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Short abstract:

I develop a pragmatics of documentation and demonstration to describe how literary technologies are entangled with technologies of affect, thereby positioning low tech at once as doable, reasonable and desirable for the wider public.

Long abstract:

Critiques of high-tech are increasingly common. One site in which this critique is visible, are the initiatives that aim to develop and document technologies that are more convivial, accessible, useful, repairable and sustainable than current technologies. This paper is concerned with such “low” technologies, by asking how they are experimented with and how they are documented. Based on a study of experimental settings in which people live with various kinds of low-tech tools, the paper analyses documentation and demonstration practices. Aiming to reach a wide audience, these practices mobilize various formats: tutorials that present ‘cookbook recipes’ for low techs, reports that assess experimentations in a scientific way, and videos that stage low techs as key actors in ecological lifestyles and part of modern adventures. The paper shows that documents not only record how low techs are experimented with, but that they also demonstrate that they are worth living with. Arguing that we need to develop a ‘pragmatics of documentation and demonstration’, the paper describes how literary technologies are entangled with technologies of affect, thereby positioning low techs at once as doable, reasonable and desirable for the wider public.