There I was, minding my own business, when I stumbled on Dr. Eleanor Drage’s latest article published – where else? – on The Guardian (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/aug/02/billionaire-big-tech-frugal-elon-musk-innovation)
Yes, the rousing tale of “frugal tech” — the stuff TEDx dreams are made of. I can see it now: kindly villagers whittling life-saving microscopes from driftwood, while an enterprising goat herder personally strings fiber optic cable across the savannah using nothing but a plucking tool. Heartwarming. Noble. And, bless her soul, hopelessly naive.
The latest typical Guardian’s darling of feel-good op-ed pieces. While reading it, one can’t help but get a lovely image of MacGyver-like barefoot visionaries cobbling together miracle devices from bottle caps, dental floss, and lots of optimism, while at the same time, barely visible in the background, a fearless farmer sets a LoRa network of sensors and actuators with nothing but a rusty hoe and sheer muscle.
It’s an adorable story. It is also, for anyone mildly awake, hopelessly disconnected from reality.
The article’s sales pitch grapples with “soulless billionaire vanity projects” against “pure, needs-driven tech,” as if a NASA Mars rover and my friend Dan’s $70 weather sensor are rival products on the same Sparkfun warehouse shelf (Sorry, Lady Ada, no disrespect). In truth, the former built the vast, complex, and yes, expensive foundation that made the latter even possible.
And just for clarity, let’s unpack the article’s heroic examples:
Community Internet: It’s terrific that they are using “software-defined radios.” And where, please do tell, were those developed? Not in a village shed. They are the result of decades of viciously expensive, capital-burning R&D in military, academic, and corporate labs. The “frugal” part is merely the final footnote in a multibillion-dollar technological supply chain.
DIY Solar Sensors: These are built with a Raspberry Pi, a device casually treated better than most garden vegetables. A Raspberry Pi is a miracle of semiconductor engineering, relying on global supply chains and billion-dollar fabrication plants. Calling its use “mundane” is like dismissing a Rembrandt as “some paint I found on my neighbor’s garage sale.”
The 3D-Printed Microscope: A triumph of accessibility, no doubt. But it’s not a grassroots invention. The 3D printer, the material science behind the polymers, the CAD software – all were born from massive, capital-heavy, and often proprietary innovation. The frugal microscope exists because big tech already plowed the field.
Then there’s the showstopper: the argument that generative AI is “irrelevant” to low-bandwidth communities. This sounds like a 1920s argument about the electrical grid being irrelevant because the dissenter didn’t own a toaster.
Foundational technologies rewire the world for everyone. Artificial Intelligence is already shaping medicine, logistics, and climate models that will benefit humanity on a scale that a locally-made sensor, for all its utility, simply cannot.
Granted, right after it’s done with that, AI will eliminate us all and replace us with robots, but hey! Until then… what a ride!
And the final, delicious irony? Wringing hands over the “digital divide” while scoffing at the very “bombastic billionaires” trying to solve it.
Starlink, Eleanor? Seriously? A project like Starlink is a high-cost, high-risk attempt to close that exact gap. You can dislike the man without being blind to the mission, or falling in love with your own rhetoric.
This isn’t a fairy tale of noble villagers versus depraved tech bros. Technological progress is an ecosystem. The expensive, risky breakthroughs – the satellites, the chips, the global networks – create the very fertile soil where clever, “frugal” applications can mushroom.
So, by all means, celebrate ingenuity, but spare us the fiction that it’s born in a vacuum. Frugality is not a rebellion against the big-tech machine; it’s a dividend of it.
Let’s face it; frugal tech doesn’t stand in opposition to the machine. It stands on its shoulders, while ‘some’ are constantly complaining about the height.
Please do celebrate the clever hacks. Just don’t mistake the ripple for the tidal wave that made it. Always keep in mind, ‘frugality’ in tech isn’t the Force’s rebellion. It’s a Walmart rebate.