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Today, more and more people wanna live in more independent self-reliant, less institutional way.

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The kind of tools and techniques that

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are chosen to support that way of life have been given a name:

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"Alternative" or "Appropriate Technology"

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You can have a free society.

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The tools and techniques appropriate to that

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will be of a certain kind.

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Not a certain kind in the sense of the behind technology or low technology,

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but be a certain kind in the sense that they can be developed

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and deployed, maintained by the people involved

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so the justice there, their politics is participatory,

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so is their material base.

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Some people think appropriate technology means

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making your own candles and wearing a lot of beads

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and saying "wow" a lot.

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It would seem to me it's the other way around - appropriate technology means that you gotta know more than all those people in MIT.

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They can make a gadget that is just plain dumb!

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And there's always GM and the US government to support it.

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If anybody says that I'm a leader in alternative technologies,

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I would tell they're absolutely wrong. I'm neither a leader nor a follower, I'm a practitioner.

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And all the people that I know who are involved in this take it as one of the most important points

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that there are no leaders - only practitioners.

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My teaching - if it is indeed teaching - is about an attitude, it's called "beginner's mind".

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What it means simply is approaching every problem... open, like a child.

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With no pre-conceptions, trying to understand the problem wholly,

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and then using the entire universe of knowledge for the answer.

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The world demands of people that they know more and not less

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about their entire environment. The environment isn't just trees and bunny rabbits.

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The environment is ideas, the environment is machines, the environment is just a (central real living ?).

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To the extent that you think anything is too complicated for you,

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or too worrisome, "it's too boring", "I don't wanna get involved with that",

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you become - intend to be victimized by.

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This does not mean that everybody has to know everything,

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but it certainly suggests that you should know something about most things.

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A lot of people look at today's huge commercial mass production technology,

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and they (think ?) it'll always be here.

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My feeling is that's the way the cockroach must have once looked at the dinosaur.

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It looks up to this thing and then says:

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"Oh my God! That thing is too big it'll be with us forever and the best we can do is just (dug ?)."

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And the same thing I think is true of the big technologies - like a dinosaur:

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Big tail, swishes around, knocks everything over but the brains is the size of a pea - and it too shall pass.