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Albert Borgmann's notion of the "device paradigm" can be used to explain a widely experienced frustration encountered in attempts to put people's values into practice in a technological world: Technologies increasingly embraced as a means of disburdening them from social and bodily engagement also increasingly constrain their efforts to express their values through action. Expressive elements of their actions are effectively (if unthinkingly) fixed by, and incorporated in, the devices they adopt. Ethnographic investigation of the "home power" movement in the United States, however, provides evidence of a successful break from the device paradigm. In the process of installing more expensive and less convenient renewable electric power systems in their homes, participants in this movement have achieved a uniquely creative reassertion of alternative environmental, community, and work-related values. The resonance between Borgmann's theoretical framework and the home power experience affords both practical guidance and grounds for hope that people's use of technology can be brought into greater conformity with more careful formulations of their fundamental values.In his essay, &dquo;Brandy, Cigars, and Human Values,&dquo; Langdon Winner captures well an irksome impasse that is often experienced in our individual and collective struggles to bring patterns of life in a technological society into conformity with what we call our &dquo;values.&dquo;' This impasse and the frustration it produces achieve their purest expression, perhaps, in Winner's description of the classic final session in a whole genre of conferences on &dquo;technology and human values&dquo;:In the quiet of the evening after a delicious banquet, the scholars and administrators at a conference center by the sea gather for their peak experience. Out comes the brandy. Out come the cigars. And out comes the after-dinner speaker, an old trooper, usually a distinguished scientist or engineer, often someone who helped pioneer an advanced weapons system of some sort, to address his colleagues on &dquo;technology and human values.&dquo; Typically, he observes that in our rush to achieve scientific and technical progress we have overlooked some very important questions. World hunger is still a dreadful problem. The environment is being damaged by human meddling.

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