He predicted and theorized
free software 10 years before it happened in Tools for Conviviality, made the most obvious and needed critic of education and hospitals alone against the Zeitgeist, studied step by step a lot of field of society to find patterns to simplify understanding.
He created simple concepts that everyone should know —- counter productivity, vernacular, iaotrogenic, radical monopoly, conviviality, poverty vs. misery etc.
He is much more pragmatic than all his leftists colleagues. He might not go very deep in economics but at least he’s not a basic marxist. He might not go as deep as Jacques Ellul in his critics of technology, but at least he is very understandable, anyone can be inspired by his books. I read most of Illich writings at 19 years old and it stayed with me for years
I suspect it's because he's like most of the more radical writers: if you actual dissect his writing, it really gets to the heard of a lot of what is rotten about modern industrial society. And the rectification of the problems he highlights pretty much necessitates disassembling a lot of modern technological society and getting rid of most of its institutions.
So while he makes sense, no one wants to discuss his work, because then they must also come to a lot of the same conclusions he did, which is: the global society we have today is a lost cause, and a lot of it needs to be torn down. Which of course goes against the status quo.
It's a lot different than the fluffy, weak criticism of many today that recommend making changes that don't change anything. But then at least people reading that stuff can convince themselves that they are doing something, when they are not.
People don't like revolutions, even if they are the one carrying it out. Revolutions are a last resort, mainly because of how uncertain it is what comes out at the end of it. So, an action calling for complete dismantling will never have large support. And everyone kind of knows where to go to. Th difficult thing is knowing how to get there in a piece by piece manner, one area of the social order at a time.
Having said that, his criticism is completely on point. But the people who have reached the same solution are then lost on what to do after it.
Also his criticism is very specific. Most of contemporary anti-capitalist or marxist thought that gets published is very, very abstract and hence toothless. It's easy to entertain radical ideas as long as they don't pit you against your employer.
You might enjoy a newsletter called The Convivial Society, which is heavily influenced by Illich.
I'm just starting Tools For Conviviality. I suspect that Illich's ideas are underrated because, at least today, most people want more and Illich does not offer that. He offers freedom, I think, in his definition of conviviality... but it seems to be quite clear that offered freedom or comfort, most of us today (I'm not excluding myself from this) prefer comfort.
The fact that he's a very eclectic thinker and not very systematic, although that's one of the things that a lot of people admire about him. His religious commitments, as well, I would guess. But also he had some very odd ideas--like refusing to get a tumor removed from his face. He also was not the best at communicating his ideas.
I agree with you. Is it perhaps because of his religious background (he was a Catholic priest)? For much of the last couple decades, there has been an anti-religious streak in the educational mainstream universities.
The distinction between lack of wealth/goods/services and lack of access to services that you now mandatory need to get wealthy/goods/others services (because of how society just changed commons into privatisation). Note that I’m not anticapitalist yet I think there are interesting concepts there
Majid RAHNEMA wrote a book about this in french, “Quand la misère chasse la pauvreté” based on similar ideas than Illich
This was a whole cottage industry during the cold war, kind of like it is now that we're in another sort of cold war.
The Soviets would fund anyone applying Marxist thought to this or that. There may be some interesting ideas for those willing to sort out the chaff, but for the most part you know exactly what they're going to say if you're already familiar with the propaganda that came before.
People act like you need a petaflop for something to be useful. The US census of 1890 would have been impossible to complete before the next one started without puchcard machines. One may as well say the information age arrived then. Anyone with basic numeracy and imagination could imagine what the future held at that point.
“We could easily be made increasingly dependent on machines for speaking and for thinking…”
One thing that bothers me about the ubiquitous encroachment of LLMs into most areas of human writing is that it helps us write faster, but does not necessarily help us read faster. Producing large amounts of human-looking text is instantaneous, but reading (and acting upon) still takes the same amount of time. I was e.g. called to read and review a report from an academic committee with hundreds of pages that mostly looks human but also not, with pages and pages of slop after slop. I felt like I was staring into the abyss, spending hours to read something that probably took seconds for someone to produce with AI. It felt like an absolute meaningless waste of my time.
The thing is that I think people have missed the fact that the act of reading is inherently connected to the act of writing; I take the time to read something because I know that someone took the time to write it. For those who live/work by writing it seems that the act of writing has become so detached and matter-of-fact that they think “words are words” regardless of whether they were written by a human or an AI. If it helps you write faster, then why not? Like someone who used to cut trees with axes and suddenly gets a chainsaw as a gift.
