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Abstract
This chapter explores the networks created with the goal of disseminating small-scale technologies and how they were put into the service of different social causes, including feminism and environmentalism, through the resonances of textual catalogs published in the 1960s and early 1970s. Through publications like the Village Technology Handbook and Tools for Progress, a pre-internet network of engineers and technicians in the US and the UK helped to bring the idea of appropriate technology into international development practice. At the same time, they provided crucial inspiration to Stewart Brand as he fashioned the first Whole Earth Catalog. Though Schumacher had intended his theories to be for the developing world, Brand and his followers took up his ideas and developed their own, often exclusionary, interpretations of them. Whole Earth, in turn, inspired the early west coast US cyberculture which positioned small-scale tools and technology as the solution to the world’s problems. I argue that this focus on small-scale tools came full-circle: from development theory to the fledgling US tech industry, where it was amplified and sent back out to the developing world as innovative.
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