COMMUNITY TECHNOLOGY
by Karl Hess
With an Introduction by Carol Moore
Adams-Morgan is a seventy-block neighborhood in the center of Washington, D.C. For five
years Karl Hess worked with hundreds of people in this neighborhood striving
to make it self-sufficient. There were fish in basements, vegetables growing
in once vacant lots and on rooftops, self-contained bacteriological toilets
to unhook the community from conventional sewer systems, a newsletter,
plans for a methanol plant to convert local garbage into fuel, and a shopping
cart to handle most heavy moving chores. Most important were the weekly
town meetings: “After tasting a participatory democracy,” Hess says, “I
would never want to trade it for a merely representative one.”
Even though several thousand people were finally involved in some part
of all this community technology, it didn't thrive. Community Technology
is the story of what these people did, how they did it, and why it didn't
work. It is also an explanation of how any neighborhood can achieve self-sufficiency
now, using what Karl Hess and Adams-Morgan learned. From Community
Technology:
“There are no shortages of anything on the face of the earth that would
prevent any community from surviving healthily and happily. If you say,
Aha, there are shortages of petrochemicals so severe that not everybody
can have them, the obvious answer is that not everyone needs them. There
are other fuels. There are other chemicals. Petro-chemicals seem essential
not because of technology so good that everyone must have it but because
of technology so poor that it has become inflexible, dependent, stultified.
The petrochemical industry is a monument to the folly of putting all our
technological eggs in one huge basket. That huge basket is corporate and
state domination of technology. This book is an argument for community
participation, with all of the diversity and resultant flexibility's that
that implies.”
“The kind of technology that is possible, and which would suit the old
yearnings of the American Dream, is exactly the kind that would under-mine
the sort of spectator-sport politics we have come to play. It would be
a tool to serve their purposes and make possible the kinds of lives they
(and not Madison Avenue fantasists) want to live. Having a role in the
development, deployment, and maintenance of technology, wouldn't people
also want more of a role in politics? Wouldn't they want a politics that
makes possible a democratic life rather than a politics that makes necessary
a life subordinated not to politics but to politicians?”
“New consolidated schools, new towns, and most new prepackaged social
offerings depend on a consumerist mood and mode. In fact, the major argument
overall for favoring big organizations over small ones is that the big
ones do make it easier for people to be passive; that is, they depend on
delivering entire life-styles and not just single products. People are
said to desire this. In this perception, progress is in part the ability
to escape 'doing' things (action) so that people can have or enjoy things
(objects).”
“From the anonymity-passivity position, finally, comes the basic canard
against people delivered with smug assurance by the defenders of large-scale
organizations. People, they say, do not want to do things for themselves,
think things through for themselves, go to meetings, be part of a community,
and so forth. People, they say, are sheer appetite. This does not include
the people making the charge, of course. They are hardworking, responsible,
eager for challenge, always wanting to do more. They are people, the implication
is, while we are slugs.”
Loompanics Unlimited is very proud to offer our readers Karl Hess's
Community Technology.
1979, 5½ x 8½, 120 pp, soft cover.
COMMUNITY TECHNOLOGY: $9.95
(ORDER NUMBER 14177)
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