A rant approximating the content of this document was delivered to an audience of new media artists and activists by James Wallbank, Coordinator of Redundant Technology Initiative, at The Next 5 Minutes conference in Amsterdam, March 1999 .
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' "Lowtech" means technology that is cheap or free.
Technology moves on so fast that right now we can recover low-end Pentiums and fast Macintoshes from the trash. Lowtech upgrades every year. But we don't have to pay for it.
Lowtech includes hardware and software. We advocate freeware and low cost software. We particularly advocate the use of low cost, open source operating systems.
[...]
Lowtech counters exclusivity. Lowtech is street level technology.
Text is great for communicating. Write down what you want to say. Make it clear and simple and non-exclusive.
Email is still the "killer app". Fast, low cost global communication for the ordinary citizen is genuinely something new.
HTML is good for lots more than web pages. Now you can author all sorts of graphical stuff with a plain text editor.
Use the web for plain text and images. It's simple and cheap and quick and it works.'