But the problem is that, inevitably, we will go down the road of “if you can’t bother to write it, I won’t bother to read it” and AI will also be used to read and interpret the writings that it itself generated. So we’ll have documents with thousands of pages that are never going to be read by humans, with AI processing in both ends, so the writing will basically be a payload, a protocol, and nothing more. As such processes become the norm, we’ll be entirely dependent on the AI to both produce text and read what it produced, and become enslaved by whatever hidden (or not?) ideological bias it has been fed by its masters.
Different perspective: I'm currently using a LLM to rewrite a fitness book. It takes like 20 pages of rambling text by an amateur writer and turns it into a crisp clear 4 pages of latex with informative diagrams, flow charts, color-coding, tables, etc. I sent it out to friends, and they all love the new style.
My experience is LLMs can write very very well; we just have to care enough to ask them to do so. Those 4 pages needed a whole lot of fine-tuning. But I'm optimistic eventually people will figure it out.
Illich's 1983 Japan talk seems to be in response to McLuhan's 1971 convocation talk where he critiques Illich: https://mcluhan-studies.artsci.utoronto.ca/v1_iss5/1_5art3.h...
(The spacing on this document I'm linking is hideous. Excerpts inlined below, paragraph breaks my own)
Both talks center "enterprise" and communication. Thanks Claude for validating my hunch about the late-century subtweet.
> What has happened today is that there is a new hidden ground of all human enterprises, namely a world environment of electric information, and against this new environment the old ground of 19th century hardware—whether at school or factory, whether of bureaucracy or entertainment—stands out as incongruous.
...
> It is this situation that Ivan Illich addresses himself to in Deschooling Society. He is vividly aware of the irrelevance of current curricula, drills and certification. He knows that these can no longer help us relate to the new world, and he frankly appeals to the forms of preliterate, and even prenatal experience as models for the training now needed.
> As Coleridge said "If you wish to acquire a man's knowledge, first start with his ignorance." Illich is unaware—I'll repeat: Illich is ignorant of the new all-inclusive "surround" of electric information which has enveloped man, but it is his instinctive response to this new ground that in some measure validates the figure-image he suggests for the new school. For example, he says "Since most people today live outside industrial societies. Most people today do not experience childhood. In the Andes, you till the soil once you become useful: before that you watch sheep; if you are well nourished you should be useful by 11, and otherwise by 12."
> Illich relates this story: "Recently I was talking to my night-watchman, Marcos, about his 11 year old son who works in a barbershop. I noted in Spanish that his son was still a nino. Marcos answered with a guileless smile, 'Don Ivan, I guess you are right.' I felt guilty for having drawn the curtain of childhood between two sensible persons." What Illich has in mind, although he does not state it, is that childhood was unknown in the Middle Ages and was a renaissance invention that came in with printing, and is ending very rapidly now in the television age...
> "Enclosure, once accepted, redefines community. Enclosure underlines the local autonomy of community. Enclosure of the commons is thus as much in the interest of professionals and of state bureaucrats as it is in the interest of capitalists. Enclosure allows the bureaucrats to define local community as impotent..."
That was made much more evident with the government restrictions/mandates during Covid.
The endgame seems to be that people will be treated as farm animals.
Readit News
He predicted and theorized free software 10 years before it happened in Tools for Conviviality, made the most obvious and needed critic of education and hospitals alone against the Zeitgeist, studied step by step a lot of field of society to find patterns to simplify understanding.
He created simple concepts that everyone should know —- counter productivity, vernacular, iaotrogenic, radical monopoly, conviviality, poverty vs. misery etc.
He is much more pragmatic than all his leftists colleagues. He might not go very deep in economics but at least he’s not a basic marxist. He might not go as deep as Jacques Ellul in his critics of technology, but at least he is very understandable, anyone can be inspired by his books. I read most of Illich writings at 19 years old and it stayed with me for years
So while he makes sense, no one wants to discuss his work, because then they must also come to a lot of the same conclusions he did, which is: the global society we have today is a lost cause, and a lot of it needs to be torn down. Which of course goes against the status quo.
It's a lot different than the fluffy, weak criticism of many today that recommend making changes that don't change anything. But then at least people reading that stuff can convince themselves that they are doing something, when they are not.
Having said that, his criticism is completely on point. But the people who have reached the same solution are then lost on what to do after it.
I'm just starting Tools For Conviviality. I suspect that Illich's ideas are underrated because, at least today, most people want more and Illich does not offer that. He offers freedom, I think, in his definition of conviviality... but it seems to be quite clear that offered freedom or comfort, most of us today (I'm not excluding myself from this) prefer comfort.
