It is May 1940. German armoured columns have broken through the French lines and the terrified population is pouring onto roads that are quickly becoming clogged by refugees. From his spotter plane, sent on a desperate mission over enemy lines to gather information that nobody will use, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry contemplates the debacle:

Forgive me, my dear Saint-Ex, for using your insightful reflection as an example of low-tech, simple technologies. As an intrepid aviator, you were of course wholly convinced by advanced technologies. But you asked for it, proposing the abandoning of yesterday's elegant cars to return to the horse and cart! Nothing, for me, summarizes better the crucial question facing our industrial society. Exchange electronics for the mechanical – replace pistons and valves by transistors and capacitors – and the insight is as fresh today as it was in 1940. Could our technically complex, globalized, specialized world withstand a catastrophe, whatever it might be – a dearth of easily accessible energy and material reserves, the consequences of pollution – especially climate change – or some new and more acute financial and economic crisis?

This book develops the thesis, radical I know, that instead of seeking topdown solutions to current environmental and societal challenges, instead of seeking ever more innovation, high technology, digitalization, competition, networking, growth – giving them names such as ‘sustainable development’, ‘green growth’, ‘Economy 2.0’ – we must instead direct ourselves, as quickly as possible, to a society based primarily on simpler technologies, undeniably cruder and more basic, maybe a little less powerful, but much more resource-efficient and locally controllable. This idea is not new: as early as the 1940s and 1950s, writers like Bernard Charbonneau and Jacques Ellul denounced the race towards more technological societies; in the 1960s and 1970s, Ivan Illich and Ernst Friedrich Schumacher argued for the use of ‘convivial’ or ‘intermediate’ technologies.