That software has eaten the world gives a worldview that can’t think otherwise, where the idea of inevitability becomes its own self-fulfilling tyranny. “Big tech” cannot wait to internalize every externality into value.
If, as Marshall McLuhan says, media (used interchangeably with technology) is an extension of ourselves and creates a whole new environment that we immerse ourselves in, then we need to understand the societal implications of our use of tools. Because technology becomes a part of us, it becomes hard to understand. We take it for granted, as we already do with our own physical bodies. Whether it’s language (as previously mentioned, it extends our inner thoughts) or any other tool, seeing these goods as a form of technology may be a helpful lens to understand their impact on the world, subject to the same kinds of inquiries we’ve had of technologies throughout time, whether it be a physical clock or a digital protocol. When we uncritically evaluate technology, we tend to treat it as inanimate blocks, standing reserve, inventory in a warehouse simply waiting to be used (recall language as simply interchangeable blocks as opposed to poetry). In contrast, Questions Concerning Technology shows us an alternative beginning, where L.M. Sacasas reminds us of the ethical nature of our artifacts
But this also means thinking beyond whether something is simply good or bad, and seeing how we live with technology as a two-way relationship and all of its implications. As the saying goes, “we shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us.”
Many technologies have opened up paths for expression: the printing press for books, Flash for animations, Youtube for videos, Unity for games. But who gets to decide what gets changed in a platform? Even setting aside trust, does anyone really have the ability to balance their goals with their community’s input? Platforms given the means, can’t help but act like controlling parents that smother us with love (this is for your own good), acting in some cases more like carpenters than gardeners.
This is the way that school turns into a substitute for learning, cars a substitute for walking, the hospital a substitute for healing. Each of those ways are perfectly valid, but they start to harm when they crowd out all other possibilities. These means become counterproductive when they start to believe that there is only one way to accomplish things, namely their own way.
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While they begin as augmentations of ourselves, Illich finds that “the institutions of industrial society do just the opposite. As the power of machines increases, the role of persons more and more decreases to that of mere consumers.”
“The hypothesis was that machines can replace slaves. The evidence shows that, used for this purpose, machines enslave men.”
Tools for Conviviality View Highlight 2024-03-30
Should any of us have to think about life in financial terms so much? We minmax our time and space like resources for a side hustle. Desire lines become paved by our investments rather than by our curiosities. There was a time where all my conversations started to end with the thought, “that would make a good podcast”. Can we escape this language of scarcity, of value
Even if not explicit, this reductionism becomes the water we swim in, our cultural liturgies. Follow count, subscribers, page rank, h-index
Even in the spiritual realm, faith becomes solely a belief, ritual disappears, the transcendence of a sermon may become a TED talk, covenant community becomes more like a Costco membership.
Maybe they are even “open source, not open contribution”. A repo can be seen as it’s own city, with its own rules, customs, and language. Traveling to a new physical country comes with an understanding of how different cultures may greet, eat, work, and play differently.
Rather than being the opposite of evil, he uses the language of virtue ethics to describe how what was good had a proper place, a golden mean. Confidence is to tread the middle ground between self-deprecation (too little) and vanity (too much). So he felt that we had lost the language of the good, and thus the language of limits. So how can our tools balance what we can do for ourselves with what a professional service can do for us? To reiterate, Illich’s suggestion wasn’t to stop using technology entirely, but to voluntarily impose boundaries on our tools. Namely, “tools to work with rather than tools that ‘work’ for them.” These “convivial” tools nurture each person’s call to help themselves and their neighbor
The language of curation advancing a bottom line rather than helping people find and interact with what is meaningful to themPeople used to narrate their lives to doctors that listened to their stories. They understood themselves within their own words and lived experience. Now both the system itself and those in it (patients and doctors) have less need to know anything beyond what is precisely measured by instrument, whether in child care or palliative care
There is a clear pull to automate away all our decision making, whether to a corporation or even the computer
The distinction between homegrown and corporately grown automation matters. A tool built by its users to serve their own decision-making carries a different relationship to autonomy than one designed to extract value at scale.We see ourselves as entirely subjective and thus biased. Any chance we have to remove ourselves, we take, forgetting that it is precisely our personal commitments that motivate us to make art, create structures, practice science. We outsource to our end
suggests that using multi-sigs or social recovery wallets (which involve people) doesn’t betray the goal of crypto, but “give people access to.. building blocks that give people more choice in whom to trust.” In a similar vein, DAOs should refer to the freedom of each party to make decisions rather than a desire to make organizations operated without human control. This at least can suggest a view of living with technology rather than being dominated by it
Illich suggests that we need to rediscover what was vernacular, as non-economic ways of thinking and being. Typically referring to local languages and architecture, Illich remixes the term to be a domain that is homemade, and thus within bounds. Like a book dedication, it’s when we create for particular people (that we know by name) rather than the abstraction of a user story, cohort, or “the world
The vernacular parallels the “home-cooked meal” framing of software — tools made for particular people rather than abstract users. When creation is bounded by relationship rather than scale, it resists the logic of industrialized optimization.
