Residential houses come in all shapes and sizes and are located in communities both large and small. Yet modern residential dwellings largely share a set of common technological systems—electricity, water, waste removal—and these technologies involve common sets of practice, unthinking habits that we engage in throughout the day, every day. These shared practices are the little active rituals of residential life. Most Americans largely take for granted much of what is materially involved in the daily rituals of dwelling.¹ There is often very little reason to question whether the lights will turn on when we flip the appropriate switch, hot water will be delivered momentarily after turning the appropriate valve, and the garbage man will come on Tuesday. In many parts of America, life is almost impossible without a personal vehicle, and we rarely question why a family may own more than one.

Residential dwelling in America involves almost constant interaction with technological systems that we hardly ever even contemplate. We learn how to interact with these systems through our bodily practices, flipping light switches and opening garage doors and flushing toilets and cooking for families of four with ingredients from the grocery store. Dwelling involves bodily rituals that take place in concurrence with the material systems around us.

Technologies that support daily life in the American home enroll us in both techniques of the body² and particular patterns of thought regarding the material and social world. The systems of electricity, domestic heat, water provision, waste removal and treatment, transportation, and food production are just some of the massive material infrastructures that provide for the needs and comforts of modern human dwellers. Yet technologies are not merely material; they are “at the same time a mode of organizing and perpetuating (or changing) social relationships, a manifestation of prevalent thought and behavior patterns, an instrument for control and domination.”³ Technologies are not static material systems; they are “a social process in which technics proper (that is, the technical apparatus of industry, transportation, communication) is but a partial factor.”⁴ Material systems shape how we act, and think, in our dwelling lives.

This study involves conscious attention to the ways the dominant technological systems that support residential dwelling in America shape social thought and practice. I draw on classical thinkers like Pierre Bourdieu, Michel Foucault, Herbert Marcuse, and Lewis Mumford to suggest that material systems operate to shape both action and thought. These insights inform a more recent body of scholarship on theories of practice,⁵ and this book explicitly pays attention to how the sociotechnical networks that support residential dwelling encourage particular forms of practice, rendering most options for alternative forms of technology and practice invisible.⁶

The technologies that meet the needs and comforts of modern residential dwellers are based on a scaffold of political structures (like building codes and zoning regulations), economic institutions (like utility companies that demand monthly payments for their services), and scientific ideals (about the safety and suitability of various technologies). These technologies are also based on a particular conception of what normal residential life is and should be, involving monthly utility bills and an unending source of electric power, weekly trash service and immediate wastewater removal, and the largely unthinking reliance on infrastructures, bureaucracies, and individualized economies to meet our needs and comforts. Residential dwelling, then, involves the interplay of political, economic, material, and cultural structures that shape conceptualizations of normal and acceptable ways of living, and the rituals of social practice, the intersection of norms and action where individuals habitually enact shared patterns of daily life.

The question then becomes—and this question shapes the empirical investigations of the case studies presented in this book—how do some Americans come to adopt alternative forms of residential dwelling technologies? I do not ask “why” people choose to adopt alternative technologies because, like other sociologists, I recognize that the conceptualization of and language used to describe motivation may be more cognitively, socially, and temporally complicated than the simple formulaic that yesterday’s motivation leads to today’s action.⁷ While I, like other sociologists, am often tempted to ask why, here I attempt to focus on how—how the people I’ve met who dwell differently than the average American understand their own dwelling choices, how their practices differ from other dwellers, how they understand the choices (and compromises) they’ve made to dwell in resistance.

The chapters in this book present four diverse cases of alternative technology adoption at the residential scale through a theoretical lens that focuses on how alternative material systems involve alternative forms of social organization and social practice. The cases are: (1) an intentional community largely centered on alternative education and alternative birthing options in Tennessee (The Farm, chapter 3); (2) an intentional community based on communal labor and income sharing in Virginia (Twin Oaks, chapter 4); (3) a third intentional community, located in rural Missouri, that blends shared resource use with private economic systems (Dancing Rabbit, chapter 5); and (4) the case of Earthships, radically efficient off-grid homes made out of tires (in New Mexico, chapter 6). Three of these cases involve communal dwelling, where people are living in formally identified intentional communities.⁸ The Earthship community is not formally an intentional community, but is similar in that the people who live in the neighborhoods of Earthships around Taos, New Mexico, and the people who come to work for and volunteer with the company that builds these homes, are all there with a shared purpose—to pursue radically alternative and sustainable dwelling through Earthships.

This introductory chapter, which reviews the intellectual history, scholarly questions, and academic insights that frame my approach to studying these four diverse case studies, is intended to examine how technological systems act to maintain and secure existing understandings and enactments of so-called normal life. In this, I hope to make myself clear straight away: it is my view that power in the modern world is not held but exercised—it acts, and in doing so, it actively shapes the actions of individuals and groups and societies writ large.⁹ Technological systems—like electricity; transportation; water and wastewater collection, distribution, and treatment; modern home heating; modern food systems; modern reproductive technologies; educational systems; and so on—shape and are shaped by relationships of power, through the political, economic, and cultural structures under which we dwell. As elements of active power, technologies shape the very ways we humans think and act within these structures.

Historical examination helps to demonstrate this, and chapter 2 examines the history of technological development to define and clarify the technologies that support “normal” contemporary residential life. Yet American history also provides examples of alternatives, attempts to utilize technological systems that involve different understandings of normal life as well as different forms of residential practice. This book traces this history forward to the present, examining some of the many possible ways that individuals are choosing to pursue technological alternatives in their residential lives and how these alternative technological systems are related to alternative ways of living, knowing, and being.

