What you are holding in your hands or browsing on your screen is the first book published by the \nohyphens{Everyday}\nohyphens{Technology}\nohyphens{Press}, an imprint run by the Rotterdam-based collective space Varia. Everyday technology is not just a moniker for the tools and devices we use on a daily basis, but a formula that identifies a perspective on technical artefacts and a programmatic goal. Everyday technology means that a sewing machine is no less important than a laptop, that a seamstress’s work is by no means less meaningful than that of a computer scientist. Focusing on everyday technology means questioning the hierarchies that surround technical objects and therefore the valorisation of skills needed to design or use them. \nohyphens{Everyday} technology means also reconsidering the hegemony of high tech: with our publications, we try to show that low-tech approaches can be complex, inventive, and joyful.
At \nohyphens{Everyday}\nohyphens{Technology}\nohyphens{Press}, we believe that not only experts should have access and decisive power in regards to how things should work. This is why our publications show and document convivial tools; tools that guarantee a certain degree of autonomy to their users. We understand autonomy in Ivan Illich’s terms, namely, the possibility for each and everyone to use a tool in order to realise their own intentions and create meaning by leaving a mark, however small, in the world.\footnote{ Ivan Illich, \emph{Tools for conviviality} (New York: Harper and Row,1973).} We strive to include multiple and entangled perspectives, needs, and aspirations that are at play when it comes to technology. We think of theory as a practice and practice as a form of knowledge production. True to this belief, in our publications we complement analyses with instructions and code; tutorials and methods with essays. Here, the \emph{know what} goes hand in hand with the \emph{know how}.
\hspace{-2pt}Through its engagement with vernacular languages,\thinspace\emph{Vernaculars come to matter} suggests another meaning of everyday technology. Technology is often not recognised as such. Language, for example, is something that many take for granted and deem and call “natural.” However, a variety of technical procedures, rules, and constraints operate on top of its roots, which are, according to Jorge Luis Borges, “irrational and magical.”\footnote{Jorge Luis Borges, \emph{El otro, el mismo} (Buenos Aires: Emecé, 2005).} This is how language becomes a technology. The technologisation of language tends to be a singular, reductive operation that produces language with a capital “L” as a technology with a capital “T.” \emph{Vernaculars come to \nohyphens{matter}} counterbalances that: this book does not only show that a wealth of \nohyphens{linguistic} modes of being exist, but also that they can thrive, given enough space and the proper amount of attention.
