High-tech pollutes and alienates us; faced with them, more energy-efficient alternatives are being developed, which can be appropriated by their users and adapted to our needs: low-tech. While this idea is comforting, it is too simple to be true. This is often the case when a turnkey solution seems to have been discovered. In an exciting little book, Low-Tech Perspectives. How to live, do and organize differently? (Divergences editions), Quentin Mateus and Gauthier Roussilhe explore the ambiguities of low-tech and identify the pitfalls into which the movement risks falling.

“Nothing says that low-tech represents a miracle solution, but it helps us to understand that we are going through […] a technical crisis”, they ask straight away. The authors, respectively a long-time companion of the Low-Tech Lab and an independent researcher specializing in the environmental consequences of digital technology, had the opportunity to observe low-tech initiatives in the four corners of France and Europe, and offer in this book a stepping stone.

This reflection is all the more important as the trend is reaching a tipping point: now that the myriad of low-tech initiatives are attracting public attention, can this technological path retain its emancipatory potential by spreading massively, or is it doomed to be taken over by the market and led astray?

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