When I was reading it I just couldn't believe it was written in 1973. So ahead of its time.
The other half, as a very conservative Catholic, conservative Catholics are neglecting our great teachers like Dorothy Day.
I like your username ahah.. you might be biased ;)
Majid RAHNEMA wrote a book about this in french, “Quand la misère chasse la pauvreté” based on similar ideas than Illich
The Soviets would fund anyone applying Marxist thought to this or that. There may be some interesting ideas for those willing to sort out the chaff, but for the most part you know exactly what they're going to say if you're already familiar with the propaganda that came before.
Yet this speech could have been written today.
Intriguing.
Or take The Machine Stops from 1909.
My city ran its payroll on a single computer with 64KB of RAM. This would have required weeks of work from a whole team of bureaucrats.
One thing that bothers me about the ubiquitous encroachment of LLMs into most areas of human writing is that it helps us write faster, but does not necessarily help us read faster. Producing large amounts of human-looking text is instantaneous, but reading (and acting upon) still takes the same amount of time. I was e.g. called to read and review a report from an academic committee with hundreds of pages that mostly looks human but also not, with pages and pages of slop after slop. I felt like I was staring into the abyss, spending hours to read something that probably took seconds for someone to produce with AI. It felt like an absolute meaningless waste of my time.
The thing is that I think people have missed the fact that the act of reading is inherently connected to the act of writing; I take the time to read something because I know that someone took the time to write it. For those who live/work by writing it seems that the act of writing has become so detached and matter-of-fact that they think “words are words” regardless of whether they were written by a human or an AI. If it helps you write faster, then why not? Like someone who used to cut trees with axes and suddenly gets a chainsaw as a gift.
But the problem is that, inevitably, we will go down the road of “if you can’t bother to write it, I won’t bother to read it” and AI will also be used to read and interpret the writings that it itself generated. So we’ll have documents with thousands of pages that are never going to be read by humans, with AI processing in both ends, so the writing will basically be a payload, a protocol, and nothing more. As such processes become the norm, we’ll be entirely dependent on the AI to both produce text and read what it produced, and become enslaved by whatever hidden (or not?) ideological bias it has been fed by its masters.
My experience is LLMs can write very very well; we just have to care enough to ask them to do so. Those 4 pages needed a whole lot of fine-tuning. But I'm optimistic eventually people will figure it out.
Both talks center "enterprise" and communication. Thanks Claude for validating my hunch about the late-century subtweet.
> What has happened today is that there is a new hidden ground of all human enterprises, namely a world environment of electric information, and against this new environment the old ground of 19th century hardware—whether at school or factory, whether of bureaucracy or entertainment—stands out as incongruous.
...
> It is this situation that Ivan Illich addresses himself to in Deschooling Society. He is vividly aware of the irrelevance of current curricula, drills and certification. He knows that these can no longer help us relate to the new world, and he frankly appeals to the forms of preliterate, and even prenatal experience as models for the training now needed.
> As Coleridge said "If you wish to acquire a man's knowledge, first start with his ignorance." Illich is unaware—I'll repeat: Illich is ignorant of the new all-inclusive "surround" of electric information which has enveloped man, but it is his instinctive response to this new ground that in some measure validates the figure-image he suggests for the new school. For example, he says "Since most people today live outside industrial societies. Most people today do not experience childhood. In the Andes, you till the soil once you become useful: before that you watch sheep; if you are well nourished you should be useful by 11, and otherwise by 12."
> Illich relates this story: "Recently I was talking to my night-watchman, Marcos, about his 11 year old son who works in a barbershop. I noted in Spanish that his son was still a nino. Marcos answered with a guileless smile, 'Don Ivan, I guess you are right.' I felt guilty for having drawn the curtain of childhood between two sensible persons." What Illich has in mind, although he does not state it, is that childhood was unknown in the Middle Ages and was a renaissance invention that came in with printing, and is ending very rapidly now in the television age...
He also seems to prompt many interesting book review comments. I have now found my mission!
> The thing is, Illich is more like Plato than Marx. Nobody ever tried to mount a Platonic revolution. [0]
https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R2LL7H3HL0WENO/re...
https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R2LL7H3HL0WENO/
So it's really more about the medium in itself, rather than what it is or is not used for
That was made much more evident with the government restrictions/mandates during Covid.
The endgame seems to be that people will be treated as farm animals.