trip.

The attorneys general from all 50 states have banned together and sent an open letter to Congress, asking for increased protective measures against AI-enhanced child sexual abuse images, as originally reported by AP. The letter calls on lawmakers to “establish an expert commission to study the means and methods of AI that can be used to exploit children specifically.”

The letter sent to Republican and Democratic leaders of the House and Senate also urges politicians to expand existing restrictions on child sexual abuse materials to specifically cover AI-generated images and videos. This technology is extremely new and, as such, there’s nothing on the books yet that explicitly places AI-generated images in the same category as other types of child sexual abuse materials.

“We are engaged in a race against time to protect the children of our country from the dangers of AI,” the prosecutors wrote in the letter. “Indeed, the proverbial walls of the city have already been breached. Now is the time to act.”

Using image generators like Dall-E and Midjourney to create child sexual abuse materials isn’t a problem, yet, as the software has guardrails in place that disallows that kind of thing. However, these prosecutors are looking to the future when open-source versions of the software begin popping up everywhere, each with its own guardrails, or lack thereof. Even OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has stated that AI tools would benefit from government intervention to mitigate risk, though he didn’t mention child abuse as a potential downside to the technology.

The government tends to move slowly when it comes to technology, for a number of reasons, as it took Congress several years before taking the threat of online child abusers seriously back in the days of AOL chat rooms and the like. To that end, there’s no immediate sign that Congress is looking to craft AI legislation that absolutely prohibits generators from creating this kind of foul imagery. Even the European Union’s sweeping Artificial Intelligence Act doesn’t specifically mention any risk to children.

South Carolina Attorney General Alan Wilson organized the letter-writing campaign and has encouraged colleagues to scour state statutes to find out if “the laws kept up with the novelty of this new technology.”

Wilson warns of deepfake content that features an actual child sourced from a photograph or video. This wouldn’t be child abuse in the conventional sense, Wilson says, but would depict abuse and would “defame” and “exploit” the child from the original image. He goes on to say that “our laws may not address the virtual nature” of this kind of situation.

The technology could also be used to make up fictitious children, culling from a library of data, to produce sexual abuse materials. Wilson says this would create a “demand for the industry that exploits children” as an argument against the idea that it wouldn't actually be hurting anyone.

Though the idea of deepfake child sexual abuse is a rather new one, the tech industry has been keenly aware of deepfake pornographic content, taking steps to prevent it. Back in February, Meta, OnlyFans and Pornhub began using an online tool called Take It Down that allows teens to report explicit images and videos of themselves from the Internet. This tool is used for regular images and AI-generated content.

If you've ever considered picking up an Amazon Echo Show but weren't sure about the price or which one, now's your chance. A range of Echo Shows are currently on sale, including the new third-generation Echo Show 5, down from $90 to $65, a 28 percent discount. The deal is available in Charcoal, Glacier White or Cloud Blue. However, for the same price, you can get the Echo Show 5 and a Sengled Matter Smart Bulb that you can control with your voice or the Alexa app. It's typically $110 for the bundle, so this option gives you 40 percent off.

The third-gen Echo Show 5 has a 5.5-inch, 960 x 480 display, a built-in 2MP camera for calling loved ones on their Echo device or Alexa app and lets you control lights and thermostats across your home. Listen to music and entertainment through its 1.7-inch speaker from Amazon Music, Prime Video, Spotify and more. Plus, you can tell Alexa to set alarms, show you the weather or play a song — all displayed on its screen. Speaking of the display, you can set your Echo Show 5 to play a slideshow of your favorite photos when it's not in use.

Along with the classic, you can pick up the Echo Show 5 Kids for a steal right now, with a 25 percent discount dropping its price from $100 to $75. It lets kids get help with homework and ask some of their favorite Disney characters, like Olaf or Mickey, to do things instead of plain old Alexa. The Echo Show 5 Kids also comes with a year of Amazon Kids + and includes easy-to-use parental controls.

Then there's the biggest deal of them all: The second-generation Echo Show 8 is available for 42 percent off its sticker price — a drop from $130 to $75. The 8-inch device is a couple of years older than the third-gen Echo Show 5 but has benefits like 1280 x 800 resolution, a pair of two-inch speakers and a 13MP camera with auto-framing. You can also get it with the Sengled Matter Smart Bulb right now for no extra cost.

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Measuring a mere 72 x 40.7 x 14.1 mm — just over half the length of the original NES controller — the 8BitDo Micro is a spiritual successor to the company’s Zero line of similarly minuscule gamepads. It also hurts my hands just to look at it.

The 8BitDo Micro pairs via Bluetooth with the Nintendo Switch, Android and Raspberry Pi. The wee little thing weighs 24.8 grams, includes a mode-switching button and supports button mapping via 8BitDo Ultimate Software. The company says it has a 180mAh battery that will last 10 hours of playtime and can fully recharge in one to two hours. However, it also works in wired mode (via USB-C) when you don’t mind being tethered to your gaming system.

8BitDo

The controller skips analog sticks in favor of a lone D-Pad. It includes four standard action buttons (A, B, X, Y), face buttons (plus, minus, star and checkered flag) and shoulder bumpers / triggers. (The latter is one way it differs from 8BitDo’s Zero 2.) It can work in keyboard mode, which opens up some compatibility with macOS, Windows and iOS — and you can assign shortcuts to use it as a remote control for tasks like photo or video editing. It's an impressive amount of IO to cram into a form factor that makes Joy-Cons look like the front face of an arcade cabinet.

The 8BitDo Micro launches today in blue and green. It costs $25 and is available to order from Amazon.

8Bitdo / Aspercreme / Avery Menegus / Engadget

Some of the most advanced Roomba robot vacuums are on sale right now. Wellbots has the poop-detecting iRobot Roomba j7+ for an all-time low price of $549. Or, you can opt for our favorite vacuum / mop hybrid, the upgraded Roomba j7+ Combo, for $799. In both cases, you can enter the coupon code ENGROOMBA200 to receive the $200 discount exclusively for Engadget readers.

The Roomba j7+ includes a bundled cleaning station and iRobot’s poop detection tech. The company says the vacuum’s advanced sensors will avoid pet feces — and its “Pet Owner Official Promise” (P.O.O.P.) policy assures you it will replace the device for free if it runs over pet waste within its first year. The self-emptying vacuum also includes an intelligent mapping feature that lets you choose which rooms it covers, and you can schedule multiple cleanings per day in advance. The Roomba j7+ is usually $800, so its $549 discounted price (with code ENGROOMBA200) is worth noting if you’ve been on the lookout for a cleaning machine.

Wellbots’ coupon also applies to that model’s upgraded sibling, one of Engadget’s picks for the best robot vacuums. The Roomba j7+ Combo takes the j7+’s base features (including self-emptying tech and poop detection) and adds wet mopping, letting you transition seamlessly between carpet and floor cleaning. (It can do both simultaneously on hard floors.) It also includes a feature that can help keep your rugs dry by lifting the mop out of reach when it detects it’s on a carpet. The j7+ Combo typically costs $1,100.

Both devices work with the iRobot mobile app. It lets you manage the devices’ smart mapping capabilities, remote startup and scheduling. We find the app to be simple, intuitive and a significant selling point for Roomba robot cleaners.

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