The philosopher Ivan Illich, one of my go-to influences, died pointlessly and painfully from a tumor which could have been treated - that he could have had at least some respite from but which, in accordance with his beliefs, he refused treatment for. So we don't have to take him as gospel truth in everything. But I think he had a point about technology, and in fact complex systems more generally.
It isn't simply our political institutions which disempower us. The overwhelming majority of us are also undermined by our inability to understand the fundamental enabling technologies of modern life – how they do work in the world, how we may intervene in their operation, even how to repair them when they inevitably break down.
Illich’s response – which I read as both a reflection of its epoch, the 1970s, and as having been enormously influential on anarchist and antiauthoritarian thought downstream – was to argue for a “convivial” technology, a technics which allowed ordinary, nonspecialist and non-technically-inclined users to inspect, disassemble, learn from and meaningfully intervene in its operation, and which tended to organize communities around each stage in this process.
The desirability of this seems self-evident to me, but there are any number of voices on the contemporary Marxist and accelerationist left who are troubled by it. Frederic Jameson, I think acutely, reads many anarchist projects as embodying "a spirit of conservatism and of preserving the older and more humane communities and ways of living against the inhuman or posthuman development of late-capitalist technology." And so far as this goes, this is accurate.
But when Jameson goes on to lodge the charge that this “is to encourage an unproductive Luddism and an anarchism with purely negative views of technology, easily accused of a commitment to vandalism and destruction,” he loses the plot.
What seems to have eluded him is that the production of justice for all has a cognitive dimension, as well as the more usually discussed distributional or representational aspects, and that this dimension is intimately related to questions of speed or scale.
If we want to uphold the idea that we all have the right to understand the processes that shape our world and the choices (and, again, this is something I think of as self-evident), we have to reckon with those aspects of contemporary technology that abscond from even the possibility of broad comprehensibility, either through complexity (“Al”), involution (neural nets, the blockchain), regimes of speed, etc.
If we wished to live in a world where these technologies were present and operating, and, at the same time, that definitions of justice that encompassed matters beyond the merely distributional remained a possibility, we would have to break them to harness. In Illich’s terms, we would have to render them, somehow, convivial. So that’s the challenge I set to those of you who are enthusiastic about technologies like “AI”:
How might these technologies be made to account for themselves, in ways that ordinary people can understand? How might they be made transparent, such that their workings become subject to democratic oversight and accountability? What can you do to ensure that their operations do not abscond from the human comprehensibility and justice, including the interests of nonhuman life?
For me, these are a few of the irreducible minimum conditions for the acceptability of a technology, and at that this is clearly not a comprehensive or a complete list. But that I can see, considerations like these only very, very rarely feature in the conversations people have when they set out to develop new technics, either with themselves or among their peers.
I tend, out of a quarter-century of experience with thinking about, designing, using, maintaining and living with emergent technical systems, to be sharply skeptical now about any chance that they’ll help us live more lightly on the Earth, in justice and dignity, but I know there is still a great deal of enthusiasm for their development here. And given that the people within range of my voice right now feel like they’re among the more likely to be thoughtful
about the way they approach questions of technical development, that’s what I’m going to ask of you. How can your enthusiasm for these technologies be expressed in such a way as to center justice, dignity, and the virtues Illich described as convivial?
@adamgreenfield I'm glad Illich seems to be having a bit of a moment right now/again. I'm very wary of projects that seek to distribute expertise in a way that leads to what I refer to somewhere as "the burden of participation", but I also think undeniably the tech should be of, by, and for the peoples, and conviviality is a good way to conceptualize this.
@adamgreenfield My friend Tiziano Bonini who is not on here I don't think gets credit for bringing up Illich again (for me), a few years ago. He organized a conf on conviviality, the last one I went to before the pandemic began.
This is the premise of much of critical HCI and the design justice movement.
In many ways, the technologies that undermine our abilities to live differently do so because they arise from and reinforce our prevailing political institutions and economic orientations.
It is possible to build and to live differently. Today's tools are highly plastic, ideologies are multiple. We can build technologies to weave our communities and ecologies together instead of rending them asunder.
@cyberlyra (On the substance of your point: oooof, I wish I had something smarter-sounding to say than “it depends.” I think some technologies have the kind of plasticity you’re interested in, while others – proof-of-work-based blockchains come to mind – can only ever be harmful at scale, so far as I can see. I’d imagine the nous consists in being able to assess which was which before investing too much energy in development.)
@adamgreenfield but I’d also say the great illusion to “technology” is that it draws a demarcation line around some elements, like hardware, and makes it seem like it’s only That Thing that is acting as an object with force all by itself. Instead of exploding the network and seeing “technologies” as compound, composed of people and machines, distributed in specific arrangements that make alternative forms of power, ownership, alliance and governance possible.
@adamgreenfield oh yes. Sorry I meant, I think there is now a greater degree of access to the building blocks of tools in that there is more open hardware at multiple scales of granularity, more ppl can code in more languages with more flexibility, etc. I am seeing more alternatives being proposed and build by more pluralistic forms of human cooperation beyond the shareholder held corporation. That is where I put my time, effort, networks, skills, and hope.
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