Lewis Mumford, an infamous critic of modern technology, once wrote, “The brute fact of the matter is that our civilization is now weighted in favor of the use of mechanical instruments, because the opportunities for commercial production and for the exercise of power lie there: while all the direct human reactions or the personal arts which require a minimum of mechanical paraphernalia are treated as negligible.”¹⁰ Technological systems act as modes of political and social organization and as discursive constitutions regarding normal, acceptable, or appropriate ways of life and living. In other words, modern technological systems work to reinforce existing relations of power.

The work of Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu helps us make sense of the role of technology in perpetuating particular power dynamics, forms of social organization, and mental conceptions. Foucault recognized that power is not held; instead, power is a verb, it is active, and it is exercised incessantly. In modern societies, power works through “procedures which allowed the effects of power to circulate in a manner at once continuous, uninterrupted, adapted, and ‘individualized’ throughout the entire social body.”¹¹ Thus, power can be seen as diffuse and constantly exercised. Power is no longer held in the hands of a centralized state administration (this is what Foucault meant when he quipped that it was time to ‘cut off the king’s head’).¹² Power does not sit in Washington, DC, or on Wall Street, but flows throughout and constantly within society.¹³

Furthermore, this power is exercised through individual bodies. Foucault terms this “biopower.” Biopower is “that which is exercised on people as both a general category of population (nation, social groups of one sort or another) and individual bodies (people in their roles as individual citizens, wives, farmers, etc.).”¹⁴ Biopolitics serve to categorize, classify, and contain; they construct and articulate groups and individuals through modes of power internalized through daily practice.

The technological systems that support residential dwelling and dwelling practice are strategies for deploying this kind of power. Technologies contribute to the “ceaseless temporal and spatial interweaving of . . . physical components . . . individual inhabitants, and the concrete practices of . . . families.”¹⁵ Technological systems, as strategies of power, help define what is normal and abnormal in our daily practices, from where we get our water to how we use it in our homes to where our water goes when we’re done with it.¹⁶ Technologies govern individual practice and social organization. The technologies that support residential dwelling are sustained by the constant maintenance of the boundaries between technologies considered acceptable for use and legitimated through dominant practices, and technologies considered alternative, unusual, or unacceptable.

For example, electricity is a strategy of power because its source (the fuel source used and the forms of generation) and use (including who uses it, how and how much) help define and shape a population of members, either as community members or citizens. It is common, shared knowledge that modern American citizens largely rely on fossil fuels for their electricity, that each home demands a practically endless supply of electricity, and that this power is provided by a large utility company. This example of electricity demonstrates how relations of power are embedded in and maintained by the technologies used in a given society. With this insight, residential dwellers are arguably enacting embedded relations of power with every turn of the faucet and every flip of the light switch.

What are the consequences of this view of power? When thinking about power, it is difficult to escape the categories of thought produced by power. Pierre Bourdieu, in characteristically convoluted language, put it this way: “To endeavor to think the state is to take the risk of taking over (or being taken over by) a thought of the state, i.e., of applying to the state categories of thought produced and guaranteed by the state and hence to misrecognize its most profound truth.”¹⁷ Foucault argued that these categories of thought are produced through our disciplined daily practices, including our use of dominant technologies. Randall Collins similarly claims that these cognitive categories are shaped through ritual practices.¹⁸ Karl Marx suggested that ways of thinking are shaped by technologies themselves.¹⁹

Thinking this way, there is no one actor or group of actors we can point to in a quest to overturn relations of power; instead, we have to grapple with the way active, capillary, and materially embedded flows of power shape even our own thoughts about normal or acceptable ways of acting and being and knowing. Turning to Bourdieu again can add yet another layer of depth to our understanding of how technologies shape cognition and thus contribute to thinking like the state (in other words, using categories of thought created by relations of power). Bourdieu writes, “By realizing itself in social structures and in the mental structures adapted to them, the instituted institution makes us forget that it issues out a long series of acts of institution (in the active sense) and hence has all the appearances of the natural.”²⁰ Thus, power is exercised through the shaping of our categories of perception and thought. The “instituted institution” (the incessantly active and productive forms of power that flow throughout society to produce the categories of thought used by members of society) does this through the naturalization of what are actually instituted (constructed) institutions.

Technology is one such institution. The technologies we use, which are by no means socially or technologically determined, come to be seen as natural, inevitable, and normal through our very use of these technologies and the categories of thought we come to associate with this use. Through our everyday use of the material systems that support residential life, power is actively involved in daily practices and the categories of thought that correspond with daily practices. Technology operates as a strategy of power through its active involvement in shaping both practice and constructions of normal practice. Power is thus exercised through us as individuals, rendering a particular constellation of dwelling practices “normal,” while alternatives are rendered invisible.

Viewing technological systems as strategies of power that support particular kinds of practice and ideas about that practice while rendering alternatives invisible is congruent with the approach I take to understanding motivations to change the relationships individuals and communities have to the dominant forms of technologies that support residential life in modern America. Through this conceptual lens, I can ask, if the use of technological systems is a form of power such that we are blinded to the social construction of these systems and see them instead as totally natural and normal, how can we understand the choice to live with alternative kinds of residential dwelling technologies? Understanding